Like, for example, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations that increasingly is pulling
the workers together in a city like Chicago and matching corporate power.
You're no longer relying, as you did in the 1920s,
on benign big businesses to take care of their workers.
They couldn't take care of their workers under the strains of the Great Depression.
Instead the unions are mobilizing to look after themselves.
There are some huge pitched battles, like,
for instance, in the auto-industry between the
new United Auto Workers and companies like
Ford and Chrysler that were fighting the union.
So, imagine big business, big unions mediated, umpired by a big government
that is increasingly sympathetic to the unions, giving them the power to offset
corporate power. That kind of triumvirate captures some of
the sense of social democracy. In a city like Chicago, it's balanced, too,
by a continuing heavy reliance on local government to manage social conflicts.
Take this map of Chicago, for instance. This is from 1950.
It's an ethnic map of Chicago.
You see how all the different ethnic
communities are broken up into their neighborhoods.
Each of them part of a local ward.
Each of them represented in their way in a city government.
Genially presided over by the big city mayor.