> your detailed knowledge of Western labour history would had added an extra dimension to our trip.
There's an important recent interpretive history of western labor history up to 1924 that's been published recently. Haven't gotten a chance to read it yet, but it's reviewed in the current issue of the American Historical Review by the great labor historian Leon Fink....
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John P. Enyeart. The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924 . (Social Science History.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 326. $65.00.
Leon Fink University of Illinois, Chicago
This paradigmatic case study of labor politics packs an unexpected interpretive wallop. For those excited by the late nineteenth-century rise of the Knights of Labor but disappointed by the quick collapse of a visionary labor movement into the business-unionist model of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), John P. Enyeart offers (at least temporarily) bracing, advice: look West, old man!
Tracking the complex history of labor conflicts, organization, and political ideas of the larger Rocky Mountain region from the era of the Knights to that of the prewar Socialists, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and Non-Partisan League, Enyeart discovers a lost world of “social democracy”—a deeper, more powerful, and longer-lasting tradition of class-based politics than anywhere else in the country. Led by a succession of both hard-rock and coal miner union launching pads, Rocky Mountain workers “earned the nation's highest real wages in the country, obtained the first constitutionally recognized eight-hour-day laws for private employees, and rejected affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), instead creating their own regional labor federations: the Western Labor Union (WLU) and the American Labor Union (ALU)” (pp. 5–6). A phalanx of heretofore little-known regional labor editor-leaders like the Knights' Joseph Buchanan and Non-Partisan Leaguer-cum-Communist William Dunne serve as prime architects of a self-conscious “progressive unionism” that, for Enyeart, offers the strongest U.S. equivalent of European social democracy. And, unlike the merely new-liberal progressivism associated with the era's “middle-class women, farmers, muckrakers, intellectuals, corporate liberals, or [even] a broadly defined radical middle class,” western workers, Enyeart asserts, tapped socialism's mother lode (p. 21).
Moreover, it was a vision that stretched to the rank and file worker. An invaluable 1899 survey of some 700 workers commissioned by the Colorado Bureau of Labor Statistics found over ninety percent in support of public ownership of utilities, railroads and street cars, and telegraph and telephone services as well as strong backing for eight-hour legislation, a Henry George-style single tax, and abolition of judicial review. Finally, it is worth noting that Enyeart contrasts the more substantively influential tradition of progressive unionism with its better-known syndicalist (and antipolitical) counterpart, the IWW or Wobblies.
Nor are Enyeart's dramatic findings made without a strong, sustaining argument. He postulates that the more flexible, confident and democratic politics of western labor activists depended on tight labor markets combined with a peculiar political culture of relatively weak parties and undeveloped state structures. Rapid industrialization associated with the fever of mineral discoveries, for one, gave skilled metal workers and coal miners economic leverage over absentee owners largely lacking elsewhere. In such locales, notes Enyeart, it proved impossible “to create a permanent oversupply of labor” (p. 52) Perhaps even more important, in Enyeart's evaluation, the party machines that regularly incorporated working-class immigrant voters into “existing electoral arrangements” (p. 73) were simply lacking in the Mountain West; as a result westerners not only regularly engaged in ticket-splitting but willingly aligned themselves with non-partisan and/or third-party movements. The combination of these conditions, argues Enyeart, at once explains the election of Colorado's Populist Governor Davis Waite in 1892 and the backing of Debsian socialism over Samuel Gompers's voluntarism by western miners at the turn of the century.
Skeptics are less likely to challenge Enyeart's narrative directly than to point to less politically flattering aspects of western labor exceptionalism. Enyeart himself readily acknowledges an obvious fault line of racism in the deplorable treatment of Chinese workers and mixed record in relation to African Americans. Temporary union success in excluding a “labor surplus,” Enyeart implicitly acknowledges, contributed to a political advantage. But two other potentially telling explanations of the region's political development go largely unexplored. One might imagine the entire region as a kind of extractive, peripheral economy (à la the post–World War II Middle East oil states) blessed—or cursed, depending on the point of view—with a decidedly unbalanced social order. Within this artificial order, there existed places of advantage for the labor politics that Enyeart skillfully dissects, but the region also bred tyranny, especially at the hands of company towns and moments of state repression (see Coeur D'Alene and Ludlow), and by the 1920s in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. One also wonders how the gender division of the region's productive economy fed into its wildly vacillating political culture? The dynamiting of the Butte Miners' Union hall in 1914—the apparent result of a complicated internecine labor feud and an event that devastated the local socialist political regime—underscored the downside of a “masculinist” labor culture.
Further afield is a debate that Enyeart chooses not to join about the “Turner question.” Like Frederick Jackson Turner—but with an altogether different explanation—Enyeart finds the West to be a seedbed of democracy, and even more so, democratic socialism. By contrast, “new western historians” across three decades have reoriented western narratives away from democratic celebrations toward themes of conquest and empire and a reckoning with the history of Native peoples who go unmentioned in this text. On balance, then, are Enyeart's progressive unionists only the working-class variant of a privileged imperial outpost? Or, as a congeries of multiply exploited subalterns, did their revolt and pragmatic vision truly signal a “western” pathway with a difference? In a work otherwise chock full of worthy discoveries and provocations, would that the author had ventured one step further.