"Kevin Boyle has done a masterful job of identifying the unique contribution of the UAW, not only to American Liberalism, but also to the nation and to all people. As contemporary labor and society at large search for new directions, this book should be required reading."—Victor G. Reuther
Kevin Boyle is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, coauthor of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, and editor of Organized Labor and American Politics.
Intelligent, well written, and exhaustively researched,... Boyle's work... is part of an important and increasingly favorable reevaluation of the character of late New Deal social democracy.
(Journal of American History)
This book constitutes a compelling argument that throughout the immediate post-war decades, the union's leadership under Reuther attempted to construct a cross-class, biracial reform coalition in the United States.... The role and influence of institutions in the making of history is surely an argument that labour historians ignore at their own peril. Post-war United States labour historical scholarship has been surely enriched by Boyle pointing that out in such a compelling fashion.
- Harry Knowles, University of Sydney (The Journal of Industrial Relations)