«Vast in scope and exhaustively researched...this work is the definitive account of the efforts of the culture industries to fight for better working conditions and create a class identity in mid-twentieth-century New York.»

Stephen Petrus, The Metropole

«Well-crafted, empirically rich and thought-provoking...Clark's book...studies the trade and professional organisations of several ten thousand white-collar employees in publishing, advertising, industrial design and broadcasting industries from the 1930s to the 1970s, focusing on New York as the centre of media production during the period. Zooming in on organisations and prominent activists, the book analyses the twin effort to negotiate fair pay and conditions and to reform the culture of consumer capitalism. Clark shows that at the height of their mobilisation, culture workers were not content with getting good money for producing the nation's news, ad campaigns and radio plays. They also strove to transform culture from 'mere' mass consumer good to something that had aesthetic, social and political value.»

Klaus Nathaus, H-Soz-Kult

«This ambitious book explores the intersection of cultural industries largely based in New York City and environs, and the emergence of a vast middle class of salaried workers who often struggled to partake in the consumer capitalism their work celebrated....Drawing on a diverse array of archival and secondary sources, the book addresses their often unglamorous wages and working conditions, but also workers' efforts to gain some measure of control over their work through strategies, from the creation of new agencies and media to political engagement (particularly through the Popular Front) and unionization....Bookended by the Great Depression and the deindustrialization and fragmentation of the 1970s, this is a narrative of discrimination and resistance, and of competing visions of consumerism and solidarity.»

Choice

«A rigorously detailed labor history of a particular subset of white-collar workers in the 20th century....Rich with a detailed accounting of both the internal political strife within white-collar unions and the pervasive anticommunist anxiety of postwar America, Clark recovers a set of significant accomplishments among white-collar labor activists in mass culture.... As the structural constraints of cultural production in media, namely the reliance on freelance labor, have become even more acute, Clark's recovery of the creative class as a nearly coherent labor movement has a renewed salience.»

Emily Holloway, The Gotham Center for New York City History blog

«Reasserting the radical history of this country's culture industries, The Making of the American Creative Class shows the far-reaching influence of labor law and politics on culture: Artists in the middle of the twentieth century flourished not because the economy was inherently favorable to them, but as a result of powerful economic winds and the groups that joined in an attempt to harness them. Together, creative class groups wielded the crowbar of politics in an attempt to pry some autonomy out of consumer capitalism.»

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, The New Republic

«[A] thorough accounting of how media workers have historically gotten short shrift.»

Kirkus

«For media and culture junkies — and those who work in those industries — this is an interesting and heartening, if academic, look at the rise of the cultural industry and labour relations in the middle of the last century. As job losses in our media and cultural class continue to deliver body blows to tens of thousands of workers, it would seem there are parallels to be drawn.»

Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star

«This volume examines, in depth, an illuminating part of history that isn't taught much in schools or noticed in our popular media.»

Steven Provizer, Arts Fuse

«The book is many things: a history of labor and trade unions, a history of social movements, a history of consumerism at the height of Fordism, a history of ideas and intellectuals in left-wing thinking in the USA, and...a history New York's heyday as the cultural and media capital of the USA...Shannan Clark's extremely source-saturated and clearly argued book provides an extremely instructive narrative that combines the rise of mass consumer society with the traditions of socio-politically oriented trade unionism in the USA in the mid-20th century.»

Benjamin Moeckel, Sehepunkte

«Shannan Clark has written a subtle history about a curious topic: white-collar unionism...His book serves as a kind of pre-history of today's 'creatives'-those producers of culture laboring in the offices (and virtual spaces) of contemporary, post-industrial consumer capitalism. Clark argues that long before theorists such as Richard Florida wrote paeans to the supposedly rising 'creative class' in the twenty-first century, an earlier incarnation fell from power in the twentieth.»

Michael J. Kramer, Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog

«A rich account of the emergence and transformations of the 'white collar' and 'creative' classes in the US since the 1920s...The political, personal, and professional motivations of creative workers have long been heterogeneous and historically unstable. To put it mildly: the creative industries have long struggled to reconcile their conflicting desires for intellectual autonomy and economic recognition. What is hearting to a non-historian in Clark's account is that it offers a precedent for just about any dilemma in which the creative industries find themselves today. Changing cultural consumption habits? It already happened. Fierce competition in the labour market? Yes. Economic collapse? Ditto. Political in-fighting? Continuously. Change in funding paradigms? Repeatedly. Against this backdrop, Clark brings out examples of solidarities between creative workers and society at large.»

Pierre d'Alancaisez, Arts Management Quarterly

«This book is a fine work of labor history that offers insights on professional labor activism. It opens the doors onto the broader study of creative professionals in modern American business—and raises thought-provoking questions about disciplinary fragmentation and the impact of that fragmentation on the writing of American history.»

Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Journal of American History

«This ambitious book explores the intersection of cultural industries largely based in New York City and environs, and the emergence of a vast middle class of salaried workers who often struggled to partake in the consumer capitalism their work celebrated... Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.»

J. Bekken, Albright College

«Shannan Clark has written an immensely comprehensive and brilliantly insightful history of the white-collar workers who created Popular Front culture in New York and sought to sustain it well into the postwar era. His understanding of the aesthetics as well as the political economy of the newspapers, magazines, advertisers, and radio and TV networks of that era illuminates a generation-long class struggle often obscured from our view. Clark's book therefore stands as a powerful, empirically nuanced rejoinder to the work of such iconic intellectuals as C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and David Riesman.»

Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara

«In this remarkable book, Shannan Clark reveals the radicalism that coursed through the culture industries in mid-twentieth-century New York, showing how the political efforts and dissident organizing carried out by writers, editors, designers and other cultural workers helped to shape consumer capitalism. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Clarks reconstructs a political world that few have even known existed but which exerted a profound influence on New York City — and on the country as a whole.»

Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

«This is the definitive history of the political economy of mid-20th century unionism among creative workers in New York. Based on prodigious archival research, it traces the rise and fall of unions among newspaper, radio, advertising writers, professional, technical, and creative workers in architecture, and design, among others. It explains how and why architects, ad agency employees, and office employees unionized, what their vision of creative autonomy, economic equity, and collective power was, and how business used law and economic power to destroy their unions, illuminating the consequences for us all in the contemporary era of unstable jobs and rampant economic inequality that render even the most talented of creative workers vulnerable.»

Catherine Fisk, author of Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue

«The Making of the American Creative Class persuasively dislodges the stereotypes of The Organization Man and Mad Men to show that midcentury Madison Avenue was a site of important political struggle. This deeply researched and eloquently written book exposes the long overlooked successes and challenges of creative workers to improve their working conditions and forge their own class identity. It is critical reading for anyone trying to understand the history of the creative class and for anyone who believes in making creative work more just.»

Lily Geismer, author of Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic