Ohio Books

Daniel Opler's sharp, focused study of the rise and collapse of New York City department store unions insists on the primacy of particularity and local context in writing history, but in the process provides an insightful answer (or partial answer) to a big question: why the failure of a white collar labor movement? This absence becomes ever more glaring in the twenty-first century United States as industrial work moves offshore and income disparity widens between corporate cogs and major executives. In supplying an answer, Opler looks in some expected places - the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that reversed many of labor's hard-won Depression-era gains, the postwar Red Scare that all but neutered many of the unions that had drawn on radicals' organizing skills. But he also weaves in the postwar flight to the suburbs, where both a rising middle class and their retail suppliers decamped after the war, producing both a new kind of shopper, a new kind of worker, and a new kind of public space. His analysis distinguishes between an institutionalized Communist party, whose strategies sometimes cloaked specific political goals, and individual Communists, who adapted these strategies to local needs. He considers the role of gender in a union with a heavily male hierarchy and a predominantly female workforce - and suggests the effect of this gender composition on the unions' virtual erasure from history. Altogether this is a penetrating analysis that mines a largely unexplored field to sparkling effect.

For All White Collar Workers raises the curtain on a vanished world when department stores served very specific customer bases in downtown neighborhoods rather than supplying standardized goods through national chains operating in suburban malls. Opler's first scene is the Union Square shopping district, where in the 1930s stores like Klein's and Ohrbach's offered troughs of cheap knock-offs - and nothing in the way of service - to Lower East Side housewives. Here both clerk and customer came from the same social milieu, which was generally immigrant working class. Across the square were the offices of the Daily Worker. The Square itself was contested terrain, sometimes co-opted by neighborhood merchants producing sanitized celebrations, sometimes taken over by workers or radicals for protests or as a staging ground for May Day marches.

When working conditions for clerks worsened during the Depression, the AFL, which had a charter to organize retail workers under the Retail Clerks International Protection Association (RCIPA), showed little interest in the women and girls who worked at Klein's and Ohrbach's. Instead in 1934 these workers approached the Communist-affiliated Office Workers Union, which assigned an organizer and sponsored a strike. Opler clearly relishes the tactics of these free-wheeling years, when workers disrupted store operations by setting white mice loose in the stores and organizing themed protests that promoted class solidarity among both strikers and customers. Members of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians provided expertise and assistance for some of these operations. Klein's and Ohrbach's settled the strike in 1935, acceding to some of the union demands but neither recognizing the union nor keeping the strike leaders on the payroll. The infant union ended up allying with the AFL but continued to benefit from the organizational skills and protest skills of the radical leaders.

In the second chapter Opler's scene shifts to May's, on Brooklyn's Fulton Street - like Klein's and Ohrbach's, a cut-rate department store. May's workers formed a union under RCIPA which, more typical of AFL style, eschewed provocation but benefited from institutional legitimacy and won the support of middle-class sympathizers in the League of Women Shoppers. RCIPA's tepid support for strikes led in early 1937 to a rejection of the national union's leadership, as local leaders formed the New Era Committee. Freed from AFL restraints, unions at F&W Grand and Woolworth's - two five-and-ten-cent variety stores - benefited from radical leadership that imported the sit-down strike from Detroit's auto industry. With radicalism carrying the day, the New Era Committee applied for a CIO charter in mid-1937.

In Chapter 3 Opler turns to the quite different retail territory centered on Thirty-Fourth Street, anchored by Macy's and Gimbel's, where goods were kept under glass and extracted for customer inspection by seasoned salespeople. No class consciousness here - shoppers expected to be waited on by clerks of a lower social stratum. Under the CIO, New York's retail unions, now gathered into the United Retail and Wholesale Employees Association, managed to retain the legitimacy they had enjoyed with the AFL. Swayed by the conciliatory Samuel Wolchok, managers at Macy's signed a union contract in February 1938 and at Gimbel's the next month. But at the stores the local leaders still tended to have Communist connections, and locals proved far more willing to resort to strikes than the national leadership, which saw benefits in stability.

Stability was a necessity during the fraught war years, the subject of Opler's fourth chapter. In a curious reversal of roles, Communists within the unions sought to prove their loyalty by keeping their heads down, and liberals became more militant. Samuel Wolchok, for example, spoke out for the rights of women and blacks, both of whom were being given more responsibility during the war but neither of which group had received strong advocacy from Communists.

The postwar period would be the testing ground for white-collar unionism. Would the unions' growing legitimacy lead to their expansion even as they shed their radical past? Would the support of workers in other fields add to their power? As Opler demonstrates in his fifth and sixth chapters, events both within and outside of the unions led to collapse and defeat. Early prognostications were positive: radicals and liberals both supported a full employment bill, and Wolchok assiduously avoided branding local leaders Communists. Locals maintained their hold on the operations of their unions. But a provision in the Taft-Hartley Act effectively forcing a purge of Communists destroyed the possibility of continued reconciliation. Local leaders in the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (as it was now called) refused to sign noncommunist affidavits, but national leaders like Wolchok ultimately knuckled under and then called for cooperation among the locals. Once again the locals bolted the national union, although they had maintained their local autonomy and had managed to construct both an administrative structure and a social culture that boded well for the future.

But besides the anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940s and early '50s, the suburban diaspora of the postwar years threatened solidarity. A house and garage encouraged the typical member of the white collar class to think of himself or herself as middle class professional rather than a "worker." And suburban shopping - the self-service paradigm that worked so successfully in the neighborhood supermarket - made the full service model of Macy's and Gimbel's increasingly obsolete, leading to mass layoffs. Unions tried to represent themselves as bastions of democratic decision making. After the break with the CIO, many local leaders did sign noncommunist affidavits anyhow. Opler suggests that this emphasis on consensus stifled the little interest that locals had previously demonstrated in women's issues or opportunities for people of color. And the strategy of allying with liberals rather than keeping the lines of communication open with Communists proved fatal. In a 1952 strike at Hearn's in which managers attempted to brand strikers as Communists, strikers effectively turned the tables on the store, calling Hearn's un-American for firing veterans and Gold-Star Mothers and refusing to negotiate. In the process, strikers won the support of politicians and the NAACP. But anticommunism was equated with a respect for government rulings, and the government of this era was a stranger to the labor camp. When injunctions were called to end the strike, the union suddenly found itself painted into a corner.

For All White Collar Workers tells this story compactly but with considerable subtlety. Typical of Opler's nuance and evenhandedness is his treatment of Communists as protagonists: to be sure, they were more forward-looking than anyone else in evidence, grasping the possibilities of white collar organizing when other unionists were locked in outdated assumptions of who constitutes a worker that still hinder the labor movement. But despite the verve of their radicalism, they shared the prejudices of their time about the potential role of women and people of color.

Opler also avoids the kind of narrative that writers of labor history often fall back on - chapter-long disquisitions on the mechanics of negotiating sessions, union elections, and the mergers of locals, leaving the reader to flip back through endless pages to answer the question "What was the ABCD again?" Instead, because he keeps emphasizing the importance of context in making sense of the situation, he draws from a real variety of sources, from the newspaper ads placed by stores to little-known novels, from the inescapable 1939 World's Fair to the Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street. Yet far from seeming gratuitous, the introduction of these references has a remarkable inevitability, and they lend tremendous liveliness to the story.

The one context that is left somewhat unexplored is the relation of the department store unions to other white collar unions, either in New York or nationally. How did the challenges of organizing retail workers reflect or differ from the unionization of, say, teachers or actors? Were there any unions of retail employees outside New York during this period? As it is, the New York retail unions exist in a kind of vacuum. But to have covered these issues in any depth would have resulted in a very different kind of work. Within the constraints of the case study, For All White Collar Workers successfully explores of one of history's intriguing dead ends with trenchant implications for the present.

Excellent for those interested in Ft. Ancient studies. thgis team took aa archaeological problem and went about solving it. A must for those conducting or interested in the Late prehistoric period of the Ohio valley.

GeoFacts are a series of FREE one-page educational handouts by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey. Please see their website, [...], to download FREE PDFs.

If you grew up in Ohio from the 1930s through the 1960s, you undoubtedly remember-or should-Frank Lausche, the bushy-haired, immensely popular Mayor of Cleveland, five-term Governor of Ohio, and two-term United States Senator.
Who was Frank Lausche? He was the highest-ranking Slovenian-American politician in the country. He was a talented baseball player who turned his back on a professional career. He was the mayor of Cleveland during one of its worst catastrophes-and governor of Ohio during World War II. And briefly he was the choice of President Eisenhower's choice to replace Richard Nixon as vice president. In case you're wondering, Lausche was a Democrat and Ike a Republican.
Those are a few examples of how author James E. Odenkirk has brought Lausche into fuller perspective. The author traces the career of the industrious youth who never went to college and yet graduated from law school and went on to a distinguished career as a municipal and common pleas judge. He shows how Lausche was an independent spirit as a judge and mayor, retaining capable Republicans like Eliot Ness in his cabinet and cracking down on the gambling dons. He describes Cleveland's version of 9/11, the East Ohio gas explosion of 1944 which virtually leveled the neighborhood in which he grew up. Lausche was the Rudolph Guliani of that catastrophe-calm, capable, and determined.
No wonder Lausche was so successful in running for governor in a Republican state. Unlike today's politicians, he eschewed ideological labels and often refused to discuss issues. Odenkirk shows how he worked the state fairs and attracted the votes of the small town Republicans with pledges of fiscal integrity. As governor, he kept those promises, keeping taxes low and committing himself only to highways (the Ohio Turnpike) and restoring of mine-scarred hillsides.
I enjoyed learning of Frank and Jane Lausche's marriage. Frank was Catholic and Jane Protestant; yet, at a time when mixed marriages were unusual, they attended their own churches without fanfare. To save money and improve their diet, Jane raised vegetables and chickens on the grounds of the Governor's Mansion when Frank was governor. They subsisted on a modest $13,000 gubernatorial salary, though Jane finally had to browbeat her parsimonious husband in providing a larger clothing allowance.
When I was a boy, I heard a family friend, a Republican politician, refer to Lausche as "Frank the fence sitter." Odenkirk shows the two sides of the coin: the fiercely independent public servant who refused to keetow to organized labor or Democratic bosses and on the opposite side, the crafty politician who managed to get elected and reelected by avoiding issues. As a senator, he hewed a conservative course that was Democratic only in its resemblance to the southerners in his own party. Odenkirk virtually admits that he was a Republican elected as a Democrat.
Ironically, on one issue, he was ahead of his time-civil rights. As governor, he always supported civil rights legislation and even desegregated a southern Ohio town with separate schools for black children. In the cauldron of the 1960s, while supporting the war in Vietnam, he voted for the Civil Rights Acts. But changes in racial demographics, Odenkirk shows, resulted in his political demise. He refused to support the first black candidate for mayor of Cleveland, Carl Stokes, who was swept into office in 1966. Two years later, organized labor and black voters combined to back John Gilligan of Cincinnati who defeated Lausche in the Democratic primary.
Odenkirk evokes the memory of long departed Ohio luminaries: Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer-prize winning author-farmer who was a close-the closest-friend of Frank and Jane Lausche; Louis Seltzer, the powerful editor of the once-influential Cleveland Press and an early Lausche supporter; Ray Miller, the Cuyahoga County political boss who couldn't stand Lausche and yet couldn't defeat him; James Rhodes, the Republican warhorse who would be his party's version of Lausche (in political longevity) and a personal friend. In fact, the political friends of Lausche confound political logic: Robert Taft, John Bricker, even Dwight Eisenhower.
Yes, the author is aware that Lausche's politics represents a contradiction-a Democrat often clothed as a Republican. Yet he has dug deep enough to convince the reader that Lausche was a remarkable politician-the first Catholic to break into the highest echelons of politics in Ohio; the first ethnic to command the loyalty of WASP voters in rural and small town Ohio; one of the few politicians with lengthy careers never to be tarred with scandal. Ironically, his honesty and frugality were perhaps his downfall-he wanted to run the government as he ran his own life and that became increasingly difficult.
I strongly recommend this thoroughly researched and nicely illustrated book. It's obvious to me that the author, while not blind to his subject's shortcomings, really admires Frank Lausche. And, I came away from this book believing that there is a lot to admire in Lausche and that he deserves the close attention to details of his life and career. I found this book held my interest and attention (though I didn't read it in a single sitting). I give it a thumps up.

John S. Watterson

Enhanced with a profusion of historical black-and-white photographs, Free & Public written by John Fleischman is an impressively visual and textual tribute to the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County. Images spanning the decades artfully combine with insightful quotations with a matter-of-fact history, resulting in showcasing the remarkable and informative saga of a much beloved and enduring literary institution -- the free public community library system of Cincinnati, Hamilton County, Ohio.

This book has great suggestions of what you can do and see around Ohio with kids and not spend all your money. I was very pleased to see that it is not just a book about Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati but inlcudes the rural areas around the state. It is good for those of us who live in Ohio and are looking for weekend entertainment as well as for those coming to visit Ohio. I actually gave my copy away to a friend and now need to get another one for myself! Believe it or not there are still alot of cool things to do that are really FREE.

This book is very impressive. Clearly, the author has a wonderful insight into youngsters and their thoughts and feelings. Excellent read for any age, young and old.

Even though I know better, like most people, the term "Underground Railroad" conjures the image of white folks rescuing hapless black folks. Griffler believes this is partly because historians have focused too much on the "Railroad" (with its mostly white conductors and stations) and not enough on the "Underground." Without diminishing the interracial aspects, Griffler documents how African American communities created and utilized a vast underground front-line network decades before there was much white involvement. As he states, "Even at its height the Underground Railroad did not entice African Americans to escape; rather, the loosely organized support operation was formed in response to the constant stream of fugitives."

In addition to introducing black freedom fighters like John Parker (a former slave who built a prosperous business in Ripley, Ohio and worked from that base) Griffler crosschecks letters, reminiscences and oral histories against contemporary scholarship to explore the inner workings and attitudes of various participants and societies, providing a fascinating new perspective on things we thought we knew.

In less skilled hands, this book could have been an unwieldy tome, but Griffler packs a wallop in a slim volume. His writing is concise, his narrative smooth, and God bless him, he never belabors a point. I easily rank this as my #1 book of the year, for general readers and academics alike.

This book is interesting less for its literary quality than for the Indian captivity tale it tells and the example it provides of a little-known woman heroine of the American frontier era, based on a true story. Since you have to dig hard these days to find the unvarnished, less savory accounts of Indian and white settler behavior in early American history and since tales of only a few women heroines of the era are recycled over and over again, this book both reminds us of historical truth and adds a woman heroine to the standard lexicon. Suitable for upper- grade school (with parental approval) through adult readers.

This is a wonderful, unique addition to existing histories of African Americans in the north. I had no idea (as most people, I think) that the Black community in Cincinnati had such a great impact on mid-nineteenth century American history. Slavery in the north, the work of Black Abolitionists, the importance of the Ohio River, the work of Black churches and the Prince Hall Masons to Black freedom in the 19th century, Fugitive Slave Law cases, and much more are covered. Professor Taylor has written an enlightening, exciting account of this epoch in American history. Thank you so very much Nikki M.Taylor!