Running Steel, Running America

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The history of modern liberalism has been hotly debated in<br>contemporary politics and the academy. Here, Judith Stein uses<br>the steel industry--long considered fundamental to the U.S.<br>economy--to examine liberal policies and priorities after World<br>War II. In a provocative revision of postwar American history,<br>she argues that it was the primacy of foreign commitments and the<br>outdated economic policies of the state, more than the nation's<br>racial conflicts, that transformed American liberalism from the<br>powerful progressivism of the New Deal to the feeble policies of<br>the 1990s.<br> Stein skillfully integrates a number of narratives usually<br>treated in isolation--labor, civil rights, politics, business,<br>and foreign policy--while underscoring the state's focus on the<br>steel industry and its workers. By showing how those who<br>intervened in the industry treated such economic issues as free<br>trade and the globalization of steel production in isolation from<br>the social issues of the day--most notably civil rights and the<br>implementation of affirmative action--Stein advances a larger<br>argument about postwar liberalism. Liberal attempts to address<br>social inequalities without reference to the fundamental and<br>changing workings of the economy, she says, have led to the<br>foundering of the New Deal state.<br><br>

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