American Factories Research Articles

Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy

Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy

THE ALLIANCE OF DOUBT WITH CERTAINTY

Hitler assaulted the USSR in June 1941. The Russian resistance in Stalingrad/Volgograd, Moscow, and Leningrad/Saint-Petersburg, together with the American factories of vehicles and ammunitions, won WW2. The West forgot the heroism of Russians when refusing to approve about thirty years ago a Marshall-like Plan to redistribute the assets of the communist state, thus firming the hand of the Oligarchs who bought major properties in Russia with few and cheap legal pieces of paper. America and Europe forgot then that the Soviets had half the deaths of WW2, with 40% Ukrainians. Today most people forget that Russia and Ukraine can help us avoid now WW3 and a possible avalanche of global warming, an action more vital than the war between two Slav nations coined in the Rus’ of Kiev 1000 years ago.

Entire system of wages and rewards to increase productivity in factory

One of the latest tests to see whether one day or an industrial organization is functioning successfully or less successfully is the product units of that system. This assessment is not directly about the physical equipment, technology, or products of Japanese factories or about capital expenditures, and the stage of the companies being studied. However, there is a close relationship between social organization and the special attention currently paid to the question of productivity, apparently considering some special consideration of the problems which increase the effort to increase productivity in the large Japanese factories. Productivity - of course - is a relative measure, and the standard commonly used by Japanese executives is the output and cost of American factory production. In general, Japanese executives do not flatter their company when it comes to making such comparisons. Estimates need to be rough, and it can be difficult to mislead them to try to get an exact value. However, in comparing their factories to American factories producing the same goods, very few Japanese executives would speculate on a measure of productivity.

From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940 by Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James Oberly

Reviewed by: From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940 by Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James Oberly Laura A. Detre Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James Oberly, From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro-Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2017. 354 pp. In recent years, immigration has again become a political flashpoint, with some Americans demanding a curtailment to both legal and illegal immigration and others lionizing immigrants as the backbone of our nation. Against that backdrop, Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, and James Oberly's book From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations is a timely examination of another period in our history when the migration of people in and out of the United States was of profound importance—the years at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, up to the First World War. Specifically, these three scholars examine the movement of people out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the experience of these migrants after arriving in the United States. Their work is an in-depth examination of many of the classic sources used by immigration scholars, such as census records and ship manifests, but what sets it apart from previous work in this field is the way they approach that material. Their interpretations make this book an innovation as well as enjoyable reading. What sets this work apart from others on the history of migration is the authors' focus on the transatlantic nature of life for many migrants. These were not the immigrants of American mythology, seeking out the one and only country where their miserable lives could be transformed. The migrants depicted here are laborers, tempted by high wages in American factories, who [End Page 111] always intended to return to Europe and, in many cases, did exactly that. As these migrants did not see themselves as new Americans, they resisted assimilation and it was only after many years (and in some cases several generations) that they became integrated into wider American society. This is a fundamental change in the way that historians approach immigration history, moving away from the idea that migrants were transplanted people looking for new homes and toward a view of them as genuinely transnational people who lived their lives deeply connected to multiple cultures and, therefore, many identities. Focusing on return migration requires a deep understanding, not just of North America and the contexts that immigrants found themselves in upon their arrival in a new home but also the societies that emigrants were leaving and, in many cases, returning to after extended absences. This expertise is not common among historians, in part because we tend to limit our study along national lines, but the transnational focus that Steidl, Fischer-Nebmaier, and Oberly have adopted is the strength of their project. Of course, their transnational view of migration is enhanced (or perhaps required) because the people they were studying originated in a multiethnic empire. This study does not simply focus on German-speaking Austro-Hungarians or even the people of Cisleithania. The authors of this work recognize, as so few historians have before now, that despite the multiplicity of languages, religions, and cultural traditions, the people of Austria-Hungary shared a political history, an aspect that earlier research has neglected. They assert, with strong evidence to back their claim, that emigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not see themselves exclusively as Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and so on but also as interconnected subjects of the Habsburg monarchy. The authors go even further, suggesting that the ethnic identities ascribed to the people of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, either in their place of birth or later as emigrants, are not necessarily categories that would have had meaning for these migrants. Or, at least, these categories were malleable and held different meanings depending on the context. Did ethnic identification become more central in the lives of immigrants to the United States as a means of coping with old-stock Americans? Also, studies that focus narrowly on ethnicity often overlook the role of social class in an immigrant's construction of...

Minimal Solutions

This article discusses aspects of different manufacturing developments where manufacturers are working with researchers to develop ways to make products using less material and energy. Manufacturers looking to make American factories more competitive with foreign-based facilities are finding opportunities through re-engineering long-held wasteful practices. As a part of a multi-pronged approach, Pradeep Rohatgi, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is leading an effort at reducing embodied-energy and decreasing emissions (REMADE) to examine manufacturing processes. REMADE aims to develop technology enablers to accomplish such goals as reducing primary feedstock consumption in manufacturing by 30 percent, reducing energy demand of secondary material processing by 30 percent, and achieving a 25 percent improvement in embodied energy efficiency of materials such as metals, polymers, fibers, and electronic waste. According to an expert, with embedded energy as the measuring stick, it is also possible to find manufacturing processes that produce very low life-cycle energy costs using carbon fiber composites or high-strength steels.

The Decline of Manufacturing in the U.S. Economy: Impacts of China's Trade Shockk, Trump's Protectionist Tariffs, and the Drivers of Manufacturing Job Losses (Presentation Slides)

The long-term declining role of manufacturing in the U.S. economy – reflecting a shift of the economy after World War II to a post-industrial orientation with an increased emphasis on services – was accelerated by the effects on manufacturing jobs and trade deficits of President Reagan’s budget deficits in the 1980s and China’s recent trade penetration. Similarities of Reagan’s policies to President Trump’s proposed protectionist tariffs and the cross-border corporate tax reform advocated by House Republicans in February 2017 suggest a possible partial reversal of the long-term job decline, but the ensuing major dislocations in jobs are unlikely to lead to a net increase in manufacturing jobs. The magnitude and fast pace of China’s import penetration, coupled with anemic demand for domestic goods and high productivity gains in American factories, are associated with the 33 percent decline of 5.7 million domestic manufacturing jobs in the 2000-10 period – the largest loss in a decade in U.S. history. The effects on manufacturing employment associated with trade, domestic demand, and productivity strongly suggest that the largest impact – accounting for over 85 percent of total manufacturing jobs lost in the 2000s – is attributable to technological advances in U.S. factories sustaining productivity gains, with trade a relatively minor contributory factor, when viewed from the long-term perspective. The superior productivity gains, as well as the vaunted growth in real value-added output, associated with manufacturing are driven by the performance of its computer and electronic products industry, representing only 13 percent of total manufacturing value added. China’s trade competition challenged the prevalent assumption, based on bilateral trade pacts after World War II, suggesting that economies recover from ‘trade shocks’ by displaced workers shifting into higher-productivity export industries. Free trade agreements and China’s trade penetration – with the benefits not evenly distributed in the U.S. – are associated with the geographically-concentrated and unexpected political results of the November 2016 elections.

A transnacionalização de objetos escolares no fim do século XIX

RESUMO Este artigo propõe reflexão sobre a transnacionalização2 de objetos escolares no fim do século XIX, dando especial atenção às carteiras. Nesse período de estruturação da escola moderna, pública e obrigatória em muitos países do Ocidente, observa-se uma circulação internacional de discursos e saberes sobre o corpo infantil, o corpo do cidadão escolarizado, no âmbito da higiene pública e escolar. Ao lado das questões pedagógicas, médicas e higiênicas, a industrialização, as inovações tecnológicas e a globalização propiciam a fabricação e a difusão de um novo objeto que se tornaria cada vez mais imprescindível ao funcionamento das instituições de ensino, a carteira escolar. A partir da análise dos catálogos das indústrias de mobiliário escolar, discorro sobre os modelos de carteira mais hegemônicos, expostos nas exposições universais do século XIX. Destaco as empresas norte-americanas e francesas que disputavam a liderança do mercado de mobiliário escolar, num contexto em que a escola emerge como um importante mercado consumidor. Por meio do relatório do jury da Exposição Pedagógica de 1883, no Rio de Janeiro, é possível perquirir as características técnicas e higiênicas que, no Brasil, estavam sendo apreciadas na fabricação das carteiras. Como resultado, evidencia-se a via de mão dupla da relação entre escola, indústria e Exposições Universais. De um lado, a escola movimenta o mercado. De outro lado, o Estado depende do mercado para produção, em grande quantidade e em curto tempo, de um mobiliário padronizado que corrobore a expansão do ensino.

THE SUSTAINABLE MICRO-SCALE MOVEMENT OF COMMUNITIES: CASE STUDIES OF SUBDIVIDED DEVELOPMENT AND ADAPTIVE REUSE OF SHARED SPACE IN NEW YORK CITY

1. INTRODUCTION In New York City a decline in manufacturing has propelled social and economic changes that have transformed certain districts [1,2]. Unused building stock there has been the basis for adaptive reuse yielding new housing for families of varying compositions. The constant pressure of the need for affordable housing has resulted in the conversion of existing abandoned industrial structures, providing a green, environmentally friendly alternative to new construction [3,4,5]. Adaptive reuse provides an opportunity to bring a building up to current codes, to make the layout and building systems more appropriate and efficient, and to help revitalize neighborhoods. The nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth centuries were characterized by urban environments which provided manufacturing jobs and the municipal services and education that supported them [6]. American cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh became boom-towns as people followed employment opportunities and moved to these locations throughout this period [7,8,9]. In the decades after World War II, the creation of highways and freeways–including the interstate highway system that stretched east to west and north to south–led to suburbanization, exemplified by Long Island's mushrooming Levit-town and many more like it [5,10]. These were the Baby Boom years. The suburban sprawl ultimately resulted in the creation of mega cities like New York City. Families typically consisted of a father, mother, and at least two children [16]. This trend was supported by strong manufacturing industries and plentiful space that allowed much of the population to fulfill the American dream of home ownership [2,11]. As labor cost increased due to stricter labor laws, unions, increasing land cost, and higher taxes, many manufacturers began a search for less costly environments, moving first to locations in the less expensive suburbs and then to the South [4,8]. Eventually, American factories moved overseas to places such as China, other Asian countries, and South America. This became known as out sourcing manufacturing [6,7,12]. With the subsequent boom town collapse that began in the 1980s and continued through the new millennium, old U.S. industrial cities faced declining populations, and Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and their like were soon deserted by those who could no longer find employment there [14,40]. City populations decreased by as much as 50% and in some places even more steeply [13]. According to the U.S. Census (figure 1) [13,14], among American cities only New York City's and Los Angeles's populations have grown since the 1980s. Migration for employment opportunities became common and members per household, and households of one or two became not uncommon [15,16]. Typical housing no longer required a big space for shelter and a lawn or garden, and many people looked for smaller units [11,16]. Smaller working spaces made micro-scale businesses possible. New York City is an example of this change. Left with abandoned super block manufacturing buildings such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Brooklyn Army Terminal and retired infrastructure, New York City has looked for ways to repurpose these structures [10,17]. Super block, old manufacturing buildings and factories still stand, but in New York and elsewhere some have become mixed-use spaces. The goal of this paper is to examine how New York City served the public by providing working and living space through the conversion of existing super block buildings and creating new public spaces out of under-used or abandoned infrastructure. Comparative case studies are conducted focusing on the micro-scale movement and renewed use of old infrastructure. It considers a future model for sub-divided building spaces and repurposed structures providing shared, public venues as it analyzes this movement structurally and the changes it has wrought on local communities.

Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border - by Tuttle, Carolyn

Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border - by Tuttle, Carolyn

Review: Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border, by Carolyn Tuttle

Review: <i>Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border</i>, by Carolyn Tuttle

Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border

Mexican Women in American Factories: Free Trade and Exploitation on the Border

Mexican women in American factories: free trade and exploitation on the border

List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. American Factories in Mexico Chapter 2. The Border City of Nogales Chapter 3. House to House: The Method of Analysis Chapter 4. The History of the Maquila Industry Chapter 5. Are the Maquilas Sweatshops? Chapter 6. Liberation or Exploitation of Women Workers? Chapter 7. Fancy Factories and Dilapidated Dwellings Appendix 1. Maquilas in Nogales in 2004 Appendix 2. Survey of Maquila Workers Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Fictional Murder and Other Descriptive Deaths: V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas and the Problem of Postcolonial Description

Fictional Murder and Other Descriptive Deaths: V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas and the Problem of Postcolonial Description Toral Jatin Gajarawala (bio) “The sea smelled of swamp; it barely rippled, had glitter rather than colour; and the heat seemed trapped below the pink haze of bauxite dust…” —V.S. Naipaul, Guerrillas “Nothing that happened here could be important. The place was no more than what it looked” (45). In V.S. Naipaul’s 1975 novel Guerrillas, the bauxite dust of American factories hangs in a haze over the pages, stagnant, heated, prescient. In an atmosphere of anticipation, where real guerillas never materialize, and political revolution is a fictional abstraction, it is descriptions of landscape that hold a charged textual potential: the trapped heat, the smeared slogans, the chain of hills all seem to indicate a violent end. As Naipaul himself points out on the blurb to the 2002 Picador edition, “The violence actually is in the tone. It wasn’t angry. It was just violent.” That violence snakes its way through narrative depictions of a Caribbean landscape, the shantytowns and the sea, until it erupts in the brutal rape and murder of a white woman on the compound of Jimmy Ahmed, the half black, half Chinese, British rabble rouser, the [End Page 289] criminal deported for sexual misdeeds, the new “guerrilla.” The two are mediated by Roche, the former apartheid activist turned liberal corporate do-gooder, and Bryant, Jimmy’s tormented child-slave, member of the commune. Why return to a forgotten novel, even one that is singular in its misogyny as well as its critique of a “misguided socialism”? Guerrillas is, while also conjuring, a suggestive place to begin a discussion of literary description and the question of a “postcolonial narratology.” Based loosely on the political life of Michael X, the British black power leader who organized an agricultural commune in Trinidad and was hanged in 1973 for the murder of Gayle Ann Benson, the novel is claustrophobically organized despite the constant figuration of the outdoors, the hillsides and beaches, the Ridge and the town, the narrow furrow of earth in which Jane’s body is interred.1 In fact, the majority of the text seems to be comprised of non-narrative landscape scenes that punctuate dialogues and the slow unfolding of tragedy. Until that final terrible and, presumably, literarily unprecedented moment, however, it is description that does the work of violence as well as disdain, both of which emerge from the glittering swamp and presage the murder to come. Scene after scene fixes the narrative eye on bauxite dust, the stink of the sea, or the heat of the bush: “The sea, when they came to it, gave no feeling of air and lightness: the fine red powder of bauxite, sheds of corroded corrugated iron, the reek of the burning rubbish dump: everything here, hillside, forest, sea, mangrove, turned to slum” (22). Repetition is, in fact, a constitutive feature of the novel, repetition of the landscape scene and of the language of its construction. The sea is seen many, many times, the bush “smokes” again and again, slogans are “daubed” more than once. Is this a pedagogy? A preparation? An anti-orientalism? What is the work of description in this novel of failed revolt? This article will consider the historical genealogy of literary description and its role in the contemporary postcolonial novel. But it will also probe the relation between literary description and literary murder in the context of a nameless neocolonial state, a liberal intelligentsia, a failed revolution, and the perverse logics of domination constructed by race and gender. Mieke Bal writes, “Like eyes, words can kill. The yellow patch does not exist, but it does kill a character. Killing a character: what better place than fiction—where no [End Page 290] live subjects are endangered—to explore the dangers that cultural habits such as language, voyeurism, and ethnographic othering allow us to incur?” (594) It isn’t entirely clear if Proust’s Bergotte, the ambitious artist, actually dies from the stunning yellow patch of Vermeer’s painting figured in the fifth volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, but it is true that literary deaths have...

Review: Jean Monnet and Canada Early Travels and the Idea of European Unity

JEAN MONNET AND CANADA Early Travels and the Idea of European Unity Trygve U gland Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 109 pp, $29.95 (doth) ISBN 978-1-4426-4310-9Jean Monnet (1888-1979) was not one to let a good crisis go to waste. No surprise, then, that the European Union's seemingly endless agony over the euro should have led many to ask what counsel this tireless and creative founding father of European would offer today's leaders. A believer in the power, durability, and accumulated wisdom of institutions, Monnet might well press them to seize the moment, follow the logic of integration, and take another bold step in the direction of supranational economic governance. But he would then immediately confront the living legacy ofthat rival Frenchman, Charles de Gaulle, whose insistence on the primacy of national governments is reflected in the Merkozy partnership that has shaped Europe's response to its financial crisis.The persistent vitality of Monnet' s ideas is reason enough to continue exploring their origins. That is one attraction of Trygve U gland' s brief but lively account of Monnet' s early years - a narrative that traces the roots of his innovative, pragmatic theory of European back through his in international business, the League of Nations, and the promotion of inter-allied cooperation in both world wars. A second attraction, particularly for readers, is Ugland's thesis that Monnet's travels in Canada prior to World War I much of his thinking about designing institutions and getting things done in international relations.A Norwegian-born political scientist at Bishop's University, Ugland covers a great deal of ground in this book. His earlier work on the state control of alcohol, combined with a passion for Europe, drew him naturally to Monnet, whose family produced a prominent brand of cognac. Not yet 20, Monnet was first dispatched to Winnipeg in 1907 to develop a market for it. Until 1914 he returned repeatedly, visiting most of the country and establishing privileged, profitable ties with the Hudson's Bay Company as the distributor of Monnet cognac. Ugland argues that Monnet's Canadian school of experience (49) was the source of the personal theoretical code that inspired and spurred him to promote European integration (9-11).Monnet's impressions from these early visits to Canada were undoubtedly seminal. His exposure to the west in him visions of progress, expansion, organization and - not least - a working federal system. Two subsequent engagements with Canada reinforced his ideas about practical international cooperation. First, during World War I he arranged for the Hudson's Bay Company to become the French government's purchasing agent for food, raw materials, and manufactured goods - a supply system then extended to several other allies. Monnet's next transatlantic venture was a scheme hatched in 1938 to evade America's neutrality act by assembling military aircraft in Canada from components shipped across the border from American factories. Their destiny was the French air force, desperate to counter the growing threat of the Luftwaffe. In all of these commercial and diplomatic enterprises, Canada was for Monnet an indispensable link. …

Keep from all thoughtful men: how U.S. economists won World War II

* How economics influenced the planning and strategy of World War II Keep from All Thoughtful Men overturns much accepted historical dogma on how World War II strategy was planned and implemented. It is taken for granted that the Axis powers were defeated by an avalanche of munitions that poured forth from pitiless American factories, so it is amazing that the story of how thismiracle of production was organised and integrated into Allied strategy and operations remains untold. Keep from All Thoughtful Men is the first book that tells how revolutions in both statistics and finance changed forever the nature of war. While the book relates the overall story of how economics dictated war planning at the highest levels, more specifically it tells how three obscure economists came to have more influence on the conduct of World War II than the Joint Chiefs. Because military historians rarely understand economics and economic historians just as rarely involve themselves with the details of war, there has never been a military history that shows how economics influenced the planning of strategy and the conduct of any war. This is sadly true of even World War II, which has been called by Paul Samuelson,The Economist's War. About the Author Jim Lacey is a defence analyst and writer based in the Washington DC area. He is the author of several books on military history, terrorism, and current affairs.

Improving Construction Management of an Educational Center by Applying Earned Value Technique

Earned value project management is a well-known management system that integrates cost, schedule and technical performance. It allows the calculation of cost and schedule variances and performance indices and forecasts the project cost and schedule duration. The Earned Value concept was conceived by industrial engineers working in American factories over a century ago. This concept improved by the time and in July 1998, the Earned Value Management System became the American National Standards Institute (ANSI/EIA) Standard #748. By concise reports derived from using Earned Value Method (EVM) in the project, the manager is able to have exact information about the project details and also can mitigate the risks in his decisions in critical conditions of the project. It would be an early warning tool for a project control. Consequently, the project could be finished after a short period of time. This paper aims to explore the concepts of earned value method, its methods and metrics, performance measurements and forecasting project progress. In order to compare between EVPM method and traditional methods, the effectiveness of applying EVPM in a real project, construction of an educational center in one of the petrochemical refineries as a case study is explained. Reports derived from using earned value method in the project indicated that the manager was able to have exact information about the project details and also mitigated the risks in his decisions in critical conditions of the project. Consequently, the project was finished after a short period of time.

Strength in Numbers

This article highlights that today, however, American factories are in decline; their products cannot compete internationally, and they are being overtaken by global competitors. US manufacturers not only face very real challenges, but they also have their share of success when compared with many of their counterparts in other countries around the globe. Economists spend a lot of time arguing about the trends behind the data. Yet the debate takes place against a changing background. The US economy has grown more international and more globally integrated than anyone could have imagined 30 years ago. Federal Reserve economists use marketplace feedback to place a value on such added capability, and that is the number that shows up in the IP Index for computer and electronic products. Subtract computers from the index for the manufacturing sector, and the numbers look very different. Hence, manufacturing output should include computers and electronics, but subtracting them from the total provides a very different picture of the rest of the manufacturing economy.

Surrogate Supervisors: Railway Spotters and the Origins of Workplace Surveillance

Labor spies, the furtive agents working undercover and reporting on workers in American factories and mines, have long fascinated labor historians. This essay finds their forerunners in nineteenth-century railway spotters, undercover agents posing as passengers who rode American trains and streetcars surreptitiously observing conductors. Railway spotting started out not to thwart worker militancy but to curb conductors' fare thefts, which were prolific. In the 1850s, aspiring detective Allan Pinkerton devised and marketed spotting to railroads and streetcar corporations eager to maximize fare collection in a nascent service-sector industry. Their robust craft solidarity enabled conductors to build strong unions, but fare theft was a solitary, secretive act not sanctioned in conductors' workplace moral economy. Thus conductors individually contended with spotters on their cars but proved unable to devise a collective strategy to combat them. Meanwhile Pinkerton sent a railway spotter to infiltrate the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 1870s, and railway spotting spawned labor spying. Spotting led conductors to mistrust their passengers, but labor spies, in the guise of workers, bred suspicion and undermined solidarity among workers. Labor espionage quickly spread across American industry, while fare collection technologies gradually replaced spotters. Historians have treated labor espionage as a straightforward example of employers' drive for workplace control, but the spotter phenomenon shows how a repressive management technique grew out of a more nuanced negotiation between workers and employers of a complex workplace problem.

Market Visions: Expenditure Surveys, Market Research, and Economic Planning in the New Deal

Materialistic desire may be the engine of capitalism, but those seeking to redress eco nomic inequities in America have also found it valuable for building and strengthening unions, regulating production and retail practices, attacking monopolies and business collusion, and championing redistributive economic policies.1 Consumption is the uni versal virtue for capitalism; what better weapon to trim that system's excesses? But, prote an like capitalism itself, the tactics used to muster the reformist potential of consumption have also evolved. Thus prior to World War I, consumption-based calls for higher wages relied heavily on a mixture of ethical and loosely physiological claims as labor activists implicitly or explicitly defined an appropriate (and continually advancing) standard of and demanded wages sufficient to reach that level. As the 1920s pro gressed, union leaders and their liberal allies emphasized a different justification: rising industrial productivity would require increasing working-class purchasing power to provide an expanded market for the abundance of goods now rolling out of American factories. This shift in justifications benefited labor activists in multiple ways: It coun tered conservative arguments that a minimum living wage was economically unsound; it moved the debate from a moral grounding (which had often proved ineffective) to one of pragmatic business self-interest; and it helped labor representatives build alliances with moderate or liberal mass-producers and retailers who recognized a similar logic, such as the auto manufacturer Henry Ford, General Electric's chairman Owen D. Young, and the department store magnate Edward Filene.2 It also bound proponents more tightly to

Citizen: Jane Addams and the struggle for democracy

Jane Addams was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.Now Citizen, Louise W. Knight's masterful biography, revealsAddams's early development as a political activist and social philosopher.In this bookwe observea powerful mindgrappling withthe radical ideas of her age, most notably the ever-changing meanings of democracy. Citizen covers the first half of Addams's life, from 1860 to 1899. Knight recounts how Addams, a child of a wealthy family inrural northern Illinois, longed for a life of larger purpose. She broadened her horizons through education, reading, and travel, and, after receiving an inheritance upon her father's death, moved to in 1889 to co-found Hull House, the city's first settlement house. Citizen shows vividly what the settlement house actually was a neighborhood center for education and social gatherings and describes how Addams learned of the abject working conditions in American factories, the unchecked power wielded by employers, the impact of corrupt local politics on city services, and the intolerable limits placed on women by their lack of voting rights. These experiences, Knight makes clear, transformed Addams. Always a believer in democracy as an abstraction, Addams came to understand that this national ideal was also a life philosophy and a mandate for civic activism by all. As her story unfolds, Knight astutely captures the enigmatic Addams's compassionate personality as well as her flawed human side. Written in a strong narrative voice, Citizen is an insightful portrait of the formative years of a great American leader. Knight s decision to focus on Addams s early years is a stroke of genius. We know a great deal about Jane Addams the public figure. We know relatively little about how she made the transition from the 19th century to the 20th. In Knight s book, Jane Addams comes to life. . . . Citizen is written neither to make money nor to gain academic tenure; it is a gift, meant to enlighten and improve. Jane Addams would have understood. Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review My only complaint about the book is that there wasn t more of it. . . . Knight honors Addams as an American original. Kathleen Dalton, Chicago Tribune