Kimberly Phillips-Fein

The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street, by William Kleinknecht,

from management’s perspective. While many labor historians might see this as a fatal flaw, it is refreshing to read scholarship that considers the other side of the labor management equation. So many recent works of American labor history do not do justice to the multiple motivations that managers had, instead treating them (if they treat them at all) as single-minded profit maximizers with no concern for the welfare of their workers, thereby ignoring all the employers who operated under the human resources model of labor management relations. Kaufman reminds us that managers had many different approaches to labor relations, much the same way that labor had many different approaches to management. There was as much distance between John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Oscar Elsas of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills as there was between the American Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World. As a result of his perceptive, far-ranging analysis, Kaufman’s book is an important step towards the blending of business and labor history. Industrial relations are a dialectical relationship, and Kaufman’s body of work – including this study – ought to be the first place that labor historians go to see what different managers thought about how to manage their workers and why.