Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

After flourishing in the late twentieth century, community labor history projects have languished in recent decades. 1 Perhaps not anticipating the new spark of labor mobilization of the past few years, labor historians and local museums and historical societies have missed opportunities to document the stories of ordinary workers and their unions and educate and inspire others through public exhibits and programs. Both public historians and their academic partners have faced new challenges in presenting stories about American workers. This is partly due to the neoliberal political economy, as editors Thomas Klubock and Paulo Fontes conclude in their introduction to a special issue of International Labor and Working-Class History on labor and public history, but also because of new priorities within museum and academic cultures. 2 Richard Anderson recently noted this disconnect between labor and labor historians and stated that making labor scholarship accessible is key to forming "a deep reservoir of inspiration and guidance" for current labor struggles, even as the demands of the academy require scholars to publish in more

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of social progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. Walter Lippmann In the spring of 18...

It has, admittedly, been a long time since I have read Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. The essays in this volume were foundational to my PhD training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an alma mater I share with Gutman, and I remember them as core texts in the labor history seminar that I took there as a second-year graduate student. As time went on, though, my research interests during my dissertation work and as an early career professor seemingly took me far afield from Gutman's emphasis on working-class formation and culture. I primarily identified as a historian of the US West and of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. My research, which dealt with unfree and quasi-free labor systems in California from the 1850s to the 1870s, did focus on work and workers. But as with many other Civil War and Reconstruction historians, my preoccupation has almost always been with the state. I want to know how labor and immigration exclusion policies shaped the lives of workers; how workers engaged with the state by contesting these laws and policies; how the state acted violently against workers; and how the outcomes of these struggles changed the overarching political history of the United States during Reconstruction.Given my research commitments, my first impression on rereading Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America was dissatisfaction at the weak emphasis on the state. There was precious little about the law, politics, and judicial proceedings that were at the heart of my own interpretations of labor history and inherently central to the Civil War and Reconstruction.In fact, one of Gutman's most provocative claims in the title essay of this volume is that the Civil War and Reconstruction may not have mattered all that much in the broader scheme of labor history. Gutman purposely disrupted the familiar periodization of national history that pivoted around the Civil War and Reconstruction as major turning points. Instead, he treated the period from 1843 to 1893 as a single unbroken era characterized by continuity, “common patterns of behavior,” rather than change.1 The “profound tension” between “American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism” remained the constant theme of American life, relatively uninterrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath.2After quieting my initial kneejerk protest—how could Gutman possibly discount the impact of emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments on labor history?—I gave serious thought to his argument about continuity across the pre–and post–Civil War periods. I concluded, to my surprise, that Gutman was ahead of his time in questioning whether the Civil War and Reconstruction were actually moments of tremendous rupture in national history.For decades, historians had emphasized that the United States victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War resulted in the consolidation of the power of the liberal US nation-state. The federal government emerged from the Civil War a powerful, muscular entity capable of crushing challenges to its authority across the nation. It quelled the slaveholder rebellion and installed free labor in the South, subdued and incorporated the Native peoples of the West, and crushed worker dissent in the North and Midwest.In the past ten years, however, Civil War and Reconstruction historians have begun to dismantle this image of the postwar American state. Their focus has instead been on the continuities between the pre–and post–Civil War United States: the uneven and ineffectual power of the federal government, the persistence of unfreedom after the end of slavery, and the hierarchy and violence that still structured social relations in a republic (allegedly) dedicated to liberal individualism and equality before the law. The picture of post–Civil War America that emerges from this new scholarship is much more chaotic and ambiguous, and more eerily similar to the antebellum era, than we have often imagined.3Gutman's delineation of workers’ struggles and working-class formation between 1843 and 1893 anticipated this new interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. More importantly, his arguments suggest that a renewed focus on labor history—which many Civil War and Reconstruction historians abandoned after the 1980s—can help us trace the threads of continuity that bound together the antebellum and postbellum eras.First, Gutman's focus on workers’ persistent resistance to the ethos of liberal capitalism, which he highlights in both “Work, Culture, and Industrializing Society” and “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement,” undermines any notion that the US victory in the Civil War was also a victory for the Republican Party's vision of liberal citizenship. Scholars often blame the failure of Republican policy on recalcitrant former slaveholders in the South who refused to adopt free wage labor or acknowledge Black Americans’ equality before the law. Gutman reveals, however, that the nation's working people were themselves often rightly skeptical of a Republican liberalism that emphasized individual acquisitiveness over communal good, as well as Republicans’ vision of citizenship rooted firmly in the defense of private property over the right to economic justice. Workers’ resistance clearly shows that a liberal consensus did not triumph after the Civil War. Instead, the post–Civil War era saw the continuation of a battle over the legitimacy of liberal capitalism's cornerstone concepts that started long before the war and lasted long afterward.Second, and relatedly, the essays in the volume speak to Civil War and Reconstruction historians’ current emphasis on the inefficacy and unevenness of state power in the postwar era. Gutman's two lesser-known early articles at the end of Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America—“Trouble on the Railroads in 1873–1874” (1961) and “Two Lockouts in Pennsylvania, 1873–1874” (1959)—are especially worth revisiting because they show how the strength of workers’ community ties derailed (sometimes literally) industrialists’ efforts to harness the power of the state.4 Gutman's intensely local community studies reveal that the image of a muscular postwar state intervening on the behalf of capital to squash workers’ protests does not always resemble reality. In the smaller railroad towns of the Midwest and the coal towns of Pennsylvania during the early years of the Long Depression, the relationships that working-class people forged with middling shopkeepers, white-collar professionals, and small manufacturers often diluted the coercive power of the state. Middle-class leaders in local and municipal governments, who were often bound to their working-class neighbors through long-standing ties of friendship, common working-class origins, and a shared hatred of corporate autocracy, might side with protesting workers against large industrial operators or refuse to deploy state power against them. Together, working- and middle-class residents could frustrate capitalists who wanted to bring down the heavy hand of the postwar state on workers in the name of defending private property. Gutman's community studies remind scholars always to be attentive to the contested and highly contingent nature of state power over and in workers’ lives in the postwar era.Finally, Gutman's emphasis on the incomplete imposition of capitalist labor discipline on working people across the entire nineteenth century can transform our understanding of emancipation. Civil War and Reconstruction historians, including myself, frequently portray the abolition of slavery as a massive social, economic, and cultural transformation. The federal state tried to remake the lives of formerly enslaved people (and the lives of enslavers) by installing free wage labor, along with all of its coercive features—contracts, at-will employment, and time discipline—in the South. This interpretation of the postwar period rests on the assumption that free wage labor and all its disciplinary trappings were already fully developed in the North and that enslaved people had to be acclimated to ways of life that northern wageworkers had already been living under for at least one generation. Gutman's insight that capitalist labor discipline was still very much contested and in flux across all of the nineteenth century forces scholars to reevaluate both the significance of emancipation and the experience of the formerly enslaved. In particular, former slaves’ postemancipation labor struggles seem less disconnected, and less radically divergent, from those of northern wageworkers when we discover that both groups were actively shaping an incomplete, fluid, and contested capitalist vision of labor discipline still very much in the making. In this context, then, emancipation could be read as a continuation of pre–Civil War struggles over worker autonomy rather than as a complete break with antebellum labor history.On the whole, my rereading of Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America in my academic middle age convinced me that I needed to revisit classic works in labor history more often. My work does not fundamentally focus on working-class formation, identity, or culture. Still, Gutman's distinctive periodization of the nineteenth century presents a different way of looking at the questions that concern me the most, including the meaning of freedom in the age of emancipation, the character of the post–Civil War state, and the policies and practices of labor coercion. Returning to labor history generally, and to Gutman specifically, may well be one of the most fruitful paths for revising our understanding of the world that the Civil War made.

The coal fields have been the setting for some of the most legendary traditions of class conflict in American labor history. Dishonest and irregular pay, child and convict labor, mine disasters and black lung, repression of unions and the suffocating paternalism of the company towns ?these have been among the more potent symbols of labor exploitation in industrial America. Relatedly, the mining regions have yielded an unmatched legacy of labor militancy and solidarity, embodied most enduringly in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The recent, hard-fought Pittston strike illustrates how alive and immediate this history remains in the coal fields today. On October 18-20, 1990, approximately one hundred people, primarily labor historians and UMWA officials, gathered at Penn State University to mark the union's centenary and to evaluate its history and current prospects. UMWA President Richard Trumka set the tone with his keynote address, World to Win: A New Unionism for the '90s. In order to remain vital, he argued, the labor movement needs to redefine the meaning of unionism, to expand beyond the workplace to confront the community needs ? social, financial, legal, etc. ? of its members as well. But in doing so, he added, the unions must not shed their traditional commitments to workplace issues and social justice and become mere purveyors of credit cards and travel services. It is both a moral and a strategic imperative that the unions reconcile their roles at the workplace and in the community, for working people pursue empowerment in both realms. Trumka turned next to the new proletariat of service in offices, hospitals, and the like. He called on the labor movement to reject the assumption that these workers cannot be organized, likening such thinking to that of the American Federation of leaders regarding industrial workers during the 1930s. Finally, Trumka noted the response of white working people in Louisiana to the racist populism of U.S. Senate candidate David Duke. Liberals, he observed, tend to denounce the racism and move on; the challenge of the labor movement is to address the economic distress and political disaffection that make struggling white workers susceptible to Duke's demogoguery. Labor is the only entity in America capable of challenging American racism at its roots, Trumka concluded.

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology PHILIP SCRANTON This article represents an attempt to assess the relationships be­ tween research in labor history and issues of moment in studies of the history of technology. To make this topic manageable, the dis­ cussion will be confined to matters concerning American industrial labor, excluding work in agriculture, extractive sectors, and service trades,1 in order to keep the focus on what might be termed the core of labor history studies, the articulation of the manufacturing base in the United States. The plan of exposition is tripartite, a customary craft practice among mental laborers. Initially, the thematic devel­ opment of American labor history will be summarized, followed by an assessment of elements that have divided and may link labor and technology research, concluding with a bundle of suggestions for fu­ ture inquiry, based on the state of our collective arts. American Labor History: An Overview The historiography of American labor studies breaks readily into two major eras, with a third perhaps at present dawning. The roots of the discipline lie in the Midwest, at the stronghold of institutional economics in the World War I decade, the University of Wisconsin. There John R. Commons erected labor history as an integral element Dr. Scranton is associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers Uni­ versity, Camden, New Jersey. His study of development and decay in skill-intensive manufacturing, Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885—1940, will be published in spring 1989 by Cambridge University Press. ■One must, having narrowed the span of the present article, acknowledge that im­ portant work has recently been done in all three of the excluded sectors. For agriculture, see Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land (Urbana, Ill., 1985), and T. J. Byres, ed., Sharecroppers and Sharecropping (London, 1983); for mining, Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless, The Kingdom of Coal (Philadelphia, 1985); and, in service trades, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890— 1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), as representative of the current body of published work.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/88/2904-0002$01.00 722 Labor History and the History of Technology 723 in the analysis of industrial economies, assembling first the massive Documentary History ofAmerican Industrial Society, followed by the mul­ tivolume History of Labor in the United States, completed in the 1930s. Befitting adherents of the school of institutional economics, Com­ mons and his followers, most prominently Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, devoted themselves to chronicling the vagaries of American trade unionism, especially the “job-conscious” craft organizations that engendered the American Federation of Labor. This commitment to the study of pure-and-simple trade unions generally passed over the radical initiatives evident in efforts at cooperative, labor-managed production and the transformation-minded struggles by socialist ag­ gregations and the Industrial Workers of the World. It also led to a focus on collective bargaining, interunion rivalries over jurisdiction, and intraunion battles over organizational structure, funds, and power, rather than any emphasis on workplace relationships or the links between workers and their social and political communities. This is not to say that the Commons group operated from ivory towers or that they were indifferent to theorizing. Selig Perlman served the Commission on Industrial Relations as a species of secret agent in 1913—14, investigating labor relations at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the wake of the great 1912 Bread and Roses IWW strike—at some risk to life and limb, as he noted in his reports to the commission staff. In the late 1920s, Perlman also attempted to draw together European and American patterns in his Theory of the Labor Movement (1928).2 Yet, as the literature produced by the third generation, the post-World War II scholars led by Philip Taft, amply demonstrates, institutional studies rooted in labor economics failed to advance be­ yond earlier boundaries. Although they continued to produce large tomes choked with detail, the “old institutionalists” occupied an in­ tellectual dead space even as Taft published the second half of his study of the AFL in 1959 and helped launch...

In Carbon County, USA, the historian Christian Wright examines the history of labor organization in eastern Utah's coal mining industry between the 1930s and 1980s. Split into three parts, the book first documents the period from the 1930s to the early postwar years, including the problems emerging in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Part 2 chronicles the coal industry's revival during the nationally and internationally tumultuous 1960s and when the UMWA encountered the rise of a competing union in 1970: Miners for Democracy. In the book's final section, Wright dedicated one chapter each to race, gender, and generation, emphasizing the 1970s to 1980s period, which was also the decline of industry and organization. In the epilogue, Wright connects the preceding chapters to pending questions about the roles of coal and labor organization in the United States during the twenty-first century.Wright's argument is at least twofold. One argument is that labor history is still relevant and valuable. But Wright also argues that looking beyond the labor–management and union–antiunion dichotomies to the nuances of labor organization demonstrates that union power's decline in Utah's coal industry resulted from fracturing union leadership and changing understandings of identity among rank-and-file workers. Integral to Wright's study of identity are race, gender, and generation. While the first argument—the relevance and value of labor history—will speak mainly to an academic audience, the second will likely appeal to anyone interested in the histories of coal mining, Utah, labor organization, and identity studies.In exploring the depths of labor organization in Utah, Wright's book adds to several bodies of literature. For one, it is the most comprehensive examination of coal mining labor organization in Utah. It adds to a 2006 edited volume on Utah mining by examining eastern Utah over a fifty year period in particular. Additionally, Wright's arguments about labor organization extend the chronology of most mining labor histories, which often analyze the pre-1930s period. In doing so, Wright's work fills a gap but also demonstrates the value of learning from the decline of the movement, not just its heyday. Finally, labor history had its own heyday and has seen some decline, but Wright's analysis reveals how labor history might add to ongoing political conversations.Overall, this volume contains excellent prose, impressive research, and useful graphics, ranging from graphs and tables to historical images. The introductions to chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 are particularly noteworthy for their prose. Wright's spread of records from the United Mine Workers of America and Miners for Democracy archives to local repositories, including museums and records in Carbon and Emery counties, expresses a deep engagement with the national and regional stories. Readers will surely appreciate the images contained throughout the text as well, including the maps at the front, the appendices (e.g., a timeline of regional and national events), and tables throughout that illustrate Wright's extensive and impressive use of demographic data.Wright's inclusion of race and gender in particular are a welcome addition to the literature on mining history, especially in Utah, though the analysis and framing might have benefitted from stronger situating in gender and identity studies. Commendably, he consulted numerous sources regarding women's history and several histories that speak to Mexican American and Mexican workers. That said, the concept of “intersectionality” might have offered Wright a way to investigate race and gender more consistently throughout the narrative. Cordoning off race and gender in their own chapters, rather than integrating them more prominently into earlier chapters, comes with costs and benefits. Treating them separately highlights them in a way that integrating them would not. On the other hand, it suggests that the two are mainly characteristics of later labor organization. The introductions of the race and gender chapters provide only brief information about those themes in earlier chronological periods. To be fair, perhaps Wright did not include women earlier because they were not miners—state law did not allow women to mine until 1973 (227). Even so, were women part of the strikes or other labor events, perhaps similar to the involvement of auto workers’ wives at the 1937 Flint General Motors strike? If not, how did notions about masculinity affect pre-1970s unionizing? Even without answers to these questions, these chapters are still much-needed additions to the extant literature on mining and labor history in Utah and the West.In the end, Wright's thought-provoking, nuanced work is a useful base for further explorations and a smart addition to the current literature on mining labor organization efforts.

I WOULD SIMPLY LIKE TO REFLECT on some of my experience in teaching labour history. I interpret the scope broadly and so I will make some comments on the satisfactions and frustrations of teaching labour history in three areas — the university, the labour movement and the wider public sphere. ' In the early 1970s the only undergraduate course in labour history available to me at the University of Toronto was Bill Dick's course in American labour history at Scarborough College. It was a fine course and even included a visit by a then little-known American historian named Herbert Gutman. By the 1980s labour history had become an established teaching field at many universities. In my own case, I was brought to the University of New Brunswick not only to teach Canadian history and edit Acadiensis, but also to encourage work in labour history, which my department viewed as an exciting and welcome new subject in Canadian history. At the graduate level, this has largely taken the form of encouraging MA theses on various aspects of labour and social history in New Brunswick. My first two graduate theses turned out to be about New Brunswick workers in the 1930s — Patrick Burden's study of the New Brunswick Farmer-Labour Union and Carol Ferguson's study of unemployed workers in Saint John. The department has long emphasized the study of Atlantic Canada and specifically of the province. I felt that I was able to help open up a new area in New Brunswick history and, importantly, that the department welcomed my doing so. On the other hand, there has been an element of frustration as well in the graduate field. Arriving in New Brunswick fresh from graduate studies about industrial Cape Breton and from teaching assignments at the (then) College of Cape Breton, it was unrealistic to expect students at the University of New Brunswick to share all my interests. Most of them came with topics already decided and were not looking for me to assign them topics. In addition to various New Brunswick topics, I also supervised one in American labour history and, most recently, a fine study of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. At the same time I have been fortunate to have had two excellent graduate students who followed up neglected aspects of my own earlier work. There is

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Reviewed by: For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 Robert H. Woodrum For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865. By Robert H. Zieger. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. ix, 276.) In the course of his long and productive career, Robert H. Zieger has contributed much to the study of labor history. His classic works, The CIO: 1935-1955 and American Workers, American Unions (currently in its third edition), have introduced waves of aspiring scholars to the major themes in the field. Zieger's edited volumes, Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South and Southern Labor in Transition, served as vehicles for new and innovative scholarship and helped fuel an explosion of interest in Southern labor history. In his latest ambitious work, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865, Zieger turns his attention to the troubled relationship between African Americans and organized labor since the end of the Civil War. Zieger focuses much of his analysis on two themes: the struggle of blacks to obtain full citizenship in the workplace and wider society, and the role that organized labor has played in either helping or hindering these aspirations. Zieger rejects the narrow focus of recent surveys by "free market" historians, such as Paul Moreno, who view unions mainly as cartels that restrict the number of workers in the labor force, driving up wages and benefits in part by discriminating against African Americans. Zieger believes that unions are essential elements in a free and democratic society, and they have historically played a broader, more complex, and more beneficial role in American history than scholars like Moreno acknowledge. Zieger, however, does not downplay organized labor's racism, and he focuses much of his analysis on the contradiction between the movement's rhetoric of equality and the discriminatory practices of many unions. For Jobs and Freedom begins with an examination of the decades after Emancipation, when national labor organizations first grappled with the race issue in a substantive manner. Tentative efforts to create interracial movements emerged in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama, and on the waterfront in New Orleans. However, more durable and exclusionary practices emerged in the lily-white railroad brotherhoods and in many unions that affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), particularly in the building trades and in unions such as the International Association of Machinists (IAM). Many of these tendencies, Zieger finds, continued into the new century, through the era of World War I. More positive trends emerged as well, in the migration of millions of African Americans out of the South and into the urban areas of the North, and in [End Page 129] the rise of A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who began his long campaign against racism within the American labor movement in the decade after World War I. A burst of activism followed the Great Depression, with the passing of New Deal legislation favorable to unions and the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a rival to the AFL. The CIO, behind the success of John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), organized black workers, though leadership positions usually remained in the hands of whites. Unions with substantial black membership grew in the automobile, meat-packing, and other industries under the direction of the CIO. The number of African Americans in labor unions grew dramatically, according to Zieger, from sixty thousand to more than one million by the end of World War II. Many of these workers belonged to AFL unions, which were forced to modify their policies and reach out to black workers in part to keep up with the CIO. Legislatively, this era was mixed, according to Zieger, with Franklin Roosevelt's symbolic actions having little practical effect and some New Deal legislation actually excluding or harming black workers. Meanwhile, civil rights attorneys won important victories for black workers against discriminatory unions in the courts, beginning a difficult and long process of reform. Thus, at the end of the war, Zieger concludes that "African American workers had more reason to be optimistic than at...

As a European labor historian interested in American labor history, I find Sean Wilentz's essay both informative and stimulating. Wilentz focuses on the issue of class consciousness and looks at the language of protest in Europe and America. He maintains that American labor historians have exaggerated the class conscious ness of European workers while underestimating that of American workers. On this point, I find his arguments plausible and compelling. I am more skeptical about his conclusion that the failure of a socialist party to develop in the United States is not an interesting historical question. Wilentz's description of American radicalism in the period between the Amer ican Revolution and the Civil War suggests a parallel with developments in Western Europe between the French Revolution and the Revolutions of 1848. In the first half of the nineteenth century, in both Europe and and the United States, far-reaching criticisms of large-scale industrial capitalism spread widely among small shopkeep ers, artisans, and industrial workers. This period witnessed a florescence of socialist, trade unionist, feminist, and radical republican ideas among large strata of the population. In Britain Chartism found a wider constituency for radical ideas than did any other mass working-class movement for a century.1 It is possible, as some historians have suggested, that France never again came so near to a revolutionary socialist transformation as it did during the Second Republic between 1848 and 1851.2 The rediscovery of early nineteenth-century popular militancy has led to a reexamination of the ideals that inspired these movements. It is now widely accepted that the harsh working conditions of the industrial revolution and the spread of factory labor cannot alone explain the spread of class consciousness. Work expe rience may well produce frustration and a sense of injustice but the manner of expression of such feelings, whether they are turned internally against other workers or channeled in some political direction, is a consequence of the variety of political alternatives available to workers. In nineteenth-century America the republican tradition, as transformed by its artisans, was one readily available political tradi tion.3 Wilentz's paper is most interesting and intriguing in dealing with the trans

Book Reviews 189 Clayton Sinyai. Schools ofDemocracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 292. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $22.50. When Alexis de Tocqueville lauded America's repubhcan traditions in the 1830s, he applauded the young nation's flourishing voluntary associations that promoted civic education. Clayton Sinyai's political history of American labor unions emphasizes how workers made their organizations into "schools of democracy" (p. 3) that hkewise fostered civic education. Schools ofDemocracy draws upon a wide knowledge of secondary literature to iUuminate the union movement's contributions to American political culture. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), which many labor historians have castigated as hidebound and unimaginative, emerges as courageous and visionary, while the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), typically seen as innovative and open-minded, is portrayed as having initially benefited in terms of growth from its rehance on government support, but as having ultimately been hobbled by its dependence on that support. Sinyai's point of departure is the nineteenth-century skilled craftsman's desire for independence and protection of craft skills. The most successful craftsmen created autonomous labor organizations that "achieved remarkable levels of control over their jurisdiction" (p. 30), such as the International Typographers Union. Samuel Gompers and the AFL stressed the importance of voluntarism, meaning that trade unions' independence from both business and government was essential. Sinyai explains that Gompers realized that rejection of government support during the Progressive Era "virtually doomed the great masses of industrial workers to disorganization, dependence, and poverty" (p. 102). In fact, Gompers imphcidy argued that the majority of industrial workers were not capable of exercising the type of democratic self-rule necessary for a successful independent union movement. Yet the AFL's continued neglect of industrial workers, those who were either unskilled or semiskilled machine tenders, irritated many labor leaders after World War I. By the 1930s, several AFL affiliates moved in the direction of industrial unionism and recruited new members based on place of employment rather than possession of craft skills. Crucially, the CIO's separation from the AFL and its explosive growth in the 1930s and 1940s depended on its alliance with progressive Democrats. In this sense, the CIO unions were "creatures of the government" (p. 163). Phihp Murray and Walter Reuther's efforts steered the CIO toward a new type of civic education that stressed that employers treat workers fairly and impartially; 190 Michigan Historical Review unions offered security above all else. As the progressive arm of the Democrats from World War II through the late 1960s, the labor movement, centered especially in theMidwest and led by unions such as the United Auto Workers, continued its educational mission yet did so inways thatmoved farther away from Gompers's voluntarism. Sinyai's analysis of the changing meaning of civic education in the American labor movement rests primarily on the views of union leaders. Although references are made in places to the political behavior of specific unions, Sinyai's arguments would have benefited from greater attention to developments at the local union level. How did local unions' "schools of democracy" reflect the views of union leaders? How did the rank and file's political behaviors impact union leaders' views? Still, Sinyai's book offers an important perspective on the vital contributions of labor unions to American political culture. Wilson J.Warren, Department of History Western Michigan University Edmund F. Wehrle. Between a River and aMountain: TheAFL-CIO and the Vietnam War. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 320. Bibliography. Drawing. Index. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $25.95. In Between a River and aMountain, Edmund F. Wehrle demonstrates that the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and later the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) were deeply and integrally involved in the Vietnam War. The relationship between the American labor federations and Vietnam began shortly after the Second World War. The AFL saw its postwar mission in the world as advancing free trade unionism. Ideally, independent unions were advocates for worker and human rights. They were also proponents of full-employment pohcies and vigorously anticommunist. In other words, the AFL and...

In May 2015, the Connecticut General Assembly passed Public Act No. 15 – 17, encouraging local school districts to teach the history of the American labor movement. This was the culmination of years of advocacy by teachers, union activists, and supportive legislators. Spearheaded by Steve Kass, a retired teacher, member of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and vice-president of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association (GNHLHA), this effort followed naturally from GNHLHA activities on the local level to document union history. As Kass testified before the General Assembly Education Committee, “The purpose of this legislation is to get labor’s untold story told,” citing a recent national poll finding that 54 percent of adults know “little” or “not much” about unions in the United States. Also, for the past several years, AFT Connecticut Secretary-Treasurer Ed Leavy testified in support of similar legislation at the state capitol. “Life as we know it today would be impossible without the contribution of organized labor,” Leavy told the legislature’s Education Committee in February 2015. “The men and women who struggled against deplorable working conditions, bias, and abuse deserved the right to be remembered,” he said.The key to this success was persistence in submitting the legislation each year and building allies over the years. “It took five legislative sessions, five years starting in 2010 and ending in June 2015,” noted Kass. The final version of the legislation needed to satisfy Republican legislators who wanted a “balanced perspective,” so the title of the bill was amended to “An Act Concerning a Labor and Free Market Capitalism Curriculum.” The added language called for “the history and economics of free market capitalism and entrepreneurialism, and the role of labor and capitalism in the development of the American and world economies.” This was an easy concession for labor historians, as recent scholarship has emphasized that the history of labor cannot be told without attention to the history of capitalism. This legislation added this subject to the list of other recommended topics, including the Holocaust and genocide education, the Irish Great Famine, African American history, Puerto Rican history, and Native American history.This act is not binding on school districts, but it does require the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE) to provide teaching materials on these topics. Kass assembled a committee of labor historians and teachers to produce the materials. I wrote a short summary of the history of the Connecticut working class and the labor movement, and other committee members provided labor history materials for the CSDE. Steve Thornton, retired union organizer and compiler of Hartford local history through his website “The Shoeleather History Project,” delivered other Connecticut materials, while Professor Troy Rondinone of Southern Connecticut State University provided input. Stephen Armstrong, Social Studies Consultant for CSDE, prepared these materials for posting on the CSDE website. Together, the three presented teacher workshops on the topic at the Spring 2018 Connecticut Council on Social Studies conference. It is an ongoing project to inform teachers about labor history topics and suggest ways to embed those topics in the standard US history survey classes they teach.A key goal of the CSDE Social Studies curriculum is to use Connecticut examples of national history to allow students to appreciate where they live. Crucial to this effort is the ongoing work of historians to gather materials on local events. GNHLHA has been a local pioneer in this endeavor, aided in the beginning by Yale University’s David Montgomery and his crew of graduate students. It created and maintained a local archive of labor records curated by Joan Cavanagh, carried out oral-history projects, and mounted traveling exhibitions on New Haven garment workers and on the Winchester Repeating Arms Company factory. The Winchester exhibit is an excellent example of public history, telling the story of one employer and one factory and its interaction with the African American Newhallville neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century. See the Greater New Haven History Association’s website.LAWCHA itself is aiding these efforts on the national level, with its committee Teaching Labor’s Story, chaired by Professor Emerita Nikki Mandell, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. See its website, which includes a link to Professor Rosemary Feurer’s “Labor History Links,” including a comprehensive labor history chronology, bibliographies, and other teacher resources. LAWCHA urges everyone to use these resources and contribute to them, if possible.

Reviewed by: Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement Edmund F. Wehrle Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement. By James B. Jacobs . New York: New York University Press, 2006. 352 pp. $32.95 hardback. Although I have studied American labor unions for nearly two decades, the issue of racketeering rarely has caught my attention. I suspect this is true for most of us in the field of labor studies and labor history. James Jacobs' Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement, however, offers a jolting corrective to our complacency. "Labor racketeering," Jacobs argues, "was a defining feature of American organized labor from the first decades of the twentieth century" and has contributed mightily to the decline of US trade unionism. Jacobs, a sociologist and legal scholar, begins his well-documented, cogently argued book by reviewing the ugly history of the Costa Nostra's infiltration of important segments of American labor. Organized crime took particular aim at unions representing employees of smaller enterprises in dispersed localities. Truck drivers, hotel and restaurant employees, and construction workers were frequent victims. Patronage, intimidation, and sweetheart deals with employers who were eager to undercut militant alternatives allowed the mafia to establish toeholds that later proved nearly impossible to upend. More than any other area, infiltrated trade unions became the primary "cash cows" enriching Costa Nostra families through embezzlement, bribery, and inflated salaries for mob figures serving in union offices. Resistance, until recently, proved futile. The FBI—under J. Edgar Hoover, who denied the existence of the mafia—turned a blind eye to racketeering even as the agency aggressively prosecuted trade union radicals. Rank-and-file reformers gained little traction and often suffered bitter defeats. The AFL-CIO, except during a brief period in the 1950s under George Meany, fought federal oversight and eschewed internal reforms. The dark tide turned, however, by the 1980s. The second half of Jacobs' book treats in detail the rise of a more aggressive FBI and Department of Justice. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) passed in 1970 greatly expanded the federal government's arsenal against organized crime. In particular RICO contains powerful civil remedies allowing the government to impose far-reaching reforms on corrupt trade unions—including the imposition of trusteeships over corrupt unions. By the mid 1980s, the DOJ had filed a barrage of legal suits against unions, backing the onslaught with substantial resources. The results of the federal government's war, however, have been mixed. The best case scenario is the "liberation" of Teamsters Local 560, a union previously in the grips of the Provenzano crime syndicate. The government [End Page 102] managed to purge Provenzano family influence and impose a successful decade-long trusteeship. Elsewhere, RICO suits have enjoyed less success. Jacobs depicts efforts to purge Costa Nostra influence from a number of other unions, including the New York District Council of Carpenters and the Laborers' International Union of North America. In these cases, corrosive corruption proved almost impossible to eradicate. Union members (for reasons not adequately explored by Jacobs) frequently resist government regulation and defiantly reelect corrupt officers. Jacobs recommends even more aggressive action in the form of an SEC-like organization to monitor and regulate trade unions. Comparing the challenges of "liberating" corrupt labor unions to that of "liberating" Iraq, Jacobs hardly paints rosy prospects. But his insightful book should open the eyes of many of us who study American labor to one important reality shaping its past and its destiny. Edmund F. Wehrle Eastern Illinois University Copyright © 2007 the West Virginia University Press, for the United Association for Labor Studies