Volume 39 part 3 (December 1994)

Summaries

DAVID MONTGOMERY, Labor and the Political Leadership of New Deal America
This essay examines the relationship between popular initiatives and government decision-makers during the 1930s. The economic crisis and the reawakening of labor militancy before 1935 elevated men and women, who had been formed by the workers' movement of the 1910s and 1920s, to prominent roles in the making of national industrial policies. Quite different was the reshaping of social insurance and work relief measures. Although those policies represented a governmental response to the distress and protests of the working class, the workers themselves had little influence on their formulation or administration. Through industrial struggles, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) mobilized a new cadre, trained by youthful encounters with urban ethnic life, expanding secondary schooling and subordination to modern corporate management, in an unsuccessful quest for economic planning and universal social insurance through the agency of a reformed Democratic Party.

ERIK VAN REE, Stalin's Bolshevism: The First Decade
This article discusses Stalin's Bolshevism during his Tiflis and Baku periods in the first decade of the century. It focuses on his position in the inner-faction debate between Lenin and Bogdanov. It holds that Dzhugashvili's tactical and organizational views in the years from 1907 to 1909 moved from sympathetic to Bogdanov to a position near Lenin, though remaining somewhat to the left of the latter. Dzhugashvili never belonged to the leftist tendency. He was a typical representative of the "Russian" praktiki, whose main concern was to further conciliation in the Bolshevik faction.

PETER ACKERS, Colliery Deputies in the British Coal Industry Before Nationalization
This article challenges the militant and industrial unionist version of British coal mining trade union history , surrounding the Miners' Federation of Great Britain and the National Union of Mineworkers, by considering, for the first time, the case of the colliery deputies' trade union. Their national Federation was formed in 1910, and aimed to represent the three branches of coal mining supervisory management: the deputy (or fireman, or examiner), overman and shotfirer. First, the article discusses the treatment of moderate and craft traditions in British coal mining historiography. Second, it shows how the position of deputy was defined by changes in the underground labour process and the legal regulation of the industry. Third, it traces the history of deputies' union organization up until nationalization in 1947, and the formation of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS). The article concludes that the deputies represent a mainstream tradition of craft/professional identity and industrial moderation, in both the coal industry and the wider labour movement.