Reform Coalitions Research Articles

Volatile Alliances: Middle-Class Reformers and Working-Class Activists in Nineteenth-Century Boston

Volatile Alliances: Middle-Class Reformers and Working-Class Activists in Nineteenth-Century Boston Brian Greenberg (bio) David A. Zonderman. Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2011. xii + 312 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $28.95. In November 1865, the ardent abolitionist and acclaimed orator Wendell Phillips told a group of Boston workers meeting in Faneuil Hall in support of the eight-hour workday that, throughout all his years of antislavery activity, he had opposed the idea that the “laborer must necessarily be owned by the capitalists or individuals.” As that struggle for the ownership of labor appeared to be ending “we fitly commence a struggle,” Phillips declared, “to define and arrange the true relations of capital and labor.”1 The demand for an eight-hour workday was a key goal of the newly invigorated labor movement after the Civil War. In Massachusetts, the eight-hour movement was chiefly identified with Ira Steward, a prominent official of the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ International Union. In the summer of 1869, Steward and other labor activists, along with middle-class reformers, founded Boston’s Eight Hour League. By then, Steward and Phillips were well acquainted, and, like Steward, Phillips underscored the benefits to the community if workers had greater leisure. Echoing a precept basic to Steward’s reform creed, Phillips identified eight hours as “the first measure to be urged and the first rule to be established.”2 Steward and Phillips had a public falling out in 1872. In May of that year, the Eight Hour League, under Steward’s direction, censured Phillips, charging that the patrician reformer’s expansive rhetoric and agenda were “distracting public and political attention” and, as a result, were undermining the factory operatives’ current campaign for ten-hour legislation (p. 142). Phillips, in anticipation of the league’s censure, had already persuaded the Massachusetts Labor Union to pass a resolution that appeared to deliberately snub George McNeill, Steward’s closest ally and president of the Boston Eight Hour League. Shortly after Steward and Phillips’ personal and political breakup, the vigorous coalition of worker-activists and middle-class labor reformers in Massachusetts became hopelessly fragmented, a point that David Zonderman [End Page 271] makes in Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston, his illuminating study of Boston’s labor reform movement from its origins in the 1830s to the dawn of the twentieth century. Uneasy Allies traces the often-tenuous cross-class alliances that Boston’s middle-class reformers forged with working-class activists during the nineteenth century. In his well-researched and highly informative study, Zonderman chronicles the activities of the numerous labor reform organizations that campaigned for better working conditions and the dignity of labor in Boston during this period. Unlike David Montgomery, who’s magisterial Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) explained the underlying ideological and political meaning of labor reform, Uneasy Allies follows the tactical debates and evolving structures and strategies that dominated Boston’s labor reform movement. Zonderman’s account is one of uneven progress and internal tensions through the century’s middle decades and of decline by century’s end. Boston in the 1830s was a thriving port city of more than sixty thousand inhabitants. The broad-based labor reform coalitions that began to form in these years championed both immediate and more utopian goals. Early labor reformers agreed that securing a shorter workday was a necessary first step to achieving more extensive social change. The key questions that animated the first cross-class alliances continued to energize the cross-class labor reform movement in Boston throughout the nineteenth century: whether to focus on immediate improvements in working conditions, especially the shorter workday, or on long-term changes in the social structure; whether to function primarily as educational or as activist organizations, and, if the latter, whether to agitate for an improved workplace or to engage in electoral politics; and whether to concentrate their efforts on local, state, or regional labor reform. Boston’s first cross-class labor reform organizations emerged as alternatives to the city’s struggling trade unions and workingmen’s parties. Founded on February 16...

Going Where the Money Is: Strategies for Taxing Economic Elites in Unequal Democracies

Summary How can policymakers circumvent obstacles to taxing economic elites? This question is critical for developing countries, especially in Latin America where strengthening tax capacity depends significantly on tapping under-taxed, highly-concentrated income and profits. Drawing on diverse literatures and extensive fieldwork, the paper identifies six strategies that facilitate enactment of modest tax increases by mobilizing popular support and/or tempering elite antagonism. Case studies from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia illustrate the effect of these strategies on the fate of tax reform initiatives. The analysis builds theory on tax politics and yields implications for research on reform coalitions and gradual institutional change.

Pathologies of Europeanisation: Fighting Corruption in the Southern Caucasus

In order to stabilise the post-Soviet region, the European Union seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States. In light of high adaptation costs, the lack of a membership perspective, and low levels of democracy, the prospects of Europeanisation appear to be limited. The Southern Caucasus belongs to the most corrupt countries in the world. While being least likely cases, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have responded to the EU's demands for good governance introducing formal institutional changes. Moreover, despite their differences in statehood, democracy, and power (a)symmetries with the EU, domestic institutional changes look very similar. This double puzzle is explained by differential empowerment. Instead of liberal reform coalitions, which are largely absent in the Southern Caucasus, the incumbent regimes have instrumentalised the EU, selectively implementing anti-corruption policies to gain and consolidate political power. As a result, the EU stabilises rather than transforms its neighbourhood.

Political Opposition and Reform Coalitions in Jordan

Jordanian politics has seen decades of pro-reform and pro-democracy political activism, but with little effective change on the Jordanian political system itself. This analysis explains how and why the regime has resisted more than cosmetic reform and democratic change. It also examines in detail old and new avenues of opposition reformist activism in the kingdom, from leftist political parties and the Islamist movement to new forms of pro-democracy activism in the form of grassroots coalitions, youth movements and social media activism. As both government and opposition in Jordan are affected by the 2011 Arab uprisings, this analysis examines the past and present possibilities for democratic political opposition and for an effective and unified coalition for reform in Jordan.

Mapping Opposition Cooperation in the Arab World: From Single-Issue Coalitions to Transnational Networks

This is an introductory contribution to a special issue on the dynamics of opposition cooperation in the Arab world, a phenomenon that, although commonplace, has received limited attention in the comparative literature on the region. Mapping its varied empirical manifestations, this contribution presents a twofold typology of joint opposition action, based on the objectives (single vs. multiple issues) and actors (domestic/foreign) involved. Thus circumscribed, it identifies and discusses the trademarks of the following four types of opposition cooperation: (1) the ad hoc/single-issue coalition; (2) the reform coalition; (3) the pre-electoral alliance and post-election parliamentary block; and (4) transnational networks of collaboration.

Meeting the deadline: on the complexity of fault-tolerant continuous gossip

In this paper we introduce the problem of Continuous Gossip in which rumors are continually and dynamically injected throughout the network. Each rumor has a deadline, and the goal of a continuous gossip protocol is to ensure good “Quality of Delivery,” i.e., to deliver every rumor to every process before the deadline expires. Thus, a trivial solution to the problem of Continuous Gossip is simply for every process to broadcast every rumor as soon as it is injected. Unfortunately, this solution has high per-round message complexity. Complicating matters, we focus our attention on a highly dynamic network in which processes may continually crash and recover. In order to achieve good per-round message complexity in a dynamic network, processes need to continually form and re-form coalitions that cooperate to spread their rumors throughout the network. The key challenge for a Continuous Gossip protocol is the ongoing adaptation to the ever-changing set of active rumors and non-crashed process. In this work we show how to address this challenge; we develop randomized and deterministic protocols for Continuous Gossip and prove lower bounds on the per-round message-complexity, indicating that our protocols are close to optimal.

Contracts, Choice, and Customer Service: Marketization and Public Engagement in Education

Background/ContextMarket models of school reform are having a major impact on school districts across the country. While scholars have examined many aspects of this process, we know far less about the general effects of marketization on public participation in education and local education politics.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThis article uses an examination of marketization in Philadelphia over a six-year period (2001-7) to explore its implications for public engagement—or the ability of individuals and groups to work with and influence the school district and hold officials accountable.SettingThe research was conducted in Philadelphia, the sixth largest city in the country. In 2001, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania took over the School District of Philadelphia, citing on-going fiscal crises and poor student achievement. The resulting reforms included new leadership, new governance structures, and significant privatization.Research DesignThis is a qualitative case study of school district change in Philadelphia, focusing on the implications for public engagement.Data Collection and AnalysisData included over 50 interviews with education administrators, civic and political elites, and representatives of grassroots and community groups. Data also included six years of participant observation at public meetings and in reform coalitions. Analysis followed a grounded theory approach designed to identify district policies and practices related to public participation and to document how these practices shaped the ability of individuals and groups to engage productively with the district.Findings/ResultsWe find that the marketization of education in Philadelphia had a major impact on the district's institutional structure and practices for interacting with local stakeholders. Our data point to several changes that were particularly consequential in shaping the opportunities for engagement and the direction such engagement took. These are: a corporate governance structure, an emphasis on communication, widespread contracting out for services, an increase in school choice, and a focus on customer service.Conclusions/RecommendationsThese changes have resulted in channeling of public participation along individual lines at the expense of collective forms of action and, more broadly, undercutting of the understanding of education as a public good. Given the continued influence of market models of education reform at the local and national levels, it will be important for policymakers to pay close attention to the ways by which marketization can limit engagement and to develop strategies, such as increased transparency and new vehicles for public input, to address this tendency.

Preface

Preface

Legal origin, ideology, coalition formation, or crisis? The emergence of labor law in a civil law country, Spain 1880–1936

What drives institutional change? This paper analyses the roles of legal tradition, ideology, changes in relative prices, interest groups, and coalition formation by looking in detail at the passing of labor law in Spain from 1880 to 1936. In spite of being a civil law country, I show how political elites were reluctant to intervene in the labor market until 1919. Factors stressed by classic political economy held sway with weak and small coalitions for reform being unable to pass and implement new labor market regulations. The influence of the international debate about the causes of industrial conflict and its remedies – both from social Catholicism and from reformist and legal thought in more industrialized countries – shaped nonetheless the domestic debate and increased the appeal of labor market regulation. Labor law made big leaps in critical junctures like periods of poorly managed colonial wars (Cuba, Morocco) or in the late 1910s with the explosion of social conflict. Especially, the crisis of 1918–20 increased the decision-making powers of governments with weak parliamentary support, bringing about the definitive consolidation of labor law in Spain.

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers": Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South

"A Nation's Need—Good and Well Trained Mothers"Gender, Charity, and the New Urban South Thomas C. Henthorn (bio) In the first decades of the twentieth century Houston, Texas, underwent profound economic and social changes resulting from oil strikes on the Texas Gulf Coast and a subsequent population explosion. In response a unified coalition of reform-minded city builders, yearning for a more orderly community, implemented a host of bureaucratic solutions to ameliorate the dynamics of urbanization. The realization of this community, known universally among reformers as the New South, depended on the effective regulation of the economy, but also control of the social environment in which this new economy would operate.1 It was within this larger commitment to Southern progress that the modernization of social services and charity developed within Houston. Armed with an unequivocal commitment to New South ideology, a core coalition of reformers—elite boosters, club women, and educated urban clergy—embarked on an ambitious social uplift scheme to bring the city in line with national standards in health, education, and social services. To progressives in Houston social uplift encompassed a number of health and welfare policies included as part of city builders' vision to build Houston into a grand metropolis of the New South. An overriding consideration by reformers as they modernized and centralized social services was guarding family life against the ravages of the city. Within this context Southern progressives premised their policies on the belief that building a great city and redeeming Southern society depended on a patriarchal hierarchy of healthy children, dedicated mothers, and hardworking fathers. The discussions that emerged among the coalition of reformers flowed from a decidedly class-bound vision of families. Central to these discussions were representations of women and their contributions to civic life. These representations drew upon middle-class discourses that articulated a racialized version of femininity in which the ideal civic function for women was motherhood. The result was a set of welfare practices that defined working-class [End Page 71] men and women's public civic capacity by their private paternal and maternal roles. Such representations had real social and economic effects on the lives of working-class women and their families. These gendered concepts of the civic form allowed reformers to set the terms of the debate about the proper place of men and women in a rapidly changing urban society. Hence, as city builders erected the built environment, they wished to construct, simultaneously, good mothers and good fathers as means of mediating the unwieldy dynamics of urbanization. Constructing representations of motherhood as a way to influence the distribution of limited social welfare resources also constituted a particularly intense struggle around race. As residents of a Southern city, Houston's city builders saw maintaining racial hierarchies amid changing social and economic circumstances as fundamental to the New South's civic culture. Southern views on race emphasized the differences between black and white. But at the dawn of the twentieth century the lines between race and what Americans refer to as ethnicity were not clear. This fluidity in racial thinking was due to large numbers of foreign-born immigrants who had been streaming into American cities for the past several decades. And this fluidity complicated the overly simplistic view of race in Houston. Even though reformers characterized some of their efforts as "immigrant work," when it came to uplifting families, charity workers only seldom racialized their gendered representations of the family in a manner that distinguished foreign-born women from native-born whites. Rather, a shared racial identity between foreign-born and native-born white women crystallized poignantly the necessity, reformers believed, to impress upon all newcomers normative Anglo middle-class ideals—religious faith, good citizenship, an appreciation for hard work, and moral strictness.2 Charity workers, however, consistently reproduced racialized narratives about the fitness of Mexican, and especially black, families in social policies that addressed health and hygiene, child care, and settlement work. Progressive economic and social uplift policies in the New South were foremost predicated on the assumed inferiority of blacks. Jim Crow laws and the traditions of a segregated society meant that any social service provided to African Americans would be...

The Education and Labor Collaborative: Organizing a Coalition for Authentic School Reform

Imagine how much easier and effective the work of unionists would be if a generation of children graduated from US schools understanding their right and duty to be heard, the power of joining together in common cause, and the knowledge, political savvy, and skill to speak on their own behalf. And imagine how much easier the work of teachers would be if, through unionization, the lives of working families improved and the resources they need to support their children's education were more widely available. In the Fall 2006 Working Class Notes , Patrick Finn and Mary Finn painted such a scenario and asked readers to consider the possibilities for a truly radical education movement that would be built by a coalition of educators, community organizers, unionists, and teacher unionists rather than the autocratic, top-down reform movement of the dominant education as business model. This article briefly describes what impelled the authors to act on their concerns and what those actions have entailed to date, in the hope that other educators, teacher educators, unionists and teacher union activists will see the importance of linking our respective fields and will be moved to join our efforts.

Reagan, Regulation, and the FDA: The US Food and Drug Administration's Response to HIV/AIDS, 1980-90

The beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s placed tremendous strain on the Food and Drug Administration, regulator of one quarter of the domestic US economy and protector of the nation's drug supply. Much has already been written on the AIDS epidemic, and this body of literature continues to expand, but careful consideration of this subject matter is of crucial significance to understanding the interaction between regulatory agencies, the executive branch, industry, and the public. Periodically, the FDA has gone through phases in which various priorities dominated. At one point or another it has distinguished itself as a regulatory agency, law enforcement agency, and science agency, depending on the political party in power, the ideology of the FDA Commissioner, and the influence of external stakeholders. The AIDS epidemic, which gave rise to a new and robust coalition of AIDS activists, reformers, and libertarians, tested the agency's institutional identity. To some commentators, the FDA’s management of the AIDS crisis was a serious blunder, akin to the Reagan administration’s failure. This paper contends, however, that despite the absence of presidential leadership, the FDA succeeded in rising to the challenge of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s by refashioning its existing regulatory rules, reaching out to the AIDS movement and the pharmaceutical industry, and maintaining its strong commitment to consumer protection.

We have a religion: the 1920s Pueblo Indian dance controversy and American religious freedom

How do we define 'religion'? For Native Americans, religious freedom has been an elusive goal. From nineteenth-century bans on indigenous ceremonial practices to twenty-first-century legal battles over sacred lands, peyote use, and hunting practices, the U.S. government has often acted as if Indian traditions were somehow not truly religious and therefore not eligible for the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. In this book, Tisa Wenger shows that cultural notions about what constitutes 'religion' are crucial to public debates over religious freedom.In the 1920s, Pueblo Indian leaders in New Mexico and a sympathetic coalition of non-Indian reformers successfully challenged government and missionary attempts to suppress Indian dances by convincing a skeptical public that these ceremonies counted as religion. This struggle for religious freedom forced the Pueblos to employ Euro-American notions of religion, a conceptual shift with complex consequences within Pueblo life. Long after the dance controversy, Wenger demonstrates, dominant concepts of religion and religious freedom have continued to marginalize indigenous traditions within the United States.

How to Reform a Reform Coalition: Outreach, Agenda Expansion, and Brokerage in Urban School Reform

Coalitions have always played an advocacy role in policymaking, but they are increasingly regarded as a form of community capacity that can be harnessed to civic ends. As explored in this study of urban school reform in Oakland, California, this civic view of coalitions confronts a tension between the cohesiveness and the inclusiveness of coalitions. Coalitions unified around cohesive goals and beliefs are often narrowly based, which can encourage the formation of rival coalitions. By contrast, reform coalitions that build broad‐based support across the community may have difficulty developing coherent reform strategies. Using a social network analysis of key stakeholders to analyze the challenges of building civic capacity in Oakland, we find that the school district's recent reform experience more closely resembles an advocacy coalition than a broad civic coalition. The article then explores strategies for developing a broad civic coalition by expanding the existing advocacy coalition. We use the network analysis to identify opportunities for brokerage across individuals, institutions, and issues.

Editors' Notes

The fourth and final 2009 issue of PSJ showcases the international breadth as well as the rigorous theoretically-driven scholarship found in contemporary public policy research. Readers will find applications on implementation and network analysis, the multiple streams framework, the advocacy coalition framework, attribution theory, policy disruptions, and policy entrepreneurs. This issue features articles on a wide range of issue-areas, including poverty, welfare policy, central-bank independence, education policy, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights. As editors, we are proud to feature articles written by authors residing in New Zealand, the United States, Israel, and the Netherlands. We offer three articles on salient public policy issues. The lead article is a thought provoking piece contributed by Douglas Besharov and Douglas Call entitled, “Income Transfers Alone Won't Eradicate Poverty.” This article provides a controversial perspective on the effect of government transfer programs and whether what is commonly treated as “poverty” (and addressed with government transfer programs) is better conceptualized as “income inequality.” The argument is that income inequality is best remedied by raising income and human capital. Readers must not miss the empirical and logical rebuttal by Robert Plotnick and a reply by Besharov and Call. This exchange initiates what the Editors see as an occasional point/counterpoint exchange over especially provocative arguments. Next we explore what explains support for the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. Guided by attrition theory, Greg Lewis responds to this question by showing that growing support for rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals is largely explained by beliefs in the biological basis of homosexuality. We are also proud to present an analysis of the social welfare systems in the United States. Ae-Sook Kim and Edward T. Jennings Jr. present their work entitled, “Effects of U.S. States' Social Welfare Systems on Population Health.” Their paper addresses the consequences of the social welfare system on the population's health. Offering a rare sub-national analysis of social welfare and population health, the authors find that improved social welfare programs enhance a population's heath condition. Innovations in policy process research can be found in five articles. The first is another contribution to PSJ's ongoing synthetic review series. We are gratified to present PSJ readers a review and synthesis of the policy entrepreneur literature by Michael Mintrom in “Policy Entrepreneurship and Policy Change.” Mintrom's piece demonstrates that the policy entrepreneur is central to a number of distinct policy approaches, in particular when considering policy change. Mintrom will likely serve as a must read for any scholar seeking to contribute to our shared understanding about the role of policy entrepreneurs in policy processes. In “The Puzzle of the Diffusion of Central Bank Independence Reforms: Insights from an Agent-Based Simulation,” Orit Rapport, David Levi-Faur, and Dan Miodownik offer probably the first agent-based model inspired by Kingdon's multiple streams framework on the diffusion across governments of central bank independence. They place special emphasis on three aspects of the diffusion process: the likelihood of reform; the rate of adoption; and the time to the outbreak. Chris Ansell, Sarah Reckhow, and Andrew Kelly integrate the civic capacity literature and the advocacy coalition framework in “How to Reform a Reform Coalition: Outreach, Agenda Expansion, and Brokerage in Urban School Reform.” Ansell, Reckhow, and Kelly compare advocacy coalitions to relatively broad civic coalitions using social network analysis in an Oakland school district. Inspired by policy network analysis, Joop Koppejan, Mirjam Kars, and Haiko van der Voort describe a framework for dealing with legislative representation and executive power in terms of the content, evolution, and outcomes of the policy process. Drawing upon the politics in a Dutch province, they argue the merits of horizontal networks and vertical politics. Finally, Peter May explores how policy disruptions affect agendas across policy subsystems post the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. May's important findings—that only limited system disruptions occur during a time of crisis—suggests that stressed bureaucratic systems deployed particularly stable subsystems as a means to buffer and minimize the threatening disruptions. As co-editors, we are doubly appreciative to the authors and reviewers for the quality of the submissions in this current issue. Once again, we encourage authors in the public policy community to continue to support PSJ bysubmitting your best manuscripts; to our referees, please note that your always thoughtful and constructive reviewsbenefit both the authors and the PSJ readership. Thank you.

Home-Visitation Advocates Confront Chorus of Doubts

Home-Visitation Advocates Confront Chorus of Doubts

Assessing How Far Charter 88 and the Constitutional Reform Coalition Influenced Voting System Reform in Britain

Lead in large part by Charter 88 and the Scottish Constitutional Convention, the activities of the constitutional reform movement since the early 1990s have clearly helped to introduce new proportional voting systems into UK politics. Yet, at the same time, the Labour governments after 1997decisively rejected voting reform for the House of Commons and dragged out Lords reform to prevent any direct election of a second chamber. To explore how Charter 88 and other groups influenced this process I first examine and critique the conventional wisdom that the reform movement’s influence had minimal influence, as expressed by Anthony King’s 2007 book, The British Constitution. Second, to illuminate the processes that King leaves so obscure, I chart three critical games played largely inside the Labour party from 1994 to 2003: – the pre-election game that lead to Blair’s initial pledge of a referendum on voting reform; – the ‘new institutions’ game that produced a welter of new proportional voting systems everywhere else but Westminster; and – the post-landslide game that lead to Labour reneging on the voting system referendum pledge, plus taking no action on Commons or Lords electoral reform. Despite these latter setbacks a large-scale transition of UK voting systems has already taken place. British voters are increasingly used to proportional representation and the defence of plurality rule is intellectually dead (as the weaknesses of King’s analysis inadvertently demonstrate). So the overall story is one of unprecedented success for electoral reformers, of a piece with the ineluctable transition to complex multi-party systems across all the nations and regions of the UK.

The politics of market reforms: Korea's path from Chaebol Republic to market democracy and back

This paper studies the politics of market-oriented reforms in Korea since the 1997/98 financial crisis. It focuses on the capacity of the state to implement these reforms, and challenges the view that successfully implemented market reforms follow a technocratic ‘best practice’ approach. On the contrary, this paper argues that reforms in Korea were relatively successful because they were political projects that went beyond ownership concepts of the IMF and World Bank. The temporary weakness of big business (chaebol) and the formation of reform coalitions by the government created a balance of power between societal interest groups that opened a political space for the government. The state regained some of the autonomy it had lost during the ‘Chaebol Republic’ from 1987 to 1997 and was able to implement reforms in a temporary corporatist framework. However, the chaebol adapted to the new situation and used the market-friendly reforms in their favour. The re-emergence of the chaebol undermined state autonomy and with the inauguration of the new President and former chaebol CEO Lee Myung Bak in 2008, Korea is arguably entering the second Chaebol Republic.

Solving the “Rural School Problem”: New State Aid, Standards, and Supervision of Local Schools, 1900–1933

“The greatest educational problem now facing the American people is the Rural School Problem,” argued Minnesota county superintendent Julius Arp in 1918. “There is no defect more glaring today than the inequality that exists between the educational facilities of the urban and rural communities. Rural education in the United States has been so far outstripped by the education of our urban centers, that from an educational standpoint, the country child is left far behind in the struggles of life.” This conceptualization of the Rural School Problem, framed within a larger national discussion about the growing disparity between urban and rural life wrought by industrialization, galvanized a broad based coalition of educators, ministers, farmers, agro-businessmen, sociologists, and social reformers into a robust campaign for rural school reform in the early twentieth century. Often lost in recent education histories which have paid much greater attention to urban school reform, this rural school movement had far-reaching consequences, not only for local school governance in the countryside, but for emerging state administration of education. The Rural School Problem, this article argues, helped to stimulate and legitimate significant new state interventions into local schools and define the forms of state aid, regulation, and bureaucracy in a formative period of state development.

RICHARD A. GREENWALD. The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York. (Labor in Crisis.) Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 332. $24.95

Richard A. Greenwald explores the advancement of industrial democracy in Progressive-era New York by connecting the great strikes of 1909 and 1910, the horrifying Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, and the fitful actions of an uneasy coalition of workers, reformers, and political leaders. Defining industrial democracy as “an effort to square free market capitalism with democracy to provide a fair and just workplace” (p. 3), Greenwald identifies collective bargaining as essential to industrial democracy and calls for renewed attention to the subject of industrial relations between unions and employers. The story of the young immigrant women who led the “shirtwaist uprising” of 1909 that startled New York City and attracted the support of middle-class women reformers is largely a familiar one. By paralyzing the industry through a general strike, these women not only saved the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) but boosted morale and hope, especially as the public became more aware of—and sympathetic to—the plight of women workers. Their action set the stage for the “Great Revolt” of the cloakmakers in 1910, a massive strike that convinced Progressive reformers that achieving industrial peace and stability was essential and required their intervention.