The Quest for "Just and Pure Law": Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870-1924

Abstract

This engaging book challenges interpretations about working-class politics in the late nineteenth century that emphasize organized labor's defeats or conservative politics and that assign working-class activism in the West to an ephemeral syndicalist spirit that was broken by employer power. It argues instead that workers in Colorado, Utah, and Montana developed a wide-ranging, sophisticated political agenda that influenced both major parties’ relationship to the “labor question.” John P. Enyeart argues that workers in these states sought a nonrevolutionary path to social democracy, using pragmatic community- and state-based strategies. He presents a great deal of evidence to show that this agenda was endorsed and developed by the politics and values of the rank and file as well as leadership and that these were closer to their European counterparts than is usually acknowledged. Workers remained pragmatic but visionary in their quest for political power to create “just and pure” laws that would effectively counter capitalist labor market imperatives and imprint workers’ desires onto the polity—struggles to win shorter hours, unemployment benefits, public works, and worker cooperatives are seen in this account as hard-won victories in a class struggle. His work revises notions of the meaning of “municipal socialism” and connects it to a developing challenge to capitalist labor markets and a challenge to the American Federation of Labor (AFL).