Glenn Dyer, The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank and File Rebels

Reviewed By Benjamin Serby

The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank-and-File Rebels
by Glenn Dyer
The University of North Carolina Press
October 2024, 232 pp.

Following the Second World War, as Joshua Freeman has shown, organized labor and reformers in government built a “hybrid form of municipal social democracy” in New York City. [1] Public benefits, services provided directly by unions, and labor-backed cooperatives and service organizations together composed a mixed welfare state that benefited millions of New Yorkers — including many who were not themselves union members. This arrangement, a glaring exception to national standards of urban policymaking, ended abruptly following the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. Since then, business-friendly austerity has largely dictated the course of events here as elsewhere in the country.

The principal antagonists in this story, as it is commonly told, are employers and unions, elites and the popular classes, capital and labor—or some combination of the three. Glenn Dyer’s The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank and File Rebels (UNC Press, 2024) instead emphasizes conflicts between union members and employers, city officials, and union leaders alike. Dyer examines the years 1965-1975, which saw an intensification of rank-and-file militancy across industries and sectors. The core of the book is the period from 1969 to 1972, when the city’s manufacturing and construction industries were decimated (bleeding 100,000 jobs in 1970-72 alone), unemployment escalated (jumping from 3.1% in 1969 to 6.7% in 1971), and high inflation chipped away at workers’ standard of living. [2] These years of what Dyer calls rank-and-file “fever” mark the high point of labor unrest in New York after the strike wave that followed the end of the Second World War. [3] Whether rejecting bad contracts, pressing their leaders to call strikes, or fighting to democratize their unions, he presents the rank-and-file as a force in its own right—one that shaped the city’s politics in this tumultuous moment.

To illustrate the point, Dyer revisits a number of well-known moments in New York City labor history, beginning with the 1966 transit strike. Public memory of the event, which Freeman describes as “the most disruptive strike of the entire post-World War II era,” tends to spotlight the dramatic confrontation between Mayor John Lindsay and Mike Quill, the aging president of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100. [4] (Quill was imprisoned for refusing to obey an injunction to halt the strike and died shortly thereafter.) Dyer instead situates the work stoppage in the context of mounting rank-and-file impatience with inept union leaders. Pressure from below forced Quill to call a strike “in spite of himself” when he would have preferred to settle. [5] Similarly, the union rank-and-file—not labor leaders—formed the backbone of resistance when business elites inflicted drastic cuts on the city’s public sector during the fiscal crisis a decade later. “Repeatedly workers championed militant action while their leaders negotiated givebacks,” Dyer writes, describing the leaders of public sector unions such as DC 37 president Victor Gotbaum and UFT president Albert Shanker as “quick to negotiate but late to fight.” [6] This pivotal moment in the balance of class power in New York City therefore also reveals an “ongoing gap between union members and their leaders.” [7]

One of the key contentions of The Era Was Lost is that rank-and-file discontent converged with broader working-class concerns, such as law and order, in ways that often mapped onto racial divisions and paved the way to political realignment. For instance, Dyer writes that the infamous 1970 “Hard Hat Riot,” when construction workers beat up antiwar demonstrators in Lower Manhattan, reflected “mounting anger within the building trades over [Mayor John V.] Lindsay’s effort to impose hiring quotas for Black workers in the industry. [8] Another example is the “short-lived insurgency” within the Taxi Drivers Union (TDU) in the early 1970s, a moment when the union was lobbying city officials to crack down on the growing livery cab industry. [9] Because livery cabs served primarily Black and Puerto Rican customers who faced discrimination from (overwhelmingly white) taxi drivers, and because they were a much-needed source of employment in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, the conflict between the taxi industry and its upstart competitor pitted the TDU against communities of color—and against Lindsay, the son of an investment banker and a former Congressman representing the affluent Upper East Side, whom “many white rank-and-file union members” viewed as “actively promot[ing] the welfare of racial minorities at the expense of whites.” [10] (In an address to more than 3,000 union members in June 1972, Michael Mann, AFL-CIO regional director, denounced Lindsay for “prioritizing welfare recipients and criminal livery drivers over the honest, hard-working owner-drivers of [TDU] Local 3036.”) [11] As new regulations were imposed on livery cabs, many Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers took to the streets, blocking intersections and, in some neighborhoods, attacking yellow taxis. Tragically, one young Puerto Rican man in the South Bronx fell—or was thrown, according to some witnesses—to his death during a police chase.

Dyer’s account shows that New York’s rank-and-file rebels of the late 1960s and early ‘70s punched down as often as they punched up. To a certain extent, mass discontent “from below” can be said to have expressed an incipient backlash to the perceived excesses of urban liberalism. Within the Police Benevolent Association, “rank-and-file rebellion” took the form of law-and-order politics: the member-organized Law Enforcement Group, formed in 1968, demanded less restrained policing, a firm crackdown on radical groups such as the Black Panther Party, and abolition of the Civilian Complaint Review Board.  More broadly, Dyer directs attention to white working-class support for George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. The former Alabama governor sought—and, to a surprising extent, managed to attract—the votes of blue-collar union members in the industrial north: according to a September 1968 straw poll taken by the New Jersey United Auto Workers, upwards of 60% of members planned to cast a ballot for the Southern segregationist. Dyer does not reduce Wallace’s “undeniable cachet” with New York City’s workers to racism, plain and simple, but instead shows how his law-and-order message converged with their demand for safety on the job at a time when crime rates were spiking—a concern that, in their view, was ignored by public officials and union leaders. [12]

Given the considerable overlap between rank-and-file rebellion and backlash to urban liberalism (and the Lindsay administration in particular), Dyer writes that this wave of insurgency “play[ed] a central role in increasing political polarization in New York City and hastening the decline of the city’s social democracy.” [13] The evidence in The Era Was Lost does not always support these claims. After all, the book shows that it was rank-and-file workers who fought the hardest to halt the evisceration of New York’s robust public sector some fifty years ago. The extent of political “polarization” also seems quite limited. In the end, Wallace performed poorly in the five boroughs, maxing out at 9% of the vote in white working-class neighborhoods like Greenpoint, Maspeth, Red Hook, and Howard Beach. (By comparison, in 1948 the progressive candidate Henry Wallace took 13% of the vote citywide). Union voters did not buck the Democrats, nor did they reject the appeals of labor leaders, who stood firmly behind Hubert Humphrey. In a powerful demonstration of its political muscle, the AFL-CIO registered 237,773 new voters in New York City just in the final days before the November registration deadline. Rather than magnifying the split between the rank-and-file and union leaders, the 1968 presidential election thus points to shared ideological cohesion around the Democratic Party. Dyer’s concluding invocation of Hilary Clinton, whose “beliefs are broadly representative of an enduring limousine liberalism that heaps invective on its social inferiors,” hints at the idea that rank-and-file hostility to the elite liberal paternalism of John Lindsay anticipated the rise of the Reagan Democrat and its lineal descendant, the Trump voter, but this intriguing line of inquiry never gets off the ground. [14]

At times, the book relinquishes its focus on rank-and-file workers (as opposed to labor more generally). We learn, for example, that leaders of the building trades resisted the city’s affirmative action policies at every turn. That they were essentially in lockstep with their membership on the issue of hiring quotas would appear to indicate a consensus between leaders and the rank-and-file. Likewise, while Dyer points out that TDU leaders exploited drivers’ anger at the livery cab industry to divert attention away from their own failings and pacify the insurgency inside their union, the reader comes away from the story with an impression of relative cohesion in the face of an external threat (livery cabs) and the powerful forces supporting it (personified by Lindsay).

Even when its distinctive role is made clear, the rank-and-file can, at certain moments in The Era Was Lost, look like a paper tiger. Dyer concedes that while rank-and-file rebels could press their unions into action, their “actual capacity to shape events” was profoundly limited. [15] This became especially evident in their response to the fiscal crisis, when pressure from below resulted in union-sponsored mass actions such as pickets and demonstrations—and, in some cases, led to rehiring—but was not nearly enough to push back against the onslaught of austerity or fundamentally reorient the conservative approach of labor leaders. The legacy of the rebellion, he concludes, “is primarily one of defeat.” [16]

Fifty years later, that defeat haunts the city. Dyer reports that the rank-and-file rebellion was “the country’s last strike wave,” an astonishing fact given that the intervening half-century have seen real wages flatten and inequality skyrocket even as labor productivity and corporate profits both grew by leaps and bounds. [17] At the same time, New York City continues to have levels of union density that are exceptional by national standards. Organized labor remains a powerful broker in city and state politics, driving turnout during elections and shaping policy in between them. To an extent, unions can still shelter their members from the depredations of the market by negotiating excellent health coverage and fixed-benefit pensions, and in some cases offering quality affordable housing. Labor remains vital. By contrast, as Dyer notes, “the union rank-and-file” (emphasis added) have yet to recover from the defeats of the 1970s. [18] The resulting turn to “self-preservation” has meant a general pattern of quiescence, acceptance of the prerogatives of leadership, and skepticism toward militant action. [19] Dyer laments that “a politically self-aware working class” no longer exists anywhere in the United States, including New York City. [20] It would seem that until something profoundly shifts in our political culture, workers will simply defend what they already have rather than push for more. With longstanding institutional, legal, and economic arrangements in nothing short of crisis, perhaps this is the moment when the wheel of history—stalled fifty years ago—finally begins to turn once more.

Benjamin Serby is an Assistant Professor in the Honors College at Adelphi University, where he teaches American History and the interdisciplinary humanities.

[1] Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since WWII (The New Press, 2000), 103.

[2] Freeman, 251; Glenn Dyer, The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank and File Rebels (UNC Press, 2024), 104.

[3] Dyer, 66.

[4] Freeman, 210.

[5] Dyer, 24.

[6] Dyer, 130, 133.

[7] Dyer, 130.

[8] Dyer, 95.

[9] Dyer, 111.

[10] Dyer, 51.

[11] Dyer, 123.

[12] Dyer, 57.

[13] Dyer, 4.

[14] Dyer, 161.

[15] Dyer, 151.

[16] Dyer, 159.

[17] Dyer, 160.

[18] Dyer, 5.

[19] Dyer, 159

[20] Dyer, 161.