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Book Review
| Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xviii + 333. $60.00 (ISBN 0-521-83466-X).
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| The protagonist of Andrew Wender Cohen's book is the "craft governance" of Chicago, a system of political economy sustained beyond the city's large industrial workplace by tradespeople, employers, and shopkeepers who worked or bossed in building trades, trucking concerns, and janitorial services or were the proprietors of bakeries, butcher shops, dairies, tailoring businesses, laundries, dry cleaners, groceries, and saloons. These workers and businesspeople organized unions and associations and entered into trade and collective bargaining agreements to regulate prices and work rules. Rarely were these agreements enforceable in court, because the parties were unincorporated associations (and therefore lacked legal capacity) or their terms amounted to an illegal restraint on trade. The unions and their associated employers were left to extralegal (and often illegal) means of enforcement, including strikes, boycotts, "slugging," acid throwing, window smashing, and worse. |
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Cohen tells the saga of craft governance in Chicago in two acts. In the first, the dominant conflict is the struggle between Chicago's new corporate elite and the defenders of craft governance. Cohen argues that the corporate economy came to Chicago not as a consensual search for order or an uncontested triumph of a corporate liberal ideology, but as a violent struggle between contending economic regimes. Corporations struck first with the Building Trades Lockout of 1900 and a later assault on union teamsters. Craft governance counterattacked with the Teamsters' Strike of 1905 but won no lasting advantage. The stalemate persisted into the 1920s, as the city's reformers and judges looked on ambivalently. |
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The second act commences with the entrance of organized crime. "Rackets," an old word for vaguely extortionate fundraisers, received a new referent, mob-dominated craft governance. Employers and their publicists pointed to "racketeering" to bring the normal workings of craft governance into disrepute, but they failed to convince policymakers, who continued to think of racketeering as "a crime perpetrated upon unions and associations by evil individuals, rather than a crime committed by craft organizations" (289). NRA codes and the AAA's marketing agreement for Chicago's dairy industry made craft governance federal policy, while the Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934 distinguished legitimate trade unionists and collective bargaining from the extortion of mobsters. |
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Cohen maintains that historians have unduly neglected his subject because of their a priori commitments to social theories that accord the lower middle class no decisive role in world-historical development. For his part, Cohen has no doubts about the significance of craft governance or its status as a radical force in American history. He acknowledges that Chicago's craft workers and petty bourgeoisie "did not support an independent labor party, demand abolition of private property, or endorse any broad social movement" and that they discriminated against African Americans and women, but he also argues that they mounted the most effective resistance to the corporate transformation of the city's economy and challenged the state's monopoly of violence by placing "their associations on a par with the state itself" (62, 96). |
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Cohen's interpretation of labor law in the Progressive Era follows suit. Other historians have shown how capitalists used a variety of legal tactics to hold off challenges to their deskilling of their workforces or to the imposition of costly work rules by national trade unions. Cohen also discusses such lawsuits, including a previously unknown injunction issued by Julian Mack, a prominent Chicago reformer. More novel is his focus on the mercantile and financial community, whose leaders acted less to forestall the unionization of their own workforces than to lessen the cost of doing business in a city where union teamsters hauled goods and waste and union workers erected office buildings and dwellings. The business elite's preferred tactic was to encourage prosecutions of union leaders and their collaborators for conspiracy and to use the ensuing revelations to turn public opinion against craft governance. |
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Cohen pushes a good point too far when he argues that the National Industrial Recovery Act "expressed not corporate ideals, but the values of tradesmen who battled corporations," without accounting for the breadth of business support for the NIRA or its provisions for the administrative review of industry codes (265). The relationship between craft governance and Chicago's political machines merits more discussion, as it would seem to undercut Cohen's claims for the radicalness of his protagonist. Some future study will have to show how to place craft governance in relation to mass production and such "sick" industries as coal and textiles on the map of twentieth-century American political economy. But Cohen has shown our existing maps to be inadequate and has made the drawing up of new ones seem a pressing concern. That is a great accomplishment, indeed. |
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| Daniel Ernst
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| Georgetown University |
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