On Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor

...Since the early years of the twentieth century, historians have characterized the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the preeminent organization of American trade unionists from the 1890s through the early 1930s, as craft-dominated, procapitalist, and politically tame...

...The three major groups of late nineteenth-century workers—the craftsmen, the factory operatives, and the common laborers—lived in such different "worlds" that any alliances they managed to build quickly collapsed...

...These internal developments were, Montgomery suggests, part of a much broader awakening of the American working class...

...David Montgomery's stunning new book, The Fall of the House of Labor, has swept that characterization into the dustbin of history...

...Montgomery argues that in the first two decades of the twentieth century the AFL was home to many different kinds of workers: semiskilled operatives and skilled craftsmen...

...at worst, they have attacked the AFL for repeatedly selling out the lesser skilled, the newly arrived, and the darker skinned...

...The United States, its radical movement shattered, its techniques of mass production, scientific and personnel management nearly perfected, its government all too eager to create an environment congenial to capital, embarked on a course of social development unique among the world's industrialized nations...

...The weakest link in this gripping analysis—and the one on which Montgomery focuses—is his claim that scientific management dissolved structural divisions within the working class and triggered widespread radicalization...

...First, he argues that the influence of scientific management should not be measured by the number of time-and-motion studies undertaken or the number of scientific management programs formally commissioned...

...By Montgomery's count of delegate votes in AFL conventions, the progressive bloc—resting on three powerful unions of coal miners, railroad workers, and metal trades workers—steadily gained strength throughout the 1910s and was poised, in 1921, " 'to secure control of the federation' and to promote 'a sweeping program' of 'government ownership and democratic control' of American industry...

...Consider the following pronouncement concerning the history of American workers that appears in Montgomery's introduction: Their movement has grown only sporadically and through fierce struggles, been interrupted time and again just when it seemed to reach flood tide, overwhelmed its foes only to see them revive in new and formidable shapes, and been forced to reassess what it thought it had already accomplished and begin again...

...First, Montgomery's view of scientific management as the deus ex machina of workingclass formation is not altogether convincing...

...Until now, that is...

...Working-class success appears instead contingent, elusive, and ephemeral...

...Montgomery does not offer us the kind of detailed studies of rank-and-file leadership that would systematically establish whether workers still clinging to their craft or to vivid memories of it elaborated the radical visions and triggered the organizing campaigns of the postwar era...

...In Montgomery's eyes, the conversion of American managers to such techniques quickly homogenized the workplace experience and thus unintentionally enhanced the possibilities for collective action...

...what remains questionable is whether they played the cadre role that Montgomery assigns them...

...Montgomery's grounding of the two major ideological tendencies of the AFL—socialistsyndicalist versus business unionist—in two radically different workplace experiences is a brilliant stroke that compels us to look anew at the internal politics of the AFL and to ask why the business unionists eventually triumphed...

...At best, they have seen the AFL in light of desperate struggles by a few groups of workers to maintain a smattering of dignity and economic security in a period of working-class defeat...

...Even this extended summary of Montgomery's argument cannot do justice to his book's breadth, erudition, and originality, all of which will ensure it a place alongside such a formidable classic of the Wisconsin school as Selig Perlman's A History of Trade Unionism in the United States (1922...

...new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe and native-born Americans descended from German and Irish stock...

...The militancy of the years 1916 to 1922 may be better explained by such causes as an acute labor scarcity and the politicization that the government, with its heavyhanded propaganda about a "war for democracy," unintentionally triggered among large groups of heretofore quiescent workers...

...The furious, nationwide strike activity of these years (greater than in any other period of similar length), widespread experimentation with worker councils on the shop-floor, broad working-class support for the nationalization of the railroads and coal mines, increasing sentiment for a farmer-labor party, and a political discourse dominated by such ambitious terms as "the labor question," "industrial democracy," and "social reconstruction"—all point to this period as a high-water mark of radical, workingclass activity...

...Such views of business unionism have been subject to incessant attack these last fifteen years by the "new labor historians," scholars defined by their antipathy to capitalism and their desire to write social history—the history of ordinary people rather than of "great men" and "great institutions...

...It is hard to escape the conclusion that from 1916 to 1922 American workers and their AFL unions came as close as they ever have to remaking their economic and political world...

...This twin perspective has led these new historians to discern in the "woolly-headed" schemes of nineteenthcentury workers a widespread opposition to the new forms of capitalist social relations and to mourn the rise of the AFL as evidence of capitalism's triumph...

...wise to focus instead on improving its economic power in ways that the capitalist system allowed...

...It would have been easy for him to argue that labor's fall in the early 1920s marked a fundamental watershed in American life...

...He deals with these inconvenient facts in two ways...

...That semiskilled operatives played a large role in the progressive AFL bloc in the war and postwar years now seems undeniable...

...Elsewhere in the book Montgomery himself seems troubled by the periodic derailment of working-class movements...

...But what was to have been a climactic battle turned out to be an easy victory for Gompers, who won reelection in 1921 with two-thirds of the votes...

...The story of labor's rise, as Montgomery tells it, begins in the widespread working-class unrest in the Gilded Age, apparent in the meteoric rise of the Knights of Labor in 1885-86, in such fierce conflicts as the Homestead ironworkers strike of 1892, and in campaigns for state labor legislation like the one that stirred Massachusetts politics in the 1890s...

...Even as the reputation of the AFL was thereby diminished, the notion that it represented a procapitalist, craft-dominated form of unionism remained pretty much unchallenged...

...By this standard, Montgomery claims, scientific management did indeed extend its reach over greater and greater sectors of American industry in the first two decades of the twentieth century, instilling in millions of workers in diverse work settings a set of common grievances...

...The craftsmen, the group upon which the political fate of the working class depended most, enjoyed too much shop-floor power to contemplate a fundamental reconstruction of the social order...

...Factory operatives, Montgomery claims, did begin to question the whole "wages system," but they did not possess 240 • DISSENT Books enough political weight to dislodge the craftsmen and their reformist attitudes...

...The Fall of the House of Labor, then, is really about labor's rise: the making of the American working class...

...It is striking that the workers most prominent in the progressive bloc—machinists, miners, and railroad workers—all worked in industries where earlier generations of craft workers had exercised an extraordinary degree of shop-floor autonomy...

...If we can read in such statements Montgomery's admiration for the dogged heroism of American workers, we can also discern his recognition of the 242 • DISSENT Books essentially Sisyphean character of labor's task— always to fight, never to win...

...More and more of them seized upon Taylor's principles of "scientific management," calling for the careful measurement of every worker's labor and the breakdown of any complicated job into simple, repetitious motions, as a way to improve productivity, remove the power that craftsmen had long exercised over the shop floor, and produce contented workers...

...By 1923, the AFL "devoted its Portland Convention to a celebration of American capitalism and a summons to the movement to drive out its radicals...

...Finally, it is open to question whether the radical politics of 1916 to 1922, in view of their subsequent rapid demise, involved as great a portion of the American working class—or enjoyed as strong a hold on the minds of individual workers—as Montgomery would have us believe...

...Second, Montgomery's devaluation of the role of the skilled worker in generating radical politics will come as a shock to the labor historians who first learned of their pivotal role at Montgomery's knee...

...socialists and business unionists...

...Therein, perhaps, lies the hidden meaning of "The Fall": What has evidently fallen is not so much any particular House of Labor, or even a historical moment of unique radical promise, but the fundamental Marxist belief, long guiding socialists, that labor would one day emancipate itself—and the rest of humanity...

...America's pioneer labor historians, members of the "Wisconsin school," celebrated the rise of the AFL as a natural adaptation by American workers to a society that deemed the pursuit of private property the highest good and most precious legal right...

...The House of Labor that had long tolerated political difference among its members had fallen...

...He argues that a social democratic political tendency — "progressive" in the language of the time— gradually gained strength in the AFL until it represented, at some point between 1916 and 1922, a majority of its members...

...Some building tradesmen occasionally supported the more radicalized groups, but most provided the conservative Samuel Gompers with the support that enabled him to cling—albeit at times tenuously—to the presidency of the AFL from 1896 to 1924...

...But these discussions lack the acuity and energy that Montgomery brings to the story of radicalism's rise, and thus leave the reader wondering how workers could have allowed the radical labor movement to have been deflected from its appointed task...

...The building trades, their ranks prospering from the still-fevered pace of urban expansion and their work patterns virtually identical to those that prevailed throughout the nineteenth century, formed the core of this group...

...Montgomery has restored to the AFL the importance that the Wisconsin school once bestowed on it, while infusing its ranks with the kind of anticapitalist sentiment so admired by the new labor historians...

...It may be that this radical movement was more fragile than Montgomery suggests, not simply because of formidable hostile forces arrayed against it but also because of serious divisions within the progressive bloc itself...

...Workers, he simply concludes, would continue to confront employers at the workplace, and from such confrontations would arise new forms of class consciousness and new labor movements...

...What did dislodge craftsmen and reformism was the intensifying search of capitalists, their economic system reeling from the depression of the 1890s, for order, efficiency, and mastery both in particular enterprises and in the country as a whole...

...Such troubling thoughts may help explain the curiously flat tone of Montgomery's conclusion...

...In short, only under the impact of growing managerial power in the early twentieth century did the "labor reformism" of the Gilded Age give way to varieties of socialism...

...But Montgomery sees that unrest as necessarily episodic and reformist...

...Montgomery's second argument comes as an admission that an important section of the American working class did not, in fact, experience the principles of scientific management in any form and thus did not develop "progressive" versions of class consciousness...

...Montgomery does note that feuds over anti-Semitism, communism, and industrial unionism weakened the progressive bloc at crucial moments in the postwar years...

...The author's ambitious attempt to comprehend the whole of the American working-class experience within a single analytic framework should stir lively controSPRING • 1988 • 241 Books versy among both labor historians and a broader intellectual public...

...His interpretation cuts against the grain of an emerging portrait of American capitalists as a group far too heterogeneous to embrace collectively the kind of rationalization that Montgomery has in mind...

...In their view, American labor was wise to jettison the "woolly-headed" schemes—Marxism, Greenbackism, Henry George's Single Taxism, the Knights of Labor's dream of ending the "wages system" —on which late nineteenth-century workers had squandered so much energy...

...nor did the common laborers among whom sustained programs of trade union or political action rarely took root...

...and he suggests that the growing bureaucratic power of AFL chieftains—as well as Gompers's genius for powerbrokering —frustrated radical initiatives...

...Moreover, the growing tendency of managers to innovate endlessly with little regard for the customary prerogatives of craftsmen or for the human needs of operatives created a radical disenchantment with capitalist productive relations...

...Montgomery frankly acknowledges what has become common knowledge among historians: that the ideology of scientific management in this period was more widespread than its use...

...Montgomery's painstaking research into workplace experiences, moreover, reveals an early twentieth-century world of work still staggeringly diverse...

...Such a conclusion may seem unwarrantedly optimistic, but it hints, too, at a deep pessimism...

...In a period when working-class parties came to power in virtually every European nation, American workers had to content themselves with a frustratingly subordinate role in American politics and society...

...This epic work, showing how millions of workers came together in a powerful—and quite radical— labor movement, entitles Montgomery to some sweeping statements about the effects of the 1920s defeats on the future of American society...

...But the fact that fifteen to twenty years later these workers were at the forefront in organizing virtually every CIO union suggests that it may have been more of a factor in Montgomery's story than he allows...

...But instead of imbuing the early 1920s with such historic significance, Montgomery deliberately drains them of consequence...

...Indeed, a persistent thematic undertow in this book, which works against the more dramatic story of working-class formation, portrays the working class as too diverse and its opponents as too clever and powerful to render plausible a linear story of labor on the march...

...The defeated progressives then entered a period of swift decline, unable to hold their own against the severe depression of 1921 and 1922 and the increased determination of the American state to secure a political environment in which capitalism could freely operate...

...the true measure of its influence, he suggests, is the degree to which the principles of scientific management seized the imagination of American managers and thus affected their shop-floor supervision...

...Three aspects, in particular, should generate debate...