When Progressives Were on the MarchJanuary/February 2020 167
to progressive domestic policies. In the
United Kingdom especially, elites lost
credibility over their role in presiding
over the Depression, then appeasement,
and then the country’s military ineffec-
tiveness in the first phase of the war.
Among many voters, a consensus
formed that these “guilty men,” as they
were termed in a popular book pub-
lished in 1940, should not be allowed to
determine the course of postwar politics.
The situation was different in France,
where the left and the center-left
suffered catastrophically during the war.
First, the Popular Front bitterly broke
apart. Then, in June 1940, France fell to
Nazi Germany, and the Socialists voted
to support Philippe Pétain as chief of
state of the French government at Vichy.
During the occupation, disappointment
and division among unions and parties
on the left gave way to the outright
oppression of both under the Vichy
regime and the Nazis. It was not long
before the French left was revived by the
Resistance, the movement to fight the
Nazi occupation. By the middle of 1943,
the various left-wing parties and union
federations had come together to form a
fragile yet sustainable alliance.
As victory came into view, reformist
forces and unions in all three countries
began to develop plans for the postwar
period. In France, the major resistance
movements approved the Common
Program of the Resistance in March- A few months later, the Congress
of Industrial Organizations, a coalition
of U.S. labor unions, adopted a policy
platform published as The People’s
Program for 1944. And in the United
Kingdom, the Labour Party triumphed
in the general election of 1945 by run-
ning on the progressive agenda outlined
LEFT TURN
Woloch tells his story using parallel
accounts of developments in France, the
United Kingdom, and the United States.
As a distinguished French historian, he
is at his best in recounting events in
France, but the sections on the United
Kingdom and the United States are
strong, as well. He begins after World
War I, when unions were weak and the
left was fractured into communist and
noncommunist blocs. In the 1930s, the
Great Depression and the rise of fascism
drove efforts to unify the left and mobi-
lize unions. In France, an alliance of
left-wing movements known as the Popu-
lar Front came to power. In the United
States, Franklin Roosevelt was elected
president and began to implement the
New Deal. The gains were less dramatic
in the United Kingdom, but there, too,
the Labour Party and the trade unions
began to regain some of the strength they
had lost in the previous decade.
Then came World War II, which
further invigorated progressive forces in
the United Kingdom and the United
States. Union membership grew enor-
mously as the mobilization for war gave
workers more leverage over employers
and prompted governments to broker
compromises in order to avoid hamper-
ing production. Contrary to the warn-
ings of fiscal conservatives, the mobili-
zation showed that massive public
spending could generate jobs and
growth without necessarily producing
inflation. In both countries, the govern-
ment performed effectively enough to
counter conservatives’ accusations of
official incompetence. Nazi aggression
simultaneously discredited advocates of
isolationism and the appeasement of
Germany, who were typically opposed