Bill Barry

Book Review: Dray, Philip. There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. New York: Double-day, 2010. 771 pp.

Philip Dray bravely ventures to go where many have tried and few have succeeded: to write a new survey of the US union movement. His book is a traditional labor history, describing the organization of workers to beat on our bosses and the efforts of our bosses to beat on us. While some history spreads into workers’ social history, Dray provides an old-fashioned rock ‘em sock ‘em narrative heroism, heroineism and, of course, brutal repression. No one has to ask the author “Which side are you on?” Dray begins his account with the development of the factory system in New England and the extraordinary organizing by the “factory girls” and concludes with the antisweatshop movements of 2009, with lots of strikes and picket lines in between. The book ambitiously tries to cover all of the major engagements of the labor movement, including long chapters on the Pullman strike, the CIO, the Red Scare (with a chapter titled “Spies, Crooks and Congressmen”) and the tough strikes of the 1980s—PATCO, P-9 and Caterpillar. He is also able to skillfully weave biographies and even labor trivia into the principal narratives. Even though Dray does not break new scholarly ground and most of his fifteen pages of sources are well known, he stuffs an enormous amount of material into all of his descriptions. One real strength of Dray’s book—and one that makes it an exciting possibility for a labor history course—is his sense of drama and his striking, almost lurid descriptions of various labor struggles. These episodes visualize for the reader famous scenes, like the Tompkins Square Demonstration of 1873, to the more obscure, like the Boston Police strike of 1919. In contrast to some other labor histories, which are—let’s admit it—boring to working-class readers, these are perfect for today’s graphic generation. Even his chapter titles like “The Oppressing Hand of Avarice,” from the “turn-out” of the Lowell, have a sensationalistic quality. He is also not timid about giving credit to the revolutionaries among us, not just in large movements like the IWW featured in the chapter “We Shall Be All,” but to all the socialists and communists sprinkled through almost every major labor struggle. Dray concludes by asking The Big Question: “How does one organize labor under global circumstances, when the political, social, and economic contexts in which men and women (and children) go to work each day, the wages they receive, the protections they enjoy are so dissimilar?” (p. 668) After looking at protests against the WTO and a renewed scrutiny of “labor’s historic affiliation with the Democratic Party,” Dray uses labor history to endorse labor history:

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a job for me. It was a way of life.&dquo; His story begins with his first memories as a child in 1932, trudging to the company store to buy food with scrip earned by his father. The Armstead family was part of the 45,000 black workers who migrated from the segregated south to West Virginia in the 1920s. After his retirement in 1979, Armstead began to write up his memories and joined up with S.L. Gardner, who had written about the coal camps for the Fairmount Times West Virginian, to compose the book, which was completed just days before Armstead died of lung cancer and black lung in 1998 at age 71. The book portrays workers in the United States at mid-twentieth century; it presents an account of individual accommodation and the advancement of