In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City: 1933-1966.

In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 In Transit is a richly detailed and analytically sophisticated book about a remarkable organization, the Transport Workers Union (TWU), in New York City during the heyday of industrial unionism in the 1930s and 1940s. The overall story of the TWU's development is closely intertwined with New York and New Deal politics, the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its bitter internecine quarrel with the American Federation of Labor, and the impact of the Second World War and the early Cold War on American society. But the most important--and fascinating--of the book's many threads concerns the relationship between the TWU's Communist leadership and the union's Irish Catholic, and relatively conservative, membership. Joshua Freeman engagingly demonstrates how this unlikely bond developed in the 1930s, and how it finally came unraveled in the dramatically altered political climate of the late 1940s.

By employing both the stick of repression and the carrot of company welfare programs, the principal transit companies in New York had successfully resisted unionization for many years. But the coming of the New Deal and the mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia provided the initial spark that turned an undercurrent of transit worker discontent into a belief that change was possible. Two groups emerged to weld this inchoate impulse into a wave of effective organization and, ultimately, a powerful union. The first was a network of Irish republicans, centered in Clan na …