The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925

by David Montgomery

Overview

This book studies the changing ways in which American industrial workers mobilised concerted action in their own interests between the abolition of slavery and the end of open immigration from Europe and Asia. Sustained class conflict between 1916 and 1922 reshaped governmental and business policies, but left labour largely unorganised and in retreat. The House of Labor, so arduously erected by working-class activists during the preceeding generation, did not collapse, but ossified, so that when labour activism was reinvigorated after 1933, the movement split in two. These developments are analysed here in ways which stress the links between migration, neighbourhood life, racial subjugation, business reform, the state, and the daily experience of work itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781139929882
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/28/1987
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Abbreviations used in text and notes; Introduction; 1. The manager's brain under the workman's cap; 2. The common laborer; 3. The operative; 4. The art of cutting metals; 5. White shirts and superior intelligence; 6. 'Our time … belives in change'; 7. Patriots or paupers; 8. 'This great struggle for democracy'; 9. 'A maximum of publicity with a minimum of interference'; Index.

Editorial Reviews

After the Civil War, American workers struggled to gain a voice in how the workplace was run, and to create strong labor unions. Montgomery concentrates on what was happening on the shop floor, rather than in the union hall or the factory office. He shows how craftsmen, machine operatives, and common laborers developed separate codes of job conduct related to their backgrounds (many were immigrants) and neighborhood cultures. At the turn of the century, big companies adopted management styles designed to weaken unions, while radicals competed with unions. By the mid-1920s, the labor movement was in retreat, radical movements were discredited, and workers mostly unorganized.Recommended for subject collections.Harry Frumerman, formerly with Economics Dept., Hunter Coll., CUNY

Library Journal

"David Montgomery...both exemplifies and transcends the recent trend toward painstakingly detailed social history...he has undertaken a far vaster project than most contemporary labor historians would attempt: American labor activism of all varieties and locales, from the time when American workers organized the first tentative but recognizable trade unions, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the emergence of the working class as an insurrectionary force during the first two decades of the twentieth century, to its humiliating defeat in the years following the First World War...the closest thing we have...to E.P. Thompson's monumental book, The Making of the English Working Class." Barbara Ehrenreich, in The Atlantic

"...the most sweeping portrait of working-class life to emerge from the new labor history...a subtle, complex, often brilliant study..." Alan Brinkley in the New Republic

From the Publisher