"Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking: 1930-1990.

By Roger Horowitz (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xvi plus 373pp. $44.95/cloth $17.95/paperback).

The "new" labor historians of the 1970s asserted kinship with social historians. This new generation of scholars emphasized that, in contrast to the economistically oriented history of trade unions which had been at the center of the field for nearly three-quarters of a century, we were going to research and write the "social history of working people." We downplayed institutional history to focus on workers, workplaces, racial and ethnic groups, social movements and communities. The result has been a rich array of microcosmic case studies.

In the last decade, there has been a growing call from within the field for a return to institutional studies. In 1990, a major conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison ("The Wisconsin School and Beyond") urged a synthesis between labor history's initial incarnation, which had flourished under the direction of John R. Commons and Selig Perlman at that university, and the now maturing "new" labor history of the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, at a recent North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, Nelson Lichtenstein, a prominent scholar, encouraged a "neo-institutional" turn in the field.

Roger Horowitz's "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking is typical of this intended synthesis; however, this intellectual turn may soon reach an abrupt dead-end. Far from the creative integration promised by its introduction and promotional blurbs, this book offers a disappointing patchwork quilt of mismatched pieces woven together teleologically. Horowitz seems to think that all roads lead to Rome (the national union), so he can follow whichever ones he finds it convenient to research. And, once his story has reached Rome, local stories only matter in their relationship to Rome. "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" might include both institutional and social history, but it does not interweave them in an analytical and explanatory way.

"Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" is organized into three parts, each shaped by its relationship to the fate of the United Packinghouse Workers of America: its emergence in the 1930s, its institutionalization in the 1940s and 1950s, and its decline in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. To tell this story, Horowitz draws on an extensive range of primary sources: government records, such as the National Labor Relations Board and the National War Labor Board; the records of civil rights organizations and activists, such as the NAACP and its labor secretary, Herbert Hill; labor movement records, including the national union itself, a few of its locals, and the personal papers of prominent union leaders; and more than one hundred oral history interviews, most of them conducted by Horowitz and his partner-in-scholarship Rick Halpern, whose own book, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-1954 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), has just appeared. Interested readers might also consult their recent shared product, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York: Twayne, 1996).

Part 1 of "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" includes essays which explore four cities in which packinghouse workers began to organize in the 1930s: Austin, Minnesota; Chicago; Kansas City; and Sioux City, Iowa. Here, Horowitz provides his best social history: the ethnic and racial composition of the packinghouse workforces in each city, the internal cultural dynamics of each group and the relationships between groups. He also presents in rich detail the dramatic stories of initial organization in each of these cities: the struggle against the heavy legacy of the defeat of packinghouse unionism in 1919-1922; the coming together of workers from different departments inside the plants and different racial and ethnic communities outside the plants; the roles played by radical activists from diverse political tendencies; shopfloor contests over the pace and organization of work itself; efforts to link up organization with newly unionized workers in other packing plants and to exchange solidarity with workers in other industries.

But Horowitz never explains why he has chosen these four cities. Are they the most important cities in the development of packinghouse unionism? Or is each of them meant to be understood as a microcosm of particular dynamics and patterns of organization? Is there some other logic which explains their selection? Why does understanding these cities help us to understand the emergence of a national union in meatpacking? Unfortunately, Horowitz offers no explanation for his choices at all. And so "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" fails to provide the needed linkage between social history and institutional developments in its critical first section.

Parts 2 and 3 take us even further away from this linkage. Once Horowitz accounts for the creation of the national union in 1943, it becomes the central actor in his narrative. All important decisions - how to adjust to the new collective bargaining environment of World War II; how to cope with the continuing threat represented by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in the postwar years; how to address the demands of Black workers for fair treatment in the later 1940s and 1950s, and of women workers for new in-plant job opportunities in the 1960s; how to respond to the organizational and technological upheaval of the 1970s and 1980s - are seen as emanating from the national union. The local milieu, where packinghouse workers lived and worked - the real stuff of social history - enters Horowitz's account only as a location for a script which has been written elsewhere and actors who have been trained elsewhere.

It is not surprising, then, that "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" fails to explain the most interesting questions which have revolved around the United Packinghouse Workers of America and its successors. Among them: What was it like in Fort Dodge and Waterloo, Iowa, or Fort Worth, or Omaha, for the major union in town to insist on a civil rights agenda in the 1940s and 1950s? How could this same union resist the demands of women workers for fair treatment? Why was this union so unprepared for the employer assault of the 1980s? Why did the national union (the United Food and Commercial Workers Union) systematically destroy its most militant local unions in the 1980s?

It would indeed necessitate an approach which linked social and institutional history to answer these questions. But this linkage cannot rest, as Horowitz's does, on the subjugation of social history to a national institutional narrative. The shortcomings of "Negro and White, United and Fight!" should serve as a warning to other historians who want to weave these two approaches together.

Peter Rachleff Macalester College