In 1948, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book called The New Men of Power, which examined the careers of postwar labor leaders who emerged from industrial union struggles in the 1930s. At the time, the author was hopeful that labor’s progressive wing — led by this new generation of trade unionists — would be a bulwark against war, militarism, and resurgent corporate power.

A decade later, Mills became a cheerleader for the emerging student movement, because the “main drift” of organized labor and most of its officialdom in the 1950s was trending in a conservative direction. That trend was symbolized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) purge of left-wing unions representing a million workers. This paved the way for its mid-1950s merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an alliance in which craft union influence was predominant.

One exception to this generational trajectory was the career of a World War II veteran from Brooklyn named Tony Mazzocchi. In the 1950s and ’60s, Mazzocchi rose through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a union with then-strong CIO traditions of rank-and-file activism and internal democracy.