Champion of American Labor?
Too often Social Democrats are consumed by their grudges. Getting through the biographies they write about their heroes can be a tedious chore. Worse, the subjects of these biographies are poorly served by books that devote more attention to attacking enemies than defending their subjects’ virtues. Arch Puddington’s biography of Lane Kirkland is an egregious offender. Kirkland, President of the AFL-CIO following George Meany’s retirement in 1979 until he was pushed out of office in the mid-1990’s, presided over an enormously difficult period for American labor. The decline in union density was accelerated by open hostility from the Reagan-Bush administration and a cottage industry of aggressive union-busting consultants, while corporate globalization shipped millions of unionized American jobs overseas. Kirkland’s reputation is as something of a Nero-type character who fiddled with anti-Communist foreign policy while Rome burned. That is certainly an unfair over-generalization, but “Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor” does […]