THE theory of labor's demise begins with an observation about which there is wide agreement. Labor historians who disagree on fundamental issues agree that something quite special happened in the early 1930s. From students of the traditional “Wisconsin school” like Irving Bernstein, and “iconoclastic” or “social democratic” historians like David Brody and Melvyn Dubofsky, to Stanley Aronowitz and Staughton Lynd, their “new left” critics, to the newest generation of “new” labor historians – Joshua Freeman, Bruce Nelson, and Ronald Schatz – there is essential agreement. Even though they use different language, they see the period in remarkably similar ways. Bernstein calls the period “the turbulent years” (1970); Brody says the CIO had “some radical potential” (1980:141). Dubofsky uses concepts that Aronowitz and Lynd would endorse. For him, the 1930s were a time of “ferment,” “militancy,” “radicalism,” “violence,” “and perhaps even an altered working-class consciousness” (1986:212). In Freeman's view, this period represents “the most profound metamorphosis in the lives of working people since the Civil War and Reconstruction” (quoted in Brinkley, 1990:19). To Nelson these years were “a long overdue festive upheaval, a search for more humane and just patterns of work relations, and the flowering of an insurgent consciousness” (1988:10). In Schatz's estimation, the early CIO stands “beside abolitionism, civil rights, and women's rights as one of the great movements for freedom and dignity in American history” (1983:117).