The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
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the working class before they were asked: the American Exceptionalism Argument. As I summarized in a previous work, “One of the favorite tasks of American historians has been to explain why the United States, alone among the nations of the western world, passed through the industrial revolution without the establishment of a class consciousness and an independent working-class political movement.” 10 Not surprisingly, the verdict of this older comparative tradition, most commonly associated with Werner Sombart’s 1906 Why Is There No Socialism in America? thesis, did not appeal politically to a generation of historians looking for embers of insurgency under native soil. 11 Beyond ideology, moreover, the method of the comparative approach favored by sociologists and political scientists, proved geographically as well as historically stilted. Whatever the focus—cheap land, the cult of individualism, early mass suffrage, a heterogeneous labor force, the federal separation of powers, application of brute force, etc.—exceptionalist arguments assumed the autonomy of action within the individual nation-state. In short, they assumed that what happened (politically) in Germany, England, and/or the U.S. stayed there, as irreducible functions of particular in-country configurations of power, ideology, and the like. In the end, once a new generation of social historians in Europe as well as America cast doubt on the ideal-typical “class-conscious” proletariat of classic Marxism—that is, it didn’t seem to exist anywhere—they also inadvertently undermined the motive for large-scale comparative work. 12
Aside from fending off a stultifying “internationalist” model of working-class development on the Left, the New Labor Historians had additional reasons, at once personal and political, to stress the indigenous nature of American labor and radical developments. Undoubtedly, the McCarthyism of the early 1950s cast a shadow of illegitimacy and conspiracy on any radical political project that was assigned a foreign origin, let alone sustained international inspiration. But there was something more. As intellectual historian David S. Brown emphasizes, the immigrant (and especially Jewish-immigrant) children who first advanced the new history “from below” were sensitive to their own distance from the American political heartland, and hence eager to bridge the gap. The University of Wisconsin at Madison, in particular, with deep roots in the nation’s progressive past, helped a new generation of students, including many “red diaper babies” from New York Jewish families, to redefine the central themes of American history around the democratic yearnings of ordinary working people. Not surprisingly, two journals closely tied to an emergent New Left scholarship—Studies on the Left (1959) and Radical America (1967)—emerged from Madison.
My own beloved adviser, Herbert Gutman, exemplified this trend. Raised in Queens in a radical Yiddish-speaking household, his pursuit of the American working-class experience, begun at Columbia University (where he completed an M.A. under Richard Hofstadter in 1950), did not catch fire until he transferred to Madison for his Ph.D. “The Madison years,” he would later recall, “made me understand that all my left politics had not prepared me to understand America west (or even east) of the Hudson River. Not in the slightest.” 13
For Gutman, as for a spreading host of New Labor Historians, the American industrial landscape itself thus proved a sufficiently broad and complex tableau to understand both the origins of Gilded Age labor conflicts as well as the source of ideological opposition (commonly identified with American “labor republicanism”) to the power of anti-democratic elites. These skillful social historians, of course, painstakingly documented the role of immigration in U.S. class formation, and they were not unmindful of the contributions of foreign-born socialists and anarchists in American-centered struggles. Yet, waging their own intellectual war against a consensus-minded generation of scholars who had preceded them, they focused on the domestic roots of popular resistance and rebellion. As James R. Green explained in a preface to his influential study of early twentieth-century radicalism in the Southwest, “One of the most important objectives of this study is to describe the forgotten men and women who made the movement such a strong indigenous expression of socialism.” 14
Politically, of course, the valence of nationalism/internationalism has shifted in the last few decades rather remarkably across the political spectrum. Pressed by multinational investment interests, nationalist walls of tariff protection, immigration restrictions, and, alas, labor standards as well, have all tumbled. Much weakened, the U.S. labor movement (together with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to which it attaches itself), desperate for alternatives, generally embraces internationalist cooperation and even global labor standard-setting as a response to the competitive “race to the bottom.” A purely nationalist and populist discourse is now far more common on the political Right than the political Left. 15 At the same time—and hastened by the “liberation” of formerly Communist state economies into the global capitalist marketplace—competitive pressures on European regimes have also narrowed the differences in labor and social welfare policies among the very countries whose relatively buoyant Social Democracy had once seemed to distinguish them from the free market American Exception.
However ambiguous the result from a political point of view, the current moment is a most auspicious one for rethinking American labor history through a more internationalist lens. By widening the camera angle spatially, we not only gain access to a comparative range of outcomes among contemporary national actors, but also can better zero in on the historical what, when, and why that made the U.S. record peculiar (if not outright exceptional). As suggested above, historians of all fields are helping to shape the contours of a more capacious transnational or comparatively internationalist history. My approach here tends to slither between transnationalist (how historical forces at any given moment crossed and/or superseded single-country boundaries) and comparative (how similar challenges received distinct treatment in different nation-states) analysis. What I hope I have kept consistent, however, is a “grounded globalism,” that is, attention to specific context at discrete moments in time. 16
This, at least, is my charge in the following set of essays. I say “essays” in the disparate plural rather than “book” in the unified singular, because it is a more accurate account of the genesis of the project. I spent an initial period of work combing through both older and newer historiography in labor, business, and political history looking for entry points that might prove at once productive and provocative in reexamining the distinctiveness of American institutional development. Based on my own tastes and tests of significance, I ended up with five research inquests that each took on a life of its own. While all the essays relate to central themes of American labor and working-class history—strikes, industrial relations, labor law and the state, radical and reform thought, political movements—they do so in new and perhaps unexpected ways. Each chapter, moreover, engages the “world” theme by a collective different angle; they focus, in turn, on ideas, action, institutions, policy, and political movement culture. In their very selectivity, of course, the essays inevitably slight other major themes of the period. Fortunately, readers will find excellent, and more pointed treatment of such subjects as race, gender, immigration, and imperial exploits elsewhere. 17
Societies, like individual souls, do not live by bread (or material reproduction) alone. Rather, they are sustained by belief systems backed up by a legal framework. In Chapter 1 I argue that the concept of “free labor”—vouchsafed by Union victory in the Civil War—has served as a key pillar of both modern-day labor law and social stability. Although the source of continuous contest among competing social groups, American freedom at the workplace, as crucially adjudicated by the Supreme Court, has overwhelmingly tilted towards individual property rights at the expense of larger community standards. What this means in practice for the labor movement and the larger political culture, I try to illustrate by comparison with France, a society whose dedication to “liberty” was also sealed in revolutionary sacrifice.
Another sort of sacrifice, this one demanded of the thousands of men and women involved in the great Gilded Age strikes, beckons in Chapter 2. Here, we can observe the contest over the nature and limits of American freedom played out in real time. In reconsidering a decade of iconic conflicts—Homestead in 1892, Pullman in 1894, and the anthracite coal strike of 1902—I choose to focus