Regardless of the ideology many left-wing organizers with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) started out with, working-class Americanism became the dominant creed of the labor movement by the height of the New Deal. This new nationalism drew heavily on the symbols of American democracy. Union newsletters featured images of George Washington and the Statue of Liberty. Organizers quoted the Founding Fathers. This creed was social-democratic, class-conscious, patriotic, and universalist. Above all, it reflected the aspirations of second- and third-generation Americans who wanted to break out of the ethnic ghettos in which they had grown up and claim their place as full and equal citizens.
This period also saw one of the first attempts to incorporate the black freedom struggle into the story of American freedom. CIO unions took concrete steps to challenge segregation, organizing across racial lines, condemning segregation, and framing demands to demolish Jim Crow and build interracial solidarity as essential to the realizing nation’s democratic promise.
Even in Communist-led unions, invocations of the Bill of Rights and American freedom took precedence over class war. While the Communist Party leadership’s rhetorical shift toward patriotism was motivated mainly by loyalty to Stalin’s foreign policy, many rank-and-file organizers embraced it for a simpler reason: It spoke to the genuine aspirations of the workers they were trying to organize.
Historian Maurice Isserman, in his recent history of the Communist Party, quotes one party member’s reflection on the change:
The very speed with which we adapted ourselves to the new line… was an indication not so much of our mercurial temper as the fact that it reflected what many of us really believed but could not articulate…we were so much happier to live with a policy that was natural, that heeded reality.
The new American ideal spoke broke with the previous ideal of “Americanism,” which excluded blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants without roots in the British Isles. It was multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and multi-racial without promoting balkanization, because it was a shared faith in a common nation.
Working-class Americanism proved key to labor’s success. During the strike wave of 1919, employers exploited ethnic and racial divisions to defeat organizing drives, dividing immigrants against native and white against black. By contrast, in the 1930s, labor succeeded in organizing across ethnic and racial lines, from steel mills to meatpacking plants.
The unity wasn’t forged solely by labor’s efforts. Even before the founding of the CIO, FDR’s first presidential campaign had brought millions of second- and third-generation working-class immigrants into the Democratic Party.