Bernstein was born in 1916 in Rochester, New York. His parents were Latvian immigrants, and his father was a baker. While in high school, Bernstein became deeply interested in history and the needs of working-class people. "I could see the Depression all around me," he once recalled. "I became enormously interested in the development of the labor movement, and I was tremendously impressed by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal." Bernstein enrolled at the University of Rochester. He worked at a variety of jobs—janitor, lifeguard, dishwasher in a sorority—and received support from his older brother to pay for his education. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1937. He obtained a master's degree in 1940 from Harvard University. In 1941, Bernstein became a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. The same year, he married his wife, Fredrika. They had two daughters and a son. After the outbreak of World War II, Bernstein took a variety of positions with the federal government. He was an industrial economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1941 to 1942 and a hearing officer at the National War Labor Board from 1942 to 1943. When he became aware of Sweden's involvement in assisting Jews to flee Nazi-occupied Europe, he learned Swedish and became a Swedish language specialist for the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. After the war Bernstein returned to Harvard and earned a doctorate in 1948. His dissertation advisor was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. While writing his dissertation, Bernstein was chief of the Materials Section of the U.S. Conciliation Service from 1946 to 1947.
Career
In 1948, Bernstein was appointed a research professor at the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations. Bernstein returned briefly to government service during the Korean War. In 1951, he was appointed director of the Case Analysis Division and chairman of the San Francisco Regional Wage Stabilization Board. He left the Board in 1952. Bernstein became a professor in the department of political science at UCLA in 1960. He retired in 1987.
Research
Bernstein earned critical praise for the first two books of A History of the American Worker, a trilogy about the American labor movement in the interwar period. The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 focuses on the decline of the American labor movement following World War I. A decade later, he published The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941, in which he described American unions' growth under the New Deal. In both books, Bernstein argued that the New Deal and labor unions preserved democracy and capitalism at a time when the survival of both was unclear, and that New Deal labor policy dramatically reoriented public policy away from employers toward workers. The third book in his historical trilogy, A Caring Society: The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression was less well received. The book shied away from legislative enactments and union politics and examined the broader political and social changes which occurred under the New Deal. The book was called "neither fresh nor complete," although critics said it captured well the emotional tenor of the Great Depression and Roosevelt' impact on the American people. Bernstein's work had a deep impact on labor studies. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called him "...pre-eminent among historians of American labor history", and former University of California president Clark Kerr declared him "...the leading historian of labor relations in the United States now active in the field."
