“Keep Labor Anti-Nuclear”: Leo Goodman’s Fight for Radiation Protection

From 1942 to 1980 Leo Goodman dedicated his life to protecting the health of the Cold War’s hidden workers. Starting his career investigating safety conditions inside the Manhattan project before establishing himself as organised labor’s “go to expert” on radiation safety, Goodman’s spent four decades trying to demystify working conditions on the atomic frontier. Collecting worker testimony, steering federal standards for worker exposure, and publishing his own monograph based on two decades of research into industrial malpractice, A Survey of Accidents in the Atomic Energy Industry, 1942-1966, this career labor union activists set the national safety standards for the Cold War’s most significant and secretive industry. 

This talk charts Leo Goodman’s life-long fight for radiation regulation, considering his rise and fall from the ranks organised labor and flourishing’s within environmentalist movement as a window to interrogate one of most significant and understudied labor battles of the Cold War. Offering the first dedicated historical examination of Goodman’s personal papers, his conflicts with union and political leaders, and his tireless efforts to collect workers’ testimonies, demonstrates the transformative role that activism played in shaping working conditions across one of the most significant sectors of modern industrial life. In doing so, it rediscovers a forgotten architect of modern occupational safety, exposes the struggles of organised labor to adapt to the trajectories of atomic capitalism, and links the story of radiation protection to an ever-expanding field of toxic history.

This session will be chaired by Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson (LSE).

Thomas Bishop is a Senior Lecturer in American History and the Programme Leader of the BA History Degree.

Tom's first book, Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in April 2020. In his book, Tom details the remarkable cultural history and personal stories behind an iconic figure of Cold War masculinity—the fallout shelter father, who with a spade in hand and the canned goods he has amassed, sought to save his family from atomic warfare.


His research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Library of Congress, the European Association for American Studies, the Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States. He was the recipient of the Marcus Cunliffe Prize for American Studies from the British Association for American Studies in 2016.


In 2019 he was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, where he began to research his next project on "A Glowing Work Force: The Labor Politics of Nuclear Power in the United States". In 2020 he was the recipient of the Moody Fellowship from The Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation. From 2021-2024 he will be a Visting Fellow at the Eccles Center in the British Library.

this event is free but booking is required.