Reviews for Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940

The average rating for Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-16 00:00:00 Gunnar Richter An eye-opening look at the intertwined worlds of labor unions, trade associations, and organized crime in the early 20th century. The focus, however, is on labor history, and it is here that Cohen makes his greatest contributions. He portrays many of Chicago's teamsters, builders, and service-sector workers as valiant though often over-eager unionists who were trying to protect the limns of an old craft economy against an encroaching corporate modernism. There's something to that, but in actuality most of the labor leaders he discusses come across as no more than violent thugs and selfish extortionists. This is not his intention, but it is still fascinating. Even today many of their actions have the power to shock. In Cohen's story, Chicago's economy changed when old-time crooks and "sluggers" became wrapped up in the union hierarchy and were turned into professional hit men or "muscle" in the early twentieth century. One tough testified that in 1903 he was paid $25 by the Brass Molders Union for every "scab" he "incapacitated." During the Building Trades Lockout of 1899, the newspaper reported over 250 assaults on scabs, thirty serious injuries, and four deaths. In typical union fashion, however, many of their violent disputes were with each other. In 1911 the United Association of Plumbers hired a professional slugger, James Ragen, to shoot a member of the rival International Association of Steam Fitters, an organization that the UAP had tried to expel from the AFL six years earlier. All this violence had a point. It allowed unions to create a state within a state, with their own arbitration courts, policemen (in the form of "business agents"), fines, punishments, and appeals. The goal was inevitability to monopolize a certain industry through overarching deals with trade associations, to prohibit competition, and to raise prices. The results were lamentable. In the 1920s the Chicago Federation of Musicians forced movie theaters to continue carrying four musicians in each of their pits after the introduction of sound in 1927. In the early part of the that decades unions also forbid the use of steel doors in fire exits in apartment building (because they took away carpentry jobs), enamel on cabinets (the work was performed out of state), and the sale of milk at the grocery store. Yes, with our idealization of the old-fashioned milkman, few today know that in 1933 these white-capped delivery boys overturned trucks and sabotaged inventory in a wide-ranging milk strike to enforce an agreement against "retail" milk at groceries. It largely worked. Cohen's larger stories about the craft-workers' unions becoming models for the National Industrial Recovery Act have some merit (Raymond Moley, an author of the act, certainly celebrated them in a New York Times Magazine article in 1930), but not much, and neither do many of his other contentions (that "racketeering" became merely an anti-union term of abuse, for instance), but in this book he offers a glimpse at an extremely complicated world, now largely lost to contemporary Americans.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-04 00:00:00 Mark Abrahim 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.