American Workers/Workers America: A Review of Recent Works by David Brody and James Green

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The emerging historiography at the beginning of the twentieth century took it for granted that the future belonged to labor. Our preeminent materialist historian Frederick Jackson Turner believed that with the closing of the frontier, the nation's destiny had passed from farmers to workers and industrialists. Charles Beard was patron of workers' education in this country and at Ruskin College, while Mary Beard wrote valuable history of The American Labor Movement that depicted labor as a great social force akin to titanic forces in the natural world. She spoke for her generation in saying, Anything so fundamental, so impressive, so fraught with possibilities for the future surely deserves an intensive study by those outside the labor movement as well as by those who work within it.l Her own volume was based on the intensive study by John Commons and his associates in the Bureau of Industrial Research. Commons' magificent Documen tary History and the exhaustive four volume History of Labor in the United States were monument to the centrality of labor in Progressive thought, as were works by Abbott, Brissenden, Hoxie, and others. Later generations returned again and again to this monument, most to honor, some to worship. And no one has yet come forth with structure of rival scope and influence. Now, however, the publication of books by David Brody and James Green on labor in the twentieth century gives some reason to believe the labor question is again moving to the forefront of our historical memory.2 It is not that Brody's Workers in Industrial America and Greens' World of the Worker proffer new grand synthesis. Brody himself has called attention to the absence of such synthesis in an essay prepared for the American Historical Association.3 Nor is it to disparage these books in any way to say they are not the latter-day equivalent of the Com mons project. They have no such pretension. Rather, they show that the study of working people is essential to understanding the main lines of twentieth-century American development, not just the collateral branch of labor history (important as that is). It is clear from their work that neither the distribution of power nor the lived experience of the American people as whole can be understood apart from the struggles and experiences of workers. Both authors treat American workers in their