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During the early months of 1919, the term "Reconstruction," of concern to few but historians and the friends and foes of D.W. Griffith in the years immediately preceding the Great War, was again on the lips of Americans. Alabama State Federation of Labor President, William L. Harrison, noted that "Since the signing of the Armistice, and the cessation of hostilities, the questions of reconstruction and re-adjustment are being diligently studied by the people generally." Out of the war, he argued, came "new and progressive ideas on reconstruction." He was right. As the war ended, dozens of books and articles bearing titles likeReconstructing America, Democracy and Reconstruction, and Social Reconstructionjoined a new journal calledReconstruction: A Herald of the New Time.This literature celebrated the role that a strong federal government had played in helping workers secure the right to join unions during the war, and it laid out hopeful plans for what the government might do to solve the "labor question" after the war. Such ideas helped convince Harrison's counterpart, Florida State Federation of Labor President John H. Mackey, that the postwar era would bring "a silver ray which carries with it wondrous tidings for the uplift of the masses."

Examines President Woodrow Wilson's post-WWI reconstruction efforts, arguing that they failed, in part, because opponents cast federal labor policies in terms that polarized the US South around issues of white supremacy & state's rights. The efforts of the Dept of Labor's Division of Negro Economics to promote social & economic justice in the South, were criticized by southern politicians, who were intolerant of federal labor-relations regulation. Government intervention in ensuing labor disputes helped mobilize southern opposition & Republicans were subsequently swept into political office on an anti-Wilson tide from the South. As this new political force began to dismantle federal labor organizations, Wilson turned against unions. J. Goldshmidt