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mattrohn's review
informative
medium-paced
4.0
In this book Leon Fink breaks down the barrier between the periods typically called the
Gilded Age and the Progressive Era to present a continuous period of heightened labor-capital
conflict as new technologies and new trusts drove rapid industrial and urban expansion around
the turn of the twentieth century. The Long Gilded Age attempts to contextualize the American
labor movement as only one set of outcomes within a self-consciously international labor
movement playing out across the U.S., Europe, and the British dominions, and move beyond the
implicit assumptions of atomized and isolated national labor traditions present in most
exceptionalist histories of American labor in this period. In examining why this set of American
outcomes were distinct the author focuses not only on material conditions, but also the role of
culture and law, and how they shape the structures in which people operated and the kinds of
choices they made.
Most significantly, free labor ideology, coming out of abolitionism and to a lesser extent
Western expansion, provided the U.S. legal system with strong frameworks disadvantaging the
U.S. labor movement and made many workers skeptical of collective rights frameworks and of
operating in tandem with the state, such as mandatory arbitration arrangements which became
prominent in other countries during this era. Other countries had a stronger “corporate idiom” to
discuss collective rights mediated through the government, but the emancipatory origins of “free
labor” ideas and strong linkages to American ideas of individualistic rights gave these ideas
immense staying power even in the face of rising labor activism, morphing into ideas like the
“right to work” for strikebreakers.
Examining major strikes around the turn of the twentieth century and the eventual
opposition of much of the American labor movement to formal arbitration arrangements between
workers and business, the strategic decisions of labor leaders come to center stage.
Contemporary labor movements in other countries (particularly the U.K., Australia, and New
Zealand) are used as examples of the roads not taken by American labor, sometimes on grounds
as broad as whether unions ought to operate through state structures, and sometimes on grounds
as narrow as which kind of rail shipments the Pullman railroad strike should have targeted for
disruption.
Lastly, ideas from abroad shaped the course of the American movement. Socialist ideas
with a romantic foreign appeal drew a young generation of Americans into support for new
political movements and created a basis for community identity, even if the U.S. never
developed a durable labor party. Meanwhile, the modern university system, imported from
Germany, created the infrastructure for a new generation of professionalized social scientists and
policy experts whose work denaturalized conservative assumptions about the market, free will,
and the place of the state, and opened doors to a wave of social and economic reform policies,
Conservative pressure from the universities eventually limited the radicalism which these new
experts were free to express, giving them a limited window to pursue transformational ideas,
many of which would not reach fruition until the New Deal.
Gilded Age and the Progressive Era to present a continuous period of heightened labor-capital
conflict as new technologies and new trusts drove rapid industrial and urban expansion around
the turn of the twentieth century. The Long Gilded Age attempts to contextualize the American
labor movement as only one set of outcomes within a self-consciously international labor
movement playing out across the U.S., Europe, and the British dominions, and move beyond the
implicit assumptions of atomized and isolated national labor traditions present in most
exceptionalist histories of American labor in this period. In examining why this set of American
outcomes were distinct the author focuses not only on material conditions, but also the role of
culture and law, and how they shape the structures in which people operated and the kinds of
choices they made.
Most significantly, free labor ideology, coming out of abolitionism and to a lesser extent
Western expansion, provided the U.S. legal system with strong frameworks disadvantaging the
U.S. labor movement and made many workers skeptical of collective rights frameworks and of
operating in tandem with the state, such as mandatory arbitration arrangements which became
prominent in other countries during this era. Other countries had a stronger “corporate idiom” to
discuss collective rights mediated through the government, but the emancipatory origins of “free
labor” ideas and strong linkages to American ideas of individualistic rights gave these ideas
immense staying power even in the face of rising labor activism, morphing into ideas like the
“right to work” for strikebreakers.
Examining major strikes around the turn of the twentieth century and the eventual
opposition of much of the American labor movement to formal arbitration arrangements between
workers and business, the strategic decisions of labor leaders come to center stage.
Contemporary labor movements in other countries (particularly the U.K., Australia, and New
Zealand) are used as examples of the roads not taken by American labor, sometimes on grounds
as broad as whether unions ought to operate through state structures, and sometimes on grounds
as narrow as which kind of rail shipments the Pullman railroad strike should have targeted for
disruption.
Lastly, ideas from abroad shaped the course of the American movement. Socialist ideas
with a romantic foreign appeal drew a young generation of Americans into support for new
political movements and created a basis for community identity, even if the U.S. never
developed a durable labor party. Meanwhile, the modern university system, imported from
Germany, created the infrastructure for a new generation of professionalized social scientists and
policy experts whose work denaturalized conservative assumptions about the market, free will,
and the place of the state, and opened doors to a wave of social and economic reform policies,
Conservative pressure from the universities eventually limited the radicalism which these new
experts were free to express, giving them a limited window to pursue transformational ideas,
many of which would not reach fruition until the New Deal.
More...