Many Trump supporters are celebrating his new tariffs on the hope that they’ll make America great again by bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. “For four years, Americans couldn’t afford groceries, let alone a house,” Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner wrote on X last Wednesday, “This Liberation Day, @POTUS is bringing manufacturing and jobs back. President Trump is making the American Dream achievable again!” That same day, Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana said in a CNN interview that, “The decision by President Trump today to impose reciprocal tariffs will be so good for Indiana.” Banks went on to talk about his father’s job at plant making axles for cars, saying, “Those are the manufacturing jobs that President Trump is bringing back from overseas.”
The problem is: those who credit manufacturing jobs for a glorious past America mistake correlation for causation. They think their parents and grandparents had the “good life” because of jobs in manufacturing. In reality, their parents and grandparents had that life because of unions, pensions, high marginal tax rates, and strong social policies — with a little post-war exceptionalism and a lot of racism and sexism thrown in.
The negotiation of a living wage was only possible thanks to the power that trade unions wielded at the time.
The decades following World War II represented the heyday of domestic manufacturing in the U.S., with more than a quarter of all U.S. workers employed in the sector at the time. Those decades are also the ones that Americans associate with the “good life” — getting married, living in a “nice” house in a “nice” neighborhood, raising kids on one breadwinner’s income, taking slideshow-worthy summer vacations, and retiring comfortably at age 65, all without going to college, let alone taking on mountains of debt in student loans.
Today, many Americans perceive that lifestyle as harder to access than it used to be, and they often assume that they can’t have it because of declines in domestic manufacturing. Yet, even in manufacturing’s heyday, that “good life” wasn’t open to just anyone, wasn’t good for everyone and wasn’t actually the product of factory jobs.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, for example, Black men and white men in the U.S. were employed in manufacturing at roughly similar rates. Yet, the average white man working the industry was paid substantially more than his Black counterpart — a difference of more than $10,000 a year in today’s dollars. On top of those wage differences, Black families also faced further discrimination in access to education, low-cost mortgages, and rapidly growing suburban neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the women who had stepped in to staff the factories during World War II were pushed out of manufacturing jobs and often out of the workforce entirely. Policymakers and union leaders told women it was their womanly purpose and patriotic duty to either go back to the home front or fill the jobs that men didn’t want. Even Woodie Guthrie, in the last verse of “Union Maid,” sang, “You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me // Get you a man who’s a union man // And join the ladies’ auxiliary. // Married life ain’t hard when you’ve got a union card // A union man has a happy life // When he’s got a union wife.” That lack of competition from women made it easier for men — especially U.S.-born white men — to negotiate for a family wage. That family wage offered women — especially U.S.-born white women — a path out of precarity, but it also incentivized them to accept roles where they were economically dependent on and socially subservient to men.
Even with the reduced competition, though, the negotiation of a living wage was only possible thanks to the power that trade unions wielded at the time. In the decades after World War II, roughly one in three U.S. workers were union members, compared to only about one in ten today. Unions helped increase manufacturing wages and reduce wage gaps between front-line workers, managers, and CEOs. They also helped create and maintain other employment protections, like 40-hour workweeks, health insurance, and defined-benefit pensions that guaranteed a steady income even after workers retired.
High taxes helped subsidize the “good life” for American families (especially White families) who couldn’t have afforded that life on their own.
As unions fought to protect workers from falling at the bottom, policymakers also moved to prevent runaway wealth at the top. At the federal level, the highest marginal tax rate increased rapidly after World War II, peaked at 92% in 1953, and remained above 70% until the early 1980s, after which it fell dramatically to just 37% today.
Those high taxes helped subsidize the “good life” for American families (especially white families) who couldn’t have afforded that life on their own. That money fueled innovations that increased lifespans and standards of those lives (including by allowing Americans to buy cheap goods produced in countries with laxer labor protections). That money also expanded access to education, making it possible for the children of factory workers to go to college and avoid the physical pain that their fathers suffered from manufacturing work. In the absence of unions, higher taxes, and robust regulations, we risk slipping back to an earlier era of U.S. manufacturing — one far more precarious than the one we find ourselves in today. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the height of the Gilded Age Trump has touted in promoting his tariffs — manufacturing jobs were difficult, dangerous, and often deadly. Worse still, the absence of government welfare programs left families one death or injury away from destitution, and forced them to take whatever jobs they could get, no matter how terrible or poorly paid. And, the absence of child labor laws and Social Security drove up the supply of factory workers in ways that drove down wages for workers of all races. Essentially, the nostalgia that some Americans feel for the factory is just misplaced frustration with the way they’ve been forced to live in a DIY society: to protect themselves and their families from the risk of precarity with fewer unions and hollowed-out government supports. Those who are betting on Trump and his promise to bring back manufacturing risk putting us all in a more precarious position—pushing us back to Gilded Age levels of inequality, and to a time when the “good life” was accessible only to the robber barons, while the rest of America struggled to get by.
Jessica Calarco
Dr. Jessica Calarco is a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of "Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net." 
