Industrial World War

America is in an undeclared state of emergency. Not since the Cold War has the US faced such powerful enemies—and our military isn’t ready. Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer of Palantir, issues an urgent call to action: Mobilize. The American industrial base once underwrote American victory. Builders and workers rallied to win World War II. For most of the twentieth century, great American companies from General Mills to Chrysler had defense businesses that sent mankind into space and won the Cold War. But the forges fell silent and the furnaces went dark.

The Industrial Revolution, which took place in Great Britain between the middle of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th, transformed British industry and society and made Great Britain the most powerful nation in the world. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen due to one, single factor but rather to a number of separate, yet, related developments which interacted to change the world profoundly and completely. Improvements in the production of iron allowed the construction of efficient, reliable steam engines.

For most of human existence, people lived in a somewhat similar fashion. Everything that has been produced, from food and raw materials to clothing and other finished products, has been done either solely by hand or with some help of animal power. This was the same across the eras and throughout the world, no matter how advanced or backward the various civilizations were. Yet, our lives today couldn’t be more different.

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement - especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations - and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration.