Politics of Economic Decline Book

Well-researched, carefully conceptualized, and clearly written.

Cohen begins by questioning the idea that Chicago in the early twentieth century was dominated by manufacturing corporations employing unskilled workers. Instead, he writes, Chicago's economy was dominated by associations of skilled craftsmen and of small proprietors. In this environment, there were few necessary conflicts between workers and employers; tradesmen valued cooperation, and the boundary between craftsmanship and proprietorship sometimes disappeared entirely. Against this common interest stood the interest of growing national corporations and, in many cases, a state anxious to impose complete freedom of contract in the market. The craftsmen and proprietors opposed this encroaching market order by taking political action, but also by combining to exert parallel governmental power over the city.

The craft economy, Cohen explains, operated on a different market model, to which the familiar worker-owner dichotomy typically did not apply. Craft organizations policed the market to ensure fairness, adopting regulations and enforcing them through fines, picketing, and even lethal violence. They also regulated consumption, using intimidation to keep mass-produced goods out of ethnic shops in the city. The largest public confrontations, such as the Building Trades Lockout of 1900 and the Teamsters' Strike of 1905, pitted highly skilled craft workers against modern corporations that would not abide by their standards of fairness. During these confrontations, both corporate executives and craft union leaders competed to convince the public that their own positions were in line with progressive reform values. In this environment, the unions were frequently damaged by charges of corruption and lawlessness. But their organizations survived, and paradoxically, talk of corruption tended to reinforce the public's idea that there could be such a thing as legitimate union governance.

Cohen explains that as the technical legal charge of "conspiracy" to fix prices was replaced in public discourse by the more sensational moral charge of "racketeering," the legislators and the public came to accept the legitimacy in principle of union organizing. So did a later generation of New Deal intellectuals, who were intrigued by the cooperative values of tradesmen and who believed that the Great Depression had discredited the competitive values of large corporations. (They also suspected that the escalating violence of the 1910s and 1920s revealed the necessity of a legitimate avenue for the settlement of labor grievances.) During the Depression, therefore, the Roosevelt administration experimented with the cooperative model in federal legislation like the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which ended the federal government's commitment to free competition. The new Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934 facilitated this shift by defining racketeering as a corruption extrinsic rather than intrinsic to unions; the federal government was now committed to protecting labor from racketeers, not prosecuting labor leaders as economic conspirators. Thus, the national government folded labor organizing into a reformist American consensus that owed as much to tradesmen's resistance to the modern market as to progressive intellectualism or corporate orderliness. The labor movements may not have achieved a radical political or economic transformation in the United States, but their efforts did shape American life in their own day and for decades to come.