REVIEWS

...The author shows in instructive detail that such cries of indignation and revolt against the nascent power of industrial capitalism were to be repeated throughout the 19th century in Lynn, a major center of shoe production throughout the century, as in many neighboring 102 industrial towns...

...The ballot box was the coffin of class consciousness," says the author with regret...

...Dawley tries valiantly to contradict explanations advanced by other labor historians and social scientists...

...They may order their soldiers to fire, But we'll stick to the hammer and awl...

...He instead relies on a curious explanation: "Electoral politics, not faith in occupational success or property ownership, was the main safety valve of working-class discontents...

...Lynn's political leaders came in significant parts from among former shoemakers, so that local politics provided a demonstration that men from their ranks could rise to top positions...

...Among the majority who changed occupations, far more moved up than down or across, and a substantial minority (though less than 20 per cent) moved up to stay...

...The ballot box, as contemporary workers from Spain to Poland have learned in their flesh, is the essential prerequisite for any advance of the cause of labor, and if it hinders the development of a pure Marxian class consciousness, so be it...

...Why was it, to use the shrewd distinction of Samuel Gompers, which the author quotes, that they developed a vivid Klassengefuehl, a fellow feeling among those who work for a living, while never reaching out for a Marxian Klassenbewusstsein, a clearcut awareness of labor's distinct class interests and a sense of class oppression...

...Yet, though discontent and anger among the shoe workers often rose to the surface, only a very small minority among them turned to various socialist organizations in the closing years of the century...

...The latter had more than 10,000 members in Lynn when the total number of working people was around 15,000...

...Factory shoe production, which initially had to rely mainly on a workforce of formerly independent operatives, had to deal with workers who perceived the factory routines as encroachments on established customs of work and life...

...Dawley is at his best when he shows how the later organizations of the shoemakers were decisively influenced by a working class that largely originated in the preindustrial culture of individual artisans and journeymen before the coming of factory production in the second half of the century...

...It may be perfectly true that democracy prevents the emergence of a Marxian type of class consciousness, but does Dawley really wish to assert, as he comes near to saying, that had there been less democracy in America, the labor movement would have attained the pristine Marxist purity he so ardently desires, so that democracy is the major obstacle to the attainment of labor's "true interests...

...Fueled by the ideology of equal rights, the fires of discontent never died down in Lynn's labor history...

...Most workers clearly attempted to better themselves through both collective and individual strategies, switching from one to the other as circumstances dictated...

...Despite these caveats, I have learned a good deal from this vivid, painstaking and compassionate portrayal of an important page in the history of American labor...

...The strike of the shoemakers in 1860 was the biggest strike in any industry in America before the Civil War, and it was followed by other major confrontations in the following decades...

...The same, grosso modo, seems to have been the case in Lynn...

...It deserves to stand next to other major works in British and American labor history that trace their origin to E. P. Thompson's masterful The Making of the English Working Class...

...Dawley tends to discount such factors as social mobility or slow access to property ownership as explanations for the lack of a Marxist class consciousness in America...

...Remembering the self-reliance of their artisan past, or transmitting this memory to their descendants or to more recent immigrant workers from Ireland and elsewhere, the Lynn factory workers built their strong unions, the Knights of St...

...17.50 cc Labor now has become a commodity, wealth capital, and the natural order of things is entirely reversed...

...No matter how hard he tries to explain them away, the stubborn facts will not be denied...

...A labor historian should be aware of the fact that all the various socialist and populist journals and magazines around the turn of the century, while fulminating against the cross of gold, also contained advertisements for get-rich schemes and land speculation of various kinds...

...Throughout long stretches of Lynn's history representatives of workingmen's parties sat in the mayor's seat and occupied a majority of seats in the city council...

...Crispin, and were usually found in the forefront of strikes and other labor manifestations...

...Women workers, who according to received wisdom are said to be hard to organize, had their own organization in Lynn, The Daughters of St...

...This sticks in the throat of the author, a young labor and social historian of the NeoMarxist school...

...Men and women joined in union picnics, strike parades, summer festivals, and joyous dances in the union hall...

...they surely were not a lonely crowd of atomized individuals...

...But there is no contradiction here...

...Why should that have been so...

...Just as in many agrarian movements throughout the world, peasants were led to revolt not so much by visions of a better future as by the memory of past rights and immunities that were denied in the present, so the Lynn operatives were sustained in their resistance to the deprivations of industrial production by the memory of, and the partial persistence of, a working-class culture that involved them in communal solidarity...

...As Irving Howe has so vividly shown in The World of Our Fathers, the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side perceived no contradiction in creating instruments of collective action to better the miserable conditions of their lives, and taking individual steps on the ladder of mobility whenever an opportunity presented itself...

...A dense network of communal activities tied the working class together...

...Lynn remained throughout the century a major center of working-class activities...

...Nor were they politically disenfranchised...

...After admitting this, Dawley continues to argue that this does not prove that most workers relied on individual mobility to get ahead, since the evidence indicates that the bulk of them at one time or another engaged in various collective actions to improve their conditions...

...Crispin, and later the Knights of Labor, to defend their rights...

...The tradition of equal rights, which as the author shows runs like a threat throughout the various forms of the labor movement during the 19th century, was rooted in the domestic production system that was still strong and unimpaired at the beginning of the century...

...The fact that one of every two or three shoemaker families could point to someone in the family who had become a petty manufacturer, a small shopkeeper, or a clerk, was 103 proof enough that upward mobility was a widespread and clearly evident feature of working-class experience...

...Ever since the Civil War, when all Lynn's classes had closed ranks against Southern slavemasters, politics acted as a safety valve of social discontent...

...capital and labor stand opposed," stated a labor newspaper, the Awl, written for the shoemakers of Lynn and surrounding towns in 1844—four years before the publication of The Communist Manifesto...

...He attempts to show that upward social mobility was not very widespread, but is finally forced to admit: Among an entire group of shoeworkers who spent twenty years in the city, a minority never left their original occupation...

...Political parties, he avers, especially since the Civil War, were ladders to success and creamed off the indigenous working-class leadership...

...And yet, even though there were major strikes, large-scale union organization, the rise and fall of a number of workingmen's parties in Lynn, the bulk of its working class remained still as much wedded to the American political system at the end of the century as it had been at its beginning...

...As a Lynn poet wrote in the "Cordwainer's Song" at the time of the great strike of 1860: The workman is worthy his hire, No tyrant shall hold us in thrall...

...This seems tome a curious thing to say...

...In contrast to the New England textile industry, which began at the factory stage, the shoe industry arose out of a previous system in which production took place in the household and a culture of sturdy independence...

...THE AUTHOR attempts to explain why, despite widespread communally rooted radicalism, the Lynn labor movement nevertheless did not go far beyond the mainstream of American political culture...