By the end of 1938, 1939, CIO seemed a spent force, still having failed to organize Ford or the so-called little steel companies or many, many other

firms in the mass production sector.

So what caused the change?

War.

War in Europe ended the Roosevelt Depression.

The U.S. became the arsenal of democracy. a podcast from the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University and

Jackman magazine. I'm your host Benjamin Fong. With this episode, our story takes a turn.

I have so far stayed mostly focused on the

ascendant period of the CIO, the more heroic phase of generation defining strikes

and landscape altering winds. In this episode in the next, we'll see the bureaucratization and

then fracturing of the CIO. Though the material covered in these two episodes,

going from roughly 1940 to merger with the AFL in 1955 spans a longer time period

than I covered in the first five episodes.

It is less befitting of a podcast titled Organized the Unorganized, and so I'm going to be moving through the middle and late periods of the CIO in much swifter fashion than its early period.

As I covered in episode 5, that early period could be said to have ended with a little steel strike

in 1937, when the limits of the New Deal order were dramatically illustrated in the brutal repression

and failure of the strike. But the CIO continued to grow through the

40s and it was the war escalation that provided the context for it to do so.

This episode will be devoted to the CIO's role in and relation to the war effort and what it meant for this labor upsurge.

The first thing that it meant was the departure of John L Lewis and the mine workers from the Federation they had played such an instrumental role in building.

As I mentioned in episode 2, Lewis bore no strong ties to the Democratic Party and in

in 1940 he broke with FDR by supporting Wendell Wilkie for president.

...