Abstract
Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Post-war Conservatism is an important and well-timed book, particularly in light of the passage of so-called right-to-work legislation in Michigan and other states seen generally seen as more progressive and with a long history of union activism, including Wisconsin and Indiana. Doody’s rich historical analysis helps to situate the contemporary mistrust and criticism toward unions, collective action, and the welfare state throughout the USA, but especially in areas such as Detroit that should, in theory, be a haven for left-wing politics.
Doody rightly notes that the hostility toward any semblance of collective action began as early as the New Deal, suggesting that any belief in a so-called post-war compromise between labor, capital, and the state was far from secure. The threat of Communism, and things vaguely associated with it—such as a strong organized labor movement—were immediately targeted by a strong anti-Communist rhetoric, which has had longstanding implications and continues to hamper organized labor, liberals, and the welfare state, even well after the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberal politics. This supposed threat continues to impede efforts of progressives today, who are often quickly labelled socialists. As Doody aptly states in the final sentence of the book, “the rhetoric of anti-Communism has outlived Communism itself” (p. 123).
While the primary thrust of Doody’s text is dedicated to examining Detroit in the Cold War era, a real strength of this book is that her variables and arguments are strong enough to be able to generalize elements of the anti-Communist struggle in Detroit during World War II and in the immediate post-war era to the contemporary United States. Linking her work to scholarship on contemporary conservatism, Doody argues that “the key elements of twentieth-century conservatism—antipathy toward big government, embrace of religious traditionalism, celebration of laissez-faire capitalism, and militant anti-Communism—arose during the 1940s and 1950s out of opposition to the legacy of the New Deal and its modernizing, centralizing, and secularizing ethos” (pp. 3-4). In this sense, although the book is focused on a narrow case study of one place (Detroit) in one time period (1945-58), the conclusions drawn from it help to explain the contemporary stagnation of, and hostility toward, the American labor movement.
Doody’s central argument is that a variety of social forces, including the business community, Detroit’s housewives, the Catholic Church, some civil rights activists, and liberals, though different in their specific beliefs and goals, all shared an opposition to Communism that brought them together to oppose so-called radical forces such as the Committee for Industrial Organization and unionism more generally. Together, these forces helped to “articulate an antistatist and anti-Communist ideology that was central to conservatism” (p. 6). This increasingly conservative political ideology, which is still widely supported across the USA today, is hostile toward organized labor and sought to (and successfully did) equate Communism with organized labor. Certainly the legacy of this disparate coalition of anti-Communists has, years later, successfully pushed itself into the mainstream of American political ideology, with considerable ill effects to unions and the working class more generally. Doody’s book goes a long way to highlighting this important fact and helping to explain the rise and success of the contemporary conservative movement.
I would strongly recommend this book to unionists, liberals, social activists, and those who identify themselves as progressives. This is especially true for those living in “blue states” with a strong labor movement. As Doody has highlighted, under the guise of anti-Communism, a variety of social forces helped to foster a strong sense of conservatism in the city with, at the time, the highest union density in the United States. As the recent passage of right-to-work legislation has illustrated, this climate is still there and perhaps even strengthened. Being able to identify why this political climate exists is the first step in being able to help reverse it.