This Permanent Minority
BARBASH, JACK
This Permanent Minority American Labor. By Henry Felling. Chicago. 238 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Jack Barbash Professor of Labor Education, University of Wisconsin THIS WORK, brief as it is, is the...
...the agricultural backdrop and its effect on the American style of life...
...A Fellow of Queens College, Oxford, Pelling is a historian by trade and has spent considerable time in the United States...
...The categories under which Pelling has organized his chapters synthesize the main benchmarks in the development of the American labor movement: (1) the reform epoch of the pre-Civil War period...
...Pelling's superior performance is seen in his economical use of words, his straightforward prose style, his feeling for the unfolding of history and his organization of material into meaningful segments...
...There is not, I think, even within the necessary limitations of a brief volume, proper recognition of the collective bargaining history which, after all, made the political and social history meaningful in the first place...
...2) the rise and decline of reform in the Knights of Labor and the order's confrontation of the "captains of industry...
...There could have been a better balance between pre-New Deal and post-New Deal...
...There are some shortcomings...
...It may be that American labor history needs the detachment of the foreign scholar to make it something more than an unordered array of events...
...but it seems to me that the job of historical analysis that needs to be done, particularly by someone as skilled in the historian's craft as Pelling, is to give a sense of history of the last 30 years...
...Also, of the total of nine narrative chapters, two (about one-fifth of the book) are devoted to the labor movement after 1933...
...Not that I discount the importance of pre-New Deal...
...the relatively high wage position of the American worker resulting from the scarcity of labor...
...3) the ascendancy of Gomperism...
...For most purposes Pelling's is an economic and social history of American labor with major, if not almost exclusive, emphasis on the national associations of unions, beginning with the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, the AFL...
...There is a limit to what can be done in 238 pages, and Pelling has done more in his 238 pages than has been achieved by comparable works double or triple in size...
...In the main then, one might say that this is a kind of history of the labor movement from the perspective of federation...
...Reviewed by Jack Barbash Professor of Labor Education, University of Wisconsin THIS WORK, brief as it is, is the best single volume history of the American labor movement available...
...The narrative portion of the book is concluded with a summary chapter called "The Permanent Minority," in which Pelling traces the main currents in the development of the American labor movement...
...Pelling sees these currents as: the heterogeneity of ethnic, racial and geographical characteristics...
...7) mature unionism from Taft-Hartley to Hoffa...
...6) the New Deal upsurge and the push of John L. Lewis...
...From my viewpoint, the most important is the failure to give adequate recognition to the main lines of development in collective bargaining...
...and the lack of class consciousness on the part of the American labor movement...
...4) the "trustification" of American industry, and the challenge of revolutionary unionism up to World War I; (5) the post-World War I rise in the economy and the decline of the labor movement...
...Here is, I think, the guide for the intelligent citizen—and I mean to include here the intelliegnt union member—to an understanding of the American labor movement...
...the CIO and finally the AFL-CIO...
Vol. 44 • October 1960 • No. 41
