Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland and the Tragedy of American Labor. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999. ix + 302 pp. $18.00 paper.

Abstract

Labor historians have always been better at explaining what should have been than what was. This problem plagues Paul Buhle's Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland and the Tragedy of American Labor. No one familiar with Dr. Buhle's work—his detailed treatments of socialist radicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—will be surprised by the conclusions of his most recent work. The leadership of the mainstream organized labor movement always has been an anathema to the far left, and Buhle attacks Samuel Gompers, George Meany, and Lane Kirkland with a vengeance for having undermined true social democracy in favor of personal gain and corporate accommodation with employers and the state. These themes already have received significant development from the likes of Nelson Lichtenstein, Kim Moody, and Michael Goldfield. Relying almost entirely on secondary sources, Buhle has little to add to previous treatments, although he does focus more closely on the issue of racial exclusion. Ultimately, he breaks new ground only in the passion and uncompromising nature of his criticism. Buhle spares no hyperbole in assaulting the three “over-fed fat cats”—Gompers is a “doddering conservative,” Meany as a young man was “neither conspicuously bright or mechanically talented,” and Kirkland, is “a colorless functionary.” The author's aim clearly is to denounce rather than to understand.