Preface, Acknowledgements, and Stylistic Notes
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Section I. The Rise and Fall of Labor
Unions
1 The Uphill Battle for Unionism from the 1820s to
1932
2 The Origins of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935
3 Stronger Unions, A Weaker National Labor Relations Act
4 Union Victories, Corporate Pushback in the 1960s
5 The Corporate Moderates Reorganize to Defeat Unions,
1969-1985
Section II. How the Corporate Moderates Created Social Insurance
Programs, and Later Tried to Undermine Them
6 The Origins
of the Social Security Act
7 Revising and Augmenting Social Security, 1937-1973
8 Social Disruption, New Social Benefits, and then Cutbacks
9 The Circuitous Path to the Affordable Care Act, 1974-2010
Section III. The Rise of an International Economic System,
1939-2000
10 The Council on Foreign Relations and World
Trade
11 The Grand Area and the Origins of the International Monetary
Fund
12 The Grand Area Strategy and the Vietnam War
13 Rebuilding Europe In The Face Of Ultraconservative Resistance,
1945-1967
14 From Turmoil to the World Trade Organization, 1968-2000
15 The Shortcomings of Alternative Theories
Archival Sources Consulted
References
Index
G. William Domhoff is the author or co-author of 16 books on the American power structure, four of which appeared on a list of the top-50 best-sellers in sociology from the 1950s through the early 1990s, including his now-classic, Who Rules America? He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Sociology and remains active as a Research Professor and an instructor in senior seminars at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Who Rules America? was published in a revised and updated version in 2013 and has been in print and used in many classrooms for 52 years.
Deeply engaging, this book’s long section on labor exhibits excellent scholarship, displaying all the qualities we’ve come to expect from this author. Domhoff reorganizes and extends his earlier analysis by incorporating more recent empirical findings, new archival data, and more. The story comes to life in the historical narrative of labor’s rise and decline, which offers a richness of detail and analytical coherence that makes the account both engaging and accessible to a wide readership. This book can be used in advanced undergraduate or entry level graduate courses in political sociology (and related sociology courses on social problems, economics) and courses in other disciplines that deal centrally with politics, inequality, and American society, particularly in political science, public policy, and American culture. Howard Kimeldorf, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Michigan This book offers an analysis of US politics and social/economic policy from the Progressive Era into the early twenty-first century based on extensive archival and secondary sources. The book analyzes three of the more important realms of federal policy: regulation of labor unions, social benefits, and foreign relations, focusing especially on trade. It sharply contrasts an analysis of the power elite to Marxist and institutional theories, and then throughout the book specifies how the power elite analysis yields better explanations for historical change and for the particularities of US political economy than previous explanations. The book dramatically advances our understanding of the role of race, racism, and racial conflict in the making of policy in the United States, offers an historical explanation for the emergence of a divided power elite made up of cooperate moderates and ultraconservatives, and identifies the mechanisms through which the elite shaped public policy. It also traces the making of labor policy, explaining why labor militancy had a limited effect due to the enduring divisions of craft and industrial workers and their unions, racism, and the usually united corporate interests. Taken together, these chapters offer the most sophisticated and accurate history of labor in the United States yet written. Richard Lachmann, Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany
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