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Organized Labor and the Invention of Modern Liberalism in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Karen Orren
Karen Orren
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

There is perhaps no political topic that has been given such relentlessly comparative treatment as the American labor movement. It is rare to read any comprehensive political or historical study of organized labor that is not cast, implicitly or explicitly, against the greater class consciousness of European counterparts. The explanations advanced for the uniqueness or the lack of vigor in the American strain—abundance of land, immigration, early suffrage, a revolutionary heritage of “republicanism”—constitute most of what exists in the way of theories about American labor politics.

Type
Notes and Exchanges
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 2 , Spring 1987 , pp. 317 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1. A representative selection of recent books on labor stressing these themes would include Davis, Mike, Prisoners of the American Dream (London: New Left Books, 1986)Google Scholar, and Mink, Gwendolyn, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, on immigration; Dawley, Alan, Class and Community, The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), on suffrageGoogle Scholar; and Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, on republicanism. A useful review of explanations for American labor exceptionalism is in Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop Journal, Spring 1984, 57–80.

2. In addition to the books cited above, see Tomlins, Christopher L., The State and the Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, and Montgomery, David, Workers' Control in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. In the current period the specter of labor disorder has increasingly faded. However, it continues to figure in analyses of government stability. For example, on the accord between labor and the business corporation at the foundation of the contemporary liberal regime, see Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, “The Crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism: The Case of the United States,” Politics and Society 11, no. 1 (1982): 51–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Lowi, Theodore J. describes how the unions' “clientele agency,” the Department of Labor, steadily lost jurisdiction over labor-related matters in The End of Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 118–22Google Scholar. Lindblom, Charles E. ascribes an unprivileged, “inferior” position to labor unions in polyarchies except in special circumstances approximating a general strike in Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 175–76, 198–99Google Scholar. For an opposing view, see Orren, Karen, “Union Politics and Postwar Liberalism in the United States, 1946–1979,” Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986): 215–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955)Google Scholar; see also Lipset, Seymour Martin, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963)Google Scholar. Samuel Huntington analyzes political change in terms of conflicts arising from the recurrent gap through history between the American creed consisting of political ideas and principles and political reality, and in that sense he departs from the consensus interpretation of Hartz. However, he premises his argument on the distinctive absence in the United States of working-class radicalism, explained in the usual terms: “This was a result of the prior achievement of universal white male suffrage, the general openness of political institutions, the continuing opportunities for vertical and horizontal mobility, the ethnic diversity and geo-graphic dispersion of the working class, and the preexisting prevalence of the liberal-democratic norms of the American Creed” (American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981], 19–20). Labor is given no further attention in Huntington's account.

5. See, for example, McCloskey, Robert G., The American Supreme Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), chap. 5 and pp. 150–60Google Scholar; Miller, Arthur Selwyn, The Supreme Court and American Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1968), 55–62Google Scholar; Mink, Old Labor, 185–86, 237ff; Paul, Arnold M., Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1976)Google Scholar, chaps. 6 and 7; Tomlins, The State and the Unions, chap. 3.

6. McCloskey, American Supreme Court, 153.

7. 208 U.S. 161; 236 U.S. 1; 243 U.S. 229.

8. Jacoby, Sanford M., “The Duration of Indefinite Employment Contracts in the United States and England: An Historical Analysis,” Comparative Labor Law 5, no. 1 (Winter 1982)Google Scholar, 85–128. On the inconsistency between the at will rule and contract doctrine, see Feinman, Jay M., “The Development of the Employment at Will Rule,” American Journal of Legal History 20 (1976): 118–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. 245 U.S. 225, 229, 239, 255; 236 U.S. 1, 19, 13.

10. 245 U.S. 229, 252, 259.

11. Hartz, Liberal Tradition. As already suggested in n. 4 above, the absence of feudal institutions is accepted without further analysis in studies that otherwise understand political change in U.S. history very differently from Hartz. For another recent example, see Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Democracy and Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 30–31Google Scholar. The term feudalism as used in this note refers to the relation of lord and man, reproduced up and down the political hierarchy, which was the characteristic organizing principle of medieval society in England (and elsewhere in Western Europe). See Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961)Google Scholar. The specific relation of master and servant appeared in English law in the fourteenth century. Prior to that, laborers were regulated by the highly uniform customs of manors, boroughs, and guilds.

12. Sources consulted on the English background of American law include Holdsworth, William, A History of English Law, vols. 2–4 (London: Methuen, 1936)Google Scholar, and Pollock, Frederick and Maitland, Frederic William, The History of English Law, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. On the legal status of employees in prerevolutionary America, see Morris, Richard B., Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), chap. 9Google Scholar.

13. Unless otherwise indicated, the legal account in this section is based on Wood, H. G., A Treatise on the Law of Master and Servant (Albany, N.Y.: John D. Parsons, 1877)Google Scholar.

14. Ibid., 7, and chap. 1, passim.

15. Ibid., 174, 180.

16. This is consistent with the cases in Morris, Government and Labor, 221–23. On specific performance as a feudal institution, see, for example, Selznick, Philip, Law, Society and Indus-trial Justice (New Brunswick, N.J.1: Transaction Books, 1969), 127–28Google Scholar.

17. The post—Civil War periodization is standard throughout a broad range of labor movement studies. See, for example, Commons, John R., Saposs, David J., Sumner, Helen L., Mittelman, E. B., Hoagland, H. E., Andrews, John B., and Perlman, Selig, History of Labour in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1936)Google Scholar; Brecher, Jeremy, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Gordon, David M., Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. The American brand of “pure and simple” or business unionism, as opposed to European-style labor politics, was given its clearest exposition in Perlman, Selig, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1928)Google Scholar. In recent years, labor historians, influenced by the work of E. P. Thompson, Herbert G. Gutman, and others, have undertaken a more comprehensively social approach to working-class life. See Brody, David, “The Old Labor History and the New,” Labor History 20 (Winter 1979): 111–26Google Scholar. However, the distinction between trade unionism and political action remains deeply embedded.

18. Arthur v. Oakes, 63 Fed. 310 (1894), 317–18.

19. Commonwealth v. Pullis (1806); in Commons, John R., ed., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 10 vols. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1910), 3Google Scholar: 234.

20. Morris, Government and Labor, chaps. 1, 2.

21. Commons, Documentary History, 3: 228–29.

22. 14 Wend. 10 (Sup. Ct., N.Y. 1835), 19–20.

23. Commons, Documentary History, 3: 231–32.

24. 4 Metcalf 111 (Mass. 1842), 130.

25. Ibid., 134.

26. Relevant cases on purposes may be found in Carpenter, Charles E., “Interference with Contract Relations,” Harvard Law Review 41 (1927–1928): 728–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, espec. 760–61. On means, see Wigmore, John M., “The Boycott and Kindred Practices as Ground for Damages,” American Law Review 21 (07–08 1887): 509–32Google Scholar.

27. 2 El. & Bl. 216, 118 Eng. Rep. 749 (Q.B. 1853).

28. 1 Q.B. 715.

29. 167 Mass. 92, 99.

30. Ibid., 106–07.

31. See “The Right of a Trade Union to Enforce a Boycott,” Michigan Law Review 7 (1908–09): 499–502; and “Tortious Interference with Contractual Relations in the Transformation of Property, Contract, and Tort,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 1510–39, 1533 ff.

32. Stephen Simpson, “Political Economy and the Workers,” in Blau, Joseph L., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), 138 and passimGoogle Scholar.

33. Commons, John R., Legal Foundations of Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 302–03Google Scholar.

34. “Picketing and Free Speech,” Harvard Law Review 56 (1942): 180–218. The quotation is from Atchison, T. & S.F. Ry. v. Gee, 139 F. 582 (S.D. Iowa 1905), 584.

35. 301 U.S. 468 (1937), 478; 310 U.S. 88.

36. 312 U.S. 321 (1941), 326.

37. Lawlor v. Loewe, 235 U.S. 522.

38. See Kennedy, Ronald E., “Political Boycotts, the Sherman Act, and the First Amendment: An Accommodation of Competing Interests,” Southern California Law Review 55 (1982): 983–1030Google Scholar.

39. 259 U.S. 344.

40. See Mason, Alpheus T., “Organized Labor as Party Plaintiff in Injunction Cases,” Columbia Law Review 30 (1930): 466–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The cloakmakers decision is Schlesinger v. Quinto, 192 N.Y. Supp. 564 (Sup. Ct. 1922).

41. See, for example, Harper, Michael C., “The Consumer's Emerging Right to Boycott: NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware and Its Implications for American Labor Law,” Yale Law Journal, 931, no. 3 (01 1984): 409–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The case in question is NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, 102 S. Ct. 3409 (1982).

42. Dawley, Class and Community, 4.

43. Ibid., 24.

44. An important study of American state building, and a major contribution to the con-temporary institutionalist literature on political development, is Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Skowronek's historical analysis—of how institutions such as parties and courts acted with other interests to obstruct the development of a vigorous and coherent system of national administration—is addressed to the “problem” (in an evaluative sense) of American state building, both historically and today. The view that the weakness and fragmentation of the American state ought to be considered a problem is, at least in part, expressed from a vantage point outside the analysis itself. An interesting companion reading to Skowronek is Karl, Barry, The Uneasy State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Karl sees a rough public ideology in favor of associationalism, and not institutional stalemate, behind the same historical resistance to government centralization and reform.

45. Reddy, William M., The Rise of Market Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.