Health Security for All? Social Unionism and Universal Health Insurance, 1935–1958

"This is a big fight," declared William Green, "life and health are at stake." With this fund-raising appeal to fellow unionists, the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) hoped to save the Committee for the Nation's Health (CNH), an important resource in the battle for social insurance legislation., What is most remarkable is that this appeal was made in 1951. The "big fight" was over. The cause of national health insurance lay dead, victim of conservative forces led by the American Medical Association (AMA). Yet Green and others in the labor movement persevered in a campaign to the bitter end to amend the Social Security Act of 1935 to make health care accessible to wage earners and to all Americans. Even after decades at the top of the AFL, William Green understood that such access remained a matter of life and death for tens of millions of uninsured workers and their dependents. The labor movement's contributions to the campaign for health insurance legislation in the mid-twentieth century have been underestimated. Historians have fixed attention on the academic, governmental, and medical proponents of insurance reform and have given little more than passing notice to the unionists who were deeply involved in this effort. Paul Starr's analysis of the politics of health insurance glosses over labor's role. Similarly, Daniel S. Hirshfield's monograph on federal policy under Franklin D. Roosevelt relegates the unions to a minor part in the liberal coalition. Monte M. Poen identifies labor as the "most powerful advocate" of reform during the presidency of Harry S. Truman but leaves the nature and impact of that advocacy vague.2 No one has examined unionists' perseverance on this issue throughout the 1950s, when labor stood out as virtually the only remaining cham-