Work Rights, Individual Rights: Balancing the Scales

As we near century’s end, Americans can see the entire middle third of this century, from the early 1930s to the end of the 1960s, as a unified whole. We might well call it “The Age of Social Reform,” a single generation in which a powerfully intrusive state, strengthened by depression, war, cold war, and domestic social conflict, sought to transform the traditional hierarchies governing the industrial, racial, and gender order. The two most radical pieces of U.S. social legislation passed during this era—perhaps during the entire twentieth century—were the Wagner Act of 1935 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both of these laws were passed to resolve fundamental social problems, not entirely dissimilar in their natu...