Stories of Work for the American Century

Abstract

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THE UNITED STATES WAS AT WAR WITH ITself over control of the workplace. This other civil war preceded and outlasted the four-year war over slavery and union. For thirty years before 1861, the workplace war had been mostly a discursive battle, but it took a bloody, decisive turn in 1862, when Union conscription followed class lines favoring moneyed bosses over cash-poor mineworkers in northeastern Pennsylvania. Lincoln reluctantly ordered troops into the state to put down anticipated revolt. This was the first federal intervention in the workplace war, which, at that moment, spilled into the nation's streets.' For the rest of the century, a boom-and-bust economy kept the conflict alive, and, at least once a decade, the battles spilled more blood in the streets. Until 1903, government took the side of private property over the interests of workers who sought bargaining rights, better hours, and living wages. By the end of the century, the fright and loathing created by this second civil war erupted in a paroxysm of utopian planning throughout American society that was led by newly educated professionals such as Frederick W. Taylor. He is the dominant figure in the narrative Martha Banta has constructed to explain how practical visionaries set out to find one best