The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 - Hardcover

Montgomery, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521225795 ISBN 13: 9780521225793

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1987

Synopsis

This book studies the changing ways in which American industrial workers mobilised concerted action in their own interests between the abolition of slavery and the end of open immigration from Europe and Asia. Sustained class conflict between 1916 and 1922 reshaped governmental and business policies, but left labour largely unorganised and in retreat. The House of Labor, so arduously erected by working-class activists during the preceeding generation, did not collapse, but ossified, so that when labour activism was reinvigorated after 1933, the movement split in two. These developments are analysed here in ways which stress the links between migration, neighbourhood life, racial subjugation, business reform, the state, and the daily experience of work itself.

About this title

Product Description

The Fall of the House of Labor The changing ways in which American industrial workers mobilised concerted action.

Review

"David Montgomery...both exemplifies and transcends the recent trend toward painstakingly detailed social history...he has undertaken a far vaster project than most contemporary labor historians would attempt: American labor activism of all varieties and locales, from the time when American workers organized the first tentative but recognizable trade unions, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the emergence of the working class as an insurrectionary force during the first two decades of the twentieth century, to its humiliating defeat in the years following the First World War...the closest thing we have...to E.P. Thompson's monumental book, The Making of the English Working Class." Barbara Ehrenreich, in The Atlantic

"...the most sweeping portrait of working-class life to emerge from the new labor history...a subtle, complex, often brilliant study..." Alan Brinkley in the New Republic

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0521225795
• ISBN 13: 9780521225793
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 508