Patrick D. Reagan

Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 . By Joseph A. McCartin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xvi, 303.

holds together coherently. Moreover, oral historians will find his arrangement of interviews suggestive. The juxtaposition of family, and especially husband and wife, interviews subtly reinforces his themes about multiple perspectives and gender differences. However, two problems undermine the potential of the book. First, in the introduction Dublin tantalizingly remarks that he wants to gauge how people perceived economic developments. The narratives more than adequately demonstrate how people understood the impact of the downturn on their own lives. But the reader is left wondering what, if anything, the interviewees had to say about the larger issue of deindustrialization, its causes and effects. What do they blame for the downturn? What social forces have led to the changes in their community? Dublin may have failed to take full advantage of the opportunity presented by oral history to give the narrators the chance to tell their own story and evaluate its broader significance. Second, I finished the book feeling a lack of closure. Once the themes are introduced, the narratives are left to speak for themselves. A conclusion with some remarks about the new directions to which these interviews point, or how this collection is relevant to the literature on deindustrialization or oral history, would have helped to emphasize the argument and significance of the book. Despite these shortcomings, which might give oral historians food for thought about what collections such as these should or could be doing better, When the Mines Closed is an engaging, valuable book that provides a welcome new perspective on how workers and their families responded to deindustrialization.