Writing in 1926, the economist and labor relations expert, William M. Leiserson, noted that over the previous 25 years an important change had overtaken the study of labor and labor affairs in America. At the turn of the century, students had concentrated their attention on a massive and growing 'labor problem' which they saw arising from rapid industrialization and mass immigration. They had identified their task as the discovery of the roots of the problem and the popularization of holistic solutions?the Golden Rule, the Single Tax, socialism. This approach, Leiserson argued, was later found to be wrongheaded. 'It was an abstraction, based upon the assumption that employees, owners, em ployers, and investors could be classified into two more or less mechanical forces, Labor and Capital, between which friction and conflict developed.' Students adopting a properly scientific approach turned away from such simplistic classifications. 'Scientific study of labor questions today . . . is directed rather at understanding the nature of the relationship between employers, wage-earners, and the public, and finding the methods by which these labor relations may be organized, administered, and adjusted to the satisfaction of all concerned.'1 Leiserson was describing the origins of what has since become known as industrial pluralism?since the 1930s the dominant theory of industrial relations in the United States.2 As Leiserson's description shows, industrial pluralism was predicated on a denial of the proposition that the interests of employers and workers were necessarily incompatible. Pluralists recognized that conflicts of interest arose in the employment relationship, but they saw these as discrete, and hence susceptible to adjustment, rather than as inherent in the nature of employment itself. Assuming that all conflict could be managed, pluralists sought to create mechanisms whereby this could be achieved. The result would be in dustrial stability. Until quite recently, the course of labor history writing in America complemented these propositions. The result, as George W. Brooks noted in 1962, was a whiggish consensus which interpreted all events only in the light of their contribution to or delay of progress toward America's unique modern industrial relations system. 'Almost all the articulate members of the community now accept the same objectives in industrial relations, variously called maturity, industrial stability, responsibility, or statesmanship', Brooks observed. He described the system and the values of its proponents as follows: