Popular historical account of the development of the labour movement in the USA. The background of the government elections in 1928. The relationship of workers social status and influence of political parties. Politics adopted by trade unions and their leadership.

Combining statistical analysis with well-written narrative history, this re-evaluation of the 1928 presidential election gives a vivid portrait of the candidates and the campaign. Lichtman has based his study primarily on a statistical analysis of data from that election and the presidential elections from 1916 to 1940 for all the 2,058 counties outside the former Confederate South. Not relying exclusively on the results of his quantitative analysis, however, Lichtman has also made an exhaustive survey of previous scholarship and contemporary accounts of the 1928 election. He discusses and challenges previous interpretations, especially the ethnocultural and pluralist interpretations and the application of critical election theory to the election. In disputing this theory, which claims that 1928 was a realigning election in which the coalitions were formed that dominated future elections, Lichtman determines that 1928 was an aberration with little impact on later political patterns.

At no other time in American history had labor unrest been more evident than the period immediately after World War I. Robert H. Zeiger here recounts the labor problems that faced the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding and Coolidge—massive strikes, antiracial hysteria, and the hardening of class attitudes throughout the nation— and describes the programs and policies of Republican leaders—particularly those of Herbert Hoover—to solve them. Zeiger finds that while suspicion and animosity between the Republicans and the union leaders persisted, the rising prosperity of the nation, together with the adroit efforts of Hoover and his associates, tended to lessen the influence of extremists in both groups. Labor reached an accommodation of sorts with the Coolidge administration; and when, in 1928, Hoover defeated Al Smith, the substantial labor vote he received was among the factors that lent stature to his victory.

The Revolution of ’28 explores the career of New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Alfred E. Smith. Robert Chiles peers into Smith’s work and uncovers a distinctive strain of American progressivism that resonated among urban, ethnic, working-class Americans in the early twentieth century. The book charts the rise of that idiomatic progressivism during Smith’s early years as a state legislator through his time as governor of the Empire State in the 1920s, before proceeding to a revisionist narrative of the 1928 presidential campaign, exploring the ways in which Smith’s gubernatorial progressivism was presented to a national audience. As Chiles points out, new-stock voters responded enthusiastically to Smith's candidacy on both economic and cultural levels. Chiles offers a historical argument that describes the impact of this coalition on the new liberal formation that was to come with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, demonstrating the broad practical consequences of Smith’s political career. In particular, Chiles notes how Smith’s progressive agenda became Democratic partisan dogma and a rallying point for policy formation and electoral success at the state and national levels. Chiles sets the record straight in The Revolution of ’28 by paying close attention to how Smith identified and activated his emergent coalition and put it to use in his campaign of 1928, before quickly losing control over it after his failed presidential bid.