Doug:
> Well, there were also autoworkers occupying factories and the
> example of the USSR, which was growing rapidly. I doubt the
> US elite, even the progressive branch, would have done the
> New Deal purely on its own.
I'm not saying that they did that out of the goodness of their hearts. All I am saying is that it them who did, not labor - because labor did not have enough political clout in this country. I do not think that US elites are "progressive" in our understanding of the word, but they are extremely pragmatic and, unlike most US-sers, pretty much focused on what is going on in the rest of the world. Social safety net and state dirigisme were the cutting edge thinking in the first half the 20th century that seem to produce spectacular results and that fact alone warranted a serious consideration by the US elites.
Then there was the cold war and the scientific and social challenge posited by the USSR. Not only the US was loosing the space race, but it appeared to the world a s bunch of dumb local yokels and racist rednecks. That did certainly was a losing proposition vs. Soviet space science, message of progress and internationalism. The elites had to do something to improve the US image abroad - so they swept the yokels and the rednecks under the rug, at least for a while. I have been arguing for a long time on this forum that US liberals should show undying gratitude to Lenin and Stalin for the New Deal, Civil Rights and progressive social programs briefly implemented in the 1960s - because it was them who forced the US elites to adopt more progressive policies to stay internationally competitive.
That is not to say that labor did nothing, but any action of the US labor was pretty tame by the European standards - e.g. workers occupying factories in Italy ca. 1918-1920 that brought the whole economy to a standstill. There are many reasons of that, cultural ethnic and ideological fragmentation being among the chief of them.
The lesson here is that the best - if not only - way to achieve a progressive social change in this country is not by mobilizing the culturally fragmented and generally conservative underclasses - but by influencing and convincing elites that progressive policies are in their interests, when there is enough international pressure on the elites to take such claims seriously.
Wojtek