History or Chronicle?
SELIGMAN, BEN B.
History or Chronicle? ORGANIZED LABOR IN AMERICAN HISTORY By Philip Taft Harper & Row. 818 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by BEN B. SELIGMAN Author, "Main. Currents in Modern Economics" Philip Taft,...
...Taft's book once again demonstrates that the writing of history —any history—requires many more gifts than ordinary Sitzfleisch...
...the unions' fear of Chinese immigration stemmed solely from job fear rather than racist sentiments...
...Eventually, to protect themselves, they were impelled to organize into unions, through which the characteristic market orientation of capitalism could be expressed as pressure for "more and more...
...Professor Taft's industry is prodigious and in some ways quite admirable, but unfortunately he is not able to distinguish between history and chronicle...
...No doubt it will be an important source for those who want to verify obscure facts about labor's past...
...Thus the development of retail and wholesale markets in the 17th and 18th Centuries, thought Commons, explained how it was that workers were separated from their tools to become mere employes...
...I may be forgiven perhaps one somewhat personal observation: My own organization, the Retail Clerks International Association— one of the larger affiliates of the AFL-CIO—has had a regular and steady growth since 1944 and now speaks for over 400,000 employes in the white collar field...
...the numerous conventions are tabulated and the debates summarized—yet after all the items have been neatly packaged, one still does not really know the place of organized labor in American history...
...My point is this: If the future growth of the American labor movement is to be in the white collar field, as many contend, then ought not labor historians say something meaningful about union developments in that area...
...Unionism's sole function for Taft is in the work place...
...This now archaic interpretation results in a number of curiosities: The Molly Maguires were just a gang of cutthroats and murderers whose actions had no relation to the harshness of their lives in the mines...
...and incidents such as Haymarket really had little to do with unionism and the labor movement...
...Politics affects such matters as minimum wages and labor law as much as it does the decision of a company to resist union demands...
...Organization after organization parades before the reader...
...For it is evident that no line can be drawn between the worker as employe and the worker as citizen, between the union as bargaining agent and the union as social institution...
...American unions, he asserts, always have been exponents of "business unionism" and always have eschewed broad programs of social and political change...
...For bulk and detail, it stands very well next to his huge twovolume history of the AFL published a few years ago...
...after all, he has been publishing books on labor for over 30 years now...
...True, Taft has put all of this into his book and more besides, but at no point is he able to reach the essential spirit that moved men to form themselves into organizations for protection against the crushing burdens of an expanding industrialism...
...Unions can hardly become viable institutions if they limit themselves solely to job issues...
...Commons, it will be recalled, had argued, rather naively, that alterations in market structure underpinned economic change...
...Taft-Hartley was a "non-punitive law which scarcely affected the position of organized labor...
...Despite the several chapters in his book on politics and legislation none of this seems of great import to Taft...
...I really don't know why Taft writes this way...
...Curiously enough, his own recitation belies this judgment: The Workingmens' Party in the 1820s, the old AFL'S concern with legislation, the Farmer-Labor Party after World War I and the present Committee on Political Education suggest that there is more to trade unionism than the old walkingdelegate philosophy...
...At the very least the perceptions of the sociologist, economist and political scientist must be brought to bear on whatever facts are to be exhumed from ancient documents...
...In fact, there are any number of problems confronting unionism today—such as automation—that in no way can be solved through ordinary "business" methods...
...But whether it provides a sense of history, or a feeling for the palpable human thrust that seeks to create a movement, is moot...
...Perhaps the problem stems from his insistence on the continued usefulness of the sort of economic history offered by John R. Commons, one of his revered mentors...
...Yet Taft can find nothing more to say about the RCIA than a slighting reference to an incident that occurred around 1898...
...It is all submerged by a vast flood of isolated facts...
...In existence since 1888, its history is fairly interesting, at least interesting enough to have been the subject of two recent studies as well as innumerable student dissertations...
...And workers willy-nilly must be concerned with taxation, Social Security, housing legislation and the myriad of economic questions perennially weighed by Congressmen...
...the early steel unions had been overly militant at the turn of the century...
...the names of sundry officers are listed...
...There are those who would argue that unions should help meet the broader needs of their members, for only by doing so can they enhance their abilities to organize and to bargain collectively...
...Currents in Modern Economics" Philip Taft, an indefatigable burrower among files, documents, diaries, notebooks, old magazines and other assorted archival artifacts, has produced another enormous chronicle of American labor...
Vol. 47 • September 1964 • No. 19
