Robert H. Zieger

LABOR HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

THOMAS A. KOCHAN Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2005 ISBN: 0262112922 In Restoring the American Dream, Thomas Kochan, one of Americas foremost industrial relations scholars, addresses the pa...

Labor and the State in Modern America: The Archival Trail

Labor archives are central to the study of the history of the state in the modern United States. For much of the twentieth century, no issue was more basic to the emerging political economy than the labor issue. Presidents from Grover Cleveland to Harry S. Truman and congresses from the 1880s through the 1940s sought to find the political, administrative, and legislative keys to resolving the problem. Whether the focus of attention was the nations bitter and often violent strikes, controversy over key institutional matters such as manpower, collective bargaining, and dispute resolution, or the role of working people in system-threatening radicalism, the American state often had the labor problem prominent on its agenda. Yet students of the emergence of the modern state have not fully considered the labor question in their analyses of the states historical development. Labor history, despite the historiographical, methodological, and interpretive vigor that has characterized it over the past two decades, remains an exotic specialty, which historians of the state have acknowledged only reluctantly or anecdotally.

The New Deal in South Florida: Design, Policy, and Community Building, 1933–1940, edited by John A. Stuart and John F. Stack, Jr

queer history beyond the cities of the coastal USA. In exploring the place of feminism, Enke has produced an important interdisciplinary text that will engage and delight a variety of readers. Those interested in the history of post-war social movements, the progressive history of the upper Midwest, women’s history, the history of sexuality, oral history, and historiography will all enjoy this book. Along with Emma Goldman, Enke shows us that finding a space to dance is an important aspect of revolution.

Labor History symposium: David Witwer, Shadow of the Racketeer

David Witwer’s Shadow of the Racketeer is a powerful and detailed account of organized crime’s penetration into the labour movement in 1930s America. The focus of the narrative is a Hollywood studio intent on ensuring a pliant labour supply, payments to a Chicago mob, and crusading journalist Westbrook Pegler’s subsequent exposé of the scandal. As in his previous work, Witwer persuasively demonstrates how corruption and scandal helped undercut the labour movement, in this instance revealing how Pegler’s campaign set the stage for the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act. Shadow of the Racketeer was awarded Labor History’s prize for best book in 2010, and it is here examined closely by four prominent labour scholars.

The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (2007)

During the past decade, historians have been producing important new work on the theme of race and labour. Books by Paul Moreno, Michael Honey, Laurie B. Greene and Thomas Jackson have received wide attention. The works under review offer both a sampling of recent scholarship and an intriguing glimpse into the intersection of the US legal regime and the post-New Deal race–labour nexus. The essays in The Black Worker are broadly representative of recent scholarly work on the subject. The collection reprints milestones in black labour history, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein’s 1988 Journal of American History article dealing with labour and civil rights in Winston-Salem and Detroit, and Tera W. Hunter’s discussion of black domestic servants in Progressive Era Atlanta. Some essays, notably Arnesen’s on black strike-breaking, Brian Kelly’s on African American elites and black workers during the same period, and Steven A. Reich’s on black labour in the aftermath of the First World War, are adapted from earlier published papers. Still others, including Beth Tompkins Bates on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1930s, Cynthia M. Blair on sex workers in late nineteenth-century Chicago, Leslie A. Schwalm on women in Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff’s survey of agricultural workers’ struggles in Arkansas, and William P. Jones’s paper on workers involved with wood products in post-Second World War North Carolina, are based on books on these subjects by the respective authors. Joseph A. McCartin’s study of rank-and-file AFSCME leader Leamon Hood stands alone as an original, previously unpublished contribution.

The Development of Federal Old-Age Policy in the Era of the Great Depression: Pensions, Policies, and Politics, 1920–1940

Even before the Depression struck, most of the nations public pension and retirement funds came from federal sources, in the form of veterans and civil servants benefits. In 1935, Congress drew upon these earlier programs to create the first national pension program under Title II of the Social Security Act. Unlike the other programs established by the Act, Old Age Insurance (OAI) provided for direct payments to individuals, thus bypassing often discriminatory state-controlled administration of social welfare programs. In its method of funding and in the patterns of inclusion and exclusion it evidenced, this OAI measure established the basis for what has become a generally successful program of social support. However, OAIs reliance on work history has had adverse gender effects owing to its reliance on employment rather than on common citizenship as the determinant of benefits.

Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919. By Patricia A. Cooper. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xvii + 350 pp.

In this book, Patricia Cooper provides an intriguing new perspective on the peculiar trade that incubated both Samuel Gompers and AFL-style unionism. Cooper draws on the concept of work culture, a coherent system of ideas and practices, forged in the context of the work process itself, through which workers modified, mediated, and resisted the limits of their jobs (p. 2), to recreate the world of work in American cigar shops. She employs this analysis with an eye for nuance and historical specificity hat does justice to the complexity of her subjects. Coopers book surveys the transformation f the cigar industry over the two crucial decades between 1900 and 1920. She begins with an extended examination of the skilled male cigar makers of the nineteenth century. Wisely avoiding what she terms simplistic conceptions of craft unionists (p. 4), Cooper describes their fascinating work culture as at once egalitarian and exclusivistic, generous and reactionary, anticapitalist and accommodationist. To us, these seem oddly contradictory, but at the time they had a logic all their own (p. 5). In explaining that logic, Cooper shows enormous sensitivity and insight, houghtfully combining the perspectives of both the new and the old labor history. She describes in detail how the cigar makers work, relying on dexterity and skill that could come only with experience, contributed to the formation of a set of shop rituals through which cigar makers protected both their craft and their sense of self-worth. Through their proper dress, their perception of their own manliness, and their defense of shop floor customs that allowed them to regulate their own hours of labor or to take home free smokers at the end of a workday, she argues, workers carved out a measure of authority on the job. Unlike some other labor historians, Cooper does not romanticize this culture. Indeed, she is quick to recognize its points of ambiguity and contradiction (p. 126), and she shows how this work culture often produced qualities which coincided with manufacturers needs (p. 62). She notes, for example, that cigar makers revered speedy and productive workers, that they disdained the unskilled, and that they often felt a community of interest with manufacturers. Cooper then explains how this work culture became embodied in the Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU). She traces the rise of the union through the travelling system that was critical in spreading the union, the ascendance of the international union over its locals, and the internal political struggles between progressives and union leaders. Throughout, Cooper makes clear the fundamental tension between solidarity and exclusivity (p. 115) at the heart of both the world-view of the cigar makers and the structure of the CMIU. Discussing the entry of women into the cigar trade in the second half of her book, Cooper shows how destructive this tension was. Here she traces the rise of the team system, a division of labor used to undermine union wage scales and workers control, shifting her focus from Northeastern cities, where the CMIU was strong, to rural Pennsylvania and immigrant Detroit, where cigars were increasingly rolled by semiskilled women. In the process she reveals the gendered nature of work culture, showing how women responded to work in unique ways. Because women in cigar making left few records, Cooper imaginatively reconstructs their story through extensive oral histories. She depicts a vibrant work culture defined by womens experience both as women and as workers, a culture that captured their several identities (p. 239). Women also fought for a measure of dignity and control at work, developing informal mechanisms to express their solidarity, sharing work, standing up to the foreman, or walking off the job. Yet, male and female cigar makers did not make common cause. Many union cigar makers felt that to recognize and organize these women would endanger all they had built; at stake were not simply their jobs but their whole culture (p. 328). Favorable conditions in the World War I era enabled union militants to attempt to organize all cigar makers and democratize the industry. Sage Publications, Inc.