Extended Summary

This article examines a central problem in U.S. labor history: why a labor movement marked by repeated waves of militancy failed to consolidate durable class solidarity encompassing the whole working population. Between the founding of the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and the AFL–CIO merger in 1955, major strikes, industrial expansion, state recognition of collective bargaining, and the growth of mass-production unionism did not produce a stable and inclusive class project. The article therefore asks how the social boundaries of organized labor were constructed, legitimized, and defended.
The article conceptualizes this process as the “rejection of class.” The term does not imply that class relations or class interests were absent. It refers to the historical narrowing of organized labor’s capacity to become an inclusive political subject. This narrowing operated through three interconnected mechanisms: racial stratification in access to jobs, wages, seniority, and advancement; exclusionary membership and representation regimes; and the disciplining of internal opposition through nationalism and anticommunism. Building on W. E. B. Du Bois’s account of the public and psychological wage and David Roediger’s analysis of the wages of whiteness, the article traces how advantages associated with whiteness were institutionalized in union practices, legitimized through national loyalty, and protected against egalitarian alternatives.
Methodologically, the study adopts a mechanism-centered approach within comparative-historical sociology. It does not claim to offer a systematic analysis of a primary-source corpus. Instead, it develops an interpretive synthesis of labor-history and political-history research, supported at selected points by contemporary union publications, legal materials, and official documents. Local strikes, workplace rules, seniority systems, and union constitutions are connected to national federation policies, wartime labor institutions, and Cold War pressures. The period 1886–1955 is treated as a sequence in which exclusionary craft unionism became institutionalized, industrial unionism opened competing possibilities, and postwar anticommunism narrowed the field of legitimate union politics.
The first part shows that race was produced materially and institutionally through rules governing membership, representation, seniority, promotion, and access to preferred jobs. Railway brotherhoods, segregated locals, and racially uneven welfare and labor-law provisions created forms of white worker citizenship that offered selected groups tangible advantages. These arrangements could protect wages and job security for organized white workers in the short term, while leaving employers with a divided labor market and weakening labor’s capacity to raise standards across the workforce. Racial closure therefore converted class representation into the protection of a restricted membership community.
The second part examines nationalism as a source of union legitimacy. Gompersian Americanism defined legitimate unionism through loyalty to American institutions, voluntary bargaining, and immediate economic gains within capitalism. During the world wars, this language became embedded in forms of state–union cooperation. No-strike pledges, centralized bargaining procedures, and membership-security arrangements strengthened unions’ institutional position while tying acceptable labor demands to national productivity and public order. Union leaders gained recognition, bargaining authority, and greater control over membership, whereas strikes and radical opposition became easier to portray as irresponsible or disloyal.
The third part analyzes the postwar transformation of these boundaries into an anticommunist loyalty regime. The Taft–Hartley Act linked access to National Labor Relations Board procedures to anticommunist affidavits by union officers. This provision did not automatically expel left-wing organizers, but it altered internal power relations by allowing compliance to be defended as necessary for preserving institutional rights. CIO expulsions, local eligibility rules, and the policing of union debate extended this logic across several organizational levels. Anticommunism also shaped international labor policy by aligning major U.S. labor institutions with a wider Cold War strategy.
The article then turns to counterexamples to test whether exclusion was inevitable. Interracial dockworker alliances in New Orleans, the inclusive industrial model of the IWW, the autonomous Black organizing of the BSCP, and civil-rights unionism within parts of the CIO and the UPWA demonstrate that broader solidarity was historically possible. Yet none permanently combined three conditions: membership beyond racial and occupational boundaries, transformation of material workplace hierarchies, and political autonomy from employers, state institutions, and federation leaderships. Some remained sectorally limited; repression, centralization, or anticommunist restructuring weakened others.
The findings suggest that the dominant model prevailed not because inclusive alternatives never appeared, but because selective representation accumulated more durable legal, political, and organizational resources. Racial closure narrowed the social scope of labor, nationalism made this narrowing publicly legitimate, and anticommunism reduced the institutional capacity of competing projects. These mechanisms were mutually reinforcing rather than simply sequential. The article consequently reframes American exceptionalism: the issue is not only why socialism or a labor party failed to develop, but why recurring forms of inclusive labor activism could not be converted into lasting institutions. The study is limited by its reliance on a mechanism-centered synthesis rather than systematic archival research; local records and studies of regional, gendered, and sectoral variation are needed to test the argument across different settings.