"A broad panorama in brilliant prose." -- American Historical Review In this groundbreaking work of labor history, Irving Bernstein uncovers a period when industrial trade unionism, working-class power, and socialism became the rallying cry for millions of workers in the fields, mills, mines, and factories of America. With an introduction by Frances Fox Piven.

The presidency of Lyndon Johnson was a pivotal moment in twentieth-century American history. From the decisive social programs of the Great Society, to the triumph of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, to the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and domestic unrest, it was an era of dramatic accomplishment and wrenching tragedy. In Guns or Butter, renowned historian Irving Bernstein brings those five climactic years of the sixties vividly to life, from the moment Lee Harvey Oswald aimed a rifle from the window of the Texas School Depository to the tense ballot-counting that put Richard Nixon in the White House in 1968.

A counter-revisionist examination of JFK and his administration, Promises Kept presents a policy history of major domestic legislative efforts between 1961 and 1963. Bernstein focuses on administraive and congressional progress under Kennedy in civil rights, education, taxes, unemployment, Medicare, and the Peace Corps. He persuasively argues that Kennedy was indeed a successful president, showing that many of JFK's campaign promises were well on their way to enactment by the time of his assassination, even after two years of dealings with a balky and often hostile Congress, and the difficulty of working in a political system changing from conservative to liberal.

“Pre-eminent among historians of labor history.†—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the “roaring twenties†looked very different. Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and repression. Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Rooseveltâ€s inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s. "In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition. —From the new introduction by Frances Fox Piven

A combination of social history, labor history and a history of the New Deal, interweaving stories of migrant workers, laborers and policy makers. One chapter is devoted to the arts of the period and their portrayals of workers. Summaries of several leftist plays are also given, including plays by Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman,, and Erskine Caldwell. Also has several pages of photographs of Depression scenes and leaders of the period.