Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 by Patricia A. Cooper

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 159 a combination of political power, technological change, and reloca­ tion, to reject the workers’ demand to share the benefits of the new technology. Golin focuses on (1) the primacy of the Paterson workers, contra­ dicting accounts assigning intellectual and organizational credit to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); (2) the formation and nature of the alliance, or bridge, between Paterson strikers and New York’s radical intellectuals; (3) the pageant staged by the combined groups; (4) the failure of the strike and, in its aftermath, of the IWW, particularly in the industrial cities of the Northeast. He argues that previous interpretations have misinterpreted each aspect in a variety ofways, often following the later testimony of participants. His critical reading of these hindsight evaluations offers intriguing commentary and wisely cautions against uncritical acceptance of such evidence. His account of the decline of the IWW is novel and persuasive, identifying distrust, disenchantment, and recrimination among the causes. He argues passionately that failure came from a lack of faith in the workers themselves, and lack of persistence in faith in the creative conjunction of radical intellectuals and radical workers, a temporary and potential source of united creativity in resistance to the ruling class among traditionally disparate groups. He admires the moment of the bridge and calls for current members of these groups to recapture it. Laurence Gross Dr. Gross, a curator at the Museum of American Textile History, is completing a manuscript on the Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900—1919. By Patricia A. Cooper. Champaign: Univer­ sity of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. xvi + 350; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $29.95. The central problem of Patricia Cooper’s enthralling and richly documented study is the conditions under which skilled male cigar makers built and sustained a craft union, and those that led to substitution of female for male workers, technical change, the trans­ formation of the craft, and the decline of the union. Her focus is work culture, which she defines as the everyday work practices and individual typical work history of cigar makers, as well as the ideology which grew out of these, undergirded them, and hindered change. To the conventional labor history concern with power relationships between capitalists and workers, Cooper adds gender relationships, also characterized by inequality. She pays serious attention to the implications of patriarchal ideology and practice outside and within the workplace for gender relations, and to the culture of women 160 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY ANO CULTURE workers. This work culture differed from men’s because women were hired under different conditions, because they were largely excluded from unions, their practices and benefits, and to a lesser degree because of their different work histories. Women were more likely than men to work only when they were young or to have intermittent careers. Male work culture “stressed autonomy, collective identity, and mutual aid, a fierce independence, pride, and self-worth, control over work, respect for manliness, a sense of both adventure and humor, duty to the trade, and loyalty to each other” (p. 4). This culture was characterized by a good deal of worker control over time and working conditions, linked to hand skill (acquired slowly through experience) and expressed in practices like the right to take “smokes” out of the daily product, and the custom of traveling from job to job. All these were reinforced by the presence of the strong Cigar Makers’ Inter­ national Union, which offered travel loans and sickness, unemploy­ ment, strike, and death benefits—“[creating] a fraternal and binding effect on us,” according to one member (quoted on p. 98). Labor relations in the industry were in constant tension between cigar makers’ demands for dignity and autonomy and manufacturers’ efforts to increase profits. The union leadership was concerned about too frequent or poorly prepared strikes, but the cigar makers were relatively successful in defending their prerogatives and maintaining good wages until the second decade of this century. Manufacturers then began to reorganize the work process, decen­ tralize production, introduce new technology (such as the suction table, which held tobacco leaves flat to facilitate...