In his chapter on the “paralysis of the labor movement” during the 1920s, Irving Bernstein (1970:83–84) wrote in The Lean Years that “a favorite sport” of journalists “was to denounce the American labor movement” and attribute its weakness to a lack of solidarity among union members, leadership corruption, and other factors. To the historian, organized labor in the 1920s “stood still as the main stream of American society swept by” (Bernstein 1970:84). Not until the late 1940s, after the great union organizing drives and surges in union membership in heavy industry, would organized labor, alongside the state and private corporation, become what C. Wright Mills (1948:223) termed one of the “three powerful bureaucracies in the U.S. political economy.”