During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the world of American workers abounded in paradox. Technology and division of labor eroded traditional manual skills even as education levels rose. The work day shortened and the use of child labor declined but the pace of work intensified. Life expectancy lengthened, public health advances became commonplace, and improved nutrition produced taller, heavier, and healthier workers. At the same time however, promiscuous use of untested chemicals and unregulated workplace environments gave rise to new deformities and illness. Thousands were annually killed and maimed in America's notoriously unsafe work sites. Wages rose and access to a wide range of consumer goods expanded even as poverty and complaints of exploitation, and alienation remained widespread. Prophets of harmonious industrial relations were never more vocal, yet both system-challenging radicalism and savagely confrontational labor conflict flourished at this dawning of the mass production regime.

It was in these years that the classic industrial proletariat fully emerged. Yet even as the proportion of workers engaged in industrial and related pursuits surpassed for the first time that of agricultural workers, the numbers of men and women doing service, educational, clerical, and communications work spurted even more dramatically. The new kinds of workers needed to make the new industrial system operate at once benefitted and alarmed employers. The millions of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, southern African Americans, and women pouring into the factories, shops, and offices were critical for the success of the mass production regime. At the same time, however, they added diverse and volatile elements to the labor force, often challenging managerial control of the work place and sometimes linking up with veteran labor activists to create potent mass unions. Indeed, during this period, labor organizations both gained unprecedented strength, recognition, and influence, on the one hand, and suffered from harsh governmental repression and unrelenting employer antagonism on the other.

A new century brought new kinds of workplace experiences. The very character of much wage work changed. To be sure, laborers still dug ditches, longshoremen still off-loaded cargo, railroaders still shoveled coal into locomotive fire boxes, and women still stitched garments and toiled as domestic servants. Construction sites retained many traditional work practices. Three-quarters-of-a-million coal miners still burrowed into the earth, relying more on the pick and shovel than on the new cutting machines that had begun to appear. Much agricultural labor remained heavy, tedious, and unmechanized.

But more and more workers now toiled in large, integrated factories and other large work sites. While the number of domestic servants continued to increase, commercial laundries now employed thousands of women. Huge factories equipped power hand tools employed thousands of workers as new systems of labor organization and mass production supplanted traditional methods. In Henry Ford's Highland Park, Michigan, automobile plant, for example, in 1914, the 15,000 power-driven machines on site outnumbered its 13,000 workers. Clerical work, once the province of faithful scriveners and copyists, was being rapidly expanded and reorganized, with thousands of young women using typewriters and calculating machines to process the rivers of data that an increasingly bureaucratic society generated. On the farms, horses and mules were giving way to tractors, trucks, and mechanized farm equipment. It was only with slight exaggeration that Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson observed in 1912 "that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago. . . .We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom. . . ."

At the heart of the restructuring of industrial work particularly lay the incessant effort of employers to reduce costs and increase production. Engineers and managers were determined to restructure the labor process. The metal working trades, by virtue of their role in fashioning the machines that made other machines, were crucial to this process. And it was the proud machinists, whose skill and craft knowledge gave them sovereign power on the shop floor, who often stood in the path of increased managerial control. Only by breaking traditional practices in metal working into simpler, routinized tasks could the engineer take full advantage of a proliferating array of metal-cutting, -shaping, and -boring machines to increase production, reduce costs, and-perhaps most importantly-leach control of the work process itself from the skilled machinist and relocate it in the hands of management. Machinists, declared an influential promoter of this system of "scientific management," Frederick W. Taylor, "must be taught to work under an improved system. . . .Each man must learn how to give up his own particular way of doing things." The good worker, in this view, was no longer the man whose experience and skill enabled him to exercise individual judgment. Rather it was the man who could "adapt his methods to the . . . new standards, and grow accustomed to receiving and obeying directions. . . ." This drive for greater speed of production generated a whole new "science" of time and motion study as engineers observed workers and recorded work processes, often employing motion picture cameras, to determine the "one best way" to perform a given task and to establish standards of speed and efficiency to be applied uniformly by management in controlling, disciplining, and compensating workers.

Nor were these methods of control confined to the machine shops. Variations of Taylor's methods appeared everywhere, as employers sought to increase employee effort and output through division of labor and eradication of customary work routines. Steel makers, for example, introduced powered cranes and conveyors, along with self-regulating furnaces, that usurped the work of skilled puddlers and furnacemen. In the finishing mills, workers who had previously fashioned finished products such as rails and beams from raw material into finished steel products were now tenders of the machines that performed the tasks. Declared a British observer in 1902, "The workmen in America do not act upon their own judgment, but carry out the instructions given to them."

The country's bourgeoning offices, banks, and insurance companies aggressively subdivided work as well. Squadrons of young women recorded, typed, and processed information according to increasingly elaborate managerial directives. "Time and motion study," declared one proponent of office Taylorism, "reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory," and he advised ambitious managers to observe, record, and analyze "every motion of the hand or body, every thought, no matter how simple" of his subordinates so as to maximize office predictability and efficiency.

Certainly, new machines and new methods of organizing work raised production and productivity. Between 1899 and 1925, total manufacturing output tripled. During that span, the nation's workers increased production of paper products by over 400%, chemicals by 370%, and vehicles by over one thousand percent. Even older sectors such as steel and textiles showed remarkable gains. And rising production was accompanied by rising productivity: Farmers and farm workers produced one-third more per man hour in 1925 than they had in 1909, miners 87 percent more, and workers in manufacturing generally 72%. Whole new industries, such as the manufacture of household electrical appliances, arose, with employers such as Western Electric, General Electric, and Westinghouse pioneering in the introduction of managerial and technical innovations.

The rise of mass production raised important questions about the physical and psychological well being of workers. Critics warned that modern mechanical processes deprived workers of a sense of pride in their work and turned them into appendages to machines. Thus, a visitor to one automobile plant likened work on the assembly line to slavery: There stood the worker, wielding his electric rivet gun in endlessly repetitive motions, as the conveyer chain pulled half-finished auto chassis by, hour after hour, "day after day, year after year. . . . The pace never varies. The man is part of the chain, the feeder and the slave of it."

But some evidence contradicted the picture of drone-line automatons facing a bleak and numbing future. What of the substantial increases in the numbers and proportions of workers in managerial, supervisory, and record-keeping functions, for example? Between 1914 and 1917, for example, auto maker Henry Ford tripled the proportion of workers assigned to supervisory in his Highland Park, Michigan plantafter he had introduced the moving assembly line there. Overall in manufacturing industry, the increase in supervisory workers was fifty percent higher than the rise in the number of production workers. Since typically, supervisory positions increasingly entailed considerable schooling, both prior to and during the period of employment, the increase in supervisory employment translated into an elevation of the skill level in the working class. To be sure, old-fashioned craftsmen often ridiculed this new layer of supervisors and foremen, regarding them as merely the bosses' lackeys. But for their part, men whose skills, education, and experience had gained them supervisory positions often looked down on ordinary production workers, valuing the increased job security and opportunities for advancement and greater income that elevation to even the lower ranks of management offered.

The daughters of wage workers benefitted particularly from increased access to education. Starting in the 1890s, the school leaving age steadily advanced. Whereas in 1910, only 9% of age-eligible youngsters had attained a high school diploma, by 1930 almost 30% had graduated. These gains were particularly notable for women-in the first two decades of the century, girls graduated from high school at a rate half again that of boys. Business "colleges," teaching stenography, bookkeeping, and other office skills sprang up everywhere and women enrolling in and graduating from them outnumbered men. By 1910, corporations for the first time were hiring more women than men for office work. The Remington Company, manufacturers of office and business equipment, for example boasted of its role in introducing a generation of young women "to paying positions and the means to a bigger life." Working class families saw the office work and employment as telephone operator, both of which required at least some high-school level education, as important avenues of social advancement for their daughters.

While typists, stenographers, file clerks, and telephone operators might not have possessed the same kinds of skills as machinists and iron puddlers, who was to say that the rising proportion of the labor force that they represented contributed to some overall reduction in the proportion of the work force entitled to the designation "skilled"? Indeed, some observers argued that that term was an unusually slippery and elusive one during a time in which the character and location of wage work was changing so rapidly. Why were male printers classified as "skilled," for example, while female typists, whose duties often included considerable editorial services, were classified as "semi-skilled"? Why was a switchboard operator who wielded her phone plugs with impressive dexterity while dealing judiciously with impatient callers not to be considered "skilled"? Indeed, the definitions of skill that the US Census applied in its decadal surveys of occupations, it often seemed, reflected rested more on the gender or ethnicity of those performing tasks rather than the inherent character of the work performed.

Then too there was the fact that while mass production did indeed entail subdivision of labor, it also boosted demand for the skilled workers who produced, installed, and serviced the great machines that drove the mass production system. Thus, despite innovation, restructuring, and mass production in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the proportion of craftsmen in the labor force remained surprisingly stable. True, by World War I it was more likely that a machinist worked on discrete subassemblies rather than fashioning items from inception to finished product; or he serviced and maintained the complex machinery. Even so, though, the amount of training, skill, and experience needed to install and maintain the huge turbines, milling machines, and generators was considerable, enabling those who performed these tasks actually to increase their wages relative to those of mere laborers and operatives even as their numbers tripled between 1880 and 1910. While some workers lamented the decline of hand craftsmanship, others were proud of their roles in building, installing, and repairing the state-of-the-art equipment that mass production relied upon.

If changes in the character and content of work had a diffuse impact on overall skill levels, they also had diverse effects on the pace, duration, and physical demands of work. Increasing technological innovation, for example, greatly reduced the proportion of workers classified as "unskilled," just as it tended to reduce the use of child labor. As conveyors, motor vehicles, and electronically driven machinery came on line, they erased thousands of jobs that required sheer physical effort. In the steel mills, new machinery eliminated many of the hardest and most dangerous jobs. At the loading docks of one steel mill, for example, power shovels now performed the work of almost 800 men who had hand shoveled the vast piles of iron ore bound for the furnaces, reducing manpower needs by 90%. The mechanical shaping of red-hot iron bars and hand charging an open-hearth furnace eliminated hot, dangerous jobs that, one employer remarked, that had required "gorilla men." Now, increasingly, in steel, autos, and other booming industries, the proportion of workers employed in sheer physical labor and classified as "unskilled" dropped while those classified as "operatives"-that is, machine tenders-rose sharply. Meanwhile, the average work week also declined, falling from 59 hours in 1900 to 50, a 15% drop, by 1925.

But workers, managers, and outside observers alike reported that while less brute physical labor was now required, the pace and intensity of work mounted. Moreover, the increase in supervisory personnel meant that workers' efforts were more closely scrutinized and proscribed. To be sure, a stint in a 19^th century steel mill, dumping iron ore, coke, and limestone into a blast furnace where temperatures routinely reached the 120 degree mark, was, in the words of one worker, like "working aside of hell." But then the work day had typically included long stretches of slack time as well. Doffer boys in the textile factories, whose job it was to keep the weaving machines supplied with spools of thread, spent 11 or 12 hours in the factory but found ample time for horseplay, exchanging gossip, and eating in the stretches between stints. In the cigar factories of Tampa and Ybor City, Florida, cigar rollers set their own pace, relying on their dexterity and craft knowledge to set limits on the effort required. "Lectors" employed and paid by the cigar makers read aloud from newspapers, novels, and labor publications to enlighten and inform the proud cigar makers as they plied their skills.

Now, however, automatic machinery required constant attention. Time, so the saying went, was money, and no modern employer would tolerate stopping the assembly line to allow workers to use the toilet, smoke a cigarette, or pass the time of day. In the cigar factories, machines replaced the hand workers, with young women employed to operate them. destroying the distinctive work culture of the proud cigar rollers. In factory and office alike, observers reported a quickened tempo of work even as the nominal work week declined. In 1914, one journalist visiting Ford's Highland Park plant described what he witnessed in these terms: "It's push and bustle and go. The man behind you may shove his work at you at any moment-you must not hold back. . . . One man fits the parts together so that the bolt holes come right. The next man fits the bolts into place. The next has a pan of nuts before him and all day he scoops them up and with his fingers starts them on the thread of the bolts. The next man has a wrench and he gives them the final twist. . . .There are always more bolts to be capped." "You've got to work like hell at Ford's," a worker explained to an academic observer in the 1920s, "from the time you become a number in the morning until the bell rings for quitting time you have to keep at it."

Employers hired "efficiency experts" to observe workers, clipboard in hand, and then establish an expected time for each task. Accountants then devised complex-and, workers complained, often incomprehensible-payment systems according to the data recorded. Indeed, nothing so reflected the powerlessness and alienation of much mass production work as these "time and motion studies," which workers found demeaning and intrusive. Pressure to keep up with the machine-paced tempo of factory work mounted. Testimony from the ranks of management was eloquent. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., a pioneer in mass production practices in the automobile industry, described the drive for ever greater production as vividly as any of the ordinary workers who toiled in the General Motors plants he commanded: "Speed! . . . Double your capacity. Quadruple it. . . . At times it seemed like madness. . . .The pressure on the production men was desperate."

Despite complaints, celebrants of the new industrial dispensation invoked a world of material plenty and economic security. Declared the paladin of scientific management, Frederick W. Taylor, "In the next hundred years, the wealth of the world is going to grow. . . to such an extent that the workman of that day will live as well, almost, as the high-class businessman lives now. . . ." And indeed workers and their families eagerly embraced the emerging consumer culture. Young people from the rural countryside and mining areas flocked to such new industrial centers as Flint, Michigan and Elizabethton, Tennessee, to work in the auto factories and textile mills. Work was hard and the hours long, but thousands found operating a drill press or tending a rayon-making machine preferable to life on a bleak farmstead or in an isolated mining village. And with the hard work came opportunities for amusement and consumption as the spread of radio, motion pictures, the automobile, and chain stores made available a wide range of new products and, more importantly, new ideas about personal appearance and self-conception. The modern factory, for all its noise and rigor, provided a meeting ground for young workers and for the germination of a new culture centered on urban amusements and recreation.

Indeed, sober social critics feared that affluence and cheap amusements would fatally erode the work ethic and compromise traditional age and gender roles. Parents and moralists worried that the wages paid to working girls would tempt them to ignore established standards of chastity and decorum. Even "good girls," it seemed, used their wages to purchase revealing outfits and patronize the saloons and dance halls, where they learned provocative new dances such as the "shimmy." "What particularly distinguishes this dance," reported one censorious observer, "is the motion of the pelvic portions of the body," which served as a graphic reminder of the dance's origins in houses of ill repute. Even more innocent pleasures drew disapproval. Thus, on a visit in 1915 to booming Minneapolis, progressive journalist Ray Stannard Baker complained of ordinary workers having "Too much money, too easily had, too much pleasure, not earned." He was outraged at the specter of "common people rolling carelessly and extravagantly up and down. . . in automobiles. . . drinking unutterable hogsheads of sickly sweet drinks. . . " and generally losing sight of the solid virtues of hard work and seriousness of purpose. Another muckraking journalist, Lincoln Steffens, no apologist for capitalism, was more positive about the emergence of a "New Era" of consumer abundance, declaring that "Big business in America is producing what the Socialists held up as their goal; food, shelter and clothing for all."

Even so, however, broad swathes of poverty and bleak prospects continued to characterize much working class life. Real wages edged upward, but most male workers could not support their families on their income alone. Wives took in laundry, looked after boarders, and stitched garments at home. School attendance rose steadily, but still thousands of children trudged off to work at 12 or 13, if not earlier. Unemployment regularly visited workers and their families, in any given year afflicting as much as one-third of the labor force. During periods of general economic downturn, such as during the depressions of 1907, 1913-14, and 1921-22, it devastated neighborhoods and paralyzed entire cities. As late as the mid-1920s, over half of working class homes lacked indoor plumbing. Even as life expectancy rose-from 52 years (at birth) to 59 between 1911 and 1930-workers and their families normally lacked regular medical care. Hundreds of thousands of workers and their families still lived in urban slums and rural hovels.

Consider, for example, workers in Florida's phosphate pits, located in the rural area on the outskirts of Tampa. White men who operated the machinery toiled 12 hour days while black laborers stood thigh-deep in water digging phosphate. Bat guano contaminated the drinking water. Indoor plumbing in the company-provided houses was rare. Open-pit cesspools were ever cleaned, "unless," one worker testified, "a hog comes along and stirs it up." The children of white workers had a dangerous two-mile walk; black children had no school at all. Nor were dismal conditions unique to the "backward" South. As late as the mid-1920s, in the steel mills of Gary, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, an 84-hour work week was the norm, while auto workers found that high hourly wages hardly compensated for irregularity of employment and the effects of repetitious, high-speed assembly line production on nerves and muscles.

For thousands of workers in early twentieth-century America, even these conditions would have been an improvement. On farms and plantations, in the southern turpentine camps, and in western mines and construction sites many men and women toiled as convicts, contract laborers, farm tenants, and debt-restricted captives. Tenant farming and share cropping kept thousands of southern farm workers, both black and white, in conditions of virtual peonage. During the early years of the century, at any given time 10,000 prisoners, 90 percent of them African Americans, were working under guard on the roads and public works of the southern states. Indeed, states such as Georgia became notorious for the selective arrest black men for trivial offenses and for forcing them to work under brutal conditions.

State and local authorities helped lubricate the system of peonage that prevailed in the turpentine camps of Florida and elsewhere in the South. Men convicted of even minor offenses were leased out to employers in the isolated pine forests, where they often worked under armed guards under dismal and unhealthy conditions. Local sheriffs and constables received a fee for supplying prisoners and for apprehending those fleeing from the camps, many of whom were in effect serving indeterminate sentences because of the debts they incurred in the camps owing to the exorbitant prices charged for food, shelter, and medical attention. Most of these men were African American but in the construction of the Florida East Coast Railroad early in the century it was European immigrants, recruited by labor contractors in New York, who toiled for minimal compensation and under unspeakable conditions. A federal investigator reported that in the Florida Keys "the men were obliged to sleep on the bare rocks; . . . the mosquitoes were poisonous and many men became ill. . . ." Workers were charged for drinking water and threatened-and sometimes killed-by pistol-wielding foremen. With her gulag of turpentine camps and her widespread resort to peonage in agricultural and construction work, early twentieth-century "Florida," declares historian Pete Daniel, "looked like a massive slave-labor camp. . . ." In the West, labor contractors funneled newly arriving immigrants to mine operators, construction combines, and farmers under circumstances that amounted to servitude.

Unlike bound laborers, however, workers who were dissatisfied with their treatment or compensation had the option of quitting work and seeking better employment. Most private employment was on an "at will" basis. This meant that either party, the employer or the worker, could terminate employment without advance notice. To defenders of the capitalist economic system as it had developed in the US, "at will" employment arrangements provided workers with all the protection they needed against harsh, unscrupulous, or tight-fisted employers. Thus, during the upward swing of the automobile industry in Detroit and nearby Flint, Michigan, jobs were plentiful and work could be had for the asking. Noted one observer, it was common for a worker "to quit his job in the morning and find employment in another factory at noon." Even so, however, many workers, the right to quit an obnoxious job often proved illusory. Leaving a job was risky, with protracted unemployment a real possibility. For a man with a family, it often entailed moving house, disrupting schooling and domestic life, and losing touch with neighbors, friends, and family members, to say nothing of undergoing the stress and inconvenience of starting fresh with a new employer and new work mates.

Still, an increasing number of major industrial employers were finding that the recruitment and retention of reliable workers was a significant problem for them. During periods of economic expansion especially, thousands of workers exercised their "at will" rights by walking off their jobs and finding others. The onerous nature of much mass production work led to problems of labor turnover. Henry Ford found this to be true in his large Highland Park (Detroit) facility, where the unrelenting pace of work and the harshness of shop floor discipline drove workers out of the plant almost as rapidly as he could find replacements. In 1913, for example, Ford's turnover rate was 370%, which meant that to sustain its daily average labor force of 13,600 over the course of the year, Ford had to hire some 52,000 persons. Moreover, over 70 percent of those leaving simply walked off the job, without notice, making the job of the employment department particularly difficult. "The long employment line in front of the Ford plant," noted a contemporary observer of the Detroit scene, "had become one of the sights to whet the curiosity of 'rubber neck' tourists." And turnover of these dimensions was expensive because even machine operators had to be trained, to say nothing of the disruption and down time that inevitably occurred when workers failed to report.

A growing number of employers responded to the problem of turnover with innovative programs of recruitment and retention. In 1914, Ford himself dramatically announced the inauguration of "the five dollar day," holding out a level of compensation to those workers who qualified about double the ordinary labor rate. Employers came to realize that even the routine work of the modern factory was performed better by workers who felt some attachment to their employers. Continuity and stability in the labor force made for more efficient and higher quality work and greater productivity. In addition to offering wages above prevailing street norms, companies began removing the arbitrary power to hire and fire from front-line foremen and instituting employment offices to screen and monitor new employees. Some provided medical, banking, and recreational services. Others helped workers purchase homes through low-interest loans and employer-sponsored housing developments. A few launched profit-sharing and stock-purchase schemes. Employers in the expanding southern textile industry built villages, complete with stores, churches, and schools to attract working families from the surrounding countryside. Employer-provided benefits, declared one leading corporate executive was increasingly necessary "because it is the way men ought to be treated, and . . . because it pays to treat men in that way."

But these evidences of "welfare capitalism" had a number of problematic features. Ford's vaunted five dollar day, for example, turned out to be more an elusive goal than a guaranteed right, as the auto maker used the inducement of high wages to step up production norms even as his Sociological Department grew ever more intrusive in imposing codes of personal behavior and morality on those hoping to become eligible for high-wage status. The textile industry's mill villages were often little more than bleak collections of hastily constructed houses. Employers exercised pervasive supervision, both on and off the job, relying on company-paid clergymen and school teachers to keep workers in line. Even the more benevolent and well-intentioned schemes generally favored only a handful of skilled workers and were often beyond the aspirations of the masses of immigrant, black, and female workers who increasingly made up the labor force.

Meanwhile, the drive for speed and efficiency that marked the mass production regime took a heavy toll. The pace of work on the automobile assembly lines used men up, making an autoworker "old" and often jobless at 45. Poorly understood chemical and industrial processes sickened and maimed workers exposed to them. Miners and textile workers suffered from the effects of inhaling toxic dust. "Phossy jaw," a gradual erosion of facial bone structure, afflicted thousands of match workers, most of them young women. Painting watch and instrument faces with radium-impregnated paint endangered hundreds of New Jersey women, especially since, in the words of one, they were instructed "to put the brush in their mouth to get the best point on it." Petrochemical workers were routinely exposed to lead poisoning, sometimes shaking violently, experiencing hallucinations, and other symptoms. Reporters covering one deadly episode in 1923 wrote of "looney gas" causing refinery workers to become incoherent. Work in coal mines, on the railroads, and on construction sites was often downright lethal: between 1870 and 1920, cave-ins, fires, and explosions killed over 75,000 coal miners. The toll on the railroads was even greater: between 1890 and 1920 86,600 railroad workers died in service. Accidents in steel and iron mills killed over 700 men annually.

The relationship between authoritarian working conditions and workers' vulnerability was gruesomely demonstrated on March 25, 1911 in New York City's garment district. At the Triangle Shirtwaist Company's upper-floor factory on Greene Street, scores of young immigrant women stitched garments in a building that was supposedly fire proof. But late on a Saturday afternoon a fire, apparently caused by oil-soaked rags, exploded on the ninth floor and quickly raced through the work area, consuming highly combustible cloth and wooden furniture. The one fire escape quickly became blocked. Exit doors, earlier barred from the outside to deter workers from leaving their stations, jammed. Panic-stricken girls crowded the windows, the flames roaring behind them. Rescue ladders on the fire trucks were too short to reach upper floors. Horrified onlookers watched as, singly or holding hands, girls leaped to certain death to escape the flames. "It was," wrote a newspaper reporter, "jump or be burned." Lasting only a half hour, the fire left the fire-proof exterior of the Asch Building unscathed but killed 146 Triangle workers, most of them young immigrant women. After it was over, wrote a distraught reporter, "a heap of corpses lay on the sidewalk for more than an hour" and firemen found the bodies of 30 victims clogging the single elevator shaft where they had fled to escape the flames.

The toll of death and injury did spur governmental action, mostly on the state and local level. In New York, lengthy investigations of factory conditions led to improved building codes and more systematic inspections. More generally, efforts to deal with the consequences of workplace illness, injury, and death took the form of legislation providing for "no fault" workers' compensation. Indeed, by 1920, all but five states had passed laws that required employers to compensate those injured or the families of those killed with standardized payments to defray the costs of treatment or burial and to replace a certain percentage of lost wages. These laws supplanted earlier common law doctrines that had required that workers prove employer negligence. Although these compensation laws typically provided only for very limited compensation and although they excluded many workers from their coverage, they quickly proved popular both among workers and employers. Other efforts to provide legal protection for workers, such as laws stipulating workplace safety measures in factories, mines, and workshops, also gained passage during the Progressive Era but the US lagged behind Britain, Germany, and other industrialized countries in enacting legislation dealing with workers' medical needs, pensions, and social services.

Inextricably bound up with the evolving character of the work regime itself was a radical ethnic and gender recomposition of the labor force. The dramatic changes in the content and structure of work would have been impossible without great influxes of new workers to build the factories, operate the machines they housed, transport and sell the goods the machines produced, and process the information that lubricated the whole system. Four main streams of workers supplied the necessary labor: immigrants from Europe; migrants from the southern states; women of all ethnic backgrounds entering the paid labor force; and, after especially World War I, migrants from the Western Hemisphere, notably Mexico. Between 1900 and 1914, about 12,200,00 European immigrants entered the country, about 77% of them from central, eastern, and southern Europe. In the period 1914-1929, a million and a half African Americans left the southern United States for the urban, industrial centers of the East, Mid-West, and West Coast. Between the onset of World War I in 1914 and 1925, the US drew over 1.7 million migrants from the rest of the Western Hemisphere, many of them French-speaking Québécois and Spanish-speaking Mexicans, along with thousands of Mexicans initially residing in Texas and the Southwest. Between 1890 and 1925, both the proportion of the labor force that was female and the proportion of women workers who were married doubled. By the mid-1920s, 9 million women worked for wages, nearly a third of them married.

All of this added up to a massive ethnic and gender reconfiguration the working class. Before the turn of the century, men of Anglo-American, Irish, German, and other northern European extraction had dominated manual work. Most Irish, whose peak of immigration was before the Civil War, were Roman Catholics. The rest, however-native-born Americans and workers of German, English, and Scandinavian stock-fit into the dominant ethno-cultural patterns with relative ease.

The great majority of European immigrants of the pre-World War I era, however, were Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish in religion, and those entering later from Latin America were largely Roman Catholic. Moreover, migrants from eastern, central, and southern Europe, and from Latin America, contrasted sharply in their dress, dietary preferences, communal life, and general cultural identities with both the American-born and northern Europeans. They spoke a bewildering variety of exotic languages. Northward bound African Americans were largely Protestant, and it is also true that in many of their social attitudes and cultural values they closely tracked mainstream "American" outlooks. But African Americans were the almost universal object of prejudice. Indeed, in a text designed to teach "Americanism," one instruction booklet informed European immigrants that black people "came from Africa where they lived like other animals in the jungle."

Even so, of course, the nation came to rely increasingly on these diverse new entrants into the labor force. Meanwhile, journalists, politicians, clergymen, and public moralists worried about the moral and civic implications of such massive intakes of people, whether from Calabria, Lodz, or Alabama. The entry of low-paid young women into cigar factories once the province to skilled rollers bred bitter resentment on the part of displaced craftsmen. Machinists and railroaders lashed out at the "Hunkies" and "Dagos" whose alleged willingness to accept low wages and endure long hours they believed weakened "American" standards. On the other hand, some skilled white workers made a distinction between African American (and Asian) workers on the one hand and Europeans, no matter how alien they seemed, on the other. Slavs, Italians, Hungarians, and others from eastern and central Europe, they believed, could become "white" by adopting Anglo-American workers' values and expectations in a way in which people of color never could. In a sense, in the 19^th century the Irish had "become" white as they moved into the labor force and as they began to exert political power and gain positions of leadership in the trade unions. The Irish, in turn, were teaching Italians, Greeks, and Slavs the meaning of whiteness, a major component of which was hostility toward the racial "others," Asians and African Americans.

Thus, the influx of large numbers of southern black migrants into other industrial centers triggered hostility, which sometimes served ironically as a unifying force among otherwise-divided Caucasian workers. Deadly race riots erupted in northern cities, as white workers sought to keep blacks in menial work and segregated housing. Industrial disputes often pitted worker against worker, with employers exploiting these conflicts so as to thwart solidarity along class lines. "Between the cheap negro labor and the cheap foreign labor," complained one white railroader, "the intelligent American workingman is threatened in his desire to live and enjoy the benefits of our laws. . . ."

In view of these cross currents of conflict, was the "working class" a coherent reality at all? Did the differences in goals, conditions, and interests overbalance consciousness of common class identity? For many white workers, the answer was clear: effective labor activism meant preserving the prerogatives and material conditions of white male workers against the threat of newcomers, be they immigrants, women, or blacks. The brilliant African American sociologist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois gave a name to this view. Native-born and northern-European-derived workers, he declared, enjoyed the "wages of whiteness," that is an unearned premium in opportunity, status, and material reward. Du Bois and other champions of racial and ethnic minorities concluded that the struggle of blacks for access to America's opportunities had to be conducted as much against a tenacious white working class as against employers.

But not everyone shared Du Bois's pessimistic assessment. The ideology of workers' movements dating back to the mid-19th century was egalitarian. As early as 1892, Samuel Gompers, perennial head of the American Federation of Labor, warned that "If we fail to organize and recognize the colored wage-workers we cannot. . . . if common humanity will not prompt us to have their cooperation, an enlightened self-interest should." One of the AFL's largest affiliates, the United Mine Workers, sought with some success to organize workers regardless of racial and ethnic identity and evidences of bi-racial labor activism on the loading docks, timberlands, and elsewhere suggested that racial antagonism might not prove fatal to hopes for greater worker unity. Thus, during the first decades of the century, the question of the "color line"-the mythical but powerful boundary that divided people by racial categories-permeated working-class development in the United States.

White male workers and other guardians of the demographic status quo hoped to restrict the influx of new workers. Thus, the movement to curtail immigration gained strength during this period. Beginning in the late 19^th century, Congressional enactments and informal prohibitions stopped most immigration from Asia. Efforts to curb the flow of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, while initially unsuccessful, were crowned with success in legislation passed in 1924, which imposed a quota system that weighed heavily against people from these regions. Efforts to block the internal migration of African Americans, however, largely failed, despite the efforts of southern planters and northern workers and politicians. A number of states and municipalities enacted laws to bar women from a wide range of occupations.

Meanwhile, churchmen, educators, employers, and government officials sought ways to defuse the challenge to traditional values that these industrial newcomers posed. The public schools would promote citizenship. Foreigners would master the English language, and conform to prevailing moral and material standards of behavior and desire. Employers forced immigrant workers to attend night classes. In Detroit, auto pioneer Henry Ford created a "Sociological Department" whose investigators and educators had the task of Americanizing his polyglot labor force. These men, Ford declared, were "the most wretched class [of workers] . . ., ignorant, . . . most of them unable to speak English." Elaborate graduation ceremonies marked completion of the 72-session course in language, citizenship, personal hygiene, and work habits. In 1916, for example, Ford rented the largest public meeting hall in the city. On the stage stood a replica immigrant ship and in front of it a giant kettle, a "melting pot." As described by a member of the Sociological Department, the ceremony literally stripped the worker of his past identity and gave him a new one: "Down the gangplank came the members of the class dressed in their national garbs. . . [then they descended] into the Ford melting pot and disappeared." Teachers used long paddles to "stir" the pot. Before long, "the pot began to boil over and out came the men dressed in their best American clothes and waving American flags."

However, new entrants into the American working class, whether born in an East European shtel, on a Michigan farm, or a Mississippi plantation had their own agendas. The members of the new labor force were far from passive. Thousands of European immigrants, for example, regarded their sojourn in America as a temporary strategy that would permit them to earn enough money to return home to marry, buy land, or open a small business. Through the first years of the new century, for every three immigrants who entered America, two departed, many never to return. Those who remained continued to assert their cultural identities. In all the major cities, ethnic grocery stores, fraternal associations, insurance and banking services, and churches flourished, reflecting the determination of thousands of new migrants to hold fast to their cultures. African Americans moving northward brought with them their rich religious, musical, and community heritage, as well as the determination to enter into the mainstream of modern America and claim a share of its economic, political, and educational opportunities. For young women, however dreary factory work, the new economy offered prospects of new kinds of personal freedom and cultural experience. Family survival, cultural continuity, personal autonomy, material progress-these not-always compatible goals and ambitions fired the imaginations of the members of this remarkable generation of migrants as they took their places in the factories, offices, and building sites of the mass production regime.

Of course, all was not optimism and possibility. Down along the railroad tracks, in the warehouses, factories, refineries, and metal-bashing work places, and in the working-class neighborhoods, harsh realities dashed sanguine hopes. Blacks encountered pervasive job, housing, and educational discrimination. America's harsh industrial order could cripple and impoverish even the most ambitious immigrant. Low wages and discrimination forced women into bleak marriages and desperate dependency. Cross currents of rivalry and conflict-between men and women, between whites and blacks, between natives and newcomers, between workers and employers-insured that this wrenching recomposition of the American working class would be a contentious process. For the men and women of the labor movement especially, the issue was in doubt as to whether this rapidly changing labor force would remain divided within itself or whether a consciousness of class identity might trump racial, religious, and cultural rivalry.

During the transition to mass production, journalists, clergymen, academics, politicians, reformers, labor activists, and business leaders investigated, analyzed, published, and orated endlessly about "the labor problem." Major governmental investigations, capped by the extensive hearings and reports of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, which sat from 1913 through 1916, stippled these years. At times, disagreements over wages, working conditions, and workers' rights erupted into violent confrontations as the incidence of strikes and other forms of work stoppages rose to a peak during the period 1908-1922. In 1919, three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan warned of "a war of extermination" between workers and employers, while a reporter who had taken industrial jobs to find out "What's on the Worker's Mind" reported that "'Worse than at any time in history'-that seems to be the only way to describe the present [industrial] relations."

For workers dissatisfied with their wages, on-the-job treatment, or conditions of employment, there was an option to quitting-joining a labor union. And indeed union activity was extensive during this period. The main national labor organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), grew in membership from under 300,000 in 1898 to over four million in 1919, while the railroad unions, called brotherhoods, counted an additional three quarters of a million members. In addition to these unions, which largely confined their efforts to improving working conditions and economic standards, there were others that promoted more radical programs of economic and political transformation. Most notable among these was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, whose anti-capitalist agenda and aggressive organizing attracted thousands of recruits in the timber, mining, and large-scale farming operations of the West, along with immigrant workers in some eastern cities. The efforts in this period of workers to form and sustain unions, and the determination of many employers to resist these efforts, bred some of the most protracted, dramatic, and bloody strikes in American history. It is with a good deal of justice that one historian has given this period the title "The Age of Industrial Violence."

Hostile to labor unions per se, some employers nonetheless acknowledged workers' desire to have some degree of representation and consultation in the work place. "Outside" or "independent" unions-that is, unions such as those affiliated with the AFL-were usually objectionable to employers because they actually empowered workers. Some companies sponsored "company unions" and "employee representation plans." Typically, these applied the forms of democracy to the work place while keeping actual power in the hands of employers. Workers were called upon to choose representatives to plant-wide meetings, where they consulted with managers about working conditions and facilities. These meetings were largely confined to matters relating to employee comfort and convenience, such as the food served in the cafeteria, the placement of water fountains, and minor matters of the daily routine. Some corporate managers offered employees the opportunity to register complaints and even to appeal adverse decisions about workplace discipline or disputes about wage payments to the head of the company's personnel office or employment department. Virtually all employer-sponsored representation plans were confined to a particular plant. Nor were dissatisfied workers permitted to consult outside authorities, such as lawyers, government officials, or labor organizers, in pursing grievances.

Labor activists insisted that company unions were not "bona fide" labor organizations. Established and funded by employers, they could not provide an independent voice. Instead, advocates of organized labor urged, workers had to be able to exert autonomous power in their dealings with employers. And it was only through the labor union that they could do this. Labor activists thus regarded the building of strong, independent unions as an extension of America's democratic traditions, to which citizen workers were entitled on the shop floor as they were at the ballot box.

Most of the major strikes and organizing campaigns of this turbulent period involved the keyissue of union recognition. Employers might bend on wages and even on some aspects of work routines. But to most turn-of-the-century employers, formal recognition of the union implied unacceptable infringements on the employer's right to conduct business. To labor activists and employers alike, the term "union recognition" required granting the union the exclusive right to speak and bargain for workers. In trades such as carpentry, electrical work, and machine work, the notion of a closed shop-the requirement that an employer hire none but union men-was predicated in part on a system of apprenticing and union-supplied worker. The employer or contractor agreed to hire only union men and used the union hiring hall as his means of getting a certain number of trained carpenters or electricians. In this way, employers avoided the expense of training workers and keeping them on the payroll during slack seasons. Union men, for their part, had a regular way of finding employment, a standardized wage rate, and the reassurance that their fellow workers on often-dangerous construction sites would be well-trained and responsible.

But this system did not apply to mass production work. Employers recruited workers for jobs that required little or no prior training. There was no need for apprenticeship programs and thus no role for the union role in the recruitment process. Indeed, these employers normally did not want union-trained workers, fearing that they would promote efforts to organize. Thus, those seeking to create unions among nonskilled workers lacked the leverage that skilled tradesmen had. At the same time, striking workers and union activists were convinced that any concessions they might pry from an employer could easily be rescinded absent permanent organization. Moreover, if workers had sacrificed through financial support and strike activity to build a union, they believed that, since all workers benefitted from the union presence, all should contribute to its ongoing role of enforcing the contract and periodically negotiating improvements. Hence, the one striker demand that was often non-negotiable was precisely the one that employers most fiercely resisted: union recognition and union security.

And American employers typically resisted union recognition fiercely and aggressively. During the latter quarter of the 19^th century, skilled workers in particular had been rather successful in maintaining wage rates and resisting employers' efforts to change work routines. Strikeing workers often had the support of their neighbors and fellow townsmen. To be sure, several spectacular walkouts had ended in disaster for labor organizations and for the goals that worker protest sought. Employers aided by federal, state, and local authorities had crushed a widespread railroad workers' uprising in the great strikes of 1877. The Homestead lockout of 1892 in the Pittsburgh-area steel mills resulted in the virtual destruction of the hitherto strong Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers union, while the Pullman boycott of 1894 destroyed an embryonic mass union of railroad and related workers. Nonetheless, during the Gilded Age labor organizations won over half the strikes unions conducted and unions of skilled construction and metal-working employees were resourceful and effective in their efforts to limit the application of new machinery and methods of production and to maintain workers' incomes.

At root of turn-of-century employers' anti-unionism, then, lay their determination to control the work place free of restriction. With industrial processes, machinery, and materials changing so rapidly, employers believed that it was imperative that they have maximum freedom to innovate. Over the last decades of the previous century, profit rates had been declining and the proportion of national income going to wages had been edging upward. Only by exploiting the proliferating new machinery to the maximum and by thus increasing profitability could America resume her march toward material plenty and moral leadership. And only by gaining control of the production process through eliminating the allegedly restrictive and uneconomic practices of unions, employers believed, could these goals be accomplished.

Employers and their agents believed that most of the things that unions did or advocated constituted interference with employers' prerogatives and/or infringement on workers' rights. Thus, attorney Walter Drew, who devoted a lengthy career to resisting unions in the metal-working industries, averred that he had no objection to "unions as such." He quickly added, however, that "the prevalent union methods," which included efforts to regulate the pace of work, limit the number of apprentices, and insure that all workers were required to support financially the union that represented them, violated both managerial prerogative and the rights of ordinary workers. And, he added, because these union practices were irrational and counterproductive, unions had to resort to "thuggery and violence" to accomplish their ends.

Auto makers, rubber tire manufacturers, meat packing and food processing corporations, steel makers, and other large scale employers resisted any union presence and aggressively forestalled or expunged it. The huge Carnegie Steel Company had led the way, crushing the Iron and Steel Workers union in the Homestead Lockout of 1892 and over the next two decades systematically driving the union out of its many branches and subsidiaries. During the automobile industry's earliest days, existing production methods had required a high proportion of skilled craftsmen, necessitating the toleration of unions. But once mass production began in earnest, Ford and other auto makers expelled these organizations lest they spur union sentiment among the mass of non-skilled workers. Rubber tire manufacturers followed a similar course, as did large-scale employers in electrical products, farm and construction equipment, and other expanding areas. Meat packers fought a series of bitter battles against packinghouse workers' organizations in an industry characterized by unusually rapid and thoroughgoing change in the scale of operations and work processes. Textile workers' unions had enjoyed some success in organizing plants in the Northeast but as the industry increasingly moved southward beginning in the 1880s, employers used their control of company villages and housing to thwart organizing efforts.

In some trades and industries, however, employers had learned to get along with a significant union presence. Newspaper publishers found the venerable unions so businesslike in their relations with employers that they offered little resistance to unions of printers, typographers, and pressmen. The building trades were also heavily organized, especially in larger cities, with unions of carpenters, bricklayers, electrical construction workers, plasterers, painters, and other tradesmen commonplace. The construction industry was so decentralized that organized resistance to union strength was difficult, especially when as often was the case, the building trades unions became powerful in municipal politics. In the urban garment centers, new unions, often based on immigrant workers, enjoyed some success in convincing employers that a cautious union could help stabilize the fiercely competitive industry.

The nation's coal mines were a special case. No industry employed as many men nor were many as ruthlessly competitive or as susceptible to sharp fluctuations in demand. Throughout the second half of the 19^th century, coal operators and miners had fought bloody battles over union recognition. But starting in the 1890s, the national union that emerged from these struggles, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), had begun to make progress in convincing key operators in the main bituminous coal fields that stretched from Central Pennsylvania to Iowa of the virtues of mutual organization. During the first decades of the new century, the UMWA built large organizations in this area, and in the distinctive hard coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania as well, although at the same time the opening of new mines in West Virginia and south along the Appalachians triggered violent confrontations with a new breed of anti-union employers. Arrangements in the Central Competitive Fields amounted to an experiment in collaborative labor relations, while simultaneously struggles of coal miners in Alabama, West Virginia, Kentucky, Colorado, and elsewhere were among the most savage and bloody in American history.

Indeed, the coalfields of southern Colorado were the scene of the most protracted and lethal labor war in American history. There in 1913 and 1914, coal miners clashed first with guards employed and armed by Rockefeller-controlled Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI) and then with Colorado militia. Miners sought UMWA affiliation as a means of improving the dismal working and living conditions in these remote mines, which company guards ruled with an iron hand. Over the winter of 1913-14, armed strikers confronted company guards, reinforced by local law enforcement authorities equipped by CFI. After several deadly outbursts, Colorado Governor Elias M. Ammons called in the Colorado National Guard, which quickly sided with the Rockefeller-backed employers. At last, on April 20, 1914, at Ludlow, national guardsmen attacked a tent colony housing striking miners and their families, many of them Greek immigrants. For hours, the two sides exchanged shots. The guardsmen turned their machine guns on the tents, setting the flimsy dwellings on fire. The blaze roared through the strikers' camp, burning alive two women and nine children. Enraged strikers retaliated, attacking guards in dozens of mines in the area. The Colorado State Federation of Labor urged strikers to "Organize the men in your community in companies of volunteers to protect the workers of Colorado against the murder and cremation of men, women, and children." In all, between September and May, 66 people died, including 12 children. After more than a week of open warfare, President Woodrow Wilson sent in regular army troops, who imposed an uneasy truce. With troops protecting strikebreakers, production resumed and the UMW limped out of the Colorado coal fields in defeat.

The overall labor organization that was usually involved in these various permutations of industrial relations was the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886. Not a labor union per se, it was rather a federation of national and international⁽¹⁾ unions, each of which represented workers in a discrete trade or industry. Thus there were unions of machinists, electricians, carpenters, bricklayers, teamsters, mine workers, and dozens of other separate trades. It was these separate unions, and not the AFL itself, that carried on the central activities of organized labor, notably recruiting workers into unions, conducting negotiations with employers, enforcing the terms of contracts, and conducting strikes. Unions were financed by members' dues and initiation fees, which paid the salaries of the organizers and other functionaries, often known as Business Agents, who conducted negotiations and saw to the enforcement of the contract. All of these organizations, including the AFL itself, were in theory democratic bodies, with leaders usually chosen at conventions representing the various local unions that comprised the parent organization. In fact, however, it was common for leaders of the national unions to use their offices to protect themselves from challenge, with the result that many unions exhibited little turn over in leadership from year to year.

The AFL was led almost throughout this period of dramatic industrial change by one man, Samuel Gompers, its co-founder and perennial president. A short, hard-drinking Jewish immigrant from England, Gompers was born in 1850. A cigar maker by trade, he joined his first union in 1864. After youthful attraction to the radical ideas, Gompers soon adopted a more cautious approach, seeing the trade union and the steady achievement of limited improvements in workers' conditions as the building blocks in the gradual expansion of labor's influence and power. Increasingly intolerant of socialists and others who urged root-and-branch social and economic change, Gompers soon proved a master in-fighter, helping to sustain the feeble AFL through the depression of the 1890s.

The AFL was dependent on the large national and international unions for its finances. Its functions were formally confined to helping to settle disputes among member unions, serving as labor's voice in the press and in the political arena, and coordinating state and local bodies. But as organized labor's most visible and articulate public spokesman, Gompers was often able to bend even the most powerful affiliates to his wishes. Attacked by progressives for his failure to press a broad agenda of social and political transformation, Gompers insisted on the necessity of limiting labor's goals to the "pure and simple" agenda of improving wages and conditions. In fact, Gompers was ambitious for labor but believed that only by working through the country's mainstream institutions could the AFL gain the membership and credibility necessary to claim for it (and for him) a role in the nation's decision-making structures. Careful, calculating, and shrewd, Gompers early on decided that in America, labor had to tack close to the wind and avoid provocative rhetoric and grand gestures of worker solidarity. Personally courageous and utterly dedicated to what he viewed as labor's central mission, he nonetheless had no use for what he considered emotional gestures or doomed crusades, however noble.

Under Gompers, the AFL was something of a contradictory organization. On the one hand, its founding constitution proclaimed it to be the champion of all workers and the

foe of capitalist exploitation. "A struggle is going on in all the nations of the civilized world," this document intoned. It was a struggle "between the oppressors and the oppressed. . ., a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer. . . ." Yet in their actual functioning, the unions that comprised the AFL were often discriminatory, cautious, and fiercely supportive of the US political and economic system. AFL leaders such as Gompers and John Mitchell of the United Mine Workers joined with financiers and employers in organizations such as the National Civic Federation, founded in 1908, to promote the idea of harmony of interest between capital and labor. Speaking the rhetoric of inclusion, many AFL unions nonetheless discriminated against African Americans, Asians, and sometimes other immigrant workers. Most male unionists disdained their female co-workers, making little effort to bring them into the hallowed "House of Labor." Cautious efforts on the part of the AFL to broaden the racial and gender appeal of organized labor met with little support from most affiliates, whose members regarded the defense of white male workers standards and prerogatives a central goal of the labor movement.

Far from challenging capitalist control of the economy, many unions entered into collusive arrangements with employers. Proclaiming their peaceful intentions and democratic practices, a number of AFL affiliates by the turn of the century had turned into bureaucratic machines, dominated by a handful of paid functionaries. In cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, AFL construction union leaders often exercised coercive power over fragmented contractors and politicians, using their unions to maintain tight control of the labor supply, thereby boosting wages and officers' salaries, while using intimidation and nepotism to retain control. Collaboration with criminal elements on the part of both contractors and building trades unions was frequent in these settings. Often unions devoted enormous resources and engaged in bloody street battles against other unions in "jurisdictional" disputes, that is disagreements as to which of the AFL's dozens of unions had the "rights" to organize (and to collect dues from) a given group of workers.

Even to many progressives and advocates of workers' rights, the AFL of the early 20^th century, then, seemed an unlikely vehicle for broad worker advance. Claiming to represent all toilers, the AFL in fact represented largely a relatively thin stratum of skilled craftsmen whose unions showed little interest in reaching out to the masses of nonskilled, immigrant, African American, and women workers. Its combination of racial and gender discrimination, narrowness of agenda, and often undemocratic practices contradicted its egalitarian rhetoric. Its leaders' willingness to collaborate with industrialists and financiers embittered labor activists. Over the years, Milwaukee socialist and trade union leader Victor Berger declaimed in 1912, Gompers had become "one of the most vicious and venomous enemies of Socialism and progressive trade unionism in America." Orators at the founding convention of the IWW denounced AFL functionaries as "labor fakirs." Middle class progressives, seeking support for efforts to curb the power of large corporations, regulate working conditions, protect consumers, eliminate political corruption, and improve environmental standards found the AFL a cranky and parochial ally at best.

And yet, progressives and labor activists could not ignore or dismiss the AFL. Narrow and flawed as it might be, with a membership that in 1902 surpassed the one million mark, it still constituted by far the largest organization of working people in the country. Moreover, by the 1910s there were signs that the AFL might be edging toward a broader and more inclusive notion of its role in American life. Some affiliates were reaching out to ethnic minorities and nonskilled workers. The United Mine Workers, for example, built effective multi-ethnic organizations in the Pennsylvania hard coal regions, winning a notable strike in 1902 against particularly obdurate employers there. In the soft coal fields, the UMW won dispensation to organize all mine workers, whether actual miners or men such as carpenters, teamsters, electricians, or equipment operators who would otherwise have been claimed by their respective craft union. In 1900, the AFL chartered the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which recruited thousands of Eastern European Jewish and Italian women into the organization. The AFL encouraged existing craft unions such as the Carpenters, Machinists, and Electrical Workers to organize factory hadns. Some city and state AFL bodies, notably the Chicago Federation of Labor, developed innovative campaigns that transcended the restrictive boundaries of the craft unions and brought semi-skilled electrical appliance, food processing, and packinghouse workers under the union umbrella. Dynamic labor activists believed that the working class's future lay with these organizations of mass production workers, for just as the modern factory homogenized workers' tasks, so the new system created a common class identity that blurred the lines of race, ethnicity, and job category. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs eloquently championed industrial unionism, as this broad and inclusive approach to organization was known. And if Gompers and other AFL leaders were skeptical of the ability of masses of workers to form permanent, effective unions, they nonetheless continued to experiment with methods of industrial recruitment and organization.

Unions in the AFL wanted nothing so much as to bargain peacefully with employers. The standard agenda of AFL craft unions, however, clashed directly with the determination of employers to subdivide tasks and reduce labor costs. By insisting that employers follow detailed work rules, employ only union members, follow union pay scales, and limit the number of learners or helpers, these unions attempted to make twentieth-century shop conditions conform to 19^th century notions of fairness and mutuality. To be sure, these skilled white male workers sought to gain fair monetary compensation and safe work sites. But bound up in their demand for equity were also powerful notions of manliness and racial identity. To be an American working man was to be able to support one's family. It meant being treated with dignity and respect at the job site and being trusted to work free of intrusive supervision. Conversely, to have one's work subdivided by arrogant managers and performed by "inferiors" such as women or immigrants and to be subjected to harsh and demeaning discipline was to have one's basic identity as a free American worker challenged. Hence, AFL unions, while seeking accommodation with employers, often found themselves in bitter struggles to defend traditional notions of work place governance.

Determined to destroy union power, employers formed associations such as the National Metal Trades Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Founders Association, and the National Erectors' Association. They announced that they would operate on an "open shop" basis, meaning that they would not recognize the union or be bound by the rules and restrictions it imposed. Although such a policy might trigger violent confrontation in the short run, they reasoned, in the long run it would free them to subdivide tasks, introduce new machinery and processes, and hire more tractable nonskilled workers. In major industrial centers, employers sponsored the establishment of area-wide employment bureaus, which often promulgated blacklists barring job applicants who had previous union affiliations. Thus, by the mid-1910s, Philadelphia, a major center of metal industries and once a strong union city, had become, in the words of one rueful unionist, "Scab City," so successful was the metal manufacturers' campaign to drive out the unions. Employers, of course, saw things differently: "'Open Shop' principles," boasted one, "combined with the unusually fair treatment accorded the employees in our City, make our pleasant relations with them possible."

In Philadelphia, the anti-union drive was largely peaceful, however contentious. Elsewhere, however, the confrontation between anti-union employers and hard-pressed craft unions was more explosive, nowhere more so than at job sites where contractors erected bridges and constructed the steel and iron skeletons of major buildings. Violent picket line clashes were a regular feature of employers' determination to drive the Iron Workers out of the industry. The union responded violently, dynamiting dozens of non-union work sites; in 1911, an explosion in Los Angeles traced to union officials killed 20 people. During the strike-torn opening decades of the new century, union workers' attacks on strike breakers and assaults by employer-paid thugs and hastily deputized "law" men on peaceful picket lines were commonplace. Where physical force was not at issue, the two sides squared off in the court room. There, employers were often successful in securing injunctions against union-launched strikes and boycotts. Indeed, in 1908, federal courts sentenced AFL leaders Gompers, John Mitchell, and Frank Morrison to jail terms because of their refusal to cease publicizing an Iron Molders Union boycott against a Connecticut stove manufacturer.

Indeed, unionists found the courts and the legal system major obstacles in their efforts to organize, obtain collective bargaining contracts, conduct strikes, and gain passage of legislation improve working conditions. Throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, legal doctrines that privileged property rights and freedom of contract dominated the courts insofar as labor relations were concerned. Through the later part of the 19^th century, the courts regularly struck down these union-backed measures that would have limited the hours of work and regulated working conditions. Judges regularly applied the terms of the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, initially passed as a means of curbing corporate wrongdoing, to labor union activities. In a series of early 20^th century decisions, the US Supreme Court imposed sharp restrictions on picketing, boycotts, and even recruitment efforts. The courts upheld the notorious "yellow dog" contract, by which workers were compelled to foreswear membership in a labor union as a condition of continued employment. In the 1917 Hitchman case, for example, the Supreme Court validated a lower court ruling that prohibited the United Mine Workers from even attempting to recruit miners at a West Virginia coal company who had made such an agreement.

Most crippling of all were court orders, called injunctions, issued by federal and state courts at the behest of employers requiring workers on strike to return to work. Typically these writs also prohibited union leaders from encouraging or advising any form of collective action. In the half-century after 1880, one scholar has estimated, the courts issued over 4300 of these orders. Observes legal scholar William Forbath, injunctions often proscribed even "even particular songs, catcalls, and jeers. Injunctions forbade everything from . . .shouting 'scab,' marching with cowbells and tin cans, publishing unfair lists. . ., holding meetings, or urging . . . shopkeepers to refuse service to strikebreakers." The courts were particularly harsh on sympathy strikes and boycotts, regarding the former practice, by which workers sympathetic to the strike demands of other workers struck employers not initially affected, as an unlawful conspiracy. Critics charged that these injunctions in effect abrogated the First and Thirteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, but judges regarded them as necessary for the protection of the rights of property owners and nonstriking workers.

By the turn of the 20^th century, in good part because of such intrusive judicial involvement in labor affairs, unionists turned increasingly away from efforts to improve working conditions through legislation. Gompers in particular expounded the doctrine of "voluntarism," urging workers to confine their efforts to seek improved conditions to their own organized effort in direct negotiation with employers. From this perspective, government was not the solution to workers' problems but rather a major part of these problems. Particularly on the federal level, the Federation limited its legislative efforts to seeking the passage of laws to curb the use of injunctions and to restrict immigration.

Hamstrung by the courts, the AFL also faced a sharp challenge from radical laborites for the allegiance of working people. The IWW, with its ambition to organize all workers, regardless of ethnic or racial identity, gender, or skill level, sometimes provided leadership for workers ignored or misled by AFL functionaries concerned primarily with the interests of skilled male workers. Thus, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, in August, 1909, IWW activists arrived to provide direction to 5,000 striking immigrant railroad car workers, who regarded a settlement to a strike that had begun a month earlier reached by their skilled co-workers as a betrayal. Three years later, IWW organizers provided leadership to 12,000 immigrant strikers in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills. The next year, in Paterson, New Jersey, the Wobblies provided direction for thousands of immigrant silk workers in a strike whose proximity to New York City encouraged the involvement of prominent intellectuals and artists in the workers' cause. The IWW was also active in the timberlands of Louisiana and Texas, where they built vigorous bi-racial local unions; Akron, Ohio's rubber factories; and in the Middle Western automobile assembly plants. With its radical ideology and its reputation for advocating violence, the IWW attracted fierce hostility, and not only from employers, newspapers, and government officials. AFL leaders regarded the radical organization as "dual union" whose fiery appeals would inevitably invite repression and fragment labor unity. IWW members responded in kind, calling AFL leaders "fakirs and grafters" because of the Federation's lack of concern for nonskilled immigrants and the eagerness of its functionaries to make peace with capitalists.

IWW-led strikers rarely won these battles. Mere association with the irreverent and tough-talking Wobblies provoked savage repression. "There's a war in Paterson," journalist John Reed write in 1913, "But it's a curious kind of war. All the violence is the work of one side-the Mill Owners." Moreover, the IWW disdained signed contracts and regular bureaucratic procedures. Its advocates believed that workers needed only their own solidarity to force the employers to accept union-imposed pay rates and working conditions. "Your power," Wobblies told striking workers, "is your folded arms. . . you have stopped production." Mass, nonviolent action, declared organizer Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, was "a much more feared method" than physical force. In general, workers used the IWW opportunistically, in effect prying concessions from employers through the threat of further Wobbly influence. In the end, few workers organized by the Wobblies had much stomach for the demanding kind of unionism that the syndicalist ideology of the rebel union required, nor for the protracted repression that long-term IWW affiliation invited.

The IWW was not the only force promoting a version of mass or industrial unionism. The AFL harbored activists who deplored its cautious approach. Local unionists in the Machinists, Electrical Workers, Meat Cutters, and other craft unions sought to link the concerns of skilled workers to the plight of the nonskilled, sometimes even transcending the normally rigid boundaries of race and gender. In the 1910s, for example, embryonic "vertical" unions (that is, unions that included all workers, regardless of craft, toiling in a particular plant) began to emerge in the large electrical products plants of Westinghouse and General Electric in Western Pennsylvania, New York State, and Massachusetts. Progressives in the Machinists union sought to extend organization into the nonskilled ranks of female and immigrant workers in the machine shops, brass works, and armaments factories of Connecticut. In the great stockyards of Chicago, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters expanded to include the full gamut of workers, black and white, male and female, who killed, disassembled, processed, and packaged cattle and swine in the Windy City's stockyards and packing houses.

Occasionally, these innovative efforts to build mass industrial unions succeeded.

Thus, in the fall and winter of 1909-1910, thousands of New York City garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, sustained a bruising strike in behalf of the International Ladies' Garment Workers, demanding union recognition as well as improvements in wage and working conditions. This "uprising of the 20,000" demonstrated the possibilities of successful mass organizing. Even AFL president Gompers was impressed. These brave young women, he acknowledged had "learned the heart and soul of unionism." On the heels of this victory, the ILG expanded in the urban garment trades and was joined in 1914 by another immigrant-led union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which also built strong multi-ethnic organizations uniting skilled and nonskilled men and women throughout the eastern garment centers.

Despite occasional successes, however, most efforts to build permanent unions among the masses of industrial workers failed. The causes of defeat were many but two factors loomed largest: employer hostility and the lack of governmental support for collective bargaining. To be sure, conditions within the working class also contributed to failure. For example, skilled male unionists, while sometimes providing leadership and encouragement to their less favored co-workers, usually clung to the ethnic, gender, and skill distinctions that separated them from the others. AFL experiments in broader organizing campaigns were typically poorly funded and indifferently conducted. Among industrial workers themselves, ethnic and racial division often prevented cohesive action. In the final analysis, though, so long as determined employers could rely on the courts and the rest of the state apparatus, union representation remained largely confined to enclaves of privileged workers. The ascent in 1913 of a national administration determined to curb corporate power and the effects of the great European war that broke out the next year, however, posed a powerful challenge to American business's anti-union agenda. And the outbreak of world war the next year had immediate and far-reaching reverberations throughout America's factories and union halls.

1. An "international" union was one that had membership in both Canada and the US.