| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940. By Andrew Wender Cohen. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii, 333 pp. $60.00, ISBN 0-521-83466-X.)
This monograph raises fundamental issues about the political economy of American labor and is pathbreaking in its extensive use of court records for writing Chicago history. Andrew Wender Cohen wants to displace mass-production industry from the center of labor history before World War II.	1
The central actors in Cohen's narrative are the "craft economy" (p. 16) and "corporate industrialism" (p. 21). The craft economy consisted primarily of construction, service, and commercial industries operating in the local market. In these industries, workers such as carpenters and teamsters and numerous modest-sized employers not only fought each other but also frequently cooperated to control the Chicago market, limit entrance to it, and raise prices. Violence was one tool used to enforce their agreements. Exercising quasi-public and collective economic regulation, the unions and trade associations in the craft economy were particularly obnoxious to the city's corporate elite.	. . .

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