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The CIO, 1935-1955. By Robert H. Zieger. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xii, 491 pp. $39.95 ISBN 0-8078-2182-9.)
Despite its significance for twentieth-century history, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) has not received monographic treatment since Art Preis's Labor's Giant Step (1964). In this extensively researched, solidly argued, and well-written book, Robert H. Zieger closes a large gap in the literature on organized labor in modern America. Deploying thorough research in primary sources and synthesizing a large body of secondary sources on aspects of industrial unionism, Zieger provides not just an institutional history of the CIO in its twenty-year period of independence but also a social and political history of a principal segment of the American working class during two important decades.
Zieger identifies six major contributions that the CIO made to American life: it created permanent labor unions in mass-production industry; it helped win World War...