Within their growing affluence, people were thinking of themselves less as “workers” in the way they understood that term in the Great Depression and more as “consumers” in a successful, middle-class society. To Waldie, whose father was an engineer at a gas company, “There was no obvious way to tell a factory worker from a business owner or a professional man when I grew up.”

Unionism, too, came to be understood differently. No longer did most labor organizations face the nagging, persistent threat of extinction. Now, some companies accepted unions as part of the cost of doing business in an American economy dependent on workers’ spending. A few forward-looking business leaders even embraced unions wholeheartedly as an advance over the bad old ways of violent class conflict. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, bankrolled by the capitalist family whose nineteenth-century forebear founded the Standard Oil empire and was notorious for a 1914 massacre of striking miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, issued a report in 1958 that would have startled John D. Rockefeller.

Since labor’s role in economic growth is so vital, it is important to establish and maintain an environment which will call for the most honorable, responsible, and imaginative trade union leadership. . . . Cooperation with responsible labor leadership should serve to stimulate the full contribution labor can make to growth and eliminate the forces which might take root in a strained and troubled labor movement.