The Last Great Strike

CHAPTER 9

A Change of Heart: Corporate Power and New Deal Strikebreaking

Part I of The Last Great Strike discusses the Open Shop Era, which preceded and laid the groundwork for the Little Steel Strike. Part II, which includes Chapters 6 through 10, discusses the Strike itself. In Chapter 9, Professor White explains how the strike was broken in Youngstown, Ohio, and how the events there paralleled events all across the strike zone:

The prospect of a union victory faded in the spring of 1937. Increasingly, the very acts of militancy that were so crucial to sustaining the picket lines and keeping the plants closed hurt the unionists' cause in other ways. For the companies were repeatedly able to leverage the disorder and violence associated with these tactics into a wave of government interventions that effectively doomed the walkout. How they managed this in the face of their own overwhelming culpability is a study in the prerogatives of corporate power and the limits of New Deal liberalism. This dynamic was evident throughout the strike zone and at every level of government. But its basic logic was nowhere more apparent than in Johnstown.