“Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 by Stephen Meyer

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 623 quences that run throughout the history of cotton technology. For these enormously important stories we have to look elsewhere in the literature ofAfrican-American, agricultural, economic, and southern history. Peter H. Cousins Mr. Cousins is curator of agriculture and industry at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900-1950. By Stephen Meyer. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univer­ sity Press, 1992. pp. xi+265; notes, index. $45.00. Stephen Meyer’s fine book should be of special interest to readers of Technology and Culture interested in a closer engagement between the fields of labor history and history of technology. His study of the huge Allis-Chalmers complex in West Allis, Wisconsin (a Milwaukee suburb), closely links technology and production methods with the composition of the workforce, and resultant patterns of union formation and workplace conflict. Traditional themes for 20th-century labor history, especially radicalism and federal regulation of labor relations, are closely tied to the intricate influence of the firm’s production process. Allis-Chalmers’s use of both batch- and mass-production meth­ ods provides the foundation for Meyer’s study. Until World War I, the company primarily made huge metal castings refined to order by massive machine tools. Allis-Chalmers’s specialized products and complex machinery entailed employment of a highly skilled work­ force, generally native born. To create a more stable business, AllisChalmers aggressively expanded into farm equipment in the 1920s and successfully used modern mass-production techniques to rise into the upper tier of that market. Workers in the mass-production division differed significantly from those engaged in batch production. They generally were recent immigrants and performed far simpler tasks than the machinists, molders, and foundry workers who made and refined the castings. Meyer carefully tracks how the firm’s “dual industrial structure” (p. 20) profoundly shaped the process of unionization. He effectively shows how “a social matrix of skill and ethnicity divided craft and industrial unionists in the West Allis shops” (p. 63). Production workers fell under the sway of industrial union advocates (led by a small core of Communists) who formed United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 248. Skilled workers formed a stable “social basis for opposition” to leftist militants and leaned toward more conservative forms of unionism. Meyer successfully draws this thread through the sometimes bewildering institutional conflicts between the production-worker based UAW and successive American Federation of Labor craft organizations and inde­ pendent unions that took root among skilled workers. 624 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The deep sociocultural divisions within the workforce were an asset to a management that, as Meyer shows, never conceded union recognition and fought UAW Local 248 at every step, using the tensions between batch and production workers as a lever against the UAW. Consequently, union security emerged as a persistent source of labor-management conflict and the main issue in several sharply fought strikes. Local 248 wanted a closed shop—mandatory union membership—to mitigate against the centripetal forces generated by internal differentiation among Allis-Chalmers employees. Management was equally opposed to union security, as it feared industrial unionists would be able to translate a firm base in the plant into an effective challenge to managerial authority. As long as Local 248 remained insecure, management could always count on conservative attitudes among its valuable skilled employees to blunt union militancy. During World War II, when the government forced AllisChalmers to implement limited forms of union security, Meyer sensitively shows how the union’s “dense shop steward and committee men system” (p. 105) did indeed undermine managerial authority. Meyer argues that it was management’s determination to uproot union power that lay behind the vociferous attacks on the allegedly Communist leaders of Local 248 immediately after World War II. He relentlessly describes the tawdry story of the virulent newspaper articles and hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee carefully orchestrated by Allis-Chalmers officials, aided and abetted by UAW President Walter Reuther and conservative forces within the Wisconsin Congress of Industrial Organizations. These external pressures under­ mined a long strike—fought over union security—that began in 1946 and...