It is a powerful story: the relationship between the 1960s New Left and organized labor was summed up by hardhats confronting students and others over US involvement in Vietnam. But the real story goes beyond the "Love It or Leave It" signs and melees involving blue-collar types attacking protesters.
Peter B. Levy challenges these images by exploring the complex relationship between the two groups. Early in the 1960s, the New Left and labor had cooperated to fight for civil rights and anti-poverty programs. But diverging opinions on the Vietnam War created a schism that divided these one-time allies. Levy shows how the war, combined with the emergence of the black power movement and the blossoming of the counterculture, drove a permanent wedge between the two sides and produced the polarization that remains to this day.
| Copyright Cover Title Contents Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. We Shall Overcome: Labor and the Emergence of the New Left 2. Coalition Politics or Nonviolent Revolution 3. Vietnam 4. Black Power 5. The Counterculture Illustrations 6. Debating the Labor Question 7. Organizing the Unorganized 8. Solidarity on the Labor Front 9. Testing the Political Waters Conclusion Appendix: Theory, Methodology, and Historiography Notes Bibliography Index Back cover |"Demolishes the myth of an unremmitingly hostile relationship between organized labor and the New Left. A valuable addition to the literature of the 1960s, refreshingly new and different."—Bruce Nelson, authors of Workers on the Waterfront|Peter B. Levy is a professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America During the 1960s and Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland.