TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 483 The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860—1900. By Edwin Gabler. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Pp. viii + 264; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper). This tightly reasoned book locates its subject at the intersection of three disciplines: history of technology, social history, and labor his tory. Although technology forms the backdrop for Edwin Gabler’s study, he is chiefly concerned with telegraphers as an emerging oc cupational group—lower-middle-class workers employed by large or ganizations. Telegraphers make a particularly revealing subject for study, he argues, because Western Union’s national dominance and organizational structure presaged similar developments throughout the economy; the occupational and social circumstances of telegra phers, then, anticipated that of many workers. Gabler shows how telegraphers were pulled between two social worlds—“toward the ‘old’ middle class of bourgeois solidity, polite employment, and gentility; but also toward the growing mass of wage earners, most of them skilled or unskilled manual workers” (p. 5). Telegraphers, for instance, dressed in a manner befitting the middle class; their behavior, however, was more closely akin to that of manual workers. For entertainment, telegraphers drew from both classes. By scrutinizing these and other indices ofculture, Gabler paints a detailed portrait of telegraphers as a class in transition. Despite their specialized skills, telegraphers became increasingly dependent for employment on large, impersonal firms. In fact, to many telegraphers, the social and economic standing of their craft appeared inversely related to Western Union’s fortunes. As Western Union established itself in the 1870s as the industry’s undisputed leader, telegraphers watched their nominal salaries slip, their oppor tunities for advancement close, and their autonomy in the workplace become circumscribed. Craft culture thwarted some managerial in trusions, but a more forceful response had to await unionization, notably the formation of the nationwide Brotherhood ofTelegraphers in the early 1880s. Western Union’s refusal to address seriously the brotherhood’s grievances precipitated the Great Strike of 1883, which Gabler uses as the organizational focus of his book. The month-long strike of 8,000 telegraphers galvanized the nation because it exemplified grow ing tensions between capital and labor, threatened the communication system on which many businesses depended, and challenged Jay Gould and other industrial magnates who sat on Western Union’s board of directors. Although telegraphers cultivated widespread public sup port by their defiance of Western Union, the strike collapsed. Western Union managers kept the messages flowing by tapping a sizable res ervoir of unemployed and underemployed telegraphers. But, more important for Gabler’s thesis, the strikers’ weaknesses stemmed largely from their uncertain social and occupational self-identity. Genteel te 484 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE legraphers felt uncomfortable with unions, which they associated with manual laborers; accordingly, they never fully closed ranks with their supposed ally, the Knights of Labor, depriving themselves of a po tentially valuable resource during the strike. Also, segmentation within the craft (by location, status, function, and age) weakened solidarity. Contributing this volume to a series on class and culture, Gabler probably regarded historians of technology as a secondary audience. Indeed, observations about technology per se are rare, though Gabler does note that, with the advent of multiplex telegraphy, “pressure for increased productivity shifted from capital to labor” (p. 53) and that “all operators had a shared work culture that grew out of the nature of the medium itself” (p. 79). Gabler opens the book with a straightforward sketch of the 1883 strike and returns to it in the last chapter as the basis for a more detailed examination of unionism and telegraphy. In between, he devotes chapters to the industry’s structure, the work and social cul ture of telegraphers, and women in the field. Although this organi zational scheme has much to commend, splitting discussion of the strike introduces some redundancy. Gabler draws his inferences care fully—for example, by adjusting salaries for deflation and dealing with telegraphers’ perceptions of well-being as well as the reality. The book is exceptionally well written, enlivened by selective use of vi gnettes and vivid characterizations of individuals. Richard B. Kielbowicz Dr. Kielbowicz. an assistant professor of communications at...