The postwar compact between labor and capital was that a privileged segment of workers shared in the profits from rocketing productivity. In exchange, the labor elite agreed to spend a lot and stay away from communists. And build the best bombs in the world. But freed from the wartime no-strike pledges, other workers—for whom suburban military Keynesianism looked to be a Worse Deal—tried to pick up where they left off in the 1930s. The postwar American economy was a site of high-stakes conflict: In 1946, the country set new records for corporate profits and number of labor strikes.33 Both sides sought to consolidate wartime gains and claim larger shares of expanding output, while workers struggled to keep up with rapidly increasing consumer prices newly liberated from wartime controls. In Oakland, a conflict that began with 1,000 striking department store workers escalated to a citywide general strike of 100,000.34 But the evenhandedness that characterized the Roosevelt administration’s mediation (at its best) was gone.