| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"A Broad and Ennobling Spirit": Workers and Their Unions in Late Gilded Age New York and Brooklyn, 1886–1898. By Ronald Mendel. (Westport: Praeger, 2003. xxxiv, 226 pp. $67.95, ISBN 0-313-32134-5.)

In "A Broad and Ennobling Spirit," Ronald Mendel offers a highly detailed study of worker experiences and union organization in four trades (cigar making, printing, building, and garment making) in New York and Brooklyn in the late Gilded Age. Mendel hopes to correct the "monomania" that he believes is present in labor historians' conventional accounts of that era. According to Men-del, available studies tend to concentrate either on national events (for example, the rise of corporate capital and the 1890s depression) or on individual strikes (especially Homestead and Pullman). To the degree that they have anything to say about local trade unions in the period, labor historians, Mendel insists, read history backward. That is, they overstate the extent to which craft union practices prefigured the triumph of American Federation of Labor (AFL) business unionism under Samuel Gompers in the early twentieth century. By taking a finely tuned microapproach, Mendel intends to make up for earlier scholars' lack of historical specificity as well as their failure to demonstrate how workers creatively adapted to the changing conditions engendered by industrial capitalism.

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