Shifting Perspectives on American Exceptionalism: Recent Literature on American Labor Relations and Labor Politics

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 253-274

  Gerber, Larry G ^a  

^a AUBURN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85012520032     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875897005665     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Alan Dawley, “Farewell to àmerican Exceptionalism.’ A Comment,” in Jean Heffer and Jeanine Rovet, eds., Why is There No Socialism in the United States ? (Paris, 1988), 315. Byron E. Shafer, ed., Is America Different ? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford, 1991) Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism : A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996). For recent essays directly challenging the idea of American exceptionalism, see Ian Tyrell, ‘àmerican Exceptionalism is an Age of International History,” American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 1031-55; George M. Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability : Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History,” Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 587-604; Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration” American Quarterly, 45 (March 1993), 1-43; John H. M. Laslett, “The Demise of Exceptionalism? Comparative Labour History in Light of Anglo-American Comparison,” Labour}Le Travail, 36 (Fall 1995), 309-16.
2. Werner Sombart, Why is there no Socialism in the United States ? trans. Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands ([1906] White Plains, NY, 1976) Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York, 1928) Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955).
3. For a sophisticated updating of the Sombart-Perlman analysis of the significance of the early granting of white manhood suffrage, see Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation and the State : Nineteenth-Century England in American Perspective,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York, 1985).
4. Neville Kirk, Labour and Society in Britain and the USA, 2 vols. Capitalism. Custom and Protest, 1780-1850 and Challenge and Accommodation, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, England, 1994) Sean Wilentz, ‘àgainst Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement,” International Labor and Working Class History, 26 (Fall 1984) : 1-24; Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States ? ‘’ History Workshop, 17 (Spring 1984), 57-80.
5. Aristide Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms? ‘’ in Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ, 1986). See also Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, “National Models and International Variations in Labour Management and Employer Organization,” and Keith Sisson, “Employers and the Structure of Collective Bargaining: Distinguishing Cause and Effect,” both in Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., The Power to Manage? Employers and Industrial Relations in Comparative-Historical Perspective (London, 1991).
6. Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms? ‘’ 399-400.
7. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York, 1987) Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1985) Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism : The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1993). For an extended discussion of Montgomery's book, see ‘à Symposium on The Fall of the House of Labor,” Labor History, 30 (Winter, 1989), 93-137. Peter Shergold's work also undermines the assumption that American workers prior to World War I enjoyed a consistently higher standard of living than workers in Britain. Peter Shergold, Working-Class Life : The ‘àmerican Standard ‘’ in Comparative Perspective, 1899-1913 (Pittsburgh, 1982).
8. Kirk, Labour and Society, Vol. ii, 5.
9. Fink, Workingmen's Democracy, 5. For a similar view, see Gary Marks, Unions in Politics : Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 41, 199-200.
10. In Britain, 12 percent of potential union members actually belonged to unions; in the United States the figure was 11 percent. George Sayers Bain and Robert Price, Profiles of Union Growth: A Comparative Statistical Portrait of Eight Countries (Oxford, 1980), 39, 88.
11. Leon Fink, “Labor, Liberty, and the Law: Trade Unionism and the Problem of the American Constitutional Order,” Journal of American History, 74 (December 1987), 916; Paul K. Edwards, “The Political Economy of Industrial Conflict: Britain and the United States,” Economic and Industrial Democracy, 4 (1983), 461-500. The phrase “collective laissez-faire ‘’ comes from Otto Kahn-Freund, Britain's leading student of industrial relations. For a thorough discussion of Kahn-Freund's ideas, see Paul Davies and Mark Freeland, Labour Legislation and Public Policy : A Contemporary History (Oxford, 1993).
12. Gary M. Fink, Labor's Search for Political Order : The Political Behavior of the Missouri Labor Movement 1890-1940 (Columbia, Missouri, 1973) Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana, IL, 1987) Julia Greene, “The Strike at the Ballot Box’ : The American Federation of Labor's Entrance into Election Politics, 1906-1909,” Labor History, 32 (Spring 1991), 165-92. Even an older, more traditional study, Marc Karson, American Labor Unions and Politics 1900-1918 (Carbondale, IL, 1958), presents evidence to counter the image of a strictly non-political AFL.
13. Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (London, 1963), 264.
14. Ross McKibbin, “Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain,” in McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class : Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950 (Oxford, 1990).
15. Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms?,” 426-27; Greene, “Strike at the Ballot Box,” 180.
16. William E. Forbath, “Courts, Constitutions, and Labor Politics in England and America: A Study of the Constitutive Power of Law,” Law and Social Inquiry, 16 (Winter 1991), 1-34; and Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement; Victoria Charlotte Hattam, “Unions and Politics : The Courts and American Labor, 1806-1896” (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987) Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993). Forbath and Hattam differ on a number of points of interpretation, but their common focus on the critical role played by the courts in depoliticizing the American labor movement is far more significant than any of their differences. For a related argument that puts the power of courts in an even broader perspective, see Karen Orren, Belted Feudalism : Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (New York, 1991).
17. Roy Lewis uses the term “abstentionist ‘’ in “The Historical Development of Labour Law,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, 14 (1976), 1-17; Klarman, “Judges Versus Unions.'’
18. Daniel R. Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana, IL, 1995) highlights the similarity between the AFL position in favor of “collective laissez-faire ‘’ with the attitude of the Victorian-minded American entrepreneurs who founded the American Anti-Boycott Association.
19. Marks, Unions in Politics, 233.
20. Marks, Unions in Politics, 204-10. Marks notes one important exception to the generalization that craft unions tend to be non-political. He argues that unions of craft workers whose particular skills are becoming obsolete, or who work in an industry whose product market is collapsing, may also turn to politics out of desperation. Industrial unionists, as Larry Peterson has pointed out, could also provide the social base for a revolutionary syndicalism that repudiated politics. Lary Peterson, “The One Big Union in International Perspective: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 1900-1925,” in James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900-1925 (Philadelphia, 1983).
21. Marks, Unions in Politics. For a similar, but less fully developed, interpretation of the importance of craft union domination of the AFL, see Ruth L. Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor: The New Deal Era (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978), 55-58; and George G. Higgins, Voluntarism in Organized Labor in the United States, 1900-1930 ([1945] New York, 1969).
22. Marks, Unions in Politics, 212-17. Fink and Voss both see the defeat of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s as a turning-point in the history of the American labor movement because it served to discredit the supporters of non-craft based unionism.
23. Sanford M. Jacoby, àmerican Exceptionalism Revisited : The Importance of Management,” in Sanford M. Jacoby, ed., Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers (New York, 1991).
24. Voss, Making of American Exceptionalism, 232. Voss, in fact, claims that when confronted with the challenge posed by the inclusive unionism of the Knights, employers who in normal circumstances were loathe to co-operate with each other, were willing to collaborate in efforts to crush the movement.
25. Lloyd Ulman, “Who Wanted Collective Bargaining in the First Place ? ‘’ in Thirty-Ninth Annual Proceedings of the Industrial Relations Research Association (New York, 1986) Adams, Industrial Relations Under Liberal Democracy.
26. William Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA, 1990) Howard F. Gospel, Markets, Firms, and the Management of Labour in Modern Great Britain (Cambridge, 1992). See also Jeffrey Haydu, Between Craft and Class : Skilled Workers and Factory Politics in the United States and Britain, 1890-1922 (Berkeley, 1988) and “Trade Agreements vs. Open Shop: Employers’ Choices before WWI,” Industrial Relations, 28 (Spring 1989), 159-73; Bernard Elbaum and Frank Wilkinson, “Industrial Relations and Uneven Development: A Comparative Study of the American and British Steel Industries,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 3 (1979), 275-303; Keith Sisson, The Management of Collective Bargaining : An International Comparison (Oxford, 1987) Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, “National Models and International Variations in Labour Management and Employer Organization,” in The Power to Manage?
27. Sisson, The Management of Collective Bargaining, 174-79.
28. Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms? ‘’, 438-41; Robert L. Heilbroner, The Economic Transformation of America (New York, 1977), 146-47. Britain actually had a higher percentage of its entire working population involved in the tertiary sector than the United States (40 percent as compared to 35 percent). However, when one excludes the large number of Americans (33 percent of the population) working in the primary sector (agriculture), 56 percent of the remaining non-agricultural labor force was employed in the tertiary sector, whereas in Britain the figure was 47 percent. These statistics are derived from Zolberg, 441; and George Sayers Bain, The Growth of White Collar Unionism (Oxford, 1970), 15.
29. Haydu, “Trade Agreements vs. Open Shop” Haydu, Between Craft and Class Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor.
30. Martin J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (New York, 1981). Eugene S. Ferguson, “The American-ness of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 20 (January 1979), 3-24.
31. Haydu, “Trade Agreements vs. Open Shop,” 168. Gospel, Markets, Firms, and the Management of Labour, 21, 58, makes a similar point. In 1914, for instance, union density in the construction industry was quite similar for the two nations (approximately 25 percent). Bain and Price, Profiles of Union Growth, 63; Historical Statistics of the United States, 74, 98.
32. Bruno Ramirez, When Workers Fight : The Politics of Industrial Relations in the Progressive Era, 1898-1916 (Westport, CT, 1978).
33. Howell Harris, “Employers’ Collective Action in the Open-Shop Era: The Metal Manufacturers’ Association of Philadelphia, 1903-1933,” in Power to Manage? Harris, Right to Manage.
34. Harris, “Employers’ Collective Action,” 142.
35. David Brody, “Workplace Contractualism in Comparative Perspective,” in Nelson Lichtenstein and Howel John Harris, eds., Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (New York, 1993).
36. Derek C. Bok, “Reflections on the Distinctive Character of American Labor Laws,” Harvard Law Review, 84 (April 1971), 1394-463.
37. Brody, “Workplace Contractualism,” 184.
38. See also Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy : Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945 (New York, 1985).
39. Adams, Industrial Relations Under Liberal Democracy.
40. For a survey of state-labor relations from the 1870s to the 1970s, see Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill, 1994).
41. For useful introductory essays on the development of the new American labor history, see David Brody, “The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of an American Working Class,” Labor History, 20 (1979), 111-26; and David Montgomery, “To Study the People: The American Working Class,” Labor History, 21 (1980), 485-512.
42. For an introduction to recent social science efforts to revitalize interest in the state, see Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York, 1985).