Dana M. Caldemeyer. Union Renegades: Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded Age.

Abstract

In Union Renegades, Dana M. Caldemeyer provides a novel and engaging examination of a perennial question that plagues both the American labor movement and historians of America’s working class: why do so many workers, seemingly against their own interests, oppose or refuse to join labor unions? Drawing on underutilized sources, she focuses on midwestern miners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly during the 1890s, when the newly formed United Mine Workers (UMW) struggled to secure a stable membership and base of support. Although some of Caldemeyer’s claims are paradoxical or underdeveloped, this provocative book is an important contribution that is sure to influence scholarship for many years to come. Most of the evidence presented in Union Renegades comes from a uniquely rich archive of writing by miners themselves: the letters and reports published in mine workers’ newspapers. In particular, Caldemeyer notes, the United Mine Workers’ Journal printed any and all letters submitted during its first three years of publication, which “offer a unique window into workers’ lives and are crucial to understand how and why rank and file support for workers’ organizations like the UMW ebbed and flowed in the Gilded Age” (16). What these texts show, she compellingly argues, is that few workers were simply “union” or “non-union.” Rather, they usually supported and joined specific unions when they believed that those unions were responsive to their needs and goals and abandoned those unions when this no longer appeared to be the case. In other words, miners did not automatically join “the union” in response to dire working conditions or a sense of class solidarity; they joined, left, or stayed aloof from specific labor organizations based upon their analysis of those organizations’ words and deeds. This deceptively simple observation is a reminder to scholars that union membership cannot be used as an unproblematic sign of or shorthand for class consciousness and workplace discontent. Miners who fully, even militantly, supported “unionization” in the abstract might refuse to join the UMW or end their membership in it when it appeared to abandon or ignore them. This was the case, for example, when at the last minute, the UMW called off a nationwide miners’ strike in 1891. Many of its midwestern members “abandoned the UMW not because they had grown disillusioned with organized labor but because they believed the UMW leaders had turned away from their original goals” (69).