Melvyn Dubofsky

Labor History symposium: responses

Even while discounting views normally associated with it, Robert Goldstein’s article examining the political repression of the American labor movement in its formative years (c.1870–1914) sustains the ‘myth of American exceptionalism’. Instead of a nation whose history has featured liberty, relative equality of opportunity, and dissent, Goldstein imagines one where the extraordinary repression of trade unionism has produced a singularly conservative labor movement. How valid is Goldstein’s ‘American exceptionalism’? Has US history been marked by manifold instances of unusually severe labor repression? Has the American labor movement been singularly conservative? What sort of evidence does Goldstein amass to prove his claims? These questions find no ready answers in Goldstein’s article or in his documentation. Admitting that his theories cannot be proven, he acknowledges that he lacks the quantitative data to prove his case, and comparative labor history remains too underdeveloped to provide an adequate scholarly base on which he could draw. A fuzzy chronology also makes it hard to answer Goldstein’s questions. On the one hand, he asserts that the exceptional pattern of US labor history was set between 1870 and 1914, yet, when it suits his needs, he switches to the World War I years, the 1920s, the New Deal, or even the heyday of the cold war. I want to concentrate on the formative period of the modern labor movement in the United States, the years 1870–1914, and to allude to other historical moments only in passing. Goldstein is certainly correct that good quantitative evidence concerning comparative national instances of labor repression is scarce. Still, one need only consult Goldstein’s own book on political repression in nineteenth-century Europe to question his assertions about the exceptional character of union repression in the United States, c.1870–1914. Much of the repression that Goldstein finds throughout nineteenth-century Europe exceeds the worst in the United States. Did European nations suddenly offer insurgents carrots rather than sticks after 1900 while the United States continued to club its trade unionists and ‘subversives’? I think not. Even in Britain, perhaps the least repressive of European states, troops were used when the South Wales coal miners shut their industry down, Liverpool port and transport workers paralyzed the city’s commerce, and Dublin unionists engaged in a general strike. The French threatened to conscript striking railroad workers and punish them for desertion, a capital crime, if they remained on strike. And Goldstein quotes contemporary German observers of the Wilhelmine Empire noting that ‘[w]orkers have the right to combine. But if they make use of it, they are punished. . . . The trade union is free, as free as an outlaw’. Robin Archer’s recent book, Why is there No Labor Party in the United States?, may provide some answers in the comparison between the labor history of Australia and that of the United States. Archer posits that the history of labor in Australia,

Labor History symposium: assessing Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage, after 30 years

Scholars interested in employers, labor relations, and conservatism in 20th-century America have long recognized the importance of Howell John Harris’ pioneering book, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s. Published when he was a mere 30 years old, RTM – co-winner of the 1982 Philip-Taft Labor History Prize – is an outstanding study that explores the different ways in which the business community responded to the growth, militancy, and political influence of organized labor. In less than 300 pages, Harris demonstrates that employers, rather than organized labor, were the chief architects of labor relations in the 1940s. Recent scholarship has reinforced many of Harris’ central conclusions. This three-person symposium, comprising historians Mark Wilson, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Melvyn Dubofsky, offers a critical, though largely sympathetic, assessment of RTM, three decades after its publication.

Book Review: History: The Revival of Labor LiberalismThe Revival of Labor Liberalism. By BattistaAndrew. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 268 pp. ISBN 978-0-252-03232-5,

against exploitation and degradation. Act one (Chaps. 1-4) describes the rise and subsequent decline of the labor-liberal alliance from its origins in the Progressive era, through its halcyon years from Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal through Lyndon B.Johnsons Great Society, to its collapse in the 1960s when the nation seemed to come apart. Battista has little new to add to the story as told by such scholars as Karen Orren, David Greenstone, Taylor Dark, David Plotke, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Ira Katznelson, all of whom have seen the labor

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nated in a bombing that precipitated an equally violent police reaction, the action and reaction caused the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians, as well as wounds to perhaps forty-nine meeting attendees and passers-by. The city of Chicago and the entire nation, according to Green, split along the axis of class. Green has written his history of death in the Haymarket to reach an audience of literate readers rather than scholars. Hence he organized his story into a series of sixteen short chapters plus an epi logue. And he has created a narrative rather than an analytical history, one that prefers vernacular English to scholarly language and avoids academic jargon like the plague, and in which annotation is buried in endnotes. If the reviews his book have

Book Review: History: Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age AmericaDeath in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America. By GreenJames. New York: Pantheon, 2006. 383 pp. ISBN 0-375-42237-4,

The years since 1973 have witnessed vast changes in working-class life in the United States. The globalization of trade accelerated the deindustrialization of the nation. New technologies, especially the proliferation of computers, transformed work processes and moved the economy’s center of gravity increasingly away from industrial production toward the provisioning of services. The liberalization of U.S. immigration law in 1965, and the acceleration of immigration, both legal and illegal, from south of the U.S.-Mexico border began to decisively reshape the demographics of the U.S. working class. Together, such changes swept away the two decades of economic stability that most workers had experienced after World War II.

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The years bounded by the two world wars constitute a watershed in U.S. labor history, a time of profound changes in almost every feature of working-class life. During these years, the structure of the economy was transformed by consolidation of a mass production economy and the emergence of its mass consumption counterpart. The composition of the U.S. working class was altered by dramatic changes in the racial composition of the industrial labor force. Paradoxically, these years also saw corporate industrial capitalism plunge from the zenith of its vast cultural and economic power in the 1920s to the nadir of its political influence and credibility in the 1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s exacted an enormous human toll on working-class America and the frail community institutions upon which workers had traditionally relied during periods of economic hardship. The scale of the economic collapse was so vast that it triggered the sea change in American economic and labor policy ushered in by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Together with the political and social dynamics unleashed by U.S. participation in two world wars, the New Deal laid the basis for a policy of state intervention in the economy, a policy that directly benefited workers and their efforts to organize unions. Taking advantage of changing federal policy toward labor, union organizers orchestrated the most dramatic labor upsurge in American history during the 1930s, a departure best symbolized by the launching of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1935.

Era of Economic Change and Union Decline, Since 1973

The quarter century after World War II proved to be the most prosperous period in U.S. history. For most of that period the U.S. economy dominated world markets and its rising productivity raised the income of most citizens. The car in every garage and chicken in every pot that Herbert Hoover had promised voters on the eve of the Great Depression became by the 1960s sometimes more than one car in a multiple-car garage and a beef steak on every grill. Public policies and rising incomes created a suburban nation in which a majority of families and individuals, including most better-paid workers, owned their residences.

Wars, Depression, and the Struggle for Industrial Democracy, 1914–1947

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed profound changes in the size and structure of the U.S. economy, the arrangement of workplaces, the methods by which workers labored, and the organizations through which workers responded to all of these changes. These years provided the seedbed for an industrializing nation. During this time one finds the origins of an industrial working class in the United States, the end of pre-industrial work patterns of slavery and artisan labor, and the emergence of the first national workers’ organizations that sought to challenge the inequities of the emerging industrial system.

The Era of the Postwar Social Contract, 1947–1973

The colonies established on the North American mainland and the Caribbean islands by rival European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an age of mercantilism, aimed at enriching the colonial powers. The Spanish, who led the way, wrested silver, gold, and other precious materials from their Western Hemisphere possessions. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British who followed sought similar riches but failed to find the precious metals dug from the earth by indigenous and imported slave labor under Spanish domination. Instead, the Dutch, French, and British relied on other avenues of trade and exploitation to amass wealth. All three imperial nations, the Dutch and the British most especially and the French less so, turned to private entrepreneurs in the form of joint-stock companies to nourish the streams of trans-Atlantic commerce that would fill the coffers of the home country with bullion, the residue of a positive balance of trade.

The Rise of Free Labor, the Factory System, and Trades Organization, 1828–1877

Introduction Acknowledgments Labor in the Colonial and Early National Periods, to 1828 The Rise of Free Labor, the Factory System, and Trades Organization, 1828-1877 Workers in a Maturing an Industrial Society, 1877-1914 Wars, Depression, and the Struggle for Industrial Democracy, 1912-1947 The Era of the Postwar Social Contract, 1947-1973 Era of Economic Change and Union Decline, Since 1973