ARTHUR J. GOLDBERG: NEW DEAL LIBERAL by David L. Stebenne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 539 pp.

Reviewed by Richard A. Brisbin, Jr., Department of Political Science, West Virginia University
 

Arthur J. Goldberg--attorney for organized labor's leadership in the 1950s, Secretary of Labor, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court during the "real" Warren Court, and United Nations ambassador--was an eminence gris. According to historian David Stebenne, Goldberg was seen in the shadows near the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers union leadership, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Earl Warren, and Lyndon Johnson. But what did Goldberg say and do? In this biography of Goldberg, Stebenne retains the shadows and portrays Goldberg in silhouette. Stebenne's presentation never reveals much of what Goldberg said or thought about law, labor, and American politics. Instead, Stebenne allows his book to develop into a useful general history of labor politics and national policymaking in the 1950s and 1960s. Paradoxically, by leaving Goldberg in the shadows of labor law and politics, Stebenne quite incidentally tells political scientists and readers with an interest in law and society an important story about the constitutive function of law and lawyers in post-New Deal America.

Arthur Goldberg is an elusive figure for the biographer. Stebenne appears to have combed labor archives and located but a few letters written by Goldberg. He cites but does not quote what he calls "conversations" with Goldberg. When general counsel for the United Steelworkers union and the CIO from 1948 to 1961, Goldberg refused to take an office in labor's Washington headquarters. From an office a block away, he communicated with CIO officials by telephone (p. 102). Steelworkers presidents Philip Murray and David J. McDonald were often farther away at union headquarters in Pittsburgh. Little information on their telephone conversations exists. Because judicial papers of other justices were not accessed, Stebenne does not disclose Goldberg's communications with his colleagues and law clerks while on the Warren Court. Many of Goldberg's statements at meetings when a member of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations are not recounted by the author. Also, interviews are not employed to fill in the gaps in the Goldberg record. Consequently, very few of Goldberg's own words or those of his family or close associates find their way into Stebenne's. The result is pages of detailed discussions of the inner workings of American labor based on original materials from organized labor's archives, mostly transcripts of meetings and speeches, together with a reference to the effect that "Goldberg was there."

A random selection and examination of pages 100, 150 and 200 serves to illustrate Stebenne's approach in describing Goldberg. On page 100, Stebenne writes the Goldberg regarded United Autoworkers Union president Walter Reuther as "unrealistic" and that David J. McDonald became increasingly dependent on Goldberg. However, no statements or actions by Goldberg are quoted or cited in what becomes a page-long portrait of the union leaders. On page 150 Goldberg is never mentioned in a very detailed recounting of American tariff policy. On the next page, in a paragraph that is mostly about labor's position on tariffs, Goldberg's position is briefly defined by reference to secondary sources, union documents, and an undated conversation of the author with Goldberg. Goldberg's words never appear. On page 200 Stebenne writes that Goldberg made "somewhat misleading" public statements about steel company profits during the 1959 steel strike. The public statements are not quoted, described, or compared to steel company annual reports. The same is true of reported statements to United States Steel Vice-President R. Conrad Cooper cited by Stebenne. However, a statement of Goldberg to a union executive committee meeting is quoted at length from a transcript. Compared to most contemporary biographies of public figures, we learn little of Goldberg's motivations, manner of expressing himself, personal relationships with coworkers and family, daily work habits, ideological, ethical, and intellectual suppositions, and political aspirations and personal ambitions. Save in a few contexts like the 1959 steel strike and the President's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy's operations in 1961 and 1962, it is even hard for a reader to acquire a sense of Goldberg's style in labor negotiations and manner of influencing labor leaders, other Supreme Court justices, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Despite the dearth of recorded statements and actions by or about Goldberg, Stebenne provides much valuable information about labor law and labor politics in post-war America. From the start of the New Deal in 1933 the institutions of the federal government and labor-management agreements gradually created a legal status for American labor.

As briskly recounted in the first three chapters of Stebenne's book, Goldberg was not in the inner circle of labor leaders who legalized labor-management relations prior to 1950. Goldberg spent the years of the New Deal in legal practice in Chicago. He had unions as clients, but apparently he never directly advised even local union leaders until late 1939. Nonetheless, he did come to know these leaders and many politicians, including Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. During World War II Goldberg served in the Office of Strategic Services, and he participated in efforts to organize unionists in occupied France and neutral Europe to resist, strike, or spy on the Germans. To his credit Stebenne shows how Goldberg, like many bright young persons who moved into the elite circles of national politics in the twentieth century, gained power by supporting existing elites. Goldberg did not bring revolutionary new ideas into the labor movement or Washington's circles of power.

Goldberg join the inner circles of the labor movement as both CIO and United Steelworkers General Counsel in March 1948. The heart of the book, chapters three through nine, depicts Goldberg and labor at play in national politics during the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. Stebenne offers a painstakingly detailed picture of the three defining occurrences in the American labor history of these years. First, business accepted the legitimacy of the status of labor by agreeing to bargain over cost of living wage increases, job assignment and work rules, hours of work, and vacation and pension benefits in the immensely important auto, steel, and coal industry contracts of 1950 (p. 75). In negotiating disputes, such as the 1959 steel strike, Stebenne presents no evidence that Goldberg ever pressed the companies for concessions beyond the pattern of bargaining that was at the heart of the 1950 contracts. Goldberg apparently never sought union participation in management decisions or governmental guarantees for labor, as some corporatist or class-activist unionists desired.

Second, the leaders of most unions solidified their control through the completion of a program of union bureaucratization and the elimination of shop floor militancy. To a large extent, most union leaders had isolated their radical, class-activist members even before the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required them to file affidavits indicating that they had no communist tendencies. Also, even before World War II a tendency for bureaucratization of unions and the emergence of a powerful administrative role for union leaders had appeared.

Stebenne details how Goldberg participated in events that fostered these trends in union affairs. He replaced a CIO general counsel, Lee Pressman, an alleged communist who supported a more assertive union position against business. Goldberg urged the CIO leadership to support McCarthyite anti-subversive laws like the McCarran Act. He apparently urged a cautious union endorsement of social policy initiatives. He supported more European conservative unions against Marxist domination of the labor movement.

Besides support for a less militant and leftist labor movement, Goldberg set to work reorganizing and institutionalizing labor. As described in several richly detailed chapters, Goldberg played a central role in the merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955, the victory of the bureaucratic McDonald faction for control of the Steelworkers against the rank-and-file insurgency led by Donald Rarick in 1956, AFL-CIO efforts to control internal corruption while fending off efforts at congressional oversight of unions, the litigation that secured Supreme Court legitimation of judicially enforceable arbitration clauses in union contracts (Textile Workers v. Lincoln Mills, 1957; the Steelworkers' Trilogy, 1960), and the evolution of an accommodation between the Steelworkers and the steel industry in the early 1960s. Except in fending off congressional regulation of corruption through the adoption of the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, Goldberg fulfilled the aims of his sponsors and allies among the less militant leaders and central bureaucracies of the AFL-CIO and Steelworkers Union.

The result of his activity was a stronger institutional structure for labor, an institutional structure that controlled shop floor militants, and, despite the lengthy 1959 steel strike, provided a clearer legal demarcation of the status and power of labor and management in the steel industry. It paved the way for long-term stability between the union and the industry.

Third, Goldberg supported the alliance between organized labor and the Democratic Party that dated from CIO support for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 election. However, with the jointure of the more liberal CIO with the more conservative AFL craft unions, labor leadership began to divide over the question of which faction of the Democratic Party to support. Stebenne provides information on how Goldberg drew the AFL-CIO into the Kennedy camp. Goldberg's reward was being named as Kennedy's Secretary of Labor. Stebenne points out that as Secretary of Labor in 1961 and 1962 Goldberg "operating in the background" (p. 277) apparently sought a cooperative scheme of labor management relations typified by his sponsorship of the President's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy, his investigations of Swedish labor-management policy, and his efforts to get his former employer, the Steelworkers, to agree to end its "tug-of-war" with the industry (p. 291). As labor secretary Goldberg resisted direct state intervention in labor affairs, including equal rights legislation affecting female workers, he desired labor and management to become more cooperative, and he envisioned labor more as interest group supporting political reform without the state-managed policies favored by the Democrat's liberal wing (p. 238).

Although Stebenne's depiction of labor politics, a story that enriches mainstream labor histories of the post-New Deal era, the book contributes little new information on the heyday of the Warren Court. In the single chapter devoted to Goldberg's three terms of service as associate justice (1962-65) Stebenne relies almost exclusively on opinions and secondary sources to construct a picture of the justice at work. The weakness of the Warren Court chapter will greatly disappoint many scholars interested in a truly significant era in American constitutional development. Only four paragraphs describe Goldberg's selection as a justice (pp. 309-10), there is virtually no discussion of interactions among the justices, and the review of cases (pp. 318-37) concentrates on the labor law cases in which Goldberg did not recuse himself. As Stebenne indicates, Goldberg's previous AFL-CIO counseling caused him to recuse himself from the most significant labor case that arose during his years on the Court, Fibreboard Paper Products v. NLRB (1964) upholding NLRB policy permitting collective bargaining of contracting out or "outsourcing" union jobs to nonunion firms but restricting collective bargaining over many other management decisions. The key apportionment decisions of the years of Goldberg's service receive a sentence of commentary, while cases like New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) and other First Amendment decisions, criminal cases like Gideon v. Wainwright (1965) and Malloy v. Hogan (1964), the sit-in cases, and Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964) are mentioned in two paragraphs (pp. 334-36). The only information of any substantial interest is the revelation that Goldberg was kept apprised of labor policy by the executive branch and tried to mend rifts among United Steelworkers leaders while on the bench. Although the exact nature of Lyndon Johnson's pleas from Goldberg to leave the Court and become United Nations ambassador are not reported, Stebenne presents information that Johnson might have used as leverage embarrassing information about the financing of a party sponsored by Goldberg to honor Johnson. Without Goldberg's knowledge some of the money reputedly came from convicted Texas wheeler-dealer Billy Sol Estes.

Stebenne also consigns the events of Goldberg's almost three year long United Nations ambassadorship to a single chapter. Stebenne reports that the Vietnam conflict overshadowed Goldberg's time as ambassador. Although this chapter might be of less interest to law and politics scholars, it contains by far the most direct citation of Goldberg's personal views of any chapter in the book. The evidence indicates that Goldberg developed a strong hostility to the administration's Vietnam policy and joined the group of insiders who forced Johnson to change his policy in March 1968. It was, Stebenne's says, "his finest hour in government" (p. 372). The book closes with a few pages recounting Goldberg's only foray into electoral politics, a campaign for governor of New York that ended in a crushing defeat administered by Nelson Rockefeller.

In five final paragraphs Stebenne offers his assessment of Goldberg's career and links it to what he calls the decline of what he calls New Deal Liberalism. He faults Goldberg and his political allies for resting their "social democratic vision" on opposition to the Soviet threat, the achievement of economic security rather than justice for minorities and women, and "insensitivity to concerns about popular participation." (pp. 381-82). This last point surely needs development.

Although not a primary concern of Stebenne, perhaps what is most telling for law and politics scholars is his book's story of the isolation of the American labor and liberal elites from the working class and their reliance on law to resolve socioeconomic problems and enhance the lives of workers. After Goldberg left his working class Chicago home and summer laboring jobs during college, Stebenne never places Goldberg in association with the class of workers his political and legal positions tried to defend. Being a phone call away from the leaders of the Steelworkers and the White House put him in a world far away from the shot-and-a-beer world of the Steelworkers union members. Indeed, according to Stebenne, no one seems more isolated from rank-and-file of American labor than Arthur Goldberg. Once on the Court Goldberg defended the rights of minorities, but Stebenne never depicts Goldberg in any kind of personal contact with African Americans or the poor and dispossessed.

When United Nations ambassador, Stebenne describes Goldberg as concerned about labor, but Goldberg never appears to have associated with the workers of other nations. Stebenne locates Goldberg in the White House discussing bombing campaigns in Vietnam, but Goldberg never seems to have interacted with anyone with significant experience in fighting the war. Goldberg reacted to the problems of America without direct contact with the American people who faced those problems, and he reacted through the deployment of his lawyer's skills of mediation, negotiation, agreement drafting, and opinion writing. He was the "self-conscious broker on behalf of the organized working class" (p. 79).

Perhaps Goldberg was, as Stebenne's argues without ever quoting his subject, committed to the social democratic politics and New Deal liberalism. Yet, the book tells us that Goldberg tried to use law and the negotiation of legal agreements and legislation rather than direct political action to effectuate those principles. Like many American liberals of the post-New Deal era, Goldberg tried to manipulate and massage federal politics to help workers rather than encourage the grass-roots activism of the 1930s sit-down strikes or the 1960s civil rights movement to pressure the state or business to assist workers and the disenfranchised. Stebenne only rarely mentions how Goldberg's life discloses this important constitutive characteristic of post-New Deal liberalism. After World War II, liberal elites, especially those associated with organized labor, came to depend on the shadowy world of Washington lawyers and dealmakers to achieve their policy objectives. Liberal and labor elites agreed with Goldberg that, "... government supervision of the postwar social contract as, on the whole, beneficial to the union movement" (p. 182). Labor elites, with Goldberg's total commendation, isolated and repressed class activists as effectively as did the reactionary McCarthyites among the congressional Southern Democrats and Republicans of the 1950s. The labor elites neglected furthering the organization of American workers, building of neighborhood alliances between African and European American workers, and polling workers' sentiments about the policies of an expanding state. They assumed that law alone - whether in a labor contract for greater wages and benefits negotiated by Arthur Goldberg or a pro-rights decision from the Supreme Court written by Arthur Goldberg or a social welfare act lobbied for by Arthur Goldberg - might construct a better America. By their commitment to legal solutions for inequities and injustices, social democratic liberals - such as the labor leaders Goldberg represented - might have paradoxically contributed to the demise of post-New Deal liberalism and social democratic policies. Isolated in governing-class Washington, they had no sense of the needs and hopes and fears of working America or any sense of how to mobilize American workers to build a more egalitarian nation. They managed politics and union members through telephone calls to lawyers like Arthur Goldberg.