The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region.
In The Southern Key, Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region. Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries-textiles, timber, coal mining, and steel-he argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today. He contends that this early defeat for labor unions not only contributed to the exploitation of race and right-wing demagoguery in the South, but has also led to a decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and an inability to confront and dismantle white supremacy throughout the US.
A sweeping account of Southern political economy in the New Deal era, The Southern Key challenges the established historiography to tell a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal that will reshape our understanding of why America developed so differently from other advanced industrial nations over the course of the last century.
Industry Reviews
"Goldfield's level of analytical detail may challenge those less familiar with the history of the period, but it rewards a careful read. Overall, the book provides a powerful counter to those who would dismiss the South as an irredeemable backwater of conservatism, while presenting a rigorous account of labor's failures that creates possibilities for a more hopeful future." -- Barry Eidlin, American Journal of Sociology
"This substantial work examines why the US labor movement failed to expand its gains made during the 193s into the postwar period (late 195s-8s)...Goldfield's book ranks among the top tier of available resources...Summing Up: Essential. All readers." -- D. R. Turner, CHOICE
"For its exposure of the poverty of liberalism" (chapter 7), Goldfield's book ranks among the top tier of available resources. Essential. All readers." -- D. R. Turner, Davis and Elkins College
"Understanding and dealing with 'the Southern key' remains central to which way the US will go. Will the US become, or is it already, a stagnant backwater of racial and economic inequality and injustice, contaminated by right-wing politics that teaches people to fight each other and shields corporate and political power from working-class agency? Or will grass-roots movements once again build up a head of steam and challenge racial capitalism at the workplace
and the ballot box? ... For all those who care, Goldfield's book is essential." -- International Journal of Social History
"The Southern Key makes several important contributions...provides powerful evidence that a class-struggle, anti-racist outlook by movement leaders is a major factor in determining success or failure." -- Tony Leah , Labour/Le Travail
"Goldfield has done a creditable job of assembling representative sources from the past 60 years...it makes for interesting reading." -- Janet Wells Greene, New York Labor History Association
"The political and scholarly importance of The Southern Key can hardly be overrated. Michael Goldfield's empirically thorough and theoretically reflexive work convincingly argues that the failures of southern labor during the 1930s and 1940s are essential for understanding everything else that has happened since, in the US, and therefore also in the world at large." -- Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
"The Southern Key contains a significant and compelling explanation of the origins of the current state of the US and the world. Michael Goldfield with great erudition and a mastery of scholarly and archival sources engages the complexities in linking struggles against racial and class oppression in the US South Informed by his own life of activism and commitment, Goldfield guides us through the decades of the 1930s and '40s making clear the
relationship of events of those years to the limited successes and larger failures of subsequent decades. It is hard to praise The Southern Key too highly. It should be read by many who have long awaited such a work and
the many more who need it." -- John H. Bracey, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
"Culminating a lifetime of thinking and digging into sources by an important scholar of race, class, and power, The Southern Key tells the riveting story of the possibilities and failures of organizing workers in the South in the 1930s and 1940s. Goldfield brilliantly shows how defeats in that time and place closed off possibilities for a successful labor movement everywhere in the US, and for meaningful class and anti-racist politics, for decades to
come." -- David Roediger, Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas, and author of Class, Race, and Marxism
"Michael Goldfield overturns decades of historical scholarship and prevailing wisdom-about trade unions, the American Left, race and class, and especially about the South. His sober, carefully researched assessment not only explains labor's decline and its impact on democratic struggles for justice, but considers what could have happened had movement leaders made different choices. The Southern Key holds the organizer's lesson: just as our present was
not inevitable, neither is our future." -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
"Ambitious, wide-ranging, and deeply focused historical studies-those like Michael Goldfield's Southern Key-will remain indispensable for addressing such questions in the work to come." -- William Sites, Social Service Review
