Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xi + 323 pp. $59.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Abstract

Judith Stein recounts two histories in tandem that all too frequently are narrated separately: “that of a changing [American] economy and that of changing race relations” (2). The brilliant originality of Running Steel is to bring the history of civil rights in employment together with larger questions of national, indeed international, post-1945 political economy. The struggle for racial justice appears neither a beneficiary nor a casualty of an easily invoked but vaguely defined “liberalism,” as in so many other studies. Instead, the limits of fair employment prove an integral part of the making and unmaking of a political and economic totality with quite specific elements seemingly unconnected to race relations. In contrast to currently fashionable neoliberal accounts, Stein concludes “it was the foreign commitments and economic policies of liberalism, not the excesses of racial reformers or the racism of the culture, that transformed American politics in the postwar era” (6).