David Montgomery

The Mythical Man

state, were fragile and limited from the start and crumbled beyond the possi bility of retrieval after 1970. Much more dubious is their contention that the basic explanation of both the limits and the defeat of the New Deal is to be found in a political culture of individualism, which they claim has circumscribed the political life of the United States from the nations founding to the present. The presentation of the limitations and ultimate downfall of the New Deal is thoughtful, though certainly not new to historians of the United States. Cowies own pioneering studies of the relocations of business enterprises seeking to evade unionization and of the internal discussions and maneuvers of the Nixon administration in its effective efforts to woo the votes of white workers away from the Democrats by appealing to their patriotism, racism, rebellion against taxes, and desire for order in city streets and on college cam puses have greatly enriched our understanding of the Republican triumph.1 Nor is it hard to persuade historians that the political alignments of the period 1930-1950 differed significantly from those that had come before and from what would follow. Robert and Helen Lynds contemporary study of Muncie had already illuminated the rallying of previously fragmented business class voters to the Republican fold in the 1930s. Samuel Lubells deservedly influential Future of American Politics produced evidence that, although the voting patterns among working people of Old Immigrant stock had shifted noticeably, though not overwhelmingly, toward the Democrats during the Depression, it was a swelling tide of ballots cast by newly eligible immigrants and their children that secured Democratic strength in the White House, Congress, and many state legislatures. Richard Oestreicher has shown that class alignments shaped national voting patterns more definitively between 1936 and 1944 (and especially in 1940) than at any other time in the nations history.2 The point can be made more generally. Eric Hobsbawm contends: In most respects this conscious working-class cohesiveness reached its peak, in older developed countries, at the end of the Second World War.3 Its legacy remained strong enough to sustain the mixed economies, income security policies, and union strength in key sectors of manufacturing and public employment that sus tained the historic improvement in living standards until the end of the 1960s. A full understanding of the crisis that followed, starting with the stagflation that prompted the Nixon administration to institute wage controls and uncouple

Thinking about American Workers in the 1920s

Labor historians abiding interest in manifestations of working-class solidarity needs to be related at all times to analysis of the formation and reconstructions of bourgeois hegemony. All industrialized countries experienced declining strike activity and trade union membership between 1921 and 1933, although the patterns of subsidence and occasional revival of industrial confrontations were quite different in Germany or England from those evident in France or the United States. So stark was the contrast within the United States between the decade Irving Bernstein called the lean years and the turbulent years that followed, that historians have been prone to separate the twenties and thirties into two distinct periods for study. In this essay I wish to explore some of the more continuous lines of social and political developments between the world wars that deserve the attention of historians of the working class, to sug gest some international aspects of U.S. experience, and to identify topics that appear to be in special need of further research. Sidney Fines perceptive account of the policies and beliefs to which the leading executives of the General Motors Corporation adhered when con fronted by rising union membership and eventual sit-down strikes in the thir ties clearly reveals a continuity of managerial powers, principles, and practices dating back at least to the post-World War I years. Management was to culti vate and defend loyal employees; a closed shop agreement with a union would decisively undermine that objective and consequently had to be avoided at all costs. Efficient production methods required not only systematic analysis and assignment of work tasks and foremen selected, trained and guided as the front line of management, but also planned use of wage incentives. Although executives of the company needed to maintain incessant com munication with both their employees and the local elites of the communities in which they were located, they were also determined to avoid any outside interference in their direction of the enterprise. The autonomy of the enter prise was the sanctum sanctorum of interwar management. As Ronald Schatz, Nelson Lichtenstein, Katherine Stone, Karl Klare, Christopher Tomlins, and Fine himself have argued?and as Sumner Slichter revealed in 1940?

Workers' Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience

In 1898, the American Federation of Labor feared that colonial expansion would militarize the republic and undermine the living standards of American workers. Subsequent expansion of industrial production and of trade union membership soon replaced the fear of imperial expansion with an eagerness to enlarge the domain of American unions internationally alongside that of American business. In both Puerto Rico and Canada important groups of workers joined AFL unions on their own initiative. In Mexico, where major U.S. investments shaped the economy, anarcho-syndicalists enjoyed strong support on both sides of the border, and the path to union growth was opened by revolution. Consequently the AFL forged links there with a labor movement very different from itself. Unions in Mexico became tightly linked to their new government, while World War I drove the AFLs leaders into close collaboration with their own. The Pan-American Federation of Labor was more a product of diplomatic maneuvering than of class solidarity.

Wage Labor, Bondage, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America

Both the content and the boundaries of citizenship were contested terrain in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. The claims of working people to active participation in the polity were draped in the rhetoric to which the ardent revolutionary and future attorney general of Massachusetts, James Sullivan, had given vigorous, though commonplace, expression during the turbulent spring of 1776:

Trends in Working-Class History

IN THIS ARTICLE the author analyzes the last decades work in the social history of the working class in the United States and Canada. Utilizing the dual themes of structures of meaning and structures of power, he surveys many of the major works published since 1976. n n nDANS CET ARTICLE, lauteur analyse les travaux de la derniere decennie en histoire sociale de la classe ouvriere aux Etats-Unis et au Canada. A partir du double theme des structures du signifie et des structures de pouvoir, il recense plusieurs des principaux ouvrages publies depuis 1976.

Immigrants, Industrial Unions, and Social Reconstruction in the United States, 1916-1923

BETWEEN I916 AND 1922 WORKERS in the United States participated in the longest and most intensive strike wave in the countrys history. Four characteristics of the epochs strikes help us understand the interaction between an emerging collectivist style of capitalism and workers use of the strike weapon. First, individual strikes frequently closed an industry across the nation, or else precipitated city-wide sympathetic strikes. Second, an aspiration for industrial unionism was evident in both official collaboration among craft unions and all-grades action by workers undertaken in defiance of their unions. Third, much of the strike activity was informed by a One Big Union myth, despite the lack of influence of either the IWW or the OBU. Fourth, immigrants were especially prominent among the strikers. The attraction of notions of workers control to older immigrants and the power of nationalism among all immigrants shaped the goals and structures of unions and of strikers. Although no united working-class movement could congeal, let alone prevail, under these circumstances, a significant minority of highly politicized workers remained to make its presence felt in urban life after the strike wave had subsided. n n nDE 1916 A 1922, LES TRAVAILLEURS americains participent a la plus longue et la plus intense vague de greves de lhistoire des Etats-Unis. Ces greves comportent quatre caracteristiques qui nous eclairent sur les rapports entre lemergence dun style communautaire de capitalisme et le recours par les travailleurs a larme de la greve. Premierement, des greves localisees entrainent frequemment la fermeture dindustries dans tout le pays, ou encore elles debouchent sur des greves de sympathie dans des villes entieres. En second lieu, le syndicalisme industriel suscite de linteret, ce qui se traduit par la tendence des syndicats de metier a collaborer entre eux et par toutes sortes dactions entreprises par des travailleurs a rencontre de leurs syndicats. Troisiemement, le mythe de la One Big Union fascine beaucoup de grevistes malgre le peu dinfluence de lIWW et de lOBU. Quatriemement, des immigrants jouent un role majeur parmi les grevistes. Les plus vieux dentre eux sont fascines par lidee de controle ouvrier alors que tous subissent linfluence du nationalisme qui moule les objectifs et les structures des syndicats et des grevistes. Quoique ces greves ne peuvent deboucher sur lunification de la classe ouvriere, un minorite significatif de travailleurs hautement politises font sentir leur presence dans les villes memes apres que la vague de greves se soit terminee.

Response to Harold Benenson, "Victorian Sexual Ideology and Marx's Theory of the Working Class55

Karl Marx radically shifted the terms of socialist discussion of womens needs, in Harold Benensons view, by ignoring concerns with the authoritarian structure of families that had been raised by earlier Utopian criticism, by accomodating himself to the hegemony of skilled males over the working class through trade unions and the suffrage movement, and by legitimizing that hegemony in his basic theoretical concepts. Despite the validity of some points Benenson raises along the way, his exercise in the intellectual history of socialism is misleading, and his condemnation of Marxist methods of analysis, if accepted, would deprive those of us who are attempting to conceptualize the historical relations of gender and class of analytical tools that are indispensible to that task. If a fundamental contrast existed between the views of Utopians and those of Marxists on womens needs and womens activity, it was not of the type described in this paper. Benenson himself notes that forthright champions of the rights of women were few in Utopian ranks, though he quite rightly adds that those whom he discusses (especially Flora Tristan and Frances and James Morrison) were remarkably perceptive and suggested a much more thorough analysis of womens position under capitalism than was to be found in The Communist Manifesto. To understand the history of socialism, however, it is equally important to compare those forthright champions with the attitudes toward women and toward the family expressed in other dominant currents of Utopian criticism, especially with those of Etienne Cabet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Wilhelm Weitling. The com parison should be made, not to score a debating point, but to ask why utopias with widespread appeal among artisans of the 1830s-1850s should have offered a roman tic reification of the family and (especially in the case of Weitling) celebrated family love as proof that a non-competitive society could be created by the proper exercise of human reason. An important task confronting historians is to explain why these ideas flourished in particular artisan circles at the time (especially among tailors and shoemakers), and how they reflected and perhaps influenced the changing relation ship of women to the trades involved. Benensons arguments steer us away from this historical problem, and consequently from investigating the role played by influen tial Utopians in creating a plebeian version of the Victorian sexual ideology.

Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Conference in Paris

Amid the Napoleonic splendor of the Ecole Polytechnique more than 100 scholars gathered to hear 21 papers on U.S. history, all crammed into four consecutive sessions. May 25-27, 1983. The question around which the meeting was organized, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? was itself enough to guarantee that the meeting would be haunted, not so much by the spirit of Werner Sombart as by that of Louis Hartz. Opening presentations by Seymour Martin Lipset and Pierre Birnbaum elaborated upon the theme that the absence of a feudal heritage in British North America had permitted an individualistic ethos to dominate the culture, and thus left no effective political space for socialism. Upsets remarks raised a theoretical question which was never satisfactorily resolved by subsequent discussion: whether class conflicts in modern society are best explained by the workings of capitalism itself or by the influence of structural and ideological relics from previous epochs. In quite a different way, Birnbaums paper made disturbingly evident to visitors from the U.S. that the Hartzian view of their countrys history is firmly entrenched in French scholarship.