Book Review

Labor Histories is a festschrift for David Montgomery. Politics, the state and citizenship, and conflict on the shop floor over control of production have been signature subjects of Montgomery in his leading role in "new" labor history studies. Many of the essays of his students collected in this volume touch on topics far afield. In the exemplary research and manifest attention to class, political engagement, and forceful prose, however, they all bear the stamp of the mentor.	1
Five essays deal with mainstream politics and reform. Reeve Huston examines the so-called rent wars waged by tenant farmers in upstate New York in the 1840s and 1850s. He concentrates on state legislators who enacted ameliorative measures in reaction to the unrest but who also twisted the language of protest, consecrating competition and accumulation, not a mutual and egalitarian order. Bruce Laurie studies a set of reformers of middling status in antebellum New England who were able to mesh their antislavery politics with labor advocacy. Laurie's essay harks back to Montgomery's early work on Reconstruction and the interrelated failures of Radical Republicans to provide economic guarantees to the freedmen and to build a consensus in the North on behalf of the freedmen's civil rights. Shelton Stromquist looks at the uneasy relationship between reformers and labor in the Progressive Era. Specifically, he revisits the Commission on Industrial Relations established during the Wilson administration. Stromquist pinpoints divisions between commission members who promoted data collection and arbitration services to quell class tensions and those who saw growing inequalities of power and income as sources of disorder and recommended measures furthering unionization. Electoral politics are concerns of two other essays. Julie Greene documents the futile efforts of the National Association of Manufacturers to convince workers to vote for local probusiness and prosperity candidates of the Republican party during the first decades of the twentieth century; workers remained in the Democratic party fold largely for ethnocultural reasons. Cecelia Bucki analyzes the remarkable success of socialists in municipal politics in Bridgeport, Connecticut, from the 1930s through the 1950s. Socialists effectively attacked the corruption of the Democratic party machine and the constant efforts of Republicans to cut taxes and public spending.	2
Another set of essays deals with cultural issues and is less identifiable with Montgomery. Tera Hunter and Kimberley Phillips examine leisure and religious life among African American workers. Hunter studies black women workers in the urban South at the turn of the twentieth century. They worked hard as domestics and in laundries, but they also played hard, enjoying especially the freedom of the dance hall; their expressive behaviors there raised the anxieties of both the black and the white middle classes. The creation of storefront and other nonestablished churches by African American migrants to the North is the subject of Phillips's essay. She argues that, as working-class institutions, the new churches served as bases for labor organizing. The community life of white immigrant workers correspondingly figures in essays by Gunther Peck and Peter Rachleff. Peck studies Greek, Italian, and Mexican migrant laborers in the West in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although moving from place to place, they did not lack for community. Migrants formed bonds on boxcars and in shantytowns and in solidarity against padrones and hostile community residents. Rachleff studies the place of the Croatian Fraternal Union in Croatian immigrant communities in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. He persuasively shows how the fraternal order served simultaneously to Americanize Croatian immigrants, heighten their ethnic identity and concern for a united Yugoslavia, and boost labor politics. One last cultural study essay stands alone. Kathryn Oberdeck analyzes the shifting writings of Alexander Irvine, who crafted scenes of working-class life for the popular press during the Progressive Era.	. . .