Patrick Conroy, the secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) from 1941 to 1951, was not someone who gave up easily. As a friend observed, the Scottish-born coal miner was a committed trade unionist whose “moral certitude was admirable and… one of his great strengths.” In late 1942, however, Conroy seemed ready to call it quits on the CCL's campaign to win a national collective-bargaining policy in Canada. Since its inception in September 1940, the Congress, which represented most of the industrial unions in the country, had pushed hard for a comprehensive labor policy like the National Labor Relations or Wagner Act in the United States, which protected and advanced the rights of workers. But the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King repeatedly refused to move beyond a turn-of-the-century conciliatory framework that emphasized moral suasion and compromise. In late 1942, when a regional organizer asked Conroy whether a collective-bargaining policy appeared likely in the future, the CCL leader replied: “We do not feel it worthwhile to raise people's hopes when the record of the federal government is as it has been.”

As it had for countless other children in Arlington, Virginia, the idyll days of summer had come to end for eleven-year-old Edward Leslie Hamm Jr. on the morning of 5 September 1957. After donning a pair of clean khaki pants and a freshly pressed, short-sleeved white shirt, Hamm was heading back to the classroom along with twenty-one thousand other students in this Northern Virginia community. That alone was enough to put a pit in any child's stomach. But for Hamm the day possessed an added dimension. Instead of riding a bus for forty-five minutes to the Negro school six miles across the county, his parents were dispatching him, along with two other black pupils, to challenge the continued exclusion of blacks from the all-white school, one mile from their isolated exclusively black neighborhood. A full three years after Brown v. Board of Education, not a single black student had yet attended a white public school in Virginia, seen by many observers as the frontline state of resistance to school integration. The three children were nervous and took no comfort in thinking of themselves among a vanguard of the civil rights movement. “I wasn't into an integration thing,” recalled George Tyrone Nelson, who was fourteen at the time and among the trio challenging the segregated schools that day.

At the end of Turbulent Years, his classic study of the labor upheavals of the 1930s, Irving Bernstein unexpectedly announces that the American Federation of Labor “gained a decisive and permanent victory.” This is a remarkable admission. Bernstein had devoted the bulk of his study to the failures of the AFL and the emergence of a more relevant alternative, the CIO. Like most authors, he associated the turbulence of the 1930s with the rise of industrial unionism, which addressed the apparent deficiencies of the AFL, notably its preoccupation with skilled workers and neglect of large-scale manufacturing. Still, the AFL grew more rapidly. Bernstein tries to explain: the triumph of the AFL “was hidden by the mystique of power [John L] Lewis had imparted to the CIO, by the highly publicized contemporary successes of SWOC…and UAW…and the deliberate falsification of membership records.” While these factors may account for the misleading imagery of the CIO, they do not explain the behavior of millions of workers who opted for AFL organizations. Clearly other forces were at work.