TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 949 economic analysis or an understanding of metal making. One would never suspect from his account, for example, that iron puddling was a backward industry whose contempt for science and quality control was at the root of hundreds of 19th-century accidents and deaths. As noted by Carl W. Condit and others, travel before the Civil War was made hazardous by the inadequacies of the puddlers’ art. Iron bridges collapsed with alarming frequency and railroad patrons were terrorized by “snakes,” the nickname for faulty iron track that would splinter under the weight of a train and rise up through the wooden carriages, impaling whatever was in its path. The Bessemer converter conquered iron puddling not because it “met all the criteria” for exploiting labor, but Because it was a superior technology that revolutionized railroads and paved the way for safer bridges, higher buildings, and inexpensive mass-produced goods. At the same time, the soaring demand for steel after 1880 caused festering problems that often were left unattended. Owners fell prey to many of the ills of overcompetition—business collusion, rutBless cost cutting, exploitation of immigrant labor, and a social vision all too frequently limited by the skyline of an Appalachian river valley. The reader, however, is not allowed to peek into the complex world of steel making because, it seems, Krause’s thesis does not allow it. So rather than give fair treatment, Krause pillories Carnegie, Frick, and other executives as cardboard tyrants and manipulators of honest working folk. Such polemics grate more than gratify and ultimately obscure the circumstances that exploded in gunfire along the Monongahela a century ago. Mark Reutter Mr. Reutter is the author of Sparrows Point: Making Steel (New York: Summit, 1988). He is at work on a book about the impact of diesel locomotives on railroads and railroaders. Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840—1950. By Walter Licht. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 317; tables, notes, index. $39.95. Elegant, detailed, and fresh, Getting Work explores how Philadel phians between 1840 and 1950 got their jobs. Its success lies in its imaginative use of sources and in its thoughtful approach to explor ing this quite original topic. It is a superb study, well written, carefully crafted, and hard to put down. Overall, Walter Licht found that thejob marketplace was not simply a matter of seekers and employers finding each other. Personal, institutional, and structural factors shaped experiences. Chapters address workers’ attitudes and expectations, the policies of compa nies, education, skill and training, presence and policies of unions, 950 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and the role of government. All contributed to the shape of individual and group job histories. Extremely important was the city’s particular industrial pattern of small, locally owned companies, skilled workers, batch production of high-quality products, seasonality and insecurity, and the overlap of industrial and residential districts. How much did technology matter? There is no simple pattern based on technology alone, but the nature of the production system, which placed a premium on skill, meant that technology and skill were nearly always important elements of the story. Licht has carefully uncovered an array of intricate patterns here, but he also looks at them in perspective. What is striking is that most workers secured and lost their jobs in similar ways, and for the most part they were on their own—they got jobs largely through personal pluck and initiative. There were some ethnic variations and others based on gender, but the most obvious exception to any generalization was race. Black men and women, despite more schooling relative to many other workers, were cut out of the city’s mainstream industrial life until after World War II —ironically (but perhaps not accidently) just when decline would set in. Licht dedicates the book to Gladys Palmer, the outstanding social investigator at Wharton who conducted a series of labor market studies in 1936 that gathered comprehensive data on 2,500 Philadel phia workers and their job histories. Although Licht uses a wide variety of sources, he makes especially creative use of these detailed interviews, and readers meet five workers from the study right away. After mapping the...