| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Stephen H. Norwood. Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 328. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.

As Stephen H. Norwood reminds us in this intriguing volume, between 1900 and 1940 labor-capital relations in the United States were extraordinarily violent. Private armies of strikebreaking mercenaries and federal troops, labor spies and state militias, blacklists and brass knuckles alike were deployed by organized labor's enemies in order to break unions or prevent their formation. But Norwood's purpose in this book is not merely to remind us of union-busting's sordid past. His social history of anti-unionism also attempts to account for the intensity of American labor violence. The novel explanation it offers rests on the power of competing social constructions of masculinity. In the most direct statement of his argument, Norwood puts it this way: "the culture of strikebreaking had at its core a defiant, highly aggressive masculinity, in sharp contrast to family-based middle- and working-class society" (p. 12). In the conflict between the competing visions of masculinity subscribed to by trade unionists and strikebreakers, Norwood contends, are the roots of America's extraordinary level of labor violence. . . .

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