Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Welfare And Warfare: American Organized Labor Approaches The Military-Industrial Complex, 1949-1964, Edmund F. Wehrle

Edmund F. Wehrle

Historians have been almost unanimous in condemning American organized labor's postwar relationship with the military-industrial complex.(1) Most follow Nelson Lichtenstein's assessment of a movement sacrificing militancy in favor of a junior partnership in a corporate state dominated by employers and the state. This capitulation legitimized managerial authority, validated a regressive economic system, and latched labor's wagon to a reactionary foreign policy and an emerging garrison state(2) This latter relationship, in particular, has galled critics of American organized labor. By the 1970s, they could assert, as did even "labor priest" Monsignor Charles Owen Rice, that labor had become a "lackey of …