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

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David Montgomery analyzes the United States between 1865-1925 in terms of the conflicting social classes that fought for control of industry and labor relations. He argues that class consciousness permeated all levels of social interaction both inside and outside of the workplace. Labor struggles with management about working conditions, wages, and for control of the shop floor. Montgomery focuses on the workers' lives in his investigation of this battle.

Montgomery delineates three different type of workers in the nineteenth century. Skilled workers, such as iron puddlers, maintained a degree of control over the workplace because of their specialized knowledge. Common laborers, such as railroad builders, provided the muscle that shaped industrial America. They exerted power because industry depended on them to survive. Operatives, or unskilled laborers such as textile workers, filled an interum position. Mostly women, these workers operated under a piecework system and possessed limited power over their jobs. The changes in industrial society reduced the power of skilled craftsmen and swelled the ranks of operatives.

Industry used a variety of methods to transform the workplace in order to marginalize skilled workers and increase the numbers of more easily controlled operatives. Scientific management served to explain, guide, and justify this transformation. Scientific management separated the mental component of commodity production from the actual work. This separation de-skilled workers and decreased their control over the industrial environment. The open-shop drive consolidated middle class opposition to the workers. Their hostility led to the inability of workers to enact reform legislation to remedy managerial encroachments into the shop floor. Welfare capitalism diverted workers attention from collective action and solidified their support for the company rather than class consciousness. Montgomery deplores scientific management, the open-shop, and welfare capitalism because they detracted from labor's traditional control in the workplace and limited their response to the problems of industrialization.

Montgomery's study examines the different kinds of labor and how these affected the laborers' relationships not only to production, but also to unionization. What he has uncovered is a lack of uniformity and no exemplary relationship; instead, the type of work done played a highly influential role, as did myriad other factors such as race, gender, and age.
He has built an immensely impressive body of research and has constructed a powerful study of American labor history. He insightfully separates labor groups and examines them singly: craftsmen; common laborers (or "ditchdiggers"); and operatives. This allows him to construct the clearest picture of turn-of-the-century American workers; instead of approaching them as a uniform, and therefore anonymous, whole. Montgomery's statistics reveal that technological innovations actually increased the number of common laborers needed and used, while it reduced the amount of skilled workers needed, especially in the iron industry. The (very new) electrical industry was the most progressively innovative in all aspects of production and business--though, without the benefit of "Fordism" or mass production--and employed a high number of women. It is this section of his book where Montgomery is most successful at showing the utter lack of conformity from one factory to another, as well as the nearly total absence of job safety. Depending on which factory she worked in, a woman would receive different pay for the exact same work, since it was arbitrarily within the foreman's full discretion. This is indicative of the total lack of coherence, even within the same industries.
Throughout his book, Montgomery acutely delineates how the specific type of work influenced the resultant process of unionization. This meant that the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor required more than just one comprehensive unionization program: what addressed the issues of the iron roller missed the mark for the brick hauler or the filament threader or the cloak maker.
Montgomery has woven together all the disparate worker groups and has created a fuller image of industrialized and industrializing America. There are very few weak spots in his study and they are, for the most part, trifling. What would improve the picture the House of Labor creates is information on "decent" wages and the standard of living. He includes pay amounts, but does not explain how much was needed to support an individual or an average family of five relatively well. Otherwise, he leaves no stone unturned--including immigrants, race, gender, and youth in his egalitarian analysis. Montgomery is accomplished at taking a job and concisely illustrating how that job was created and evolved, producing a clear and linear image of the work. He is likewise successful at explaining the disparateness of the American working class and its unionization, which reveals how socialist political parties never truly developed in the United States. In all, The Fall of the House of Labor is an exceptionally nuanced portrait of turn-of-the-century industrial America.

The fall of the house of labor: The workplace, the state, and American labor activism, 1865-1925 has been described as the late David Montomery's opus magnum, the culmination of an academic life consumed with the study of the history of working people, their organizations (where applicable, for membership in other than "company unions" never exceeded more than one-fourth of American working people during the period the book covers), and their place in American social history. In many ways, unfortunately, such potentially understates Montgomery's superlative ability to sustain intertwining threads of business, cultural, economic, industrial, legislative, managerial, political, social, technological, and working people's histories in creating a contextual framework in which to understand the interrelated events he chronicles.

Nevertheless, per the book's stated intentions (from the author's own Introduction), "No attempt is made here to offer a comprehensive history of American labor struggles. Indeed, some of the most familiar and important episodes, such as the strikes of 1877, the Haymarket affair, the Pullman boycott, the 1902 anthracite strike, the garment workers' uprisings of 1909-11, and the steel strike of 1919, will receive only passing mention. They have had well-deserved attention lavished on them by other historians in the past and will, I hope, enjoy still more research in the future. The narrative history found in these pages is devoted primarily to less well-known chapters in American workers' experience, such as the struggles of textile and garment workers before 1900 and of railroad, mining, and electrical workers after that time. If famous events like the 1892 Homestead strike and the 1914 Colorado miners' strike are treated in detail, it is to learn from them how the relationship between the state and conflict in the workplace was changing."

This is, therefore, neither an "introduction" nor "overview" intended for beginners, who might find Montgomery's earlier Workers' Control In America more accessible in both organization and style. Despite covering some of the same material, occasionally in the same or similar words, its chapters -- deriving from previously published essays -- seem more easily digestible than the longer ones of The Fall.... And, of course, notes for each essay appear at the ends of the chapters, enabling readers of a less scholarly orientation to forestall reading them until convenient or, perhaps, not at all!

Now, I haven't counted the actual number of occurrences, but the name of "Frederick Winslow Taylor, titular father of scientific management..." seemingly appears more frequently in Montgomery's writings than the names of some of the most prominent labor leaders of the period, including Terrence Powderly, Knights of Labor; Samuel Gompers, American Federation of Labor; or "Big Bill" Haywood, Industrial Workers of the World. Indeed, it is "scientific management" as a weapon of industrial capitalism to which, by the end of "the fall," Montgomery attributes a factoring of comprehensive skill sets -- once exclusively possessed and controlled by master and journeyman craftsmen or tradesmen -- into widely disparate skill sets utilized by increasingly distinct laboring subclasses: Highly skilled tool and die, jig, and pattern makers on one hand... and specialized, but minimally trained, machine tenders or "operatives" on the other.

While Montgomery resists any temptation to pun that it was this 'factoring' that made the "factory" what it had become by the mid-1920s, his Introduction also provides a clearer statement of his conclusions than can be found elsewhere in the book: "The history of American workers has not been a story of progressive ascent from oppression to securely established rights, nor has it offered us a past moment of democratic promise that was irretrievably snuffed out by the consolidation of modern capitalism. Their movement has grown only sporadically and through fierce struggles, been interrupted time and again just when it seemed to reach flood tide, overwhelmed its foes only to see them revive in new and more formidable shapes, and been forced to reassess what it thought it had already accomplished and begin again. The taproot of its resilience has been the workers' daily experience and the solidarities nurtured by that experience which have at best encompassed a lush variety of beliefs, loyalties, and activities within a common commitment to democratic direction of the country's economic and political life. The becalmed and beleaguered trade unions of the 1920s had made their peace with a most undemocratic America, one whose economic underpinnings were soon to give way. When working-class activists sought a path out of the depression of the 1930s, they revoked that settlement, reopened controversy over what had been considered accomplished, and began to organize anew on the basis of the ways America's heterogeneous working people actually experienced industrial life."

In the face of that very heterogeneity, it is becoming ever more difficult to make many valid generalizations about American working people as a single class unified by common dreams, goals, or sense of purpose. The message of The Fall... is hardly optimistic. During one period, textile workers are seen as having lost about two-thirds of their strikes. Even so, beneath the seeming pessimism of the surface narrative, the author manages to maintain an undercurrent of abiding and irrepressible faith in, and enthusiasm for, working people and their efforts at self-governance.

Some might find what historian Dana Frank has described as Montgomery's "big arguments" mildly controversial. I, for one, suspect that Montgomery's description of the adoption of Taylorism as a "defensive" strategy of industrialists could inspire a lively chicken-and-egg discussion vis-a-vis the parallel histories of technology, business organization, labor relations, etc., surrounding the central question of who might have fired the first shot in the class war (a term the author consistently eschews in favor of "struggle" or "conflict" [ultimately, as it were, to describe an ongoing conflict of class interests]). Did trade unions, in fact, arise from the medieval craft guilds? As such, they would have represented a continuing and stable repository of traditional craft knowledge and production techniques, while more invasive or obtrusive management techniques would represent an assault on the status quo. Indeed, at the beginning of the period surveyed, Montgomery describes factory owners as somewhat passively parasitic -- They own the means of production and collect a disproportionate share of revenues [relative both to effort expended and relevant expertise], but pretty much leave the management of production processes to those who best understand them, the workers themselves (who often contract and subcontract various tasks, set levels of remuneration for different skills and duties, etc.). But then, from this perspective, capitalism eventually appears to turn ever more aggressive as business owners seek to maximize or, at least, substantially enhance the levels of productive output they can derive from their plants and equipment. Whatever more intrusive forms of management this might entail would, naturally, have been viewed as encroaching on rights and controls previously enjoyed by workers long accustomed to greater autonomy. And, thus, the struggle escalates, with each side ultimately responding in kind to new and evolving challenges from the other. But the question remains: Was management, then, playing defense or offense, during the early to middle stages of mass industrialization?

Regardless of how other readers might answer this question for themselves, The Fall... is a quality book deserving the attention of anyone seriously interested in the field of study. And, of course, in the course of a long and productive lifetime, its author stood at the pinnacle of American labor historians and, no doubt, will long be remembered by many former students as an accomplished and inspiring instructor. In some ways, perhaps, this book represents an enduring legacy for anyone who might not have been fortunate enough to have heard the lectures, enrolled in a graduate seminar, or attended in person one or more of Dr. Montgomery's many public appearances and speeches.