JAMES BRYSON MCLACHLAN is one of Canadian labour’s legendary heroes. He deserves a comprehensive biography and David Frank insures that that biography is not only a thorough picture of one labour leader’s life but a panoramic overview of the forces that shaped coal miners’ struggles in the early 20th century and labour radicalism of the times more generally. While the author acknowledges that he is documenting the life of an exceptional individual, he notes also that J.B. McLachlan, in many respects, simply embodied the Nova Scotia miners’ achievements after 1917 of "a strong union and a tradition of independent labour politics." (4) His approach is that McLachlan was a remarkable individual shaped by particular social circumstances. This book has won several prizes, including the John W. Dafoe Book Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Robert S. Kenny Prize for labour history books. It sets a very high standard for labour history biographies, indeed biographies generally.

      There are many clues in McLachlan’s early life as to why he emerged as both a union militant and a political radical. Born into a Scottish working-class family in 1869 in the small Borders village of Ecclesfechan, he was influenced by a grandfather who had experience of both Chartism and the cooperative movement, as well as by Bible readings and an interest in the works of the British historian, Thomas Carlyle. McLachlan was only four when his family moved to the industrial Clyde area, and his father and older brother began working in the coal mines, while his sisters worked as dressmakers. At age ten, J.B. also went down into the mines, never really to emerge until he was blacklisted by the Nova Scotia capitalists from practicing his trade 30 years later. He was only a teenager when he was selected as one of sixteen miners’ delegates to meet the Lanarkshire Coal Masters’ Association in Glasgow in March, 1887, to demand a wage increase. The miners had been on strike for a month, fighting valiantly to keep strikebreakers from damaging their efforts to achieve economic justice. They had called off the strike when the masters used carrot and stick to get them to the bargaining table: the stick was that there would be no talks while a strike continued, and the carrot was that there would be talks with all issues to be discussed when the strike ended. In the end, however, the capitalists not only ignored the strikers’ just demands, but imposed longer hours of work. This experience served to educate the young McLachlan regarding both the greed and duplicity of the capitalists on the one hand, and the importance of unbending worker militancy on the other.

      McLachlan continued to labour in the Scottish mines until 1902, moving from mine to mine to find work. He had married in 1893 and was a father of four when the family decided to move to Canada in search of an economic security that eluded them in their homeland. By the time he came to Canada, McLachlan, if not yet clearly a socialist, was certainly a labour radical. He was influenced by miners’ leaders such as Keir Hardie not only in adopting the view that workers needed their own political representatives alongside militant unions but also in believing that temperance, education, and self-improvement were all essential if miners were to improve their lives.

      McLachlan’s work life in Canada began in Sydney Mines at the Princess Colliery. Finding that the struggle in Canada was much the same as in the Old Country, McLachlan gradually adopted socialist views and defended them in the Halifax Herald in 1906. Capitalism, he argued, robbed citizens of their economic citizenship. He became a member of the Socialist Party of Canada and spearheaded efforts to bring the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) into the Nova Scotia coal mines to replace the Provincial Workmen’s Association, once a defender of miners’ interests but by McLachlan’s time in Canada an ineffective force in protecting workers’ interests. In spring, 1909, McLachlan and the other members of the executive of District 26 of the UMWA were blacklisted by the mineowners. For the rest of his life, this miner of 30 years would eke out a living sometimes as a union employee, but more often as a small farmer and a labour journalist.

      As secretary-treasurer of District 26, McLachlan was the key miners’ leader during the ten-month Nova Scotia strike in 1909-1910. He had his work cut out for him as the mineowners evicted miners from their company homes. The union had to quickly set up tents and build ramshackle buildings to house families tossed into the cold by companies that had profited from the sacrifices of the workers and their families. Capital certainly won that round despite the workers’ heroic efforts. McLachlan was charged with publishing a criminal libel against Dominion Coal and jailed. A jury exonerated him, but it would not be the last time that capital tried to silence J.B. McLachlan by using the courts.

      The McLachlan family moved to a small farm on Steele’s Hill, likely in 1913. McLachlan continued both his political and union efforts. While he was roundly defeated in a bid for the provincial legislature on the Socialist ticket in 1916, he proved successful in reviving District 26, which had been devastated by capital’s attack in 1909-10 and in finally dislodging the PWA from the mines of the province. In 1921, McLachlan played a key role in the launching of the Maritime Labour Herald, a newspaper representing the miners’ viewpoint. That year, he came close to election to Parliament as a Farmer-Labour candidate in Cape Breton South and Richmond. While he won an absolute majority of the votes in the mining districts, the rural vote went too strongly for the Liberals for this labour radical to carry the day.

      J.B. McLachlan played a much-celebrated role in the fightback of miners and steelworkers in Cape Breton from 1923 to 1925. Roy Wolvin, the key figure in BESCO, a monopoly over the coal and steel industry of the province, set out to use wage cuts and work intensification as the means to increase shareholders’ profits from the workers’ sweat. But Wolvin had the state authorities in his pocket, and McLachlan was arrested in 1923, imprisoned in Dorchester Prison, and charged with sedition. Eventually convicted and sentenced to two years in jail, McLachlan was freed after only four months as a result of a concerted campaign by the labour and progressive movements that caused the authorities to reckon McLachlan was more of a danger while in jail than freed to continue his propaganda work. His time in jail weakened J.B.’s health but he emerged from prison to continue as involved in the struggle as he ever was. He worked tirelessly to organize international support for the miners in 1925 during a five-month struggle in which they proved BESCO vice-president J.E. McLarg wrong in his contemptuous claim that "they can’t stand the gaff."

      The McLachlan who emerges from Frank’s account is clearly a public man who had little time left over for his family. Without his wife’s efforts both at raising the family and managing precarious family finances, his children would have starved and received little attention. Yet, if McLachlan was typical of many "great men," regardless of class in this era, in having a wife behind him who was relegated to a supportive role, he was not, by the standards of his time, sexist. While many labour leaders had a discourse that emphasized manliness and the union’s role in defending masculinity, McLachlan’s rhetoric was more familialist. He emphasized the need for women to be involved in strikes since the purpose of strikes to him was to defend the household that women kept alive through their work and their management of finances.

      McLachlan’s battles with the American UMWA leadership, particularly the dictatorial John L. Lewis, demonstrated his commitment to democratic unionism for the miners and a fighting union. Lewis proved as able to cut McLachlan out of the union as the bosses had proved able to keep him out of the mines. But he remained influential among the coal miners till the end of his life, decrying the reality that his once-beloved District 26 "had become a ‘dues-collecting machine’ for John L. Lewis, and a ‘wage-cutting tool’ for the company." (445)

      McLachlan’s devotion to workers’ rights and socialist revolution led him to the Communist Party in the early 1920s as the Socialist Party receded. He embraced the Bolshevik Revolution and V.I. Lenin, who remained his hero even as the clever party bureaucrat, Josef Stalin, redefined Leninism and turned the socialist revolution in large part into a paranoid killing machine that murdered most of the Old Bolsheviks and sizeable groups of peasants. Frank traces the development of McLachlan’s commitment to the world Communist movement with its promise to end wage slavery forever and his impact on the Communist Party of Canada. McLachlan had visited the Soviet Union and observed the royal treatment that coal miners received both in terms of their working and living conditions. Though the Soviet Union was a poor country that had suffered immensely both from the backwardness inherited from the Czarist Empire and from the devastation inflicted by the counter-revolutionaries backed by Western armies, its government managed to give more dignity to coal miners than the government of wealthy capitalist nations like Canada. McLachlan was neither the first nor last miners’ leader to be impressed by the excellent conditions experienced by coal miners in the Soviet Union. In the early eighties, a miners’ leader in Alberta, who was unsympathetic to Communism generally, confided in me that the miners were the aristocrats of the Soviet Union and he could never expect to win comparable working conditions and fringe benefits, particularly in the form of long, free holidays at seaside vacation dachas, for his members.

      Frank explains carefully why McLachlan broke with the Communists in 1936 as the party used its influence to force miners in a progressive breakaway union into re-entering the UMWA. McLachlan wanted the Nova Scotia miners to be in one union, and did not reject the UMWA out of hand. But he was repulsed by the idea that the Communists made no demand that District 26 be freed from the iron grip of John L. Lewis and his henchmen. Lewis was such an authoritarian that in the early thirties, the majority of UMWA districts in Canada and the United States were under direct central union supervision, their elected officials having been deposed by Lewis.

      Just as Frank is careful to dispel simplistic explanations of why McLachlan opposed the specific terms of unity for the coal miners in the "united front" period, he is at pains to explain that McLachlan, despite having broken with the Communist Party, remained a revolutionary. While he was on friendly terms with some social democrats such as CCF leader, J.S. Woodsworth, he was not a reformist and was not moving towards the social democratic party as he approached death in 1937. In fact, as Frank indicates, McLachlan believed that his point of view, not that of the Canadian party brass, correctly embodied the Red International of Labour Unions’ (Profintern) point of view as to how Communist unionists should approach unity discussions with non-Communist unionists.

      All very good, but here Frank is just too respectful of his subject, as biographers tend to be. McLachlan was clearly completely out of touch with what Stalin was up to in the mid-thirties or how the "world Communist movement" worked. The Profintern was subordinate to the Comintern, the world association of Communist parties, which, in turn, had become a creature of the Stalin party and government in Moscow. Stalin regarded the Comintern and Profintern, seen in Lenin’s day as the instruments to spread world revolution and end Soviet isolation, as tools to aid in Stalin’s goal of creating "socialism in a single country." As Nazism, abetted by Western capitalist governments, became a military threat to the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership, whose understanding of fascism and Nazism in the period of Hitler’s accession to power is most kindly described as naïve, came to their senses. It was necessary to create a united front of anti-fascist forces in the West that would join the Soviet Union in confronting the Nazi danger both militarily and diplomatically. Any idea of working towards revolution in Western countries was permanently shelved, along with left-wing union strategies. The Canadian party leadership DID understand what Stalin wanted them to do. It was McLachlan who had a romantic view both of the Soviet Union and the revolutionary potential of the miners. Rightly or wrongly, he would not sacrifice his fellow workers to anti-democratic union bureaucrats in order to fulfil left-wing bureaucrats’ notions of the long-term good of Communism. But it was self-delusion for him to believe that he, and not the CPC, had correctly interpreted the Comintern line and that the Canadian party leadership were simply sacrificing the miners to the opportunities created by Lewis’s willingness to use Communists in the United States and Canada as organizers for the CIO. In practice, the Communists throughout Europe also gutted the independent unions they had created during the ultra-left "Third Period." Even had there been no CIO, Canadian Communists would have been obliged, in order to support Soviet foreign policy, to renounce independent militant unions in 1935.

      Mostly, however, David Frank refrains from giving his subject undue powers of prophecy or wisdom. The J.B. McLachlan who emerges in this biography is a dedicated and unafraid defender of workers who becomes a committed socialist because of capitalism’s soul-destroying treatment of workers. The Cape Breton coal miners have been relegated to the past by neo-liberalism along with changing economic circumstances, and the Communist Party of Canada has also slipped into oblivion. But the economic system whose oppression McLachlan directly experienced as a coal miner and to whose eradication he gave much of his life continues on. McLachlan’s story can only be an inspiration for many generations to come, and David Frank is owed a debt of gratitude by all who defend the anti-capitalist cause for a vivid, readable, and nuanced appreciation of this working-class hero’s life.

Éric Leroux. Gustave Francq: Figure marquante du syndicalisme et précurseur de la FTQ (Montréal: VLB, 2001)

ENFIN! Une biographie longtemps attendue d’une figure de proue du mouvement syndical au Québec. Éric Leroux a fait de Gustave Francq le sujet de sa thèse de doctorat à l’Université de Montréal et nombreuses sont les personnes intéressées à l’histoire du mouvement syndical au Québec qui accueilleront avec plaisir et même reconnaissance cette biographie d’un personnage capital dans l’histoire syndicale canadienne et québécoise.

      Comme la plupart des biographies, celle-ci appartient au genre de l’histoire-mémoire plus qu’à celle de l’histoire-problème, et se fonde sur une quantité impressionnante de sources et d’ouvrages. Il y a des biographies où le manque de papiers personnels pousse l’auteur à combler les trous (de mémoire) par une grande attention au contexte et à tout ce qui se passe autour du personnage central. Et il y a les autres où l’abondance de documents risque d’absorber toute l’attention myope des biographes. Éric Leroux, dans son ouvrage à la fois extrêmement fouillé et bien équilibré, réussit a démêler l’écheveau des nombreux documents légués par son sujet: correspondance, pamphlets, éditoriaux et chroniques, en plus des témoignages de contemporains, tout en situant et en expliquant les combats syndicaux et politiques, les campagnes pour le droit à l’éducation ou aux mesures sociales, et facilitant ainsi la compréhension des grandes questions sociales qui ont marqué le Québec de l’époque de Francq, de sa naissance en 1871 à sa mort en 1952.

      Comme l’annonce le sous-titre du livre, Gustave Francq est d’abord une personnalité du monde syndical. Né en Belgique, il immigre à Montréal à 15 ans et apprend ici son métier de typographe sans jamais couper les liens avec son pays natal. Engagé très tôt dans le militantisme syndical, il grimpe les échelons du syndicalisme international, c’est-à-dire affilié à la Fédération américaine du travail (FAT), jusqu’à devenir vice-président du Congrès des métiers et du travail du Canada, président du Congrès des métiers et du travail de Montréal, président de l’Union des journalistes de Montréal et membre du comité exécutif de la Fédération provinciale des travailleurs du Québec. Pour défendre les intérêts ouvriers, en 1916 il fonde et dirige l’hebdomadaire syndical Le Monde ouvrier. Mais Francq occupe une position ambiguë dans les rapports de classe: dès 1904 il possède sa propre imprimerie; il est membre de la Montreal Board of Trade et de la Chambre de commerce de Montréal; enfin, il devient, dans les années vingt, haut fonctionnaire du gouvernement provincial.

      Ses orientations idéologiques évoluent au fil de sa carrière. De libéral travailliste il glisse, dans les années vingt, vers un libéralisme réformiste voué à l’harmonie sociale. Pourfendeur de la lutte des classes, Francq croit pouvoir améliorer la condition ouvrière à l’intérieur du capitalisme et se dissocie des grandes luttes ouvrières comme les grèves de 1919. Indéfectible gomperiste- ne considèrait-il pas Samuel Gompers, le leader de l’American Federation of Labor, comme un ami- il privilégiera exclusivement les syndicats de métiers contre la One Big Union, contre les Chevaliers du Travail et, en 1938, le Congrès d’Organisation industrielle. Il appuiera la conscription pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale jusqu’à s’opposer aux objecteurs de conscience. Comme le souligne plusieurs fois l’auteur, Francq, social-démocrate réformiste ou libéral, était un apôtre de la conciliation entre le capital et le travail. Malgré cette modération, il restera la bête noire des syndicats catholiques, inspirés de la doctrine sociale de l’Église et très conciliants envers le patronat pendant la période étudiée. Pour un syndicaliste comme Francq, la Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada est un élément divisif de la classe ouvrière. De plus, elle entretient un nationalisme qui lui répugne. Ce n’est que la politique anti-ouvrière de Maurice Duplessis qui rapprochera les deux centrales.

      L’ouvrage de Leroux situe le syndicalisme québécois dans l’espace nord-américain: il se développe en «parallèle». (13) Mais l’auteur ne nous présente pas un homme de la trempe de Francq comme un vulgaire valet de la Fédération américaine du travail. Il tend, beaucoup plus que les Américains, à faire confiance à l’État en matière de politique sociale en appuyant les allocations familiales, en siégeant à la Commission des accidents de travail et en présidant la Commission du salaire minimum des femmes. Cette dernière réforme illustre bien la position de Francq: soucieux d’harmonie et de modération plutôt que d’égalité des sexes, insistant sur les avantages d’une telle mesure pour les employeurs et l’industrie, susceptible aux pressions du gouvernement, il préside une commission dont les effets s’avèrent plus pervers qu’avantageux pour la grande masse des travailleuses.

      L’organisation d’une biographie n’est jamais facile: la chronologie recoupe plusieurs moments-clefs sur plus d’un demi-siècle, les engagements se succèdent sans être complètement abandonnés et les thèmes se chevauchent. Éric Leroux a choisi d’adopter une approche thématique: dans un premier temps, il traite successivement du syndicalisme, de la législation sociale et de l’action politique ouvrière, pour s’en tenir plutôt à une narration chronologique dans les derniers chapitres. Chaque lecteur et lectrice pourrait exprimer des frustrations et suggérer un autre ordre dans l’organisation des thèmes. Ainsi, puisque, à mon avis, une familiarité avec les principes de la franc-maçonnerie est fondamentale pour comprendre Gustave Francq, pourquoi faut-il attendre si longtemps avant de traiter du sujet? La philosophie franc-maçonne imprègne toute la pensée de Francq. On y retrouve les racines de ses engagements: le rationalisme, l’importance de l’éducation, l’idéal démocratique. La fondation de journaux ouvriers témoigne de l’importance accordée au savoir par les francs-maçons. L’héritage franc-maçon de Francq demande aussi des explications. L’adhésion à la loge n’était pas anodine à une époque où elle était passible d’excommunication par l’Église catholique. Il reste que dans sa forme, cette biographie oblige les lectrices et lecteurs à de constants aller-retour dans le temps qui font parfois perdre de vue la synchronie des événements.

      Malgré les éléments explicatifs fournis par l’auteur, les grands courants et enjeux qui ont marqué cette époque gagneraient à être approfondis. Un personnage se meut dans le caractère, dans l’esprit de son temps. L’époque de Francq est celle d’une grande poussée industrielle depuis la fin du 19e siècle, accentuée par la guerre et les années vingt, qui met en conflit ses promoteurs, surtout libéraux, apôtres du progrès et de la modernité, et les conservateurs nationalistes et cléricaux. C’est celle de la montée du fascisme et des clivages qu’elle crée dans le monde intellectuel québécois. On ne peut pas perdre de vue cette toile de fond nationale et internationale. Aussi, l’énumération des réformes sociales poursuivies par Francq et par les syndicats internationaux devrait faire l’objet d’une remise dans leur contexte pour faire ressortir l’importance respective de chacune et montrer les enjeux idéologiques et pratiques qu’elles provoquent.

      Il faut, même dans un ouvrage aussi érudit, relever quelques affirmations qui porteraient à débat. Ainsi, les mesures sociales prises par le Québec sous le gouvernement libéral d’Adélard Godbout entre 1940 et 1944 ne sont pas uniquement imputables à la crise économique qui les précèdent, mais aussi au climat socio-économique créé par la guerre et aussi au programme politique du parti libéral depuis plusieurs années, et plus particulièrement, inspiré cette fois par la Crise, celui de 1938. On se demande aussi pourquoi Leroux fait appel à Robert Rumilly, chroniqueur plutôt qu’historien, pour appuyer certains jugements.

      Il est regrettable que l’index, si précieux pour ce genre d’ouvrage, ne soit que nominal, ce qui limite sérieusement son utilité. Il faut toutefois remercier Leroux d’avoir inclus une chronologie qui permet de suivre en synchronie les étapes de la vie de Francq.

Ravi Pendakur, Immigrants and the Labour Force; Policy, Regulation and Impact (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000)

THIS BOOK is a contribution to studies about immigrants, immigrant women, and people of colour in Canada. By a meticulous and accessible (for non-economists) analysis of census data from Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver, Pendakur demonstrates that the Canadian state, through its immigration policy, is able to influence and is influenced by the nature of economic relations, including the labour market.

      The author states that these aforementioned issues are largely unexplored. This is hard to believe since he has listed authors such as Peter Li and Vic Satzewich in his bibliography who have done just that, and they are not alone. Unfortunately he does not refer to these works in the first part of the book when he is discussing the locations of immigrants in the labour market. I think that his analysis would have been greatly strengthened if he had. Be that as it may, Pendakur’s study is a significant contribution to this body of knowledge.

      Through a process described by him as a "cohort attainment model," he compares three cohorts of "immigrants" and "non-immigrants" in four census periods: 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991 as far as their location within the labour market is concerned. They are tracked from their entry point into Canada and then into the decades following.

      The analysis is made more dynamic by locating his problematic within the larger political economy of Canada, marked by a shift from a resource-based economy in the pre-war period, to the rise in manufacturing industries in the post-war period and finally the transformations of the new economy of the 1990s. The evolution of immigration policy from its overtly declared racist forms in the pre-war years to a more sanitized and sometimes covertly racist version in the post-war period also provide the backdrop for his analysis. Pendakur describes the relationship between the period of immigration, place of birth, schooling, and one’s location in the labour market.

      Utilizing an eight-sector typology of industries developed by the Economic Council of Canada and Statistics Canada, Pendakur is able to locate immigrant and non-immigrant cohorts in specific segments of the labour market based on skill requirements and job quality. What adds to the value of his research is that he is able to make conclusions about the positioning of immigrants from particular sources, such as those from the UK versus others from Italy, as well as for men versus women. This is an extremely useful analysis for those interested in gender, race, and ethnic patterns in labour participation. While social science studies so far have relied on a limited number of interviews, personal testimonies, and archival research, Pendakur’s study uses a much larger data set, viewing immigrants over time.

      The locations of immigrants relative to non-immigrant groups did not vary dramatically over the three decades looked at. The cohort that entered Canada in 1961 (mainly sponsored), and which was followed between 1961 and 1991, apparently did not change their occupations over those 30 years. Immigrant men remained concentrated in construction and manufacturing, while their female counterparts remained in manufacturing and service industries. Many in the immigrant male cohort were born in Italy and filled construction and service jobs since most lacked fluency in an official language. Construction jobs emerged as a male immigrant niche for this cohort and this sector commanded relatively higher wages with a variety of skill and schooling requirements. The service sector, on the other hand, was marked by low skills, education, and wages. Immigrant women in the same time periods worked predominantly in manufacturing and services, a large proportion concentrated in the garment sector, marked by low wages.

      Cohorts entering Canada from 1961 to 1977, who were tracked in 1981 and 1991, inluded sponsored immigrants as in the earlier cohort as well as a large proportion of independent immigrants from countries previously excluded as sources of immigration because of racial discrimination. The latter came under the Points System of 1967. Patterns revealed in the earlier period continued in the 1970s and afterwards with these cohorts. However, there seems to have been a movement out of manufacturing and construction into service sectors. Pendakur comments that this movement was not an indication of an actual shift in start-up employment for immigrants, rather it reflected the entry of younger, Canadian-educated immigrants. Country of education seems to be a cause for discrimination faced by immigrants and this has a direct impact on how well immigrants do in the Canadian labour market. It is apparent that immigrants schooled in the UK and US are given full credit for their education and therefore fare similarly to Canadian-born workers. The reverse is true for immigrants schooled elsewhere.

      Immigrant women who lacked fluency in an official language, including large numbers from China, Italy, and Greece continued to work in manufacturing, particularly in garment factories. Others who could speak English and French and had higher levels of schooling, from the Caribbean, Northern Europe, and Asia outside of China, went into social services.

      Immigrant men and women were over-represented in manufacturing and personal services and under-represented in better-paid sectors. Partly, the exclusion of immigrants in the latter sectors was due to lack of fluency in an official language and low levels of (or devalued?) schooling of sponsored immigrants, but it was also due to discrimination. Pendakur states that adjusting the data by education and age did not change the distribution radically.

      The movement of significant numbers of immigrants into self-employment is an interesting phenomenon flagged by the author. Those who made such a move did so within the same sector where they had been waged workers before, such as in construction and services. This could be a demonstration of the lack of mobility for immigrants due to discrimination and the entrenchment of ethnic niche employment. Overall, self-employment was much higher for immigrants compared to non-immigrants over the three decades studied.

      The limitations of census data analysis are apparent in Pendakur’s study as the actual lived experiences of immigrant men and women, their motivations, interactions, and strategies with gatekeepers, educators, and employers cannot be studied through numerical data. Nuances of inclusions and exclusions can be best studied with qualitative methodologies. That is lacking in this book, which is limited to quantitative analysis.

      In the last section of the book, there is a fascinating problematization of the state-constructed category, "visible minority," and a related critique of the policy of employment equity. Pendakur argues that by creating one singular category, class variations within and between different non-white groups are obfuscated. But then, a capitalist state can hardly be expected to acknowledge and remedy class inequalities as a structural problem. Pendakur speculates that the singular category was created to give some political clout to people of colour. In effect, the category "visible minority" homogenizes a diverse population, thereby making employment equity unable to help those who need it most. To illustrate his point, he demonstrates that west Asians are better represented in managerial positions than whites, blacks, and south and south east Asians. In another chapter, co-written with his brother Krishna Pendakur, he shows that it is true that people of colour earn significantly less than whites in Canada, but emphasizes that this wage gap is experienced differently by different ethnic and racial groups. Aboriginal men and visible minority men who are Canadian-born as well as those who are immigrants suffer the most disadvantage in terms of wage disparity. Visible minority women do not seem to have lower wages than Canadian-born white women, although aboriginal women do. In addition, among Canadian-born white workers, Greek and Portuguese men and Greek women face a significant wage gap. Thus, it is evident that all visible minorities and even all white groups do not encounter the wage gap in the same manner or to the same degree.

      Employment equity also does not address education equity, which is required to create a supply of qualified persons who could apply for positions. Thus, the program ends up helping people who have the education and skills required to be in upper echelon positions. Those who do not possess these prerequisites due to racism in educational access cannot be helped by Employment Equity.

      It is hard to know whether Pendakur is critical of the philosophy of employment equity in abstraction or whether his critique is directed at the actual program in place at the federal level. Assuming that he is coming from the latter position, I expected a more extensive critique of the federal program of equity, which in its present form, is toothless, since it lacks clear goals, timetables, as well as penalties for not achieving equity. There was no mention of the fact that the program was limited to federally regulated crown corporations and only later included the federal government itself as an employer. Private-sector companies are largely exempted from the program unless they are involved in large contracts with the federal government.

      I was hoping to see a problematization of the category "immigrant" as the author has done with the category "visible minority." However, this never happens. Pendakur assumes that anybody who is born outside Canada and who now resides here is an immigrant. This is highly problematic since the term "immigrant" is still common-sensically associated with those who are deemed non-Canadian, those who are "others." To address a person who has lived in Canada for 10, 20 or 30 years as an immigrant is unacceptable to many and symbolically sets them apart from "Canadians" who are deemed to be entitled to the privileges of citizenship. When does a person cease to be an immigrant and become a Canadian? Pendakur does not discuss this thorny question and chooses to use the term "immigrant" unproblematically.

      Despite the concerns expressed here I think that this 200 page book must be read by anyone interested in immigration, labour, gender, and anti-racist studies. The data presented is highly provocative and can be utilized in a variety of ways to complement qualitative studies undertaken by social scientists in similar fields. Discrimination, segregation, and pay inequities are clearly demonstrated between workers of different ethnic and racial groupings. It also confirms that inequalities suffered by many non-Canadian workers are not merely a symptom of adjusting and settling in a new country. It is largely an indication of discrimination and racism.

Oiva W. Saarinen, Between a Rock and a Hard Place : A Historical Geography of the Finns in the Sudbury Area (Waterloo: Wilfrid University Press, 1999)

OIVA W. SAARINEN, a historical geographer at Laurentian University, begins his work by noting that an "advantage of working with Finnish historical geography is the fact that this ethnic group can lay claim to having one of the richest archival heritages extant." (xiii) As it turns out, Between a Rock and a Hard Place reflects that archival abundance, for better and worse, in providing a wealth of data on Sudbury-area Finns, especially on the period up to World War II.

      Convinced that Finns "left an indelible imprint" on the Sudbury area, (1) Saarinen seeks a "framework for comparable studies involving other ethnic groups in North America."(1-2) He also reaches out to readers interested in the particular, the local. Brave and all-encompassing though such an approach might be, it is fraught with difficulties: does the specific tell us much about the general? Then there is the question of balance: Saarinen terms his book a "celebration" of Finnish heritage – while not excessively filio-pietistic, such celebratory aspects do appear.

      The overlying thesis here is suggested by the evocative title. As Saarinen sees it, Finns in the often sulphur-blackened landscape about Sudbury had only two options for self-improvement – the labour movement and political activism.(2) But how deep did it penetrate? Saarinen concedes the existence of "hall socialism" and other forms of pragmatic institutional activity; he also shows that few Finns actually belonged to organizations of any ilk. (272) Yet he largely ignores his own evidence in insisting on a far-reaching "Great Divide" among area Finns. Did the left/right split really matter beyond the respective elites – who by dominating the record keeping, the newspaper reportage, and the like, certainly kept it visible? If so, why did so few Finns formally join the fray? Saarinen rightly shows that as immigrants and wage earners in resource economies (or small farmers with minuscule capital), Finns faced formidable obstacles should they opt for active membership in "radical" groups. But instead of delving deeper into the supposed "Divide," he describes the institutional "players." More confusingly, he ultimately shifts ground; he urges a "recast[ing of] the leftist/radical tradition of the Finns in Canada ... as being progressive rather than radical or communist in character." (274) Perhaps the "Great Divide" was not so great? Were Finns really between two immovable objects, or were they more empowered, able to negotiate an admittedly "rocky" road as they saw fit?

      That being said, these organizations and the unquestioned commitment of a minority of local Finns to their respective causes deserve the attention that Saarinen provides. Here one will find a wealth of information on the group activities of the Sudbury-area Finns. If only for coalescing scattered data, the book deserves the attention of anyone interested in the immigrant experience in Canada. Discussion of political activity, the churches, working-class organization, and more, reveal that Finns, both men and women (Saarinen tries hard to include discussion of the latter) melded homeland views and New World ideas into an effort to both ease settlement and prevent assimilation. Between a Rock and a Hard Place is on especially fertile ground in suggesting that the border did matter, with the American authorities cutting immigration quotas in the 1920s – the Finnish Canadian experience was not just a smaller imitation of the American case. (123) One does wish for a few more consistent and developed generalizations that would aid comparative study.

      The relatively thin level of generalization reflects a problem with studying the Finnish experience, especially from the 1890s to World War II. Saarinen’s evident familiarity with the super-abundant Finnish archival record (supplemented by a thorough reading of secondary sources) creates a tendency to report rather than to analyze. Saarinen’s self-stated goal of serving the local, particular interest makes such reportage almost inevitable. There is much to appreciate: for instance, a long (80 page) chapter outlining the geographical pattern of Finnish settlement provides good summary histories of the rural enclaves, the mining camps, and the portions of Sudbury where Finns settled. One can applaud the effort and the resultant maps; the latter, while frustratingly small, are a valuable element of this work. But a tight focus can be hard to maintain, and on occasion Saarinen loses grip of the lens. Besides largely irrelevant tidbits and near gossip about colourful characters, errors inevitably penetrate the minutia. For instance, in covering the "Whitefish/Louise" Finns, Saarinen provides a "first settler" date (1905) where a pioneer actually arrived some six years earlier. Such "errors" are in a way insignificant – but they also raise questions about Saarinen’s approach. Where does important detail end and trivia begin? How many "pioneers" does one mention? Who makes the text; who the endnotes; and who does not make it at all? Similarly, the twenty biographies scattered through the book seem quite arbitrarily chosen and inconsistent in coverage.

      No less troubling is the tendency to intermingle generalization with minutia – thus the Beaver Lake history reveals a "leftist" rural enclave, while literally next door (the easternmost Beaver Lake Finn was a neighbour to a Louise Township Finn) the folks were supposedly much farther to the "right." If so, why ? Not because of the environment, which was virtually identical. Meanwhile, the Waters settlement, characterized as conservative, was home to several left-wing institutions. So we are provided with interesting micro-depictions of the Finnish settlement – but we are also left with sweeping generalizations sometimes contradicting the detail.

      The sheer volume of Saarinen’s pre-1940 data also raises concerns. Many times, Between a Rock and a Hard Place minimizes post-World War II issues. The decline of Finnishness in the rural enclaves is dealt with very briefly – often a paragraph covers the past 50 years where several pages dealt with the first half century. What was the nature of the decline? Is today’s Finnishness limited to a few pieces of glassware or the occasional Finnish laatikko (casserole)? Saarinen briefly discusses the retention of symbolic Finnishness (259-261), but given efforts like those of Timothy Dallen on rural Finns around Thunder Bay, more discussion of postwar ethnic decline would have been welcome.

      Ironically, given the emphasis on working-class ideology, the limited postwar coverage often emphasizes the Finnish élite – Finns who "made it" in business and the like. Perhaps a little "close to home," this coverage veers near the congratulatory: do we really need references to saunas imported from Finland? What of the many Finns who never "made it"?

      What then, does that leave us ? Minor errors borne of synthesis; a publisher unwilling or unable to provide full pages for very detailed maps and charts; rather idiosyncratic biographies and more. One also wishes that Saarinen’s goal of a "framework" for comparative analysis received a little more weight; so, too, his postwar coverage. Yet for all its flaws, Between a Rock and a Hard Place deserves praise. Led astray on occasion by the depth of his research and pride in his Finnish heritage, Oiva Saarinen has nonetheless done yeoman work. Readers with any interest in Canadian immigration, or in the ethnically diverse, northern resource frontier of Canada, should say kiitos! (thank you!)

Shirley Tillotson, The Public at Play: Gender and the Politics of Recreation in Post-War Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

SHIRLEY TILLOTSON’s new work on recreation is a study of ambivalence and failure. In exposing this basic pattern, through a tight blend of theory and evidence, this book succeeds admirably. Tillotson’s focus is on recreation politics during the first fifteen years of postwar welfare state building at eleven governing levels, and she addresses a crucial question: did gendered hierarchies change as organized, public leisure expanded? Through this opaque window, her chapter themes consider how recreation, as a publicly-subsidized social movement, dissipated into a publicly-consumed social service. Tillotson shows how Ontario’s postwar recreation goals came to be defined, how its bureaucracy expanded, and how its growing professionalization – the role of a new cadre of mostly male recreation directors – redefined masculine leadership. She asks how an ostensibly liberal-democratic movement’s search for legitimacy tried to transform itself and the society it served, but could not. Drawing on Carole Pateman’s critique of liberalism and the welfare state, which uncovers its inherent failure to reposition boundaries of gender, Tillotson structures her evidence, quite effectively, along a complex narrative to examine how recreation’s contradictory aims brought little in the struggle for gender equality or for social democracy in postwar Ontario.

      What could have been an activist social movement, fostering new relations between classes, genders, ethnicities, and ages, became by the mid-1950s a socially-reproducing, community service. In this prolonged and complex process, gendered power relations between breadwinning men and homemaking women; between boys and girls; and between all lives constrained by existing boundaries of lived experience and expectation, remained remarkably fixed, remarkably "normalized," and remarkably unchallenged by an increasingly centrist politics of public leisure administration. Recreation as "public play" became a vehicle of social reproduction. New funds became available, and were allocated. Consumerism had an impact. Recreation’s governing and administrative structures took shape, generally within existing norms. Its ambivalence, its failures, and the basic gender and power assumptions displayed patterns of continuity, not change. Of course, implicit to Tillotson’s entire approach is the argument that a potential fork at the road actually appeared with the end of war. I myself doubt that participatory, social-democracy and increased gender equality could have attracted more attention than it did before the 1960s, but also feel, that big "what if" aside, that all readers now have a carefully-researched study of why and how Ontario’s recreation politics at mid-century ultimately acted to forestall, not promote change.

      But, as a study situated in the postwar reconstruction period and throughout the 1950s, it conscientiously works against the pitfalls of homogenizing the period. Tillotson delivers a nuanced approach to the ambivalent discourses – of recreation professionals and volunteers – through which liberal ideals and social structure collided. "Public recreationists with a liberal vision of participatory democracy," Tillotson states in a well-crafted introduction, "thus had to struggle to establish new organizational methods, while working with leaders committed to existing, contradictory conventions of social power." (17) Her work convincingly locates discourses that reproduced gender relations, using documents – provincial government, municipal, and volunteer bodies – generated on an ambivalent terrain: between the public worlds of active citizens and the private worlds of family life. "In imagining that public recreation would be both democratic and liberal," Tillotson notes, "by having ‘private’ people as its leaders, its designers built into it such contradictory features that its decline from a movement to service was virtually ignored." (17) As a work that moves between the boundaries of public practice and personal politics, her chapters address what she sees, overall, as recreation’s backward-facing, gendered politics.

      Tillotson begins by reconstructing policy aims worked out among the province’s Community Programs Branch (CPB), the Ontario Adult Recreation Board, and local recreation organizations, particularly the making of the new profession of recreation directors. Her research is drawn, primarily, from the records of Ontario’s CPB, the Recreation Directors Federation of Ontario, and the Ontario Recreation Association. Some colourful personalities appear, like former athlete and war hero J.K. (Johnny) Tett, a CPB promoter, who helped to change recreation’s image "from the prim and class-biased one of ‘wholesome’ and ‘constructive’ activities to a more inclusive one of popular fun." (48) Throughout, Tillotson cites recreation theorists, activists, volunteers, and professional recreation directors hired across Ontario towns, as each played their parts within her underlying "social movement-to-social service" narrative. The ideas and efforts of University of Toronto community organization expert Alan Klein, Simcoe Arts and Crafts Association director Louise Colley, and American physical education professor G. Ott Romney, among many others, are examined in a study that crosses boundaries of class and gender whenever possible. Primarily, the voices of middle-class men appear, since men, as "family men," increasingly shaped public recreation politics, but Tillotson considers carefully the impact of wage-earning volunteers, women, and ethno-cultural minorities. Noting that in 1949 only 3 of 56 local recreation directors were women (by 1963 the preponderance of males still held at 86 of 90), Tillotson examines an interesting site of gender fluidity through the common plight of recreation directors trying to fashion new roles. These new recreation professionals had to be simultaneously manful, playful, helpful, and useful to the communities they served. I liked the use of Parsonian typologies of masculinity and femininity, between which they (about one third of assistant directors were women) were torn, in part because the trait names themselves – aggressive, "planful," self-confident versus affectionate, obedient, and cheerful – derived from the period under review. The "job itself was potentially feminizing," Tillotson concludes. (80)

      I also liked the nuanced approach to gender itself that Tillotson often adopts in using "social hierarchies" as the activated system in which gender operates. This is brought out in chapter four, which considers how recreation’s "authority" as a bureaucratic, gendered enterprise became legitimized within existing notions of family and community life. The comparatively broad time span considered here, 1946 to 1958, nears that covered by the book itself. So does the argument – that in pursuing their new, evolving roles, recreation directors, as professionals, undermined their "larger democratic project." (77) Recreation’s force in restructuring social hierarchies was, especially for gender equality, ambivalent, a failure really. With respect to children’s programs, Tillotson makes clear that while recreation directors were "altering something of what the welfare state meant to women and girls, they relied on and reproduced gendered hierarchy in the development of their profession." (87)

      With her thesis well demonstrated as a province-wide pattern, Tillotson presents a very useful case study, drawn from Brantford, and partly from the relatively long tenure (1945-53) of that city’s first recreation director, John Pearson. Perhaps inspired, as other recreationists were initially, by Chicago social worker and theorist Saul Alinsky’s call to action for a "peoples" governance on local, neighbourhood levels, Pearson seemed intent on keeping something of Alinsky’s bottom-up populism alive in a milieu, often of middle-class sensibilities that supported existing social hierarchies. The city-funded Brantford Playgrounds and Recreation Commission was made up of mostly middle-class women and men from groups like the IODE and Optimists. They comprised, in other words, an ambivalent body, hardly the voices for social change that, fundamentally, did not gain strength until the latter 1960s. Nonetheless, from early 1945 to 1948 some 300 men and women joined Pearson’s community committees, with slightly more men than women, of mixed classes with slightly more working-class women, and of notable ethno-cultural diversity. Ninety-one per cent, however, were married, and if any ideal prevailed it was that of a "stable," family model. By 1953, however, the Community Committees Council which attempted to articulate Brantford’s familial-biased, social hierarchy had been displaced by a bureaucratized Recreation Committee. Gendered boundaries changed little in the process.

      Social historians need to know more about how normative patterns, ideal and lived, intersected with local life, with the politics of everyday local community activities, like building a rink or staffing a playground program. It is primarily the ebb and flow of social power distributions – how societal and Ontario-wide forces shaped local recreational politics – that this book engages critically, which I think is a necessary methodological tactic. Tillotson explicitly sidesteps a socio-cultural study, one attempting to interpret the lived experiences and memories of ordinary Ontarians who remade themselves through leisure by skating, rughooking, or playing baseball in the countless teams and programs that grew in leaps and bounds. This is not meant to be a study of popular culture, nor even a social history of ordinary experience. Nor does it focus on the complexities of any large sample of front-line activists, volunteers, or participants. "Both in researching and writing, I have remained fundamentally ambivalent about the people in this movement," Tillotson explains. (19) While this may be a somewhat overstated disclaimer, she does present a careful dissection of the narrower stage of recreationist politics itself. "While I can certainly interpret the meaning of their project as a whole, the individuals involved were a mixed bag – appallingly innocent, contemptibly complacent, bracingly pragmatic, and deeply idealistic – and thus impossible to characterize collectively." (19) Instead, this book offers a well-grounded (including a revealing table of sex and class distributions for Brantford volunteers from the immediate postwar years to 1961) explanation of their structural incapacity to build a social democratic movement.

      Would, for other projects, historicizing that "mixed bag" of ordinary recreation builders, and users too, be so problematic? Through other methods, including oral history, it seems quite possible to consider how boundaries of social difference – gendered, class and age-based, and ethnic – were actually experienced on the ball diamond, in the ballet class, or the mixed-sex-and-age archery class, which in fact Tillotson includes photographic evidence of as a prime vehicle for "broad accessibility." But that, of course, would lead to other studies. Tillotson instead offers a sophisticated and carefully-demonstrated basis for other researchers to go beyond the political as inscribed in the minutes, meetings, and policy debated and toward the personal as witnessed in life-writing and in memory. I am quite sure, I might add, that other work addressing other questions, focusing instead on users rather than programs, would implicitly reinforce Tillotson’s basic premise.

      Did Tillotson choose a city case and study topic generally that too neatly fits into a pattern of ambivalence, then failure, for social democracy and gender equality? I do not think so. It is true that her socialist feminism deeply structures her entire approach, but that fact is discussed openly, not skirted. Overall, I felt closer to a historical text that began with her personal response to the end of the Cold War, with telling signs added of her own time, place, and parentage. To argue, as she does in the next-to-final chapter, that feminism failed to take hold (but had some foreshadowing) in recreation in the 1950s, that making volunteer leadership democratically "representative" of the community seems to have entailed putting "Dad" – male volunteers and recreation directors – in charge, is not supposed to make us feel simply that recreation failed. Rather, like schools, hospitals, and other provincial and federal welfare state programs, recreation operated at points of intersection between social hierarchies, however fluid, and social demands, in a self-proclaimed liberal democratic society that in fact imposed old demands on new freedoms.

      This book engages a growing conversation on postwar normalization, one that now has a place in courses on Canada in the postwar – Coldwar/Babyboom/Consumerist – period. I hope it is used widely to help shape our understanding of gender politics since 1945. Both undergraduates and period specialists will find much to learn from it. From studies of normalized ideals in education, to heterosexual dating practices, to fatherhood and family life, recreation as a local activity crosses many domains. Tillotson’s study of its politics and its gendered implications, in my view, goes a long way toward revealing how.

Leah F. Vosko, Temporary Work: The Gendered Rise of the Precarious Employment Relationship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

THIS IS A WONDERFUL BOOK, and a perfect reminder of the old maxim, "don’t judge a book by its cover." Inside the extremely pink, but otherwise blank cover, lies a thoughtful analysis addressing one of the central issues in the work world from a number of different vantage points. Leah Vosko explores the triangular relationship between workers, multiple employers, and employment agencies, and the implications this has for the balance of class power.

      Leah Vosko’s book encompasses the history and evolution of the Temporary Help Industry (THI) in Canada and the regulatory system, both national and international, that developed around it. Vosko traces the normative shift from the Standard Employment Relationship (SER), which marked the post-World War II period to the current period, where in casualized employment, workers have few rights and can expect or demand little from employers. Normative is italicized, because the SER, as Vosko notes, was not for everybody – it was a white male breadwinner norm. Vosko links the Temporary Employment Relationship (TER), to the feminization of employment and the increased commodification of labour. This term is used to indicate not just women’s entry into the labour force en masse, but the harmonizing down of men’s jobs so that virtually all women and many men are engaged in non-standard casualized employment There are gender and race differences between women and men and between white men and Canadians who are immigrants, non-white, and Aboriginal. Vosko reminds us that these differences are classed as well. There is marked polarization among women and among men in the dominant group along the lines of the good jobs/ bad jobs dichotomy.

      In developing her thesis about the racialized aspects of the THI, Vosko traces it back to the Canadian state’s nation-building and immigration policy, in which the state’s commitment to "an ethnically pure British settler colony" conflicted with and contradicted the capitalist class’ desire for a supply of cheap, temporary male labourers and guest workers. Linking the Temporary Help Agencies (THA) of the current period with this predecessor makes a connection that this reader finds illuminating, but not necessarily immediately obvious. Making this link is a significant contribution to how we think about casual work. Resistance grew to the abuses common in these private employment agencies for both xenophobic reasons, and in response to their exploitative character. Federal, provincial, and municipal regulation developed as well as the International Labour Organization (ILO) position that "labour is not a commodity."

      The direct predecessor of the THI is the typewriter companies of the early 20th century that managed to elude the attempts to regulate private employment agencies. These companies were legitimate because they did not charge fees. To encourage the sale of typewriters, companies offered the services of stenographers and typists, who were female, well educated, young, and largely Canadian born. These Canadian women who were relegated to the fringes of the labour force and denied access to a SER nevertheless were quite privileged compared to their immigrant sisters who were limited to positions as foreign domestic workers, leaving them vulnerable to work under harsh conditions, and ultimately to arrival in Canada minus the citizenship entitlements given to other classes of immigrants.

      I found the material documenting the international regulation of the THI the least satisfying. While the establishment of international standards is not insignificant, the ILO has no real power other than a fairly limited moral authority to actually enforce their provisions. It is, however, a necessary part of her argument about the normative shift from the SER to the TER. For me the heart of the book is in the wonderful material Vosko collected from interviewing managers and workers in a THA. Gaining entry was quite a feat, and in these chapters, one really gains an insight into the exploitative nature of the THI. She also documents how highly skilled immigrants take jobs as temps in the hope of gaining much needed Canadian experience only to discover that because their work site is separate from their legal employer, the THA, they are unable to get references for the work they have done. The triangular nature of the relationship where the agency is the employer, and is responsible for recruitment, payroll, and dismissal, but the worker is actually working for the "customer" of the agency leads to a very problematic situation for enforcing workers’ rights. Even when the placement is in a unionized firm, contracting out clauses in a collective agreement result in this group of workers not receiving union wages or benefits. From the point of view of the employer, or the "customer" of the THI, this is an ideal situation – the disposable workers who can be hired and fired at will and to whom an employer need have no obligation.

      In developing her argument about the normative shift to the TER, Vosko examines the Ontario version of workfare, called "work first." The mandate of "work first" is to match "employable" social assistance recipients with THA. Penalties for non-compliance by refusing to accept work or a referral to a placement are loss of benefits for up to three months. If a recipient refuses more than once, the cutoff period for benefits is six months. Vosko managed to attend a training session for welfare recipients, where the message that social assistance recipients are given is that they have about as much chance of full-time work with benefits as winning the lottery. Under new legislation of the Harris Government, Ontario Works participants are prohibited from unionizing. In Vosko’s eyes, these social policy measures constitute a throwback to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when private employment agencies engaged workers under coercive and exploitative conditions. Only pressure from organized labour and immigrant communities could curtail those practices.

      Finally, Vosko harnesses her theoretical argument to the historical case study and examines what can be done to improve employment conditions for temporary workers. She proposes collective actions embracing unions and better labour laws. In particular, some form of broader based bargaining supported by the organized labour movement is important in improving the conditions of these workers.

      One can see, even from this all too brief review, the wealth and diversity of material that lies between these pink covers. This book is impressive for the careful scholarship, and the multiple approaches that enrich the author’s discussion of the subject. Temporary Work is obligatory reading for all of us to gain a sense of how this casualized labour market came to be, and as a model of good research. I cannot recommend it too highly, and let’s hope that in the next edition (there will be many editions of this book), we actually have a cover worthy of its contents.

Patricia O’Reilly, Health Care Practitioners: An Ontario Case Study in Policy Making (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

HEALTH CARE PRACTITIONERS provides detailed, descriptive documentation of the social history of a wide variety of health practitioners in the province of Ontario. One table alone represents the positions of 45 different practitioner groups after the Regulated Health Professions Act (RHPA) of 1991. Calling her work a story, O’Reilly provides a post-positive analysis of the history of policy-making and change in the positions and divisions of various health care practitioner groups from their own perspectives and the perspectives of various representative spokespersons, as well as written documentation. She argues for the method of hermeneutics, which involves placing herself in the position of those studied in order to get at their version of reality, their story. The analytical base is the dialectic of the interaction between ideas and institutionalization as understood hermeneutically in the dynamic development and growth of these practitioner groups.

      This is a valuable book that brings together extensive documentation of Ontario health care from the point of view of the role of practitioners vis à vis one another, the state, and the public dating from 1788 in British-governed Québec. Here a particular group of practitioners was elevated above the others. They were said to be scientific as they were educated in Great Britain. This elevated status was legislated and stricter licensing procedures began to be enforced. From the early beginnings to the modern period, O’Reilly documents the processes whereby various practitioner groups were embedded, marginalized, and excluded in and through health care legislation. She summarizes some of these processes in several interesting tables that divide practitioners into those who deal with the whole body and are independent such as medical practitioners; those who are merchant-service providers such as dentists; those who are technique specialists such as chiropractors; technology specialists, such as dental technologists; and those who are assistants such as registered nurses. These groups are categorized at several points in time in terms of their degree of embeddedness, marginality, and exclusion.

      The book itself is 244 pages long but it includes 100 more pages of footnotes based on readings of a myriad of historical policy documents of numerous practitioner groups, "associations," "colleges," "boards," and "societies," as well as legislation. It also includes over 100 interviews with representatives of all of the colleges and some of the associations of health care practitioners governed under the RPHA, key policy advisors, bureaucrats, government officials, and a sample of non-RHPA-regulated and non-regulated health practitioner organizations as well as health practitioners themselves. Finally, O’Reilly includes a participant-observation component to background herself in this research. She worked in the provincial health care bureaucracy during the drafting of the RHPA.

      This is a book of detail, of history. It is not a book of explanation and prediction. It is not a book that tries to understand the processes observed through any new or even older theoretical/explanatory lens. The interviews, while claiming to represent the viewpoints of variously situated bureaucrats and practitioners, are not actually situated in any systematic way that would allow them to be seen as representative and allow generalizations to be made on their behalf. This is the story of the things said, about ideas and institutions from the perspectives of the health care practitioners and their groups and associations. It is not, however, a study of their actual behaviour. Nor is there a window on the ways that conflicts and complex negotiations were worked out. As such, although its focus is on change over time, there is little discussion of the difficult processes through which change was worked out. Max Weber is mentioned once, in the introduction. Karl Marx is never mentioned. This is not a study that contextualizes the local (Ontario health care practitioners) by paying attention to larger theories of social and political/economic change. Rather it is a story, well written and full of rich detail based on interviews and written reports with a focus on the 1960s to the 1970s.

Gregor Murray et Pierre Verge, La représentation syndicale: Visage juridique actuel et futur (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999)

LE VOLUME porte surtout sur le système juridique encadrant le syndicalisme québécois vu sous l’angle des deux principales formes de représentation syndicale, soit celle qui s’effectue à l’intérieur de l’entreprise via la négociation collective et celle qui a cours au-delà de l’entreprise dans divers organismes socio- économiques. Les auteurs s’interrogent également sur les problèmes que les transformations du marché du travail posent à l’encadrement juridique de l’action syndicale.

      Le premier chapitre comprend une portion historique qui est plutôt mince et fait plutôt référence à la progression du syndicalisme en Europe et aux États-Unis plutôt qu’au Québec et au Canada. L’analyse est donc peu ancrée dans l’expérience syndicale d’ici. Et pourtant, depuis longtemps, les travailleurs québécois ont été tentés par diverses formes de représentation syndicale. L’action de lobby auprès des gouvernements comme porte-parole des salariés date de la fin du 19e siècle et la Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (actuelle Confédération des syndicats nationaux) a porté un projet corporatiste qui imprègne encore certaines institutions au Québec.

      Un deuxième chapitre aborde la croissance récente des effectifs syndicaux et les caractéristiques particulières du syndicalisme canadien et québécois lorsque comparés à celui des États-Unis. Les auteurs notent le pluralisme syndical, le renforcement du syndicalisme national au détriment du syndicalisme international, la négociation fragmentée et l’accentuation du rôle politique des syndicats au Québec. Ils expliquent cette dernière particularité par l’expansion rapide du syndicalisme dans les secteurs public et parapublic depuis la Révolution tranquille et l’importance prise par l’État-providence.

      À noter que le tableau mettant en évidence les taux de syndicalisation au Québec demeure trop optimiste pour les années 1980 (plus de 40%) probablement à cause d’un mauvais choix du dénominateur représentant les travailleurs rémunérés. Des niveaux de syndicalisation aussi élevés comparativement au reste de l’Amérique du Nord pourraient laisser penser à la bonne santé du syndicalisme québécois. Ils rendraient inutile une meilleure protection du droit à la syndicalisation telle que les auteurs le souhaitent. Le niveau de syndicalisation se situe plutôt à 37% pendant les années 1980, augmentant à 40% au début de la décennie suivante et ayant tendance à diminuer à mesure que de nouveaux emplois se créent. En outre, les tableaux sur les taux sectoriels de présence syndicale et d’affiliation ont le travers de provenir d’une source d’informations qui excluent les syndiqués de compétence fédérale. Cette omission a pour effet de réduire la proportion de syndiqués affiliés à la Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec-Congrès du travail du Canada et de hausser indûment celle des syndicats indépendants au cours des deux dernières décennies. Cependant, ces lacunes n’affaiblissent pas la démonstration des auteurs; il y a effectivement une tendance à un recul du syndicalisme, au Québec comme ailleurs.

      Le chapitre trois est réservé à la législation régissant la négociation collective dans l’entreprise. On y relève les principes qui ont guidé le législateur dans le sillage du Wagner Act états-unien de 1935 et l’adaptation qu’en a faite le gouvernement québécois depuis l’adoption du Code du travail en 1964. Par la suite, plusieurs autres lois et la jurisprudence ont modelé le régime actuel de la convention collective dont les fondements, selon les deux auteurs, sont toujours axés sur l’entreprise et sur une opposition fondamentale d’intérêts entre employeurs et employés. Ce dernier principe aurait pour effet à leur avis de rendre difficile la participation organique des syndicats à l’orientation de l’entreprise.

      De plus, les auteurs notent que le système juridique ne rend pas compte des fonctions que les syndicats occupent à l’extérieur de l’entreprise lorsqu’ils représentent des salariés dans des lieux de concertation avec le patronat ou dans divers organismes créés par les gouvernements. On retrouve les représentants syndicaux dans des organismes touchant le monde du travail (Commission des normes du travail, Commission de la santé et de la sécurité du travail, Société québécoise de développement de la main-d’oeuvre, etc.) et dans plusieurs autres organisations reliées à des domaines de politique générale, de développement économique et de nature sociale (santé, éducation, langue, femmes, droits de la personne, etc.). Ces organismes, où la représentation syndicale est très variable et s’établit avec d’autres groupements, ont un rôle consultatif ou parfois décisionnel. Les auteurs n’y voient pas une intégration du syndicalisme à l’appareil de l’État, mais une certaine «inclusion» qu’ils jugent difficile à mesurer.

      Dans un dernier volet du volume, ils s’interrogent sur l’orientation future de l’encadrement juridique à la lumière des transformations subies par le milieu de travail sous les effets de l’intensification de la concurrence internationale. Les entreprises cherchent alors plus de flexibilité dans l’emploi de la main-d’oeuvre et sont soucieuses de réduire les contraintes étatiques et syndicales. Il en découle notamment l’accentuation du statut de travailleur autonome et l’extension du travail à des sous-contractants où les travailleurs sont peu syndiqués. Les auteurs ne croient pas que l’intérêt de certains employeurs à une plus grande participation des salariés à la gestion de leur travail puisse transformer la réalité de la subordination des travailleurs qui doivent pouvoir négocier collectivement leurs conditions de travail et recourir à la grève si nécessaire. Pour s’adapter aux nouvelles formes d’organisation du travail, le régime juridique de représentation syndicale doit, entre autres, selon eux élargir la notion de salarié pour palier à la plus grande mobilité des travailleurs d’une entreprise à l’autre, accepter la syndicalisation par secteur industriel, assurer un droit de représentation des travailleurs sur l’orientation de l’entreprise et réduire les obstacles à la solidarité syndicale interprovinciale.

      Au total, le volume a le mérite de tracer un tableau assez complet des lieux actuels de représentation syndicale et de fournir des pistes pour raffermir la protection du droit à la négociation collective. Mais c’est à une réforme considérable des lois du travail auxquelles les auteurs convient le législateur et il est douteux que le Québec soit tenté d’innover en cette matière. La tendance depuis deux décennies est de se situer à la remorque des autres administrations gouvernementales en Amérique du Nord. Le gouvernement, même du Parti Québécois, est soucieux de ne pas handicaper la capacité concurrentielle des entreprises québécoises par des lois trop contraignantes. Sa dernière réforme du Code du travail, l’été dernier, a accouché d’une souris.

Jeffery Taylor, Union Learning: Canadian Labour Education in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 2001)

WITH THE PUBLICATION of Union Learning: Canadian Labour Education in the Twentieth Century, Jeffery Taylor has made a valuable contribution to labour studies in Canada. The work represents the first comprehensive, book-length study of the area, and is a clearly presented and accessible piece of work outlining in mixed form this fascinating heritage.

      In the opening chapter Taylor provides a concise summary of key educational terms. He defines the different types of union courses (e.g. tools and issues courses) as well as different forms of learning that take place among workers ranging from formalized courses that provide official credentials, to classroom learning that does not, and the type of everyday "informal learning" that workers do all the time. The exercise helps the reader understand the mix of planned and unplanned activities that take place. However, the exercise takes on special importance given the expansion of scholarly debate on the nature of these different forms of learning, the renewed interest in union education among adult educators, and finally because of the invigorated interest in membership education within the labour movement itself. Adult education scholars may quibble about the lack of conceptual precision in this opening section but the fact remains that Taylor uses the terms consistently and readers will find them useful.

      Following this opening chapter, Taylor takes us back to 1918. From here he begins to carefully trace the development of education and learning in union federations, central and local unions, political and intellectual spheres, as well as within independent workers’ education organizations. The activities of the Workers Educational Association (WEA) dominate the first third of the book, and rightfully so. The WEA’s activities during the first half of the century, arguably, are definitive of a golden age of union learning similar to the phenomenon Michael Denning referred to as the "Age of the CIO": an exciting and energetic period of widespread non-sectarian collaboration. Taylor manages an even-handed approach to communist and non-communist, more and less radical streams of the labour movement. And, by the middle chapters, we see a full discussion of the growth of more professionalized educational techniques and membership training internal to individual unions. Important as a major sub-text of the book, in this section we begin to see how educational activities change with the broader shifts in union organization and Canadian society. Finally, in the latter third of the book we see consideration of issues of labour and learning associated with the last quarter century. Integrating original interviews, Taylor covers topics such as Paid Educational Leave, the relationship of union education to higher education, and in a (too) brief closing section, key dimensions of the international union education scene. A thread that culminates in the latter half of the book that I particularly enjoyed was the ebb and flow of the relationships between higher education, governments, and labour around issues of education, though it is clear that Taylor is at his best in his treatment of the WEA. In terms of the latter, useful comparisons between practice in Canada and elsewhere add to depth of this discussion.

      Taylor’s book, to my mind, suggests a broad analysis of the relationship between learning and society. At the heart of this analysis is the nature of the relationship between union education on the one hand and the structures, tactics, and political economic contexts of the labour movement on the other. This relationship can be characterized in a range of ways. Roughly, we could say that union education either leads broader changes, that it follows broader changes, or (the more satisfactory suggestion) that it is inter-woven with these broader changes in the kind of dialectical relationship that Marx outlined long ago. I would go so far as to say that Taylor’s work actually demonstrates how careful attention to union education can be used as an important means of assessing the meaning and function of the labour movement over time. In other words, studies of union education (understood as the organized attempt of workers to collectively and consciously respond to and to create change) tell us at least as much about workers and their organizations as do economic, industrial relations, and/or political analyses. Indeed, Taylor makes it clear that significant swings in union education go hand in hand with the types of political purposes the labour movement set for itself. For example, the methods of worker education can be seen to take on the character of a social movement (corresponding to the radicalism of the 1930’s and 1940’s), the character of a service and training activity (corresponding to the conservatism of the post-World War II era), and finally the character of a re-born social movement in today’s context. Whether this specific meta-argument has validity or not, the point is that Taylor’s work provides a place to start for a whole range of analyses.

      One minor question that emerged for me, however, was whether or not Taylor was providing an account of "union learning" or "union educational structures" (which are not quite the same thing). Discussions that organize the book tend to revolve around the rise and fall of different educational organizations and initiatives. However, "learning" as a phenomenon is not the existence of an organization or even the number of people involved in an initiative. It’s what goes on among people and the collective action that in turn emerges from these goings-on that define the learning process. Taylor does provide important clues about the character of the learning process itself. One quick example bears mentioning. It is found in the periodic excerpts from the letters of Claude Donald (a projectionist/organizer/technician working in Trade Union Film Circuit – a joint educational initiative between the National Film Board, the Trades and Labour Congress, the Canadian Congress of Labour, and the Workers Educational Association in the early 1940s). His descriptions give considerable life to our understanding of the film circuit initiative and demonstrate union learning directly.

      I have a favourite quotation about the importance of historical scholarship for social analysis. It’s found in the postscript of the second edition of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in which the author, in the process of providing a response to critics, writes that sociologists must turn off the "time machine" and "go down to the engine room to take a look." As a sociologist, this is precisely what Taylor’s work allowed me to do: take a close look at the rich history of learning in the Canadian labour movement. Union Learning is a delight and a keystone text for labour studies and labour education scholars.

Gilbert Levine, ed., Patrick Lenihan: From Irish Rebel to Founder of Canadian Public Sector Unionism (St. John’s: CCLH, 1998)

IT LIFTS the spirits to read a book that has a focus on labour leaders with a left interpretation of the role of labour in the development of the fabric of which Canada is made. But the final euphoria comes when the writer/editor of the publication is also of left sympathies and does not dismiss or degrade the contributions made by the people of the left – men and women – who had a tremendous positive impact on the lives of thousands of working men and women in mines, mills, the public sectors, and factories of this country. Such is this book, an autobiography, put together so well by Gilbert Levine and a group of highly skilled people, including Lorne Brown who crafted a very fine introduction. The autobiography, which was first submitted to tape by Gilbert Levine, was that of Patrick Lenihan, a fighter for the workers, first in Ireland and then in North America, specifically Canada. It is a story of a life of struggles, of victories, of defeats, but always of hope and determination that can only come from a person who was completely and totally dedicated to his beliefs and principles. It was these beliefs and principles that provided the vision and goals that kept this individual going, not wavering from the path that had been chosen. This kind of life should be an inspiration to everyone but especially to those who are still in the struggle that has as its main focus, improving the lives of members of the working class.

      Pat Lenihan tells a story that, in the first case, reveals the struggles and battles that were fought over a span of 40-plus years for the rights of the common worker and the unemployed, who were, and continue to be dismissed by management to make sure that profits are held at the maximum level possible. In the second case, the story also reveals the brutality that the ruling class exerted on the very people that produced the profits they so greedily attained. The brutality came from the police forces and governments that so quickly and readily protected those who owned the means of production against those who supplied the labour and produced the goods. The story is ably stated and produced by Mr. Levine, who states, "He turned out to be such a wonderful story teller – in the Irish tradition – ...." Anyone who has heard Mr. Lenihan speak would surely agree that he was a spellbinding speaker.

      Pat Lenihan begins his story in Ireland, where, by the age of ten, he was already in the fight for the independence of Ireland. He discusses the horrible conditions that existed at the turn of the 20th century and his introduction to socialism and the belief that this was the way the workers could gain their freedom from the tyranny of the capitalist class. After his move to Canada, he began the lifelong work of emancipation of workers, with the main focus centered on the trade union movement.

      Pat’s lifelong work was educating, organizing, and developing the idea that there was "power in the hands of the worker" – political power. He believed that if the workers of Russia could set up a workers’ state, then so could the workers in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter. He relates the battles of bringing workers into the union movement and the many victories won in spite of the concerted and vicious opposition by the bosses and their allies. He was jailed several times on charges of attempting to overthrow the government of Canada, for causing riots, and sedition. This did not deter him as he always said he was following the principles and directions of Marxism and Leninism and it was on these principles the workers would make the gains and win conditions that would improve their lives in terms of economics, social conditions, health, and education.

      While Pat worked hard with the miners and the unemployed during the 1930s, it is in the public sector that his star shines the brightest. He worked tirelessly to bring public sector workers into unions. While Calgary was his base, he traveled up and down the prairie provinces – Edmonton, Drumheller, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Brandon, etc., to help sign up workers into the various public unions. This collection of public sector locals was finally put together into what was known as NUPE – National Union of Public Employees. A tremendous achievement. More meetings and battles followed. NUPE later became CUPE – Canadian Union of Public Employees – spanning Canada from coast to coast and becoming Canada’s largest union. Pat Lenihan was there through it all and was a driving force all the way.

      His work in the CCF is also an important contribution to the socio-political fabric in Canada. After his "parting of the ways" with the Communist Party, he joined the CCF and was well received as a member without covering up or denying his Marxist roots and his previous membership in the Communist Party. This is an example of his ability to work with people, who were on the left in terms of their politics, but were not exactly sympathetic to the Communist Party. Through his dedication to the achievement of socialism, he felt working within a social reform party was a stepping stone to the final goal. His work within the CCF, like that in the trade union movement, was with dedication and sincerity. He was very instrumental in the formation of the NDP.

      What made Pat Lenihan the success that he was? Besides his deep faith in the working class, he was a fighter. He knew how to present the right statement at the right time. He knew backroom politics, where many tactics and strategies were carved out before they were presented to the main meeting or convention floor. He also knew how to work with people across the political spectrum – from red to blue and all shades in between. He was often criticized for getting too close to the right-wing elements in the trade union movement. On the other hand, he was always suspect to the right-wing element for being too close to the left and to the communists in the unions. It was a tricky balancing act but his story and the outcomes of the struggles suggest that he was correct in his view that labour unity was worth pursuing.

      Are there shortcomings in the autobiography as told by Gilbert Levine? It is almost a given that there will be some shortcomings in such a document. First, Patrick Lenihan told his story in his later years when memory might be somewhat cloudy and subject to error. In reading the book, one almost gets the feeling that Patrick Lenihan was the key figure in all of the struggles and battles that took place and by extension was the person who was responsible for the building and the advancement of the trade union movement. While he had a very major role, one of the glaring flaws in the book may be not what the book contains, but rather what it leaves out. Being part of the labour movement in Calgary during the post-World War II period, I am in a fairly good position to say that there were, in fact, other leaders who were equally significant in the development of the trade union movement as Patrick Lenihan, but they were either deliberately left out or were not included because Pat may have suffered from memory lapses during the telling of his life story. I suppose it can also be stated that the author of an autobiography has the license to include or leave out whatever he or she wishes.

      Regardless of the shortcomings, the autobiography is a tremendous contribution to the history of Canada and more specifically to the development of the public sector trade unions. Students of Canadian history, labour researchers, trade union leaders, union members, and members of the general public would be enriched by reading this fine addition to the body of literature on the trade union movement. Anyone who wants to be more enlightened about some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of economic and social development in Canada should find this a must.

Charlene Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998)

SCHOLARS have been largely content to consign gold rushes to the realm of television mini-series, small-town museums, and two-bit narratives of harrowing hardship and plucky upward mobility. This is unfortunate. The rushes that drew hundreds of thousands of men and women to California in 1849, Australia in 1851, British Columbia in 1858, the Transvaal in 1886, and the Yukon in 1898, provide us with a remarkable opportunity to examine the relationship between migration, labour, gender, race and colonization in the "long" 19th century. Charlene Porsild’s Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike helps begin a much needed critical appraisal of the social history of gold rushes.

      Porsild easily and conclusively challenges the popular image of the Klondike as "a frontier of white, male adventurers who overcame great physical and geographical obstacles in their quest for gold." (13) Gamblers and Dreamers begins with a demographic profile of Dawson City. Porsild finds it more cosmopolitan and less American, more female and less male, and more permanent and less transient than popular gold rush lore would have it. She then turns to the impact of the gold rush on the indigenous peoples, suggesting that both the coastal Tlingit and the local Han reaped few rewards from their sudden contact with European peoples.

      Having inserted women, families, and people of colour into the Klondike’s history, Porsild tackles its famed reputation for classlessness. Porsild argues that newcomers overwhelmingly performed manual work, often for wages. Their experiences of family, like their experiences of paid work, were essentially similar to those found in southern Canadian cities of a like size. Even the visibility of the city’s sex trade belied the more prosaic reality that "the residents of Dawson’s demi-monde were even more multi-ethnic, hard-working, and poor than the average Klondiker."(136) Middle-class formation and institution building led to the creation of a net of social services and a local, largely white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant bourgeoisie.

      Gamblers and Dreamers thus replaces the image of the Klondike as an exercise in manly daring-do with a picture that is both quieter and more complex. Porsild’s argument for the essential ordinariness of Dawson City is a needed corrective to romantic portrayals that locate gold rushes outside of the dominant structures of industrial capitalism and modernity. Yet Porsild’s oft-repeated statement that Dawson was similar to southern Canadian cities of a similar size is hard to square with her own evidence. What southern Canadian city of roughly 15,000 souls had Dawson’s ethnic/racial diversity, distance from other centres of non-Aboriginal settlement, heavily male population, and degree of tolerance for rough culture? Surely we can find a way of acknowledging the Klondike, and other gold rushes’ embeddedness in ordinary inequalities and hegemonies without denying their manifest historical specificity.

      Porsild is on steadier ground in reconstructing gold-rush history as multicultural history and gender history. Gamblers and Dreamers deals with men and women, workers and bosses, natives and newcomers, both white and black. In doing so, it reminds us of the utility of small community studies. Larger cities encourage historians to adopt smaller scopes, to study women, the working class, or immigrants in an isolation that rarely characterised their historical experiences. Porsild’s ability to simultaneously contribute to labour, Aboriginal, and women’s history is a credit to both her analytical breadth and to her wise methodological choices. Her tendency to find in Dawson City’s history broad, universal truths – such as the "natural and logical human ... to reward and hold in esteem those members of a community who have seen it though both good times and bad" (15) – belies her careful research into the intricacies of community-building in one particular context.

      That there is more to the Klondike than hardy white men in search of opportunity is the basis of Porsild’s challenge to the dominant popular narratives of the gold rush. Gamblers and Dreamers does Northern and Western historiography an immense service in creating a counter-narrative of an event that is so central to discourses of nation-building. But in setting herself up in opposition to popular culture, Porsild inadvertently robs herself of the opportunity to meaningfully engage with it. Julie Cruikshank’s analysis of Tagish and Euro-Canadian narratives of Skookum Jim and the discovery of gold has shown us that there is much to be learned by seriously probing the stories people tell about gold rushes. These stories are, as Gamblers and Dreamers often comments, in large part fiction and myth, but they are telling untruths, and this book would be richer if it analysed instead of dismissed them.

      Porsild has much to say about the Klondike gold rush, and her analysis suggests that there is much, much more to be said. Where, for instance, did the Klondike figure in the ongoing project of Canadian and British colonization? We know that the gold rush precipitated the creation of the Yukon Territory and the signing of Treaty 8. How did this practical and symbolic assertion of Canadian political jurisdiction play into both Aboriginal peoples’ and settlers’ experience and self-conception? How did the stampeders themselves understand their gold rush experiences? Unlike many events, the Klondike gold rush was understood as an important historical experience at the time it occurred. A visit to many western or northern archives will attest that gold-rush participants’ awareness of themselves as historical actors led them to write about their experience in diaries, letters, and memoirs in remarkable numbers. Historians, especially of the working class, have barely tapped this unusually rich collection of ordinary people’s descriptions of their own lives.

      In 1998, the tourist board of the Yukon invited travellers to commemorate the centennial of the Klondike gold rush by visiting Dawson City’s Diamond Tooth Gerties, "a unique casino" offering gambling, can-can girls, and the "infamous Sourtoe Cocktail." The same year, Gamblers and Dreamers offered readers a more complicated vision of Klondike history. With clear and lucid language, Porsild provides us with the beginnings of a critical social history of the Klondike gold rush. In doing so, she suggests how we might begin to rescue the history of this and other gold rushes from the likes of Diamond Tooth Gerties, and instead insert them where they belong – in the overlapping histories of labour, gender, race, migration, and colonization.

Bradford James Rennie, The Rise of Agrarian Democracy: The United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta, 1909-1921 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

WATCHING THE SEEMINGLY endless twistings and turnings of the Alliance/Reform Party this past summer was a sharp reminder of what a precarious project third-party politics is in Canada. If longevity is the test, few have negotiated this difficult terrain more skillfully than that other made-in-the-West party, the CCF/NDP. In the current skirmishes for the hearts and minds of Canadian voters, we are learning almost daily that the wreckage of such a bid is at least as interesting as its rise. Yet, great gaps persist in the historical literature. Apparently preferring to focus on the winners, historians have remained largely silent concerning the losers.

      This neglect, or oversight, is all the more curious for Western Canada, the birth-place of three third-party challenges to the political status quo within living memory. But, as Bradford James Rennie points out in his study of the rise of the United Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta (UFA/UFWA), political rebellion is practically off the screen as a subject of choice among historians of the Canadian West. It is jarring to be reminded that Paul F. Sharp’s study of American influences on the farm movement, The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada, was first published in 1948 (and recently reissued with an introduction by William Pratt and Lorne Brown) and that W. L. Morton’s The Progressive Party in Canada, still the main source for agrarian insurgency in federal politics, made its debut more than a half century ago. Indeed, Rennie’s is the "first scholarly book" focusing on the Farmers in Alberta, putatively the most successful of the agrarian parties of the interwar years.

      The book is based on Rennie’s PhD dissertation. It is a timely and much welcome addition to a curiously scant literature on a topic that is at the heart of the development of the prairie political culture. This is especially true for Alberta, long seen as the more radical partner in the agrarian revolt. Moreover, by including organized farm women in the title, Rennie promises a thoroughly up-to-date assessment of what he describes as "one of the greatest mass democratic movements in Canadian history and one of the most successful state- or provincial-level farm bodies in North American history." (4)

      Rennie may be overstating his case, but despite these and other rhetorical flourishes (he opens and closes the book with a rather melodramatic scene of rural decay as ghostly reminder of past glory), Rennie provides a well-researched, detailed account of the making of a third party in Alberta. Drawing on official UFA/UFWA documents, convention votes, newspapers (particularly letters to the editor), and to a lesser extent, personal correspondence, he traces the development of the movement in three stages: its formation (1879 to 1909), expansion (1909 to 1918), and politicization (1918 to 1921).

      Rennie’s interest is in the rank-and-file. His purpose is to do for organized farmers what historians have done for the working classes, that is, to provide insight into the "culture" that underwrote their politics. He argues that the UFA/UFWA is best understood as a "mass movement" that "arose because farmers’ demands for reform were frustrated by what they felt was an unresponsive political system." (5) To paraphrase a contemporary Alberta politician, farmers wanted in.

      Rennie traces farm "movement culture" in the shared values and beliefs that shaped their sense of community and "class opposition," which he attributes to the exigencies of rural life in early-20th-century Alberta and farmers’ cumulative political disappointments. In an effort to respond to the forces arrayed against them, from corporate monopolies to "outsider" governments and cronyism, war, drought and other natural disasters, farmers looked to each other for mutual aid and encouragement. In their sense of a common cause and shared grievances, Rennie sees the growth of a political movement. He shows that farm discontent was based on a double disaffection: exclusion from decision-making at the highest levels locally and nationally, and disappointed optimism arising from the heady days of early settlement. Rather than probe these tensions, Rennie focuses on chronicling the struggles to establish a united and effective farm pressure group that culminated in direct political action in 1921.

      There is too little written of these crucial years in Alberta’s history and Rennie provides a useful and, for the most part, highly readable account of the farmers in politics, but there is little here that is new. His signposts of "movement culture" are long-serving staples in a familiar narrative of political frustration leading to direct action, nursed by a sense of disaffection and moral mission. These include co-operation, communitarianism, activist citizenship, ruralism, social gospel, and social reform. The result is that, at best, the people he is writing about appear naïve in their commitment to such radical political ideas as group government, recall, and referenda as cornerstones of a new Jerusalem.

      Neither does "culture" shed light on the significance of co-operation, that mainstay of the agrarian movement, for the Farmers’ political success. As Rennie points out, in Alberta organized farmers dropped co-operation early. The most successful co-ops were locally owned and operated, and in some cases even drained off support as local farmers concentrated on the work of their district co-operative society. Even for those who continued to support economic co-operatives within the UFA, early failures strained underlying tension within the fledgling movement. Shared culture, or even a collective sense of common political purpose, often proved insufficient to sway farmers to collective action. Many preferred to go it alone. These tensions were exacerbated when the group found itself in office following the 1921 election. By emphasizing commonalities, Rennie misses an important opportunity to explore the differences within rural communities that would eventually splinter the coalitions that were necessary to the building up of the movement.

      The weaknesses of Rennie’s approach are illustrated in his treatment of the relationship between the UFA and the UFWA. Rennie sees the inclusion of farm women in the organization as a "major moment of movement building." (111) But, he fails to show how "culture" explains this partnership or why it was significant beyond farm men’s drive to build up an effective sectional lobby. He takes the coalition itself as further evidence of Farmers’ progressive politics. Of the women, Rennie writes, "[o]nce in the organization, they espoused the same movement culture as the men," a central tenet of which was the division of labour along sex lines. (11) He then goes on to describe the narrowly defined sphere of farm women’s politics within the movement and the ways in which gender was (re)inscribed in UFA discourse and action. There are no rebels here, or at least rebellions are made subservient to the demands of overriding culture.

      We know that not all members of the organization shared a single view. Indeed, Rennie identifies important fault lines within the UFA/UFWA but, preferring unity to difference, he fails to probe these tensions. As a result, culture becomes little more than a gloss, losing much of its critical capacity to explain social and political formation.

      Still, undergraduate students, in particular, will find this book useful for its summary of a scant and uneven literature. But Rennie’s book also underscores the pressing need for new questions that critically assess competing visions of western Canada and how these were lost to history.

Robert Wardhaugh, Mackenzie King and the Prairie West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)

WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING played a significant role in the development of Canadian labour legislation. From his role as a negotiator in the Lethbridge coal strike of 1907 through the enactment of P.C. 1003 during his tenure as Prime Minister in World War II, he had an impact on the lives of Canadian workers. Unfortunately, there is little of this history in Robert Wardhaugh’s well-written and clearly presented survey of Mackenzie King’s efforts over three decades to keep the Prairie provinces in the fold of the Liberal party. Readers of Labour/Le Travail, however, may be interested in the fresh discussion contained here of the relationship between reform Liberalism and its agrarian critics on the left.

      Mackenzie King and the Prairie West is a traditional political narrative that examines the shifting fortunes of the federal Liberals in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta during Mackenzie King’s tenure as party leader (1919-1948). Wardhaugh argues that the party’s appeal to voters in the region began to decline by 1935 and that Mackenzie King –despite continuing to represent a Saskatchewan riding – had turned his primary attentions eastward by this date or earlier. During the 1920s, Mackenzie King courted Prairie Canada as one of the two pillars (with Québec) of Liberal strength in the country. The reformist Progressive Party – composed of a combination of disenchanted Liberal and more radical farmers – was the second largest group in the House of Commons after the 1921 election and one of the Prime Minister’s major goals at the time was to woo the lapsed Liberals back to the party fold. This he was able to largely accomplish by 1926. While he worked to solidify Liberal support in the later 1920s by, for example, negotiating the transfer of control over resources to the Prairie provinces, in the 1930 election the region turned its back on the party in favour of Conservative, Farmer, and Labour candidates. When the Liberals regained federal power in 1935, they were more interested in nurturing their links with corporate Canada than they were in mollifying Prairie farmers.

      Wardhaugh situates his study at the intersection of biographies of Mackenzie King and the literature on Prairie Liberalism, claiming to fill gaps in both. It is certainly true that there is more in this volume on the relationship between Mackenzie King, Prairie Liberal parties, and Prairie provincial governments than one will find anywhere else. And, given Wardhaugh’s skills as a writer, it is a mostly interesting read. We learn, for example, that the Manitoba Liberal Party was deeply divided for at least fifteen years after 1917 and that, outside of Saskatchewan, Liberal electoral machinery was virtually nonexistent. On the broader issues, however, Wardhaugh does not reveal much that is new. He recasts the story of the Progressive revolt from a Liberal perspective, reports on Mackenzie King’s treatment of the freight rate and tariff issues, and details the relationship between the federal and the Prairie provincial governments. Moreover, he does not offer a new interpretive approach to the material. Rather, the book is a solid, well-researched addition to the established literature on Prairie political history, the Liberal party, and Mackenzie King.

      Perhaps one of the main strengths of Mackenzie King and the Prairie West is that it reminds us once again that Prairie political culture in the early 20th century was dominated by reform and radical impulses, and that capital and its political servants had to work actively to subdue them.

Peter N. Moogk: La Nouvelle France. The Making of French Canada. A Cultural History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000)

THE STUDENTS of early colonial Canadian history have a reason to rejoice. The recent publication of Peter Moogk’s book fills out a glaring gap in the Canadian historiography. Until now, English speakers desirous of learning about the history of French colonization of Canada were left in an unenviable situation. A number of excellent articles scattered through the various volumes of the Canadian Historical Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Ethnohistory, and other journals, do not provide for a large-scale overview of the matter, while the existing surveys are either outdated, and more recent monographs – too tightly focused. The new publication is not a survey, but its content extends beyond what the title would suggest. In addition to the cultural history, the author dwells as well on the economic, religious, and institutional history of the colony. Moogk’s longstanding interest in French Canada and his exhaustive research in both Canadian and French archives resulted in a timely and well-documented book. It should be stressed that La Nouvelle France draws extensively upon unpublished, archival sources from private and public archives in Canada and France.

      The opening chapter traces the birth, growth, and development of French-Indian relationships in the colony. Moogk discusses the early Franciscan and Jesuit attempts to impose Christianity on Algonquian and Huron peoples of the northeast. The ensuing cultural (and religious - if these two can be separated at all) clash brought to the fore the inherent viability of aboriginal beliefs and missionaries’ less-than-successful attempts to use their technological advantage and know-how to win over the unenthusiastic Amerindians. Following the destruction of Huronia, and during the last decades of the 17th century, the French established a string of mission villages. The missions were located close to French towns, exposing Amerindians to the dangers of alcohol and to other vices associated with close contact with the European population.

      The following chapter sets out to provide an imperial "backgrounder," explaining the foundations upon which the modern, bureaucratic, and centralized French state has been built. Subsequently, Moogk presents the curious relationship between the monarch and his people and draws our attention to the fact that New France had originally been conceived as "a fulfilment of Louis XIV’s dreams for France." The successes and failures of this early attempt at social engineering become obvious in the light of a more detailed examination of the legal and administrative systems implanted on the other side of the Atlantic divide.

      Chapter IV takes a look at the crucial weakness of the French colonizing attempt in North America, namely the spectacular failure to attract immigrants to the colony. The author portrays the uninspired policies of the metropolitan officials and a lukewarm (to say the least) response of the potential settlers. Among other things, we learn that only 300 colonists actually paid for their own trip, while all the others travelled at someone else’s expense. Once in New France, the settlers were eager to fulfil the terms of their contracts and, at the expiry of the three-year term, hastily return to France. In order to retain the unwilling engagés the officials invented devious schemes, among them a 1672 ordinance that restricted the right to seek return passage to France to married people only. Needless to say, families were to stay behind, in order to guarantee the return of the father and husband.

      In the final chapters of his study, Moogk picks up on his previous research concerning social mobility and social ranking in the ancien regime of Canada. Having studied the estate inventories, the author convincingly argues that in New France social rank dictated economic behaviour. It was not wealth that determined an individual’s place in the social order. High rank demanded financial sacrifices and displays of wealth, whether one could afford them or not. Consequently, the ranking families were ruining themselves, while individuals belonging to the lesser social strata could acquire wealth and preserve it for future generations. Similarly, a careful survey of prenuptial agreements explains the shape and form of the social hierarchy in the colony. The size of financial compensation for the widows (known as prefixed dower) seems to have been directly linked to the social position of their husbands.

      Despite its obvious qualities, the book also raises certain doubts. The most serious one concerns the often used generalizations that lack sufficient grounding in historical evidence. According to the author: "the current popular histories of Canada seemed to assume that New France, being so long departed, could have no residual influence upon the present. In 20th-century Canadian schools, the French Regime was presented as a colorful but inconsequential era of heroic missionaries, valiant warriors, intrepid explorers and hardy fur traders..." (xiii) In the following introduction Moogk tries to convince us that the legacy of the ancien regime in Canada is well and sound in today’s Québec, a view to which several historians might take exception, particularly in the light of the dramatic changes of the last three decades. The family-oriented society of d’antan is nowadays largely gone, churches are empty, and the former need of a comprehensive ideology, although still detectable here and there, is in constant retreat. Moogk’s conviction that the colonial traditions of New France have left a durable imprint on the Québécois soul rings true – as long as we agree not to look for evidence in the most recent period. On the other hand the author himself admits that his observations are based on his observations dating back to the 1960s.

      In the "native" chapter Moogk tends to be dismissive of the efficiency of the Jesuits’ missionary travails. However, for every citation provided in support of the author’s position, one can easily find three or four citations testifying to the power of the Christian doctrine, and its profound influence on the converted Amerindians. We might ask ourselves whether the Jesuits (no fools, themselves) would have otherwise continued to pour people and resources into such an unrewarding and disappointing exercise.

      Chapter III, "Scepter and Main de Justice," poses a different problem: the author of this review found it rather difficult to agree that the French cultural traits, legal system, and the government itself, all conspired to "encourage an idealistic rather than a pragmatic view of life." (65) While the French erred on the side of idealism, the more pragmatic view of life, based in large part on the Common Law, was the preserve of the British newcomers. In order to illustrate this French preference for doctrine over experience, Moogk refers us to the impracticality of French engineers, who continued to fortify colonial towns in a manner that was faithful to the doctrine, but certain to fail during a conflict. However, even a short overview of European fortifications of the period would reveal the very same pattern – beautiful but often impractical – used in the Dutch, Swedish, Russian, and Austrian military structures – most of which were built by non-French engineers. Another example used to illustrate the "idealistic"phenomenon was the curious case of Louisbourg’s parish church, whose depiction adorned numerous 18th century panoramas of the town. The church, although it should have been located in the designated spot, was never built. Therefore, the author concludes, the successive French mapmakers followed the old credo: "when reality conflicted with propriety, it was sometimes ignored or denied." A harsh, sweeping, statement, and one that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The maps tended to perpetuate early errors, regardless of a cartographer’s nationality. For instance, the "northern Iroquois," observed by the French north of Lake Ontario in the late 17th century, tended to appear on most of the 18th century maps as well. Despite the fact that the Ojibway attacks swept the northern Iroquois away in the late 1690s, the cartographers (both French and English) obediently followed the steps of their predecessors.

      There are a few additional reasons to worry about the book, all of them unrelated to the excellent quality of Moogk’s scholarship. For one, La Nouvelle France seems to be a hard-to-find catch even in university bookstores (not to mention the regular ones). A quick check of seven major institutions of higher learning (including Ottawa, Carleton, Toronto, York and McGill) returned nothing. For another, one can only regret that the spectacular fall of our national currency can put this important book (published in the United States and priced at US $25.95) out of reach of undergraduate students. Finally, I still have to hear a convincing argument (other than the convenience of the editor) in favour of endnotes, as opposed to footnotes. For seasoned readers of scholarly publications the constant shifting between the body of the text and the crucial references becomes an annoying distraction.

      Despite the few abovementioned problems, La Nouvelle France is an important contribution to our knowledge of the Canadian past. The book offers a broad and well-written account of the cultural, social, and economic phenomena that helped to shape French-Canadian society. Moogk’s work can be used (in conjunction with any straightforward political and chronologically-structured historical account) as an introduction to this crucial period of our past.

J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838-1852 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997)

CE LIVRE est le troisième que J.I. Little consacre à l’histoire des Cantons de l’Est au 19e siècle. Après avoir étudié le phénomène de la colonisation et comparé l’adaptation de deux communautés culturelles à un même environnement, Little se penche ici sur le processus de formation de l’État, en examinant l’établissement des institutions locales et, surtout, le rôle joué par la population dans ce processus. Rejetant une version unilatérale de la thèse du contrôle social, il soutient que les réformes des années 1840 ne furent pas simplement imposées par l’État mais qu’elles ont plutôt été le résultat d’une interaction complexe entre le gouvernement et les communautés locales. On reconnaît ici un point de vue déjà esquissé dans Crofter and Habitants, lors de l’étude de la mise en place des institutions scolaires dans le canton de Winslow.

      Le terrain d’enquête est constitué de sept circonscriptions électorales établies en 1829: Missisquoi, Shefford, Drummond, Mégantic, Stanstead, et Sherbrooke (comté urbain, comté rural). L’enquête se termine en 1852. Little admet que les changements institutionnels étaient alors loin d’être achevés mais il juge qu’un nombre suffisant de réformes avaient pris place pour permettre son analyse. Les sources sont variées: lettres et pétitions adressées au Superintendant de l’éducation, au responsable des douanes et au Secrétaire de la province; appendices du Journal de l’Assemblée législative; archives judiciaires; presse locale et, enfin, la correspondance privée de quatre députés de la région.

      Aprés avoir montré l’importance du développement des moyens de communication pour l’économie régionale, Little s’intéresse, dans le premier chapitre, à l’évolution des choix électoraux. Il soutient que si les électeurs des Cantons de l’Est suivent le mouvement provincial, passant d’un soutien majoritaire aux conservateurs modérés au début des années 1840 à un appui envers les libéraux-conservateurs dans les années 1850, c’est essentiellement pour des raisons locales et, surtout, en fonction de la possibilité d’obtenir des subventions pour le développement ferroviaire.

      Le chapitre deux est consacré aux institutions judiciaires. Du coté de la loi civile, Little insiste surtout sur les demandes de la population pour obtenir une justice accessible afin de faciliter la perception des dettes. Le gouvernement sera sensible à ces demandes en rétablissant les Cours de circuit en 1844, ce qui, selon l’auteur, ne servait pas exclusivement les intérêts des marchands mais aussi ceux des agriculteurs qui étaient autant créditeurs que débiteurs dans le réseau de crédit d’une économie encore largement non monétaire. Au sujet de la justice criminelle, Little passe en revue les principaux procès entre 1838 et 1852. Il note une augmentation du nombre de poursuites entre les deux dates mais pas de hausse des accusations relatives à la prostitution, au vagabondage et à l’ivresse, ce qui, dit-il, aurait traduit une volonté accrue de contrôle social. L’auteur estime plutôt que la régulation sociale se faisait encore largement de façon informelle au sein des communautés locales. C’est ce qu’il examine dans le chapitre trois. Le mouvement de tempérance, l’attitude envers les pauvres et les aliénés, les charivaris et le phénomène de la contrebande avec les États-Unis y sont passés en revue. La dernière analyse montre que les citoyens avaient à cet égard une éthique particulière (en jugeant que leurs propres transferts de marchandises entre les deux pays n’avaient rien d’illégal) et qu’ils réussissaient souvent à faire valoir leur point de vue face aux officiers des douanes, que ce soit par la force ou la persuasion.

      Les chapitres quatre et cinq portent sur le développement des institutions municipales. Celles-ci, soutient Little, ne sont pas que le résultat d’une mesure centralisatrice au profit de la bourgeoisie. Leur implantation correspondait aussi à la tradition républicaine des immigrants américains et au désir de la population de développer un système routier afin de sortir de son isolement. Au fil des réformes, les communautés locales ont réussi à obtenir des institutions plus démocratiques, près des administrés et détenant des pouvoirs accrus. La réaction aux lois scolaires est examinée dans les deux derniers chapitres. La population des Cantons de l’Est a dû abandonner le principe des contributions volontaires pour financer les écoles. Par contre, elle a obtenu qu’en pratique et ce, malgré la loi, le financement des écoles et même le curriculum soient régis au niveau micro-local.

      Ce livre est le résultat d’une recherche rigoureuse dans un imposant ensemble de sources. Mais l’impression générale est que l’auteur n’a pas réussi à organiser de façon cohérente et efficace l’abondante matière qu’il est allé y puiser. Il se peut aussi que cette matière se soit révélée moins féconde que souhaité en regard de certaines parties de la thèse. Quoi qu’il en soit, le résultat est une démonstration inégale qui laisse le lecteur un peu déconcerté.

      Au sujet de la construction du livre, Little précise, en introduction, qu’il raconte en détails plusiers récits et il justifie sa méthode en la déclarant nécessaire pour mettre à jour la dynamique interne et la réponse de la communauté aux pressions externes. On peut cependant s’interroger sur la pertinence de certains faits ainsi présentés. Ainsi, au chapitre deux, plusieurs causes criminelles sont présentées en ordre chronologique. Si certains cas témoignent d’une résistance populaire à l’administration de la justice, plusieurs n’apportent rien à l’argumentation. Le contenu des sources semble ici guider l’exposé. La même remarque peut être faite au sujet du chapitre trois. Par example, l’auteur y décrit tous les cas de charivaris qu’il a pu identifier, sans que les événements rapportés ne soient très significatifs quant à l’autonomie des collectivités locales en matière de régulation sociale. Heureusement, les événements présentés au sujet des municipalités et des écoles soutiennent très bien la thèse du rôle actif des élus et des populations locales dans la réception de ces institutions. Ces chapitres sont de loin supérieurs aux trois premiers. On y voit comment des communautés différentes du point de vue de l’avancement de la colonisation et de la composition ethnique ont réagi de façons variées aux nouvelles institutions et aux modalités de taxation prévues dans le corpus législatif. La démonstration est particulièrement éclairante en matière scolaire. Le Surintendant de l’éducation, Jean-Baptiste Meilleur, apparaît ici comme un fonctionnaire pragmatique qui, en fonction des particularités locales, a dû accepter de nombreuses exceptions au fonctionnement prévu par la loi.

      Par ailleurs, si l’auteur pose la question essentielle de la représentativité des porte-parole de la communauté et des pétitionnaires, la réponse, donnée en introduction, est loin d’être convaincante. En ce qui touche les députés, Little fait valoir que le corps électoral était assez large car le cens était souvent mis de coté, ce qui permettait le vote des locataires et des squatters. Comme les députés devaient, selon lui, tenir compte des désirs de la population locale pour être réélus, il estime que ces politiciens représentaient la voix de toute la communauté. Il me semble que l’histoire politique canadienne compte assez d’exemples du contraire pour douter de la valeur de l’argument. Plus loin, Little poursuit en disant que ´A[And] even while acknowledging that local leaders by definition articulated the local initiatives and responses it will be assumed [nous soulignons] that the rest of the community could generally decide how or whether to follow.ª (12) Cette présupposition donne un caractère partiellement tautologique à la démarche de l’auteur.

      Enfin, à la lecture de cet ouvrage, on peut se demander si le découpage choisi par Little, soit l’examen de plusieurs réformes dans un cadre régional et sur une courte période est le meilleur pour la vérification de sa thèse. Le terrain d’étude est à la fois trop vaste et trop restreint. Bien sûr, sa démarche permet une bonne connaissance des enjeux locaux mais elle ne permet pas l’étude du profil socio-économique des élus municipaux et scolaires ou des pétitionnaires. D’un autre coté, en dehors de la législation, l’étude écarte en grande partie l’échelle du pouvoir central qui apparaît alors être un acteur monolithique. N’est-il pas étrange, compte tenu de l’importance donnée à l’interaction entre le gouvernement et la population locale, que l’observation soit limitée à un seul des pôles? C’est un peu comme si Little nous proposait d’assister à un match de tennis en n’observant qu’un des joueurs. De plus, on ne peut s’empêcher de se demander qu’elles ont été les réactions ailleurs dans la province. Celles des Cantons de l’Est ne peuvent à elles seules expliquer l’évolution des institutions, comme le reconnaît l’auteur en conclusion. En l’absence de matérial comparatif, l’observation de la partie de tennis se rétrécit alors à une section réduite de la ligne de service. Pour les spécialistes, l’intérêt n’est pas négligeable.

Israel Medres, Montreal of Yesterday: Jewish Life in Montreal 1900-1920. Translated from the Yiddish by Vivian Felsen (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2000)

ISRAEL MEDRES’ portrait of Montreal Jewry is akin to and as evocative of its subject as Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), Hutchins Hapgood’s sympathetic snapshot of Yiddish culture on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But Montreal of Yesterday, a series of newspaper sketches begun just after World War II and first published in toto in 1947, is a unique document. Medres wrote for a popular Jewish readership, in the Yiddish-language Keneder Adler (Daily Eagle); as a Yiddish speaker, Medres knew his subject in a way that Hapgood, a non-Jew coming from an old Boston background, could not. Although Montreal of Yesterday is arguably the more valuable historical resource, however, given both its depth of understanding and its breadth (covering twenty years in chronological order), it was virtually a lost work, unknown to most historians.

      That is, until 1997, when French-Canadian Yiddishist Pierre Anctil translated it into French. Now that Vivian Felsen, inspired by Anctil’s example, has rendered her grandfather Israel’s words into English, the book is available to an even wider circle of readers. Montreal of Yesterday is compulsory reading not only for students of Jewish history but, because of the far-ranging influence of Jewish radicalism, for anyone interested in the early development of the left in Canada.

      Although only about 8 of Medres’ more than 50 chapters deal explicitly with issues relating to labour, his laconic prose conveys the complexity of the ideological choices offered to and made by new immigrants to Canada’s then largest metropolis. Medres relates the rising and falling fortunes of anarchism, socialism, Bundism and the Arbeiter Ring, political and cultural Zionism, and two variants of labour Zionism (one Yiddishist, the other Hebraist) in the hearts and minds of those who cared and thought about these things in his city’s east end. All receive their due in a manner that ordinary readers could understand.

      But the limpid style is of benefit to historians as well. For instance, Medres’ explanation of the difference between cloakmakers and other needle tradespersons, in terms of status and skill level, is deceptively simple but crystal clear: "In the pre-World War I period, women dressed differently than they do now. Suits were more fashionable than dresses. Therefore ... cloakmakers were the aristocrats among the workers. They earned higher wages, they were better dressed, attended the Yiddish theatre more frequently, purchased Jewish books more often, and in summer sent their wives to St. Sophie or New Glasgow."

      Medres’ strength lies not in analysis but in a journalistic flair for telling detail. Here is his description of typical theatre-goers: "People who frequented the theatre on a regular basis were those who earned more money, those who had arrived. It was easy to recognize these successful people. The surest sign that they had been in the country for a long time, perhaps as long as ten years, was their gold teeth. A well-to-do husband would wear one or two massive gold rings and a gold watch and chain over his vest. His wife, in an oversized hat with a long feather, was adorned with jewelry, much of it from the old country. The gold teeth, however, were most certainly acquired here in Canada."

      There are some errors, of fact and of omission. According to Medres, the first Jewish bookstore in Montreal was Hirsch Hershman’s on Main Street, between Ontario and Craig. This is only partly true. Hershman, a socialist who had previously been the door-to-door distributor of the Daily Forward (a Yiddish daily from New York that was perhaps the most influential Jewish newspaper at that time), was persuaded to set up shop as a general purveyor of Yiddish literature in 1902. But slightly east and southwards, on St. Lawrence (68 Lawrence, to be precise) the Zionist Reading Room had been established two years earlier in 1900. It did not last long, because local support for Zionism had yet to pick up steam, but it was there. Seven years later, the Keneder Adler came into being and could be found up the street, also in the heart of The Main, at 508 St. Lawrence.

      Translator Felsen provides us with a map of "The Old Neighborhood," but one would have to be armed with a microscope to locate any of many landmarks mentioned above, in her introduction, or in the text proper. Incidentally, bad maps, or no maps at all, are a problem in Canadian Jewish historiography. It is time for someone to create a historical atlas for students in this area of study. My students are often unaware that Montreal, or Manhattan for that matter, is located on an island. How then are they to apprehend spatially the contours of immigrant quarters in The Main or the Lower East Side, to say nothing of second-generation migrations to Outremont and Westmount or Brooklyn and the Upper West Side, without benefit of clearly laid out visual aids? More satisfactory is the job Felsen has done of annotating the book. Without the over 250 endnotes she provides readers would have a hard time with some of Medres’ more obscure allusions (I detected but one slip: A.A. Roback was raised in Québec City, not in Montréal, as Felsen says). A glossary of Yiddish terms as well as a bibliography is also provided courtesy of the translator.

      Medres’ most egregious error of omission is his neglect to mention Montreal’s other Jewish newspaper: the Jewish Times, a fortnightly that holds the honour of being Canada’s first Jewish newspaper. This glossing over of its existence is understandable. The Jewish Times was founded in 1897, and by 1910, the date of Medres’ arrival in Montreal, its influence was on the wane. More significantly, however, he, like other downtown detractors, probably regarded the Jewish Times-Westmount-based, Anglophonic, and Anglophilic-as nothing more than an uptown society rag.

      Nevertheless, several of the personages figuring in Montreal of Yesterday, had one connection or another to this bastion of acculturated Jewry. Sam Jacobs, described by Medres as "an outstanding jurist, a leading figure in the Baron de Hirsch institute," and "the first Jewish member of the Parliament of Canada," was one of the co-founders of the Jewish Times. The other was Lyon Cohen, another member of Montreal’s Jewish elite, who during World War I helped to establish the national body known as the Canadian Jewish Congress. Among his collaborators on that project was Hirsch Wolofsky, publisher of the Keneder Adler. Eventually Wolofsky bought out the Times and hired a new staff, including writer A.A. Roback. A frequent Adler contributor, Roback was now given the opportunity to write his blistering denunciations of the stultifying effects of Anglophone culture in English as well as in Yiddish.

      All of which is to point out that although they were in some respects worlds apart, the two newspapers – and by analogy the Jewish community of Montreal as a whole, uptown and downtown-were yet linked in various ways. His snubbing of the Jewish Times aside, Medres showed how the dots connected in a manner that was fair, relatively unbiased, and colourful.

Tara Goldstein and David Selby,eds., Weaving Connections: Educating for Peace, Social and Environmental Justice (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2000)

PUBLISHED BY Sumach Press in Toronto, Weaving Connections is one of the first Canadian books that explores the ties between social, peace, and environmental justice issues in education, and examines the diverse range of theories and approaches. Written for a wide audience of practitioners, educators, activists, and those with a general interest in Canadian K-12 education issues, this book celebrates educational successes as well as critically analyzing present initiatives, and looks to the future of education in Canada.

      The book is divided into fourteen chapters, each written by a different author (or set of authors), and each focusing on a different theme or aspect of the education system. The chapter topics cover a wide scope of issues ranging from chapters with a specific Canadian focus such as "Black Education in Canada" and "Anti-Homophobia Initiatives at the Former Toronto Board of Education," to those with a global focus such as "Development Education: Making Connections North and South," and "Educating Towards a Culture of Peace." The book is uniquely Canadian in that each chapter applies broad educational issues that have a wide range of applicability worldwide to the Canadian experience. The chapters surely complement each other, but can also stand on their own as individual readings.

      When I first read the table of contents for the book, I was worried that it would take an Ontario-centric approach, as the majority of authors were based in Ontario. I was pleasantly surprised, however, that almost every chapter used examples from across Canada. The chapter titled "Media Education in Canada," for example, described media education in various regions of Canada, and offered a whole section that discussed provincial differences. "Black Education in Canada: Past, Present and Future" also described instances of systemic racism in education reaching from British Columbia through to Nova Scotia.

      While there is no set format that each chapter follows, all of the authors offered perspectives on their particular topics from the past, present and future. This is well illustrated in "Black Education in Canada: Past, Present and Future," where the author carefully takes the reader on a journey through time, illustrating the development of black education, and the issues black and white students, parents, and educators faced during different periods of Canadian history. Another example is the chapter by Selby, where the author discusses the evolution of humane education in Canada, beginning with the creation of Humane Societies in the 1870s to the recent creation of a graduate program in humane education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

      As the title of the book suggests, the main purpose of the book is to show the connections between different educational issues with regards to peace, social, environmental, and justice issues. As someone who works almost exclusively in the field of environmental education, I was delighted to read the chapters and find links between the various topics and my discipline. While there seems to be no set order for the organization of chapters, I suspect that the editors took a very strategic approach to arranging them, as the connections amongst the topics are slowly revealed as the book progresses. Additionally, the editors do a fantastic job of illustrating the connections between the chapters in their refreshingly conversational introduction and afterword.

      The book is an excellent compendium of work that sheds light on many issues that often go unnoticed or undiscussed. While the chapters do cover a lot of ground, introducing the reader to many philosophies and concepts, the chapters are more of an overview of issues rather than in-depth analyses. It was therefore incredibly helpful to have a list of teacher resources, classroom resources, organizations, and notes at the conclusion of each chapter.

      It is important to note that this book focuses exclusively on the K-12 education system in Canada. For the reader who already has a wealth of experience in the field, this book is still bound to stimulate and inspire even the most accomplished educator. Additionally, adult and post-secondary educators worldwide will not find the book irrelevant to their work. There are many issues that can easily be applied to different educational contexts. The lessons learned regarding homophobia in the former Toronto Board of Education, for example, can easily be applied in other formal and informal educational settings as well as to educational systems in other countries. "Navigating the Waters of Canadian Environmental Education" asks crucial, critical questions about the future of education that are relevant to any environmental educator.

      I have few criticisms of this book in terms of content. I would, however, like to offer some comments about the actual book itself. The book is 400 pages in length and is printed in soft cover with a beautiful cover illustration by Helen D’Souza. While I applaud the editors’ decision to print the book within Canada with a feminist-oriented publisher, I am concerned with the type of paper used for this publication. Weaving Connections asks the reader to think critically about the environmental, political, cultural, and social implications of our actions. I therefore ask why this book was not printed on 100 per cent post-consumer unbleached paper using vegetable dyes. While I realize such an undertaking might be more expensive and time- consuming, it seems to me almost hypocritical to not do so.

      Despite this small omission, Weaving Connections is a great resource for educators searching for information on peace, social, and environmental justice education in Canada. It is a valuable and welcome contribution to the field, and reminds us that there are many links between individuals, issues, and disciplines. To steal a line from the chapter by Swee-Hin and Floresca-Cawagas, this book encourages a "deep understanding and respect for the sharing of wisdoms, identities and knowledge." (370)

Edward Broadbent, ed., Democratic Equality: What Went Wrong? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001)

THIS BEAUTIFULLY written book tells you what you already know, maybe better than you have heard it said before. What it does not do is live up to the promise in its subtitle.

      Democratic Equality is a collection of essays that assert the importance of social equality to a vigorous political democracy and reflect on the decline of both throughout much of the North Atlantic world over the past two decades. Edited and introduced by former NDP leader Edward Broadbent, the essays are contributed by leading writers and scholars from a variety of backgrounds. On the whole, their contributions offer a wealth of insights, sensitive critiques, and solid, persuasive arguments.

      The book’s objective is to show alternatives to market (or neo-) liberalism. The contributors impress upon the reader that market liberalism is not an inevitability but a choice, and that other choices can be made.

      Within limits, however. The market is accepted as a fact of life by all contributors, even if some acknowledge its social construction. The difficulty, as stated by the philosopher G.A. Cohen, is that "while we know how to make an economic system work on the basis of selfishness, we do not know how to make it work on the basis of generosity." (69) Equal sharing and co-operation may come naturally on a camping trip, and doctors do not need market signals to tell them what is wrong with their patients. But we do not know how to realize on the macro level what we find in the micro. Since a society without markets is unimaginable, the larger concern is to mitigate the market’s destructive and destabilizing tendencies. To do so, however, it is first necessary to challenge prevailing orthodoxy. The contributors are at their best showing where tenets of market liberalism fail on their own terms.

      One such tenet is the notorious equity-efficiency trade-off, whereby measures to reduce inequality are said to undermine work incentive and so to encourage inefficiency and waste. Jim Stanford and Bo Rothstein each find this claim simplistic. Generally, argues Rothstein, universal social programmes cost less than private insurance and are much cheaper and easier to administer than means-tested programmes. The resultant savings are a source of competitive advantage rather than a sacrifice of efficiency for equality. Stanford does not challenge the assumption that inequality is good for innovation and growth; but he does argue quite convincingly that in Canada a hugely unequal distribution of wealth has led to inefficiency, by creating a powerful constituency in favour of high real interest rates, ultra-low inflation, and other macro policies designed to enhance financial wealth at the expense of growth and jobs in what he terms "the real economy."

      In the same vein, adds Dietrich Rueschemeyer, the long history of European welfare states shows that even extensive social security provision has no tendency to erode the work ethic or national competitiveness. Rueschemeyer concedes that market liberals have identified problems inherent in the welfare state – it is paternalistic, it entrenches bureaucracy, and resists change, it may discourage civic participation and it may even offer some perverse incentives (such as encouraging unwed mothers to have more babies). But, he offers hope that the welfare state can correct its own failings and reinvent itself through the political engagement of the well-off and well-educated citizenry it has created.

      Of course, as we know, and as several contributors describe at length, this is not what happened. Indeed quite the reverse, as welfare states have been downsized or dismantled. Jane Jenson observes a shift in Canadian social policy from a "citizenship regime" based on universal equality to a safety net based on equality of opportunity to compete in the job market. In consequence, social policy has become child-oriented and its new focus has tended to obscure the power of social class to determine life prospects. Unions and other collectivities that promote social equality have been stigmatised as ‘special interests’ and obstacles to reform.

      The shift in social and economic policy has exacerbated inequalities of income and wealth. A fiery and impassioned Armine Yalnizyan depicts a dysfunctional Canadian economy in which the growth of the last two decades has failed to deliver any benefit to the vast majority of Canadians, who have instead seen their wages stagnate and their social benefits deteriorate. Stanford infers extreme and growing inequality of wealth from income and tax statistics (studies on wealth distribution having been cancelled in 1984 as a deficit-fighting measure). And Barbara Ehrenreich sees the same dramatic increase of inequality in the US, but finds that instead of opposing cuts to social welfare, Rueschemeyer’s well-off and well-educated have decamped to gated communities and private schools.

      Yet these private citizens were merely responding to government choices. The unkindest cut of all was inflicted on the welfare state by those who might have been most expected to defend it: social democrats. Broadbent seems particularly disturbed by this development. Although he defends the social democratic governments of Europe, he must do so in euphemisms. Thus the SPD under Schroeder was forced to "alter" (xx) the social programmes they promised to maintain. The French government has maintained social programmes, despite "putting a new emphasis on the private sector" (xix) - through extensive privatization that largely undid the early achievements of the PS under Mitterand. The government of Tony Blair is criticized gently, as "problematic" for having "barely scratched the surface" (xix) in addressing social democratic concerns and constituencies; the reader must turn to the piece by Ruth Lister for a detailed exposure of its fraudulence.

      So what went wrong? If egalitarianism is a choice, why was the path towards democratic equality not chosen anywhere, and why especially was it not chosen by social democratic governments?

      A variety of reasons are suggested – slower growth, higher oil prices, an aging population, media concentration, the geographic dispersal of the working class, or its co-optation. Interestingly, though, not globalization: Broadbent observes that "it was political decision making that liberated capital from any serious regulation, and only political decision making can put the genie partially back in the bottle." (12) In support, he holds up Austria, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries as examples of nations that have adapted to globalization while maintaining strong welfare states. The power of corporate media to control public opinion, on the other hand, is a factor, although Robert Hackett cautions progressives not to use it as an easy excuse for their own political failures or to underestimate the actual media space for progressive views. And as Ehrenreich and Rothstein note, the abandonment of universality may become self-reinforcing, undermining middle-class support for programme spending from which it does not significantly benefit. But none of these theories explain why governments abandoned universality – or liberated capital – in the first place.

      Nor do the contributors expect much help from governments in fostering social equality. Ehrenreich is heartened by civic campaigns for a living wage and welfare rights. Hackett points to the emergence of non-governmental coalitions for media democracy, like the influential Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. Ian Angus provocatively encourages us to look beyond the welfare state and the global market to develop what he calls "communities of value"; or co-ops founded on environmentally sustainable practices. His third-way is as visionary as the book gets. But without the protection of the state or the support of unions concerned with protecting wage labour, whom he regards as co-opted by capitalist production, what are its chances?

      In the end the book returns full circle to its starting point. For John Richards, the real problem is not social inequality but the social democratic party itself, trapped in a "fundamental contradiction" (34-38) between the insatiable demands of the public sector unions that form a major block of its support and the need to been seen as responsible managers of the public purse. He argues that the union grip must be broken to free such parties to follow Blair’s Third Way – in essence, an attack on the entire notion of social equality. His contribution is echoed by Daniel Savas of the Angus Reid pollsters, who quotes the president of the World Bank on the threat of stark and growing inequality to social stability and suggests freer trade with no measures to redistribute wealth.

      The problem for social democratic reform is that it must have both a goal higher than its actual target and a means of attaining that goal. The welfare state was created out of a belief that capitalism could be superseded by parties of those on whose labour it was built. Where there is no such likelihood for the foreseeable future, the hegemony of the present is merely reinforced.

Sonya Michel, Children’s Interest/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)

IN CHILDREN’S INTEREST/Mothers’ Rights, Sonya Michel documents the "long, sad history of child care" in America. (280) In doing so, she covers a lot of territory: from America’s earliest "dame schools," begun as early as 1673, and fairly numerous by the late 17th century, (15) through to the Reagan administration and the rise of corporate child care, (255-74) with the most detail devoted to the years bracketed by the late 19th century and the Korean war. America’s lack of a comprehensive, state-sponsored system of child care, Michel concludes, is due to a history of "rights withheld." (3)

      In foregrounding rights, Michel signals a distinctly feminist analysis that addresses child care as a matter of social citizenship for women. Given the distribution of domestic and reproductive labour, out-of-home child care functions as a substitute for mother-care. Michel argues that both child care historiography (a small field), as well as child care advocates and policy makers regularly avoid this ineluctably gendered reality.

      Historical writings on child care, she points out, are characterized by curious disjunctures. Most women’s labour historians address female employment without asking how mothers dealt with their children while they were on the job. Historians of children and families "detach child care from maternal employment." (7) Child care is generally invisible in histories of education, and seldom appears in the history of social welfare and welfare state development. In sum, the "artificial division between social welfare history and women’s history has prevented scholars from drawing connections between child care provision and mothers’ economic and social status." (8) These gaps are successfully bridged in Children’s Interest/Mothers’ Rights.

      The book is rich and valuable, furthermore, on at least three additional counts. First, it provides a compelling story of how child care services developed, drawing on sources from individual nursery case files through to federal policy, with attention to policy-makers, the emerging field of social welfare experts, and the social movement that fought for services. Michel handles a broad array of evidence to establish the complex forces that shaped American child care policy. She deftly documents the interplay between structural conditions (mainly the rising labour force participation of women) and the active agency of service providers and inter- and extra-state players as diverse as the Chicago Nursery and Half-Orphan Society, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and the Inter-City Council for the Day Care of Children.

      The book’s second accomplishment is equally strong. In a significant contribution to intellectual and political history, Michel demonstrates how hegemonic assumptions about women, mothers, children, and families have shifted. Here, she is especially attentive to the transformation of early maternalist ideology, benevolence, and charity into the meager gendered, raced, and classed provisions that count as America’s social services. These ideological and cultural shifts are linked to social and political forces, as the book addresses how organizational, political, and party forces intersect with state politics, from the local to the national; all within a political economy context. Over the 297 pages of Children’s Interests/ Mothers’ Rights, Michel shows how American child care policy is premised on a residual or "crisis-oriented" (294) rationale, as opposed to an understanding of child care as a normal, universal, and non-pathological service. As a stunted conceptualization, this notion of child care as a service of last resort reserved for the "deserving" family authorizes minimal public spending, stigmatizing means-testing, and lack of social approval.

      Thus, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights is a theoretically dynamic work. In it, Michel is particularly sensitive to the class and race dynamics that underwrite child care in both the voluntary and public sectors. Like other institutions, child care was often characterized by blatantly racist policies and practice. "Starch and scripture" motivated leading philanthropic women, such as the WCTU’s Frances Willard, to establish child care services in the 19th century. Willard once called the kindergarten movement "the greatest theme, next to salvation by faith, that can engage a woman’s heart and brain" – yet most white-run nurseries, in both the North and South, were segregated. (39) Race differences characterized service delivery in other ways. For example, black women’s groups regularly established universal child care, unlike white women’s organizations which were conflicted about maternal employment and preferred targeted services. Class and party differences also shaped the child care movement. Like African American women, some labour- and Communist-influenced groups also demanded services for all children, not just the "needy." In the words of AFL-CIO spokesperson Esther Peterson in 1960 at the White House Conference on Children and Youth, "Daycare should be available without regard to the motives of the consumer. Persons in the lower income brackets should not be subjected to any more scrutiny ... than those with higher incomes." (223)

      In exploring this political and ideological landscape, Michel argues that the failure of child care to become an entitlement in America mitigates against women’s and children’s full social citizenship. Moreover, the persistent denial of public responsibility for child care in America is a constitutive element of America’s welfare state regime. The US, like Canada and Australia, emphasizes free competition, an unfettered market, and a reluctance to commit public resources to social goals. Michel develops these observations as she situates American child care policy in the "Epilogue," which provides thumbnail sketches of child care mobilization and policy in Sweden, France, Japan, Australia, and Canada. The "Epilogue" appears grafted on: the surveys are too brief at a page or two per country. The "Epilogue’s" comparative impulse is commendable, but in such an under-developed form, it sounds the only jarring note in an otherwise marvelous work.

      Finally, the historical threads combine – highly appropriately – into a contemporary political commentary. Michel’s long and comparative view leads her to conclude that child care is further than ever from universal provision. At a time when poor and low-income women are being offered only minimal services, she acknowledges that "it might appear unseemly to even raise the issue of universal entitlement. Yet, it is precisely because the discourses surrounding child care have become so fractured by race and class that this deeply flawed policy has been allowed to develop in the first place." (280) Her recommendation for strategic intervention is that America needs a unified constituency for child care, in whose collective organizing lies the possibility to change the terms of provision.

      In America, it seems, neither the state nor social activists know what to do about working mothers. In the New Deal days, child care became "the road not taken," as mother’s pensions triumphed as the solution preferred by politicians and social policy experts. The legacy of this choice, and the history that preceded it, endures: child care is conceived of as a pathological and residual service restricted to the needy, and maternal employment still confounds the country. Compounding this problem, child care advocates are weak champions for their cause, not only because they face formidable opposition but also because of their organizational ambivalence. A key thread running throughout Michel’s book is that child care must be conceived of as a mother’s right as much as a child’s need. Yet, contemporary advocates emphasize the links between child care and children’s interests, while avoiding any association with women’s rights out of fear that it will harm their cause. (7) Sadly, into the breach created by the lack of an effective social movement of child care users and their supporters, conservatives have exploited child care as a means of ending welfare "dependency" and mandating employment for the poor. Michel is thunderous in her condemnation of the result. It is, she blasts, "a perverse and tragic misuse of a form of social provision that in other countries is regarded as a boon to both children and mothers." (297) Children’s needs and mothers’ rights indeed.

Adrienne E. Eaton and Jeffrey H. Keefe, eds., Employment Dispute Resolution and Worker Rights in the Changing Workplace (Champaign-Urbana: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1999)

THIS EDITED COLLECTION surveys the state of the research on private mechanisms for resolving employment disputes in the United States. The editors confess that the book was "motivated by a sense of the uneasiness about the state of one of the core institutions of collective bargaining, grievance arbitration." (1) This unease is induced by widespread criticism of grievance arbitration, on the one hand, and its enduring stability in the unionized sector and its spread to the non-union sector, on the other. Given the paradoxical state of the debate about grievance arbitration and the ongoing restructuring and reorganization of work, this collection provides a timely evaluation of the research on the old standard, grievance arbitration, and other forms of employment dispute resolution.

      Written by leading industrial relations researchers (and practitioners) in the field, the nine chapters not only identify and evaluate current trends in employment dispute resolution, they share a concern that employment dispute resolution mechanisms protect workers’ rights. This reflects the Industrial Relations Association’s belief that efficiency is not the only standard by which to evaluate employment regimes. While speed, cost, and effect on overall economic performance are important factors to consider in evaluating mechanisms for resolving workplace disputes, the contributors to this volume also consider whether workers’ rights – to associate and to be treated with dignity, for instance – are respected.

      In addition to providing a short summary of the themes unifying the collection and a description of each of the chapters, the introduction explores "the extent to which dispute resolution has actually changed in the past two decades at a time when other aspects of the industrial relations system have been described as in transformation."(8) Adrienne E. Eaton and Jeffrey H. Keefe examine developments in the formal norms and institutions of grievance arbitration, the extent to which it is a form of shop floor bargaining, how unions’ current emphasis on organizing may affect grievance arbitration, the transformation and rise of non-union employment structures, and power and rights in the workplace. What is clear is that, despite the shortcomings documented by the editors and David Lewin in Chapter 5, grievance arbitration remains the hegemonic form of dispute resolution in North American workplaces, even though fewer working people have access to it.

      The hegemony of grievance arbitration is reflected in this volume. Grievance arbitration is, often implicitly, the standard against which other private (that is, agreed to, rather than required by law) dispute resolution mechanisms are judged. This is most evident in the chapters that provide a critical assessment of the expanding practice of grievance arbitration in the non-union sector. This is not surprising; grievance arbitration tends to be the benchmark since it is the most studied of all the employment dispute resolution mechanisms.

      More significantly, this volume challenges the hegemony of grievance arbitration as the focus of industrial relations dispute resolution research. Only three (including the introduction) of the nine chapters concentrate on grievance arbitration in the unionized sector. Three focus on non-union employment dispute resolution mechanisms and the three remaining chapters focus on alternatives to grievance arbitration in unionized sectors.

      Several of the articles offer literature reviews and follow a common format: they identify the central research questions in their area and the context in which the questions are posed, discuss the key issues that have been studied, and indicate where there is need for future research. Lisa B. Bingham and Denise R. Chachere review the empirical research on non-union employee dispute resolution procedures, noting that there is very little data on outcomes of alternative dispute resolution procedures on organizations. In Chapter 5, Lewin provides a comprehensive overview of theoretical and empirical research on grievance arbitration in unionized workplaces and traces an important shift in the research. The initial focus was on how grievance arbitration operated as a continuation of collective bargaining and a struggle over industrial governance, while now it is on "the grievance procedure as a mechanism for conflict resolution within a larger package or bundle of human resource management and employment practices that potentially provide competitive advantage to the enterprise." (170) The normative question of democracy and employees’ rights has been displaced by an exclusive interest in efficiency and organizational performance.

      In Chapter 6, Peter Feuille reviews the empirical research on grievance mediation across a range of unionized sectors and concludes that it may be a viable alternative to grievance arbitration for unions, although management does not like it. According to him, one of the reasons that grievance mediation is not more popular with unions is because it is overshadowed by grievance arbitration. Michelle Kaminski, in a chapter entitled "New Forms of Work Organization and their impact on the Grievance Procedure," confirms the continuing hegemony of grievance arbitration despite the growth of alternative forms of employee participation or "voice" in the governance of the workplace. She notes that since management’s rights severely constrain employees’ voices, the arbitration of individual grievances is still essential for protecting workers’ rights.

      Indeed, it appears that grievance arbitration’s hegemony is expanding as more and more non-union employers adopt it. Two chapters explore the recent growth in non-union binding arbitration to settle employment disputes. However, rather than seeing this as a positive development that enhances employees’ rights, Stone and Zack argue persuasively that the growth in binding arbitration in non-union workplaces stems from employers’ attempts to reduce their liability for violating workers’ statutory rights and that central to its growth has been the expansion of procedures lacking due process and with limited appeal rights. Stone shows how the United States Supreme Courts’s 1991 decision in Gilmer, which stated that an employee could be required to arbitrate statutory rights, is incompatible with the reasons that the Court originally gave for deferring to private arbitration of statutory rights in other areas. Her rich account of the legal history of grievance arbitration demonstrates that this mechanism was developed for self-regulating communities in which there was a relative equality of power. While Stone’s characterization of arbitration clauses as the "yellow dog contract of the 1990s" is a bit of an overstatement, both she and Zack assess them as undermining workers’ rights. Zack urges arbitrators to adopt the due process protocol that he has helped to develop as a constraint on employers’ power to impose a one-sided arbitration process.

      Although grievance arbitration is still hegemonic, there are indications that its hold may be weakening. In Chapter 8, Jill Kriesky identifies trends in dispute resolution in the public sector, where there is increasing pressure for reform. The problem of multiple institutions (grievance arbitration, civil litigation, and civil service procedures) having the jurisdiction to resolve employment disputes and governments’ desire to cut taxes have been the impetus for reform, not the desire to enforce employee rights. In the final chapter, Heather Grob examines dispute resolution mechanisms in the building and construction trades. She claims that "research on the adaptability of the craft union through perilous economic conditions could provide important lessons for industrial and service sector unions facing the same conditions that have always characterized construction: highly competitive building processes, institutionalized outsourcing and subcontracting; new work organization and new technologies." (274) Grob’s chapter illustrates that there have always been alternatives to the grievance arbitration mechanism preferred by industrial unions. Since craft union membership is not contingent on employment with any particular employer but on holding certain standards, work rules, and codes of conduct, grievance arbitration is not an effective means of resolving workplace disputes. Grob’s discussion of how disputes are resolved in the construction crafts is very informative.

      Cost-cutting pressures in the public sector, and the growth of employment in sectors in which grievance arbitration is neither appropriate nor viable, suggest that grievance arbitration may have reached the peak of its influence. Moreover, even its reign in its heartland, large industrial workplaces, is no longer secure. According to Lewin, recent research indicates that reactive grievance procedures to resolve conflict are inimical to an organization’s performance. If this research is valid, the emphasis on organization performance poses a threat to grievance arbitration. This volume is a good place to begin to understand the state of the research literature in the United States on employment dispute resolution and to appreciate the precarious hegemony of grievance arbitration.

Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, What Workers Want (Cornell University Press, 1999)

WITH OVERALL union density at just fourteen per cent and the private sector at less than ten per cent, US employers and their champions are exuding a strident triumphalism. American management, they insist, has solved the problems of worker motivation and voice through the use of progressive human resources management and unions have become unnecessary.

      Some liberal-minded US commentators have been eyeing another lifeline – non-union forms of worker representation such as works’ councils (à la Germany) and employee involvement schemes. Some of these surfaced during the Clinton-appointed Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, chaired by former US Secretary of Labour and industrial relations sage John T. Dunlop.

      The Commission tried to steer between two strongly-defined poles: management champions who desire even weaker unions and labour champions who see management "employee involvement" schemes as an attempt to bust unions. Not surprisingly, the report pleased few, and none of the recommendations were seriously considered by the Clinton administration. They are deader than a doornail under Clinton’s successor.

      The report recommended making it easier for unions to organize and harder for employers to use "dirty tricks" against them. But it also suggested easing legal restrictions on employer-led employee involvement that duplicates the union role. It believed both approaches might draw unions and employers closer together. The Commission explored what American workers wanted in the way of voice in their workplaces, how they would like to achieve that voice, what they thought of their employers, and what they thought of the organizations that purport to give them that voice: trade unions and employee involvement schemes.

      One of the most important studies was done by Richard Freeman (a member of the Dunlop Commission and well-known economist from Harvard University, the US National Bureau of Economic Research, and London School of Economics) and Joel Rogers (a professor of law, political science, and sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison). Called the Workplace Representation and Participation Survey, it was viewed by its authors as "the most extensive analysis of American worker attitudes toward workplace relationships and power in more than twenty years.

      Freeman and Rogers’ US study would be of great interest to Canadian students of work and labour-management relations. But the authors also carried out similar but smaller-scale studies in Canada and the UK and among American public sector workers to test some of their assumptions. Unfortunately they have not reported on their Canadian findings, other than to note that "Canadian private-sector workers express much the same attitudes as American private-sector workers." (42) It would be interesting to look more closely to see if this is so.

      In terms of accessibility, the book sets an example that scholars should envy. It is written in plain language (even when it discusses complicated statistical issues) without talking down. It has a sense of humour. And it is aware of its limitations. Ultimately, it does almost ignore one major limitation, which will be discussed at the end of this review.

      Contrary to the received wisdom that suggests that US workers uniformly dislike unions, the study reports that:

* Among non-union workers, 32 per cent would vote to join a union if an election were held at their workplace and roughly the same proportion believed their fellow-workers would, suggesting that free and fair certification votes would result in a far higher rate of unionization than is presently the case.

* Not surprisingly, support for unions among the non-unionized increases substantially if workers could be assured that their employer would not interfere. Of those who wanted a union, 55 per cent cited management opposition as the central reason for not having one.

* Among unionized workers, 90 per cent would vote for a union in a new election at their workplace.

      Certain types of workers are more likely to want unions. Women outnumber men by about 30 per cent. Under 24s are more supportive than older workers. Black workers are more than twice as supportive as their white co-workers. Support for unions drops sharply as education increases but even among college graduates 21 per cent would vote union. Labourers are far more favourable than professionals (though 25 per cent of the latter want unions).

      The survey found a strong wellspring of desire for worker say in management and a large gap between wish and reality. Sixty-three per cent of respondents wanted more influence in a variety of areas. In a passage that exemplifies the refreshing sense of humour and lack of pretension in the book, the authors ask the question, "Do these results offer any news, or is this just social science reporting the obvious?" (42) From further questioning, the authors find that both workers and managers favour greater worker influence for many of the same reasons – greater job enjoyment, strengthening the employer’s competitive position, and improved product and service quality. This, of course, begs the question: why, then, so little worker involvement? Stephen Marglin’s famous thesis in What Do Managers Do? comes to mind: managers manage to justify their own existence as managers and to exert power over workers.

      While two-thirds of workers surveyed were reasonably satisfied with their work lives, another one-third were consistently dissatisfied. This dissatisfaction is strongly related to the lack of influence they have on the job and to low earnings, low education, race (black workers are more dissatisfied), and to work in the manufacturing sector. Most workers want more say in the organization of their work and in the training they receive. Yet the authors find the gap between wishing for and having influence to be greatest in precisely those areas in which unions excel: deciding benefits and pay raises. This gap is more pronounced among labourers (as opposed to professionals), blacks (as opposed to whites), and high school graduates (as opposed to college grads).

      Asked how they might achieve more influence, most workers preferred an employee association for issues like benefits and health and safety, but preferred to raise issues like sexual harassment, unfair treatment, and training by themselves. One of the more controversial findings is that most workers would like an employee association that cooperated with and had the cooperation of management rather than a powerful association with adversarial relationship. Even trade unionists (of whom 90 per cent would vote to keep their union) felt this way. The authors aver that this makes sense since "most employees believe that management cooperation is essential for any workplace organization to succeed." (58) But the authors failed to give a powerful organization with employer cooperation as an option.

      Indeed, respondents report that the greatest roadblock to worker participation is management resistance, especially in "willingness to share power and authority." Most managers said they would agree to meet with employee organizations but a majority wanted to make the final decision in any dispute.

      Another fascinating finding is that unionized workers whose employers have employee involvement schemes are more satisfied with their unions than those whose employers do not. This would seem to contradict the concerns of trade unionists that EI sabotages union support.

      Of course, all of these findings miss a key contextual point that applies to all surveys of worker satisfaction – the majority of which historically have found a high degree of job satisfaction. One’s satisfaction with one’s lot is strongly influenced by one’s expectations and stepped-down notions of what is possible. Or to put it more bluntly: "Workers know the score." This is especially the case in the union-unfriendly US where the calculus of raw management power is deeply assimilated within workers’ psyches. As one employer lobbyist told the authors, "labour policy would be set by his lobbying firm, which represented the bosses of the world, not by any commission or survey, so who cared what we found workers wanted?" (39)

Mark Dyreson, Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1998)

MORE THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, the United States has played a pivotal role in determining the modern ideal and form of human athletic performance. Over the past 100 years, the Olympic Games have emerged as the principal forum for the celebration of this cultural competitiveness, an event that unabashedly announces what nation is best in sport. Governments have, by extension, positioned championships and Olympic titles into various ideological projects of political service or even as indices of cultural progress. Hundreds of books have qualitatively and quantitatively rationalized such invocations of US supremacy in the Games. Mark Dyreson’s well-written, well-researched book is the first scholarly work to establish the historical origins of American cultural sentiment linking Olympic performance to national importance. While the more significant question may have been how the Americans came to define the parameters of Olympic sport, more broadly, Dyreson’s study amply demonstrates how they convinced themselves that Olympic success equated to national strength.

      Medal totals, contrived points schemes, and outright victories demonstrated that United States athletes were best at certain sports; indeed most sports. However, the positioning of sports as cultural signifiers in periodicals such as Outing, Collier’s, Harper’s, Scribner’s and in dailies such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Brooklyn Times, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch provided specific readings of American performances, contributing to the creation of what Dyreson calls the "sporting republic." Unlike Alfred Senn’s overview of Olympic politics, Allen Guttmann’s examination of significant events, and John MacAloon’s analysis of ritual, Dyreson’s work is contextualized within an extensive backdrop of what he refers to as the "intellectual" periodicals and a selection of newspaper sports pages. In addition, Dyreson provides readings of many of the significant events of the early Olympics by American sport leaders such as James E. Sullivan, William Milligan Sloane, Gustavus Kirby, and by writers Caspar Whitney and Finley Peter Dunne. Essentially, Dyreson reports, in great detail, the selling of American nationalism through Olympic sport.

      From the athletic victories of John Connolly, through Johnny Hayes, to Jim Thorpe, and the anecdotes of Olympic escapades, such as American shot putter Ralph Rose who refused to dip the flag during the opening ceremonies of 1908; Dyreson provides richly layered citations appraising the significance of each event as it relates to arguments about the republican ideal. Every American victory, he argues, augmented the construction of notions about vigorous manhood in American thought, consistent with the preachings of President Roosevelt and, of course, United States sport leaders and physical educators who argued vehemently that the Olympics confirmed the moral and cultural supremacy of nations. Periodical authors in Britain and the United States, during the first decade of the 20th century, jockeyed over the issue of sport and cultural supremacy as much as the athletes. For example, Finley Peter Dunne’s character, Mr. Dooley, from American Magazine is cited to highlight the clash between the British and American teams and officials during the Games of 1908. (150) The Americans, Dooley argued, succeeded in scoring well in the more important athletics events in spite of numerous disqualifications by British officials, while the English claimed the Olympic championship by winning such events as "wheelin’ th’ p’rambulator," "th’tea-dhrinkin’ contest," and "th’ Long Stand-up While th’ Band Plays Gawd Save th’ King."

      The substantive strength of the book rests in Dyreson’s selection of examples of animated, nationalist hyperbole; but, too many citations with too little evaluative analysis are a repetitive weakness in the book. Dyreson’s knowledge of secondary literature is clearly evident in his contextualization of issues. As such, the early 20th century periodicals should not be left to speak for themselves. Nevertheless, the author’s treatment of the Games from 1896 to 1912 is very good, his research exemplary, with detailed attention to the emerging sense of purpose in participation invoked by American commentators and sports authorities, in light of the pressing issues faced by Olympics organizers. The new American sporting culture that was being actively constructed through sports pages, university programs, community events, and sporting goods industries insured that the fledgling Olympic games did not founder when World War I interrupted the four-year cycle of Baron de Coubertin’s sports festival.

      The organizing principle of the book is based in Dyreson’s sense of an emerging sporting republic, steered by "champions of the republic," "leaders of the republic," and "champions of culture." Yet, following a brief introduction to the author’s methodological insights in chapter one, a more lengthy treatment of the idea of the republic is left to chapters eight and nine. The singularity inherent in the author’s use of the "republic" is problematic, particularly since the changing sense of national importance linked to American sporting success over a few decades is so well documented. With the exception of his attention to the identity politics inherent in Roosevelt’s platforms promoting rough and ready masculinities in everyday American life, Dyreson is really writing about what leading sports commentators and organizational leaders had to say about the Olympics. He has little to say about sport and culture within the broader political and economic context of the republic or about United States foreign policy.

      Sport as a unique cultural form has always been significant in organizing relations of gender, class, and race. The Olympic Games in the 20th century have been a prominent influential force in such relations. Dyreson briefly attends to these categories in chapter five, demonstrating that the common claims about sport as a great social leveler were just not accurate. The material in the chapter detracts somewhat from the flow of historical material, since it is interjected between eras. Such fundamental issues would be better integrated into each chapter as analytical interrogations of the cultural readings offered by Dyreson’s selection of commentaries by sports leaders and writers. One cannot effectively extract or isolate class issues, for example, from broader arguments about the social construction of a republic.

      The book’s appropriate title, Making the American Team, demonstrates Dyreson’s social constructivist, methodological point of departure. It works, generally, for a case study analysis of America’s sport leaders of the early 20th century and, particularly, for exploring the idea of a sporting republic in the popular press. Coubertin’s Olympic project depended, in part, upon the energies of the American sporting progressivists who came to view the Games as the pinnacle of international competition and a marker of American cultural progress. The administrative challenges to Coubertin’s group, launched by James Sullivan, only strengthened the resolve of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to sustain control over international sport. Such confrontations illustrated how some American nationalists sought to strategically position themselves within international cultural politics. Representatives of US athletic ideals demanded due respect and, further, insisted on international body representation, if not control. It was recognized early on that, without the Americans, there could be no Olympic Games of the worldly stature so hotly pursued by the IOC.

      Fortunately for scholars with an academic interest in the Olympic Games, this is not another positivist read on episodes of Olympic glory. Historians may be disappointed with Dyreson’s macro approach to the cultural construction of a republic, with little attention to the American political and economic climate of the early 20th century. However, Dyreson’s book should be commended for its breadth of research and for its critical insights on American sport leaders.

Tunde Adeleke, Unafrican Americans: Nineteenth Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 1998)

TUNDE ADELEKE is fond of the word "nuance,"(xiv, 29, 145) a term that has been absorbed into standard English, and is supposed to denote subtlety of shading, but this treatise reveals little respect for that sort of thing. Presenting himself as a revisionist, Adeleke nonetheless invokes the establishmentarian authority of Anthony Appiah, who opines that Pan-Africanism is the alien, exotic, and dangerous invention of callow African Americans. Adeleke employs the reductionist tactics of a prosecuting attorney to advance this view, beginning with an indictment and introducing selected facts to secure a conviction. This necessitates a cavalier disregard for scholarship by British, American, French, German, and West African scholars, who have shown that Pan-African ideology, before and after World War I, reflected trans-Atlantic influences and common understandings.

      The three American thinkers with whom Adeleke is primarily concerned are Martin Delany (1812-1885), Alexander Crummell (1819-1898), and Henry McNeal Turner (1834-1915). The author has lifted his research, with unconscionable selectivity, from the works of other scholars, whom he has either not understood or has intentionally distorted. The West Indian Pan-Africanists, Edward Wilmot Blyden and Marcus Garvey, are also egregiously misrepresented. Thus, Adeleke oversimplifies Garvey as "an imperialist, who appropriated European symbols and values to propagate an exploitative nationalist agenda." He supports this view with a single reference to an interpretive essay by Clarence Walker, but makes no reference to the meticulous, multi-volume Marcus Garvey Papers edited by Robert A. Hill, whose enterprise has forced most historians, including the present reviewer, to a complete reappraisal of Garvey’s ideological complexity.

      Among the many conceptual flaws in this work, the most embarrassing is Adeleke’s warping of time and space to construct discontinuities in the thinking of 19th-century African Americans and 20th century Africans. He attacks what he calls the "traditional pan-African paradigm," and implies, but never explicates, the new paradigm seen as suddenly emerging in the 20th century. He lists several persons as representing this more rational and mature "paradigm," among them the late Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, identified as "representing a truly counter-European nationalist ideology." (135) Astounding! Dr. Banda was the first African leader to recognize the South African apartheid government of John Voerster, thereafter negotiating a loan from the South African government and sending Malawian gästarbeiter to work in the republic. He was accused of murdering political rivals, had himself declared "president for life," and died in 1997, bequeathing his concubine a $350,000,000 Swiss bank account!

      Adeleke’s screed is largely an attack on the Christian redemptionist teleology that he ahistorically attributes to 19th-century African American thinkers. This leads to inevitable error, because he ignores all recent scholarship that describes his subjects’ 18th-century African antecedents. As a print ideology, Christian-based, redemptionist Pan-Africanism originated among Africans living in England during the 1700s, not among African Americans, and was only later adopted by African Americans and West Indians. Before one can understand the rhetoric of Christian redemptionism one must study Africans like Jacobus Capitein, a Fanti from the Gold Coast, who argued in 1742, that slavery was a good thing, since it was a means of advancing Christianity. Ottabah Cugoano, also a Gold Coast Fanti, rejected this argument and saw slavery as the work of the devil. Cugoano and his circle believed that divine providence sometimes brought good out of slavery’s cosmic evil, but they did not agree with Capitein that slavery was either good or consistent with scripture. Adeleke fails to understand that Delany, Crummell, Blyden, Turner, inter alia, sided with Cugoano, not with Capitein.

      Nineteenth century African, West Indian, and African American Pan-Africanists placed faith in their own efforts but also in the often quoted prophecy of Psalms 68:31: "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God." A brilliant treatment of this theme, into which Adeleke so unpreparedly stumbles, is St. Clair Drake’s revisionist work, The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (1970). Adekele lists the anthology, Black Brotherhood (1971), edited by Okon Edet Uya in his bibliography, but must somehow have overlooked the trailblazing essays by George Shepperson, Hollis Lynch, St. Clair Drake, Louis Harlan, and Harold Isaacs, contained therein. A recurrent theme among the foregoing is the evolution of Pan-Africanism as a dialectic between Africa and the New World.

      Comparisons between African and African American intellectuals are so often alluded to in this work that it is reasonable to expect some discussion of 19th-century continental Pan-Africanism. Adeleke legitimately alludes to differences between African and African American constructions of Pan-Africanism, but this calls attention to the absence from his bibliography of Imanuel Geis’s Der Panifrkanismus (1970), and J. Aydele Langley’s Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, which provide complicated and subtle interpretations of trans-Atlantic influences. Also missing is Robert July’s massive The Origins of Modern African Thought (1967), which charts the cognates, analogues, and mutual influences of Africans, African Americans, and West Indians in the creation of Pan-African ideology.

      As I have said elsewhere, the philosophies of Delany, Crummell, and Turner, combined political nationalism with cultural assimilation. This pattern is manifest in the writings of Africanus Horton, a military surgeon of Ibo descent, born in Sierra Leone, who tried to reconcile African nationalism with British civilizationism. It is also present in the career of the Ibo, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a missionary like Alexander Crummell, a Temne, and even more intolerant of traditional African religions. Adeleke’s discussion of Crummell’s promotion of the English language is conceptually naïve. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) might have aided him in raising more sophisticated questions concerning "print vernaculars" and "languages of state," problems that Pan-Africanism shared with contemporary Pan-Germanism.

      Much of Adeleke’s argument derives from distortions of prior research, in other cases from secondary sources and opinion pieces. On Blyden, he cites a solid and thoughtful essay by V.Y. Mudimbe, but ignores the pioneering work of Edith Holden and Hollis Lynch. His treatment of Crummell consists of selective excisions from Crummell’s published essays, filtered through Appiah; who revealed no interest in Crummell prior to his grudgingly acknowledged reading of the present author’s at that time unpublished manuscript. Both authors are inclined to ignore historical contexts and their textual settings. An inconvenient letter of 1853 and a speech of 1882, in which Crummell passionately denied that slavery had any Christianizing or civilizing influence on the masses of Africans or African Americans, are not the sort of nuances that Adeleke seeks.

      Adeleke makes the mind-boggling claim that pamphleteering by Delany, Crummell, Turner, and Blyden was responsible for Europeans’ colonialism in West Africa. Actually, they endorsed some colonial programs, but the British were well established long before Delany arrived. His complicated opinions on British rule were consistent with those of Aficanus Horton, and Blyden’s Gold Coast disciple, J.E. Casely Hayford. When Delany arrived in what is now Nigeria, he encountered reports of genocidal warfare, pursued by the king of Dahomey, leading him to call on the British to suppress this displacement and oppression of African peoples.

      Delany’s position anticipated that of Casely Hayford, who Adekele lionizes (135), by calling on the British to suppress inter-ethnic warfare. Casely Hayford, while generally critical of British colonialism, nonetheless cooperated with the British, as did Delany. Like Delany, Casely Hayford endorsed what he called the "Pax Britannica" which he said established peace among squabbling tribes. He did so 70 years after Delany, who is condemned by Adeleke for taking the same position. It is bad enough that Adekele is blind to this continuity between Delany and Casely Hayford. Much worse, he has set up a false dichotomy, in which 20th century Africans oppose British imperialism while 19th century African Americans support it.

      Genocide was practiced by indigenous Africans, and ethnic cleansing was supported by some of the Monrovia élite, as Crummell noted in his private correspondence. But Americo-Liberians who were committed to displacement and oppression of the indigenous Africans never admitted this openly. The mulatto élite in Liberia were hostile to Crummell’s party, which included Blyden and the Liberian president E.J. Roye. Crummell did not return to America as soon as things improved; in fact he returned to Liberia after the preliminary Emancipation of 1862, and remained for another ten years. He was driven out of Liberia in 1872, as was Blyden, by threats on his life, returning to a US where the picture for African Americans was by no means rosy. Blyden eventually achieved a place of honour in Liberia, but President Roye was murdered, and posthumously vilified by the Monrovia élite.

      Blyden, Crummell, and Roye openly advocated intermarriage with the native peoples as a fundamental component of nation building. They sought to involve the indigenous peoples in government-financed public works projects, designed to bring the various indigenous ethnicities and immigrant groups together to form one people. The élite, led by Joseph Jenkins Roberts and E. J. Russell, secretly desired to displace the indigenous peoples of Liberia, and set up a settler state after the American, Canadian, and Australian models.

      Adekele is fond of the word "paradigm" and he asserts that a paradigm shift occurs in Pan-African ideology somewhere in the 20th century. Since he attempts (inappropriately) to relate moral judgments to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the "paradigm shift," he is obliged to discuss how the shift takes place. The old paradigm that was gradually modified was Christian progressivism, but the progressivist paradigm also had a Marxist form. Bertrand Russell has even argued in a sneeringly brilliant chapter of his History of Western Philosophy that Marxist messianism offers a secular parallel to Christian messianism. It should not be surprising that the Marxist Pan-Africanism of Du Bois resembles the Christian Pan-Africanism of Alexander Crummell.

      There is, in fact, a paradigm shift that gradually and incrementally occurs between the 1870s and the 1920s. I have described this gradual shift in several publications, including The Golden Age of Black Nationalism (1978, 2nd. ed. 1988) and in Afrotopia (1998). Africans and African American intellectuals were increasingly influenced by the growth of cultural relativism during the late 19th century, and the rise of the cult of primitivism after World War I. They came to appreciate "pre-industrial" cultures for the same reasons as did Melville Herskovits, Margaret Mead, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Igor Stravinsky, and Carl Van Vechten. The Garveyite, William H. Ferris was influenced by the reform social Darwinism and the later cultural relativism of William Graham Sumner. Leo Frobenius also contributed to the new frameworks for viewing Africa that rose among a new generation of black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. As A. James Arnold has pointed out in Modernism and Negritude (1981), Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor developed negritude after Frobenius was translated from German into French. Du Bois admits that his mature views were influenced by Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud, and Leo Frobenius. These are the sources of the cultural relativism, which supported his evolving romanticization of the African village as "a perfect human thing."

      Alain Locke participated in the reconstructions of modernism and cultural relativism that occurred throughout the Western world in the 1920s. Adeleke misrepresents Locke as having suddenly and completely rejected the redemptionist paradigm. (Nuance, Mr. Adeleke, nuance!) The gradualism of paradigm shifts is well illustrated by Locke’s essay, "Apropos of Africa," which Adeleke misrepresents by selective quotation. Locke provides not only an illustration for Kuhn’s treatment of the incremental paradigm shift, but one of the most intelligent and nuanced contemporary treatments of Marcus Garvey. Adeleke would have done well to have studied Locke’s commentary on Garvey more carefully, along with E. Franklin Frazier’s two famous essays on Garveyism, written around the same time.

      Du Bois’s long life and complicated ideological development are a perfect illustration of why paradigm shift is a nuanced and difficult concept. Paradigm shifts are dialectic, gradual, and frequently incomplete. Adelcke conveniently forgets Du Bois’s description of his first trip to Africa, as minister plenipotentiary of the United States, and Marcus Garvey’s acerbic commentary on this mission. He seems unaware of Du Bois’s overtures to Harvey Firestone, described in the biography by David Lewis, and of Du Bois’s description of himself in his 1924 expedition, "riding on the singing heads of black boys swinging in a hammock." There is a gradual transformation from the Du Bois of 1895, who calls African Americans the vanguard of Pan-Africanism to the Du Bois who warns the Pan-African Congress of 1962 to beware of African American leadership.

      Du Bois also warned against certain African leaders, including "one of the black Oxford-educated leaders, married to the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps." The person mentioned was Anthony Appiah’s father, Joseph, whose imprisonment by Kwame Nkrumah constituted a violation of human rights. Whether Adeleke would associate Du Bois or the Trinidadian George Padmore with Nkrumah’s dictatorship is unclear.

      "Contradiction," says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is the hobgoblin of little minds." Adeleke seems to view his subjects’ contradictions as marks of incompetency or moral turpitude, rather than as essentials of human existence. What philosopher ever created an ideology in response to "The Poet’s" catalogue of "the oppressor’s wrong, the pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, the proud man’s contumely, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes?" Nineteenth-century African and African American personalities embodied many contradictions-far more than those contained in Du Bois’s unfortunately reductive "two souls" concept.

      Adeleke faults me for observing that Crummell found it "impossible to create an ideology that responded rationally to an irrational system." Ultimately, as Garvey understood, "Power is the only argument." Frederick II of Prussia understood this too, when he had the slogan Ultima ratio engraved on his cannons. The same slogan has been attributed to Louis XIV and Cardinal Richelieu. Crummell, however, was not in the same fortunate position as Richelieu, and the question Joseph Stalin asked regarding Pius XII, may be asked of Crummell, "How many divisions does he have?" Crummell once said that the way to make a savage into a man was to put a gun into his hands – certainly a dubious proposition, but similar to Garvey’s understanding that the African American race did, in fact, need an "Army…, navy and men of big affairs."

      In 1853, one week before Crummell arrived in Africa, Commodore Matthew Perry’s warships materialized in Tokyo Bay. Their presence was an irrefutable ideological statement to which the Tokugawa Shogunate could offer no rational response – poor butterfly. "Power is the only argument." Ideology does not exist purely in the world of verbal abstractions. Perry did not require any rationalizations about divine providence to explain "powerlessness." His battleships and cannon were the ultimate argument for the Manifest Destiny of white men to rule the world. A more complicated paradigm and a more tortured reasoning were required by African and Diaspora intellectuals to explain why God allowed the cosmic humiliation of white supremacy to endure.

Staughton and Alice Lynd, eds., The New Rank-and-File (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2000)

THE NEW RANK-AND-FILE is the follow-up to Rank-and-File: Personal Histories by Working Class Organizers, a volume first published in 1973 which has met with critical success since its appearance. Both books are mixtures of oral histories, biographies, and conference papers skillfully edited by Staughton and Alice Lynd. The Lynds, two radical historians vocal in the 1960s and 1970s, became attorneys in the 1980s dedicated to representing rank-and-file workers over employment issues.

      The Lynds collected these personal histories among the many contacts they established during their activity as legal advisors and as editors of the labour-supportive magazine Impact. In the introduction the authors acknowledge that this deliberate choice might have left the rank-and-file in many regions and industries uncovered. Committed to their militant vocation, the Lynds aimed with both books at inspiring "rank-and-file workers, and young people who are seeking long-term service in the labor movement." (1)

      Although the aim and the content of the two volumes are much akin, what makes The New Rank-and-File an interesting read is the time-span that separates it from its predecessor. The process of disinvestment and ‘globalization’ that in the 1970s had only begun to be at the forefront of public discussion is today an established practice in corporate business. The constraints in which the labour movement operates have changed dramatically. The working-class voices of this volume narrate stories of resistance to plant flight, of union organizing across the American border against multi-national capital, and of minorities struggling for dignity in the workplace.

      The editors propose to return to the concept of "solidarity unionism," the idea that rank-and-filers can counteract the crisis of the labour movement at the national level by getting organized in the workplace and building networks of mutual help. The aim of the collection is precisely to encourage a bottom-up style of organization in order to invigorate a labour movement that is "more democratic, and more willing to take risks that the union movement is expected to." (3) Solidarity unionism was also the subject of an earlier pamphlet by Staughton Lynd.

      The experience of Vicki Starr, the only worker appearing in both collections, illustrates well this point. After a career as a union organizer in the meatpacking industry, Vicki Starr (who in the first book used the fictitious name of Stella Nowicki) started organizing clerical workers, many of whom were women, at the University of Chicago, where she was later employed. Even before the recognition of the National Labor Relations Board, and thus without a contract, she noticed that, by employing collective action, she and her workmates could pressure the management into redressing grievances. Their techniques of mobilization stood in stark contrast with the Teamsters blitz-type of organizing, typically top-down. In another interview, Hugo Hernandez who organized the Overnite terminal workers in Miami, makes a similar point: "You take it upon yourself to address the questions at your workplace." (62)

      The tension between the benefits of grassroots organization and the peril of institutionalization is a recurrent theme in the book. This dilemma is vividly recounted in the experience of Marshall Ganz and the Farm Workers of Cesar Chavez. After winning a long jurisdictional battle with the Teamsters, in fact, Chavez’s resistance to institutionalization of the union through a regional structure and salaried staff eventually diminished its internal democracy and undermined its action.

      One of the strengths of The New Rank and File is its wider scope of interest that considers workers outside the US. This is dealt with in the section "Anywhere Beneath the Sun" that collects accounts from workers in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Palestine, and Canada -an apt revision in the age of the global corporation. The editors must be given credit for bringing to light stories, such as the one of the Mexican Ford workers, that show the ugly face of corporate flight. In Mexico the shift from nationally-based industry to international companies meant that American high technology displaced many workers, but did not foster the introduction of American labour practices. The Confederation of Mexican Workers, a government-sponsored union, collaborated with the company in subduing strikers demanding a wage raise and in replacing militant committeemen with more compliant representatives.

      Yet, Mexican Ford workers are privileged in comparison with workers in the maquiladoras, the free-trade zones where workers earn 55 cents per hour. The mechanisms of control there are so severe that organizing can only be clandestine. The Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), a non-governmental union, faces so much repression that its staff (as one woman relates) resorted to organizing maquiladoras workers indirectly, through wives and mothers: "the idea was that women would make a beginning and then their husbands could join." (185) This is a strategy that allows FAT to be acquainted with the conditions in the factories without putting workers at risk of being discharged.

      The section "The Ashes of the Old" complements this by drawing on accounts of resistance to plant closing in the US. Where this resistance was stronger, as in the steel mills of Youngstown and Pittsburgh, it involved a motley alliance of groups. Activists Charlie McCollister and Mike Stout recounted their experience in the Steel Valley Authority (SVA), a coalition that attempted to find a buyer to stop the demolition of the US steel blast furnace Dorothy Six in Duquesne. The SVA also tried to save Union Switch and Signal in Swissvale by using government’s eminent domain power to acquire the plant and run it. In both cases they failed. Remembering this final outcome, they bitterly observed: "all this intelligence, all this knowledge of building complex machinery, going to waste." (133)

      One controversial aspect of the book lies, in my opinion, in the use of oral history. In fact, one of the interesting aspects of oral accounts is in the way historical actors, consciously or unconsciously, construct and communicate their stories. Oral history interviews are also the unique product of a dialogue between interviewer and interviewee in a particular place and time. Nothing of this is present in the Lynds’ book. Almost all the "personal histories" are edited from several sources both written and oral, providing an account that, although approved by the person, reflects more the narrative choices of the editors than those of the interviewees.

      However, I found The New Rank and File well organized thematically and most of the "personal histories," which are actually "collective histories," make for engaging reading. Certainly, these are people who can be held up as examples for the next generation of rank-and-filers.

Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the Montreal Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)

IN PART I of this masterful study, Sven Beckert argues, like historians before him, that merchant capitalists, blessed with a magnificent harbour, a bountiful hinterland, and a mushrooming population, dominated New York’s upper crust before the Civil War. Beckert adds immensely to our understanding of this group, however. He clarifies how much the New Yorkers’ wealth depended on shipping Southern cotton and financing Southern plantations, which made the merchants inherent free trade Democrats, hostile not only to protective tariffs and internal transportation improvements but to agitation against slavery. Yet they were also paternalists of an almost Federalist stripe who tried to deal with the urban poor through a combination of alms and stewardship – moralizing plus education and the safety valve of the suffrage. Diverse by ethnicity, religion, and origins, therefore less clannish than élite Boston or Philadelphia, they could more easily absorb parvenus via social networks. Moving by mid-century into banking and real estate, they still shared the not atypical hopes of commercial establishments for peace, national stability, and deferential democracy.

      The most intractable of the prewar non-merchant groups proved to be the most dynamic and fast-growing: the new manufacturers, of mostly unpolished artisan origins, less tied to trade and the South, wanting cheap labour, high tariffs, and better interior transportation. The antagonism between industrialists and merchants provides Beckert with a story line and leads to Part II of the book, which traces the impact of the Civil War on the changing nature and ideology of the New York bourgeoisie. The war’s chief consequence was to shake the political influence and economic underpinnings of the merchants. When the South seceded, the great merchants lost their main national political allies. Into the void rushed protectionists and improvers – spokesmen for the manufacturers, whose Hamiltonian program the Republican Congress quickly enacted. By disrupting the plantation system, a key source of banking profits, and the cotton trade, the war damaged the merchants absolutely. By channeling war contracts and profits to the manufacturers, it damaged them comparatively. Makers of iron goods, copperware, boots, textiles, and other military commodities prospered, as did those merchants who had diversified their investments or moved into large-scale banking, which made them the chief financiers of the Union government. These two groups therefore came to comprise an immense bloc within Gotham’s elite – pro-Union, because victory was necessary to repay war loans; pro-Republican party, industry’s patron; hostile to slavery, an archaic system and anyway the bulwark of the Confederate enemy; and hostile to laissez faire, which would preclude, among other things, internal market expansion through aggressive railroad building.

      Part III reveals rich New Yorkers flush with the spoils of war and victory, investing in ships and railroads, mining and real estate, publishing and pianos, carpets and carriages, as well as banking, trade, and a host of lesser ventures. They indulged in now-familiar displays of conspicuous consumption: huge estates, exclusive clubs, and showy cultural institutions (Orchestra, Opera, Art Museum). They made money the indicator of status and ticket of acceptance to an incredible degree; they shaped national banking, industrial, even foreign policy in ways no local bourgeoisie ever had in the US. They became, through industrial expansion and bank financing, the absentee owners of vast tracts of the American economy.

      But unity was as yet imperfect. This came only with a shift in attitudes toward the poor, a hardening of opposition to labour unions, and a growing anxiety about New York’s teeming immigrant wards. Evident during the 1863 draft riots, when the city’s poor seemed out of control, if not insurrectionary, this antagonism on the part of bourgeois New York finally resulted in the deployment of armed militia against workers during the railroad strike of 1877, which Beckert calls "the harbinger of a militarization of class relations that would last until the end of the century" (235) and that would witness not only the construction of armories in most US cities but the free and easy deployment of federal troops to suppress foreign rebels as well as domestic strikers.

      One reason New Yorkers failed to support the protection of African American rights during Reconstruction was that, faced with lower-class unruliness, they came to fear popular democracy. By the late 19th century, immigration and imperialism had made race a component of upper-class identity, and bourgeois anti-Semitism was now noticeable. But Beckert argues that these were ultimately lesser strands in New York’s social tapestry. It was economics, born specifically of the transformations of the 1860s and 1870s and the forging of elite solidarity in the face of a restive working class, that produced the class consciousness of bourgeois New York and, given New York’s role in the nation, of America itself.

      Beckert’s unrefracted focus on investment patterns and class tension pays large dividends (so to speak). It differentiates New Yorkers from other much-studied American élites, for example the Bostonians, where great wealth came early, moved early into manufacturing, was ethnically homogeneous and therefore unwelcoming to parvenus, and financed curiously influential educational institutions that provided an alternative ticket to acceptance and a mechanism for upper-class seasoning quite distinct from cash-and-carry New York. Beckert’s chapters on the role of culture suggest that what New Yorkers meant by cultivation was speech patterns and polite manners, and what they meant by culture was largely the visual arts, not learning, for which they went to New England. New York generated its own creativity in literature, music, and drama, as Beckert’s references to printing and publishing make clear, nearly all of it commercial. More on bourgeois accomplishments of this kind would have strengthened, not weakened, the book.

      In any case, the sheer concentration of wealth and ownership in New York makes this more than just one more elite study. The New Yorkers were not representative of a national ruling class; they were that class in a way that Philadelphians, even Bostonians, were not. Beckert’s use of the term "bourgeoisie," a property ownership category that privileges infrastructure rather than superstructure, underscores the point. Here infrastructure determines superstructure – industrial investment leads to Hamiltonian (Republican) politics; banking and contracts to wartime support for the Union; worker agitation to social exclusiveness and an aversion to democracy; and staggering accumulation to the parroting of European aristocratic culture. Though complex and encompassing – Beckert on how the bourgeoisie influenced local politics is worth the price of admission – The Monied Metropolis in this respect demonstrates the value to historians of Marxian categories of analysis, certainly for the high bourgeois century after 1850.

      This is a study of real economic and political power rather than the sometimes fanciful "empowerment" that has preoccupied social historians concerned with powerless or neglected groups. Beckert’s methods are of course those of social history. The textual readings are sophisticated, the tracing of ideological shifts clear. The graphs reflect staggering research in tax lists and other sources of aggregate data. The illustrations, though only roughly chronological and without side commentaries, nevertheless support Beckert’s arguments. This is, in sum, a skillfully crafted work that dramatically furthers our understanding of New York City, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the origins of the American ruling class. Whether it will achieve its laudable goal of refocusing scholarship on this class remains to be seen.

Joanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class (New York: Monthly Review 2001)

IN A PERIOD when a significant group of academic feminists have declared class "deconstructed," rejecting all varieties of Marxism as oppressive "grand narratives," this book stands out as a welcome exception, contributing to a continuing – if somewhat beleaguered – debate about socialist-feminist theory and politics. I was initially disappointed when I opened the book, as it consists in large part of Brenner’s collected articles over the last sixteen years. I was hoping for more new material, addressing the critiques of class analysis forwarded by feminists over the last ten to fifteen years, and offering a fresh counter-argument for the analytical importance of class to both feminist inquiry and feminist politics.

      I was soon deeply engrossed, however, as Brenner’s collection provides an interesting and thought-provoking view of the evolution of socialist-feminist concerns over the last twenty years. She has also updated the articles, with some new introductions, added references, and provided an overall introduction as well as a new essay at the end, drawing on "intersectional" analyses of race, class, and gender. She is cognizant of the important changes in feminist and socialist politics since the 1960s, and indeed, a central theme in the book is the way in which capitalist restructuring, the rise of neo-liberalism, and the fact of globalization have altered the political playing field for activists in the US. In the 1960s and 1970s, in an expanding capitalist economy and secure welfare state, she notes, some liberal-feminist gains could be secured without challenging the distribution of wealth. That is now less likely, reinforcing the need to rebuild movements of working-class self-organization. Indeed, her writing, clear, lucid, and direct, is concerned not only with the more abstract realms of academic debate but always with the process of social transformation. Her explorations of history, theory, and politics are always constructed, as she puts it "with an eye to doing politics." (1)

      The book is devoted to articles that reflect Brenner’s key political and theoretical concerns over the years: Marxist-feminist theory; welfare, social policy, and the state; the politics of the family; working-class self-organization; and feminist strategies. Brenner begins with her influential essay, written with Maria Ramas, challenging Michele Barrett’s analysis of capitalism and women’s oppression. Although I am still not entirely convinced of the centrality they give to the place of reproduction in that classic piece, I found their critique of Barrett’s notion of ideology perceptive for they zero in on her tendency to see ideology as a "deus ex machina" acting on individuals, failing to integrate human agency and creativity into the construction of consciousness. Barrett’s interests, of course, are now literally a galaxy away, but her subsequent intellectual evolution – embracing post-structuralism – may have been incipient in this earlier Althusserian ethos.

      The next chapters then turn to a number of key themes and debates that Brenner has been concerned with. One is the creation of a sociology of gender in which both Marxism and feminism are important, guiding components. Her earlier work on social reproduction, in which she and Barbara Laslett offered a materialist analysis of the survival strategies, including women’s unpaid familial, emotional work, that sustain and shape working-class life, remains an important contribution for labour historians; indeed, some have recently returned to this concept as a guide to rethinking the working-class past.

      In both this chapter, and the chapters on welfare politics, she also engages usefully with writing concerning the state. Far from seeing the state as a monolithic, centralizing concept, as some post-structuralist writing has charged Marxists do, her materialist analysis tries to understand the construction of state policy as a play of power, analyzing which groups (including women) exert more power than others, and why; she does not see state interests as simply reducible to or "read off" key economic interests. However, as a political activist in the areas of reproductive rights and welfare, she also knows only too well that the state can not be so easily dismissed as deconstructed, disjointed, disunified, and ephemeral. Welfare policy, she argues, ultimately reflects gender and class structures because these "set limits and create opportunities" for interest groups involved in policy making. (123)

      Her feminist and materialist analysis of welfare "reform" and especially the attacks on the racialized poor in the US, are critical not simply of the right, but also of liberal and social democratic thinking that set the stage for, and abetted these attacks. It was not simply the right, she notes, but Planned Parenthood that raised the alarm about teenage mothers, and it was social welfare workers – well intended, trying to grasp some paltry aid – who raised the spectre of "welfare dependency," a concept which sidesteps, indeed masks, the real causes of poverty. In this debate, she develops a critique of "social welfare" feminism (what we might call social democratic feminism) and also argues for a strategy stressing women’s right to combine work and parenting rather than their right to support in the home – a position that not all feminists agree with. Her thinking on this and other issues – such as the attempts by socialist to "reclaim" the family as an arena of their concern, and "respectability" – are influenced not only by her reading of welfare history but by her continuing commitment to a critical and transformative approach to the family as an institution in capitalist society.

      Brenner addresses other key concerns of feminists, including reproductive issues, participatory democracy, and "identity." Indeed, what is interesting about the collection as a historical oeuvre is the extent to which her earlier feminist concerns with transforming the family and creating a more collective sense of community and caring – aims which she has not abandoned – still are quite radical (if utopian to some) today. Her take on identity will certainly not appeal to many feminists now influenced by post-structuralist writing and literary theory, for she argues that there is "no such a thing as identity abstracted from social practice": the unconscious and emotional, as well as the sensual, she argues, are created within the realm of the material, though they also act on and shape that realm. (86)

      There is some theoretical consistency in Brenner’s evolving thought, particularly in her desire to ground her analysis in materialist, feminist, and anti-racist categories. There are also key political dilemmas and questions which she keeps circling back to, such as the need to simultaneously create a new community and participatory politics within capitalism, while challenging capitalism wholesale. Her earlier work (as that of many feminists) was less concerned with integrating an analysis of race. In her last essay she attempts to rectify this by creating an intersectional analysis of politics that is sensitive to class differences within race, as well as to class commonalities across race and ethnicity.

      Brenner’s strength is her ability to make theory politically accessible and relevant, and also her wide-ranging reading of American social and labour history as the basis for her interrogation of theoretical and political issues. This is, of course, a resolutely American book, which speaks to feminist and socialist politics in that nation; socialist-feminists from other countries will recognize some common theoretical concerns, but also note very different, lived experiences of politics. Nonetheless, Women and the Politics of Class offers a clear, engaging reading of some socialist-feminist debaters in theory and politics over the last twenty years, and Brenner’s final essay reminds us that there are still some activists dedicated to creating a politics of social transformation grounded in a materialist understanding of class location, gender, and race oppression.

Mimi Abramovitz, Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the United States, New Edition (New York: Monthly Review Press 2000)

MIMI ABRAMOVITZ’s 1988 book, Regulating the Lives of Women, placed women at the center of an analysis of American social welfare policy as no one had before. Her recently revised Under Attack, Fighting Back, continues that project by showing readers that women have been more than just the passive objects of welfare policy: they have been involved actors, shaping policy and resisting it both. The result here is an ambitious history of how welfare policy and politics have subtly or not so subtly sought to influence women’s marriage decisions, reproductive behaviour, and labour market participation for the last 100 years. Under Attack, Fighting Back has many virtues and, at a crisp 160 accessible pages, would serve as a good introduction to the topic for those not familiar with women and welfare before and after the recent American "reforms" of 1996. Ultimately, however, it fails to capture the complexity of how women have affected and been affected by battles over American poor relief.

      Chapter One focuses on recent history. Abramovitz describes the principal targets of "welfare reform," the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRA), as women’s work behavior; their childbearing and marriage choices; AFDC’s cost and entitlement status; and the role of the federal government vis à vis the states. It is refreshing to read an analysis of the PRA that does not begin with the premise that because welfare rolls and national poverty levels have declined we must conclude that the PRA succeeded. Even on its own terms, the PRA has largely failed, and Abramovitz rightly argues that the evidence that has been accumulating indicates that poor women have been made worse off by welfare reform. For that alone this volume bears reading. One wishes that she had further observed that welfare reform’s greatest failure has been its central goal – to promote marriage (the very first words of the PRA’s Title 1 declared that "Marriage is the foundation of a successful society"). If Congressional testimony so far by the Heritage Foundation is any indication (and debate over the PRA suggests that it is), this will be a central focus of debate when the PRA’s re-authorization is considered throughout 2002.

      Chapter Two is a brief history of welfare policy developments and women’s activism in the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, New Deal, and Post-War Era. This is much terrain to cover in so short a space, and Abramovitz does it ably, but I still think it fair to complain that Under Attack, Fighting Back offers a one-sided view of women activists and overstates their influence. As Linda Gordon, among others, has demonstrated, women must bear some of the responsibility for ways in which the creation of the American welfare state privileged men (as workers) over women; in Abramovitz’s account women did no harm. When Abramovitz describes some of the anti-welfare campaigns of the late 19th century, for example, she fails to note that many of them were led by women. More to the point, most welfare policy (most policy, alas) has been made by men: it is essential to include women in any story of welfare policymaking, but to focus only upon women without revealing the context in which they acted implies that women had more influence than the historical record indicates. Even in so short a volume, a truer portrait of women’s involvement in American poor relief requires a more complicated analysis and a more ambivalent view of their role, for even when women managed to achieve access to policymaking arenas, their influence was often limited and was not necessarily in the interests of poor women.

      Chapter Three offers a review of feminist academic writings on welfare. It is a fine summary of welfare theory that would make a terrific selection for any number of undergraduate courses or for a general audience, no small feat given the thorniness of the literature and the debates. But Abramovitz muddies the discussion by bouncing back and forth from means-tested AFDC and its successor program TANF to the Welfare State itself (social security, unemployment insurance, and other programs). They have different effects upon women and must be kept more distinct than they are in her discussion. Moreover, the reinforcement of traditional family structure that Abramovitz attributes to welfare is more complex than she concedes – while midnight raids and man-in-the-house rules did have the effect of controlling women’s marital and sexual behavior (and of controlling men’s access to women’s welfare money, as Piven and Cloward might note), cash relief also can have liberating effects by allowing women to establish households independent of men, as much comparative feminist welfare state scholarship has been at pains to show.

      Finally, Chapter Four offers an overview of women’s activism from abolitionists, temperance crusaders, and suffragists to some of the welfare activists working today. While much of this activism was and is important, much of it also seems tangential to the topic at hand. And too often she focuses her discussion on the establishment of women’s organizations, which is not necessarily resistance. She heralds those organizations that "went on record" against welfare reform, but, again, this is not necessarily fighting back. This gets to the central problem with her approach to contemporary welfare: resistance to reform is not the story of the PRA; it is the virtual absence of such resistance and the ultimate ineffectiveness of what resistance there was that are the facts that need to be explained.

      More than once during Congressional debate New York Senator Moynihan bemoaned the dearth of outrage from advocates for poor people. Few took to the streets to protest. Peter Edelman, who resigned from Clinton’s Department of Health and Human Services over the PRA, described the lack of protest as a "de facto conspiracy of silence" from Democrats who did not want to sow division in an election year. While right-wing think tanks and foundations were clearly active, advocates on the left were unprepared and minimally effective. Despite the fact that 95 per cent of all AFDC recipients were women, national women’s groups were unable to mobilize their membership, perhaps, as Gwendolyn Mink argued, because "welfare reform did not directly bear on the lives of most [i.e., white, middle-class] feminists." But it did, and does.

      Welfare, among its other virtues, places a floor under all wages, which especially benefits the most vulnerable workers, who are still disproportionately female. Where were women’s groups other than NOW? Where were the unions, especially the public sector unions whose membership is so disproportionately female? Sure, there was some back-room lobbying, as Abramovitz notes, but most women’s organizations and unions did not expend financial or political capital on this battle that transformed public relief in the US in a way that is centrally about women and work. Why?

      These complaints notwithstanding, Abramovitz offers a concise and compelling account of women and welfare in the US. She places women’s activism at the center of her story, writes with labour markets always present, and valiantly tries to debunk the many myths that still stubbornly shroud women and welfare. Under Attack, Fighting Back is a fine starting point for those in search of a richer understanding of women, work, and welfare.

Arwen P. Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1999)

ARWEN P. MOHUN situates the history of steam laundries in the broader context of gender constructions, especially those relating to technology, for, as she argues, "gender is important in shaping technology and technology in shaping gender." (6) She traces the move of laundry from the late 19th century to the mid-20th, from the hand wash in the home, to the mechanization of the laundries, and back to the home with electric washing machines. Her focus, not only on laundry workers, male and female, but also on laundry owners, reformers and unions, the place of laundries in society, and the importance of the consumer, produces an interesting and original labour history.

      In tune with the increasing popularization of comparative studies in labour history, Mohun compares Britain and the United States. She notes the benefits of this approach and throughout the book identifies national peculiarities, transnational exchange, and cultural similarities and differences. Unfortunately the comparison is not as balanced as it could be –there is a bias towards the American side, to the extent that chapter Ten, "Women and Men and Unions," deals only with the US. The reason given is not lack of sources (often a problem on the British side in comparison to the American), but rather the low rates of union membership in Britain. While Mohun gives a brief explanation of this, the comparison could have been continued and the issue of levels of organization dealt with in what would have made a very interesting discussion, especially in light of the fact that overall union density was consistently higher in Britain than in America.

      Mohun begins with a theoretical introduction, pointing out that it is interesting that laundries and their workers have been so neglected in academic work, especially when you consider that "Laundry is a problem that refuses to go away." (1) She suggests that part of the reason for this lack of study is that laundries inhabit an ambiguous place in the labour world, and argues that laundries’ "particular qualities connect frequently separated analytical categories such as technology and culture, consumption and production, and domesticity and industrial process." (1) Mohun thus sets out to readdress these categories, viewing steam laundries as their contemporaries viewed them, as factories. This leads her to fully explore the technical details of laundry work (accompanied by photographs and illustrations), within a framework that considers industry and industrialization in terms of gender, race, and class. Although laundry was gendered as female, and continued to be even after mechanization, technological developments brought men into the laundries to do the heaviest work, such as loading the washing machines. This ambiguity deterred and complicated attempts at unionization and reform, for well into the 20th century unions were gendered as male and protective legislation as female. In addressing the issue of race in America (not a comparable issue in Britain in this period), Mohun considers the differences between racial discrimination in the northern and southern states, pointing out how race interacts with gender construction. She notes that in the South, racial identity had greater significance in both the eyes of employers and employees than in the North (178), and that in both regions "Women reformers understood that black women were part of their constituency, but they chose to prioritize gender over race. When political choices had to be made, they abandoned an insistence on racial equality first." (180-1) Alongside race, analysis of reformers also introduces issues of class, and Mohun draws attention to the interesting duality of the role of these women, for they were of the class that constituted the bulk of laundry consumers.

      Mohun writes a parallel history to that of the laundry workers, that considers trade unions and reformers, who at various times and with varying degrees of success represented those working in the laundry trade. For a long time it was reformers who were the primary representatives of laundry workers. Mohun points out that the very unions that were supposed to be representing laundry women depicted them as passive, and the femininity of laundry work marginalized them within the labour movement. (134-5) Reformers thus dominated the campaign for improving conditions up until the inter-war years. The vast majority of these reformers were middle- and upper-class women who, after having found collective bargaining unsuccessful, looked to legislation to improve conditions in the laundries. The comparative approach here highlights the difference in the British and American legal systems and the greater hostility to trade unions and labour legislation among American employers, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

      Mohun also considers steam laundry employers in her detailed study of the laundry trades. She notes how technological ideas crossed the Atlantic from west to east and while the Americans were more enthusiastic about mechanization than the British, both sides had very similar systems. Mechanization enabled employers to increase the number of semi- and unskilled workers employed and inadvertently reaffirmed these jobs as gendered female. A highly important consideration for employers was customer demand and Mohun also undertakes a detailed consideration of consumers (women in the majority). She explains that in the late 19th century steam laundries had to offer a good alternative to the washerwoman who did the wash in her backyard, Chinese laundries, and doing the wash oneself. As standards of hygiene and cleanliness improved, the lack of private plumbing increasingly inclined people to laundries, and steam laundries experienced a heyday with growing clientele and the rapid industrialization of the industry. As the 20th century progressed, and fashion and hygiene demanded more than the once weekly wash, the wait for clothes from the laundry became increasingly inconvenient. The advent of electric washing machines for the home offered the middle-class consumer another choice and laundry began to move back to the home.

      The history Mohun has written is comprehensive. Chapters on technology, management, the state, trade unions, workers, and modernization, consider every aspect of steam laundries, including many that are often excluded from similar industry-based histories, such as advertising campaigns. She draws on a vast array of sources, which enable her to write and effectively illustrate such a diverse history. The outcome is a critique not merely of the place of steam laundries in British and American society, but also of the interplay of class, gender, and to a lesser extent race, in the industrialization of a domestic task.

Richard Whiting, The Labour Party and Taxation: Party Identity and Political Purpose in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000)

In January 1992, the Conservative Party unveiled its slogan "Labour’s Tax Bombshell," playing on public fears that a Labour Party victory would mean harsh tax increases for the average voter. In the wake of Labour’s election defeat that April – its fourth in a row – Tony Blair argued that the tax issue had alarmed not only voters likely to be directly affected by the party’s plans, but those who hoped to earn enough to be affected. As Richard Whiting’s commendable study of the history of Labour’s tax policies makes clear, the challenge the party faced in 1992 – how to structure the tax system in such a way as to achieve its aims without alienating key supporters – was hardly new. Add to this the institutional resistances often encountered (not least from the Inland Revenue itself) when trying to reform the tax system, and the existence of genuine practical limits to the pace of change, and it is hardly surprising that, in this area of major technical complexity, Labour’s record has not been one of unalloyed success.

      Whiting focuses principally on the tax system at a national level, eschewing extended consideration of local government finance. He steers the reader through the technical maze with some skill, and provides many interesting insights along the way. It must be pointed out, however, that the book is not quite what its subtitle claims. It does not cover the whole 20th century, but only the years 1906-1979, albeit with a rather perfunctory nine page epilogue on New Labour, added, one imagines, at the behest of the publisher. This is disappointing, not least because, by leaving out the story of the Party’s earliest years, Labour’s part in the campaign against "food taxes" – i.e. tariff reform – is rather overlooked. This in spite of the fact that, as Whiting does note briefly, Philip Snowden (later Labour’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer) "had set the tax debate in terms of the challenge of tariff reform as a means for the propertied classes to place heavier burdens on working-class consumption rather than shoulder the cost of social reform themselves." (10)

      The book’s first chapter, "Struggles within a Liberal Inheritance, 1906-1940," makes an interesting contrast between Snowden and Hugh Dalton, the latter being as influential on Labour after the watershed of 1931 as the former had been before it. Whiting finds that "Snowden’s approach in the 1920s served Labour well, even if it was rather sterile," whereas Dalton and his colleagues had "little to show for their efforts in terms of positive achievement, and sometimes the dabbling in tax policy had actually served to discredit the party." (56) He does, however, overlook some items of detail that should be entered in the credit side of Dalton’s ledger. Witness, for example, the success in 1937 of Dalton’s suggestion that the National Government’s original, flawed proposal for a tax on increased profits (the "National Defence Contribution") should be remodelled as a simpler tax with a larger yield. Here, Labour’s opponents implicitly acknowledged the superior wisdom of Dalton and his coterie of experts.

      Chapter Two, "The Changing Balance of Tax Interests, 1940-1954," examines the crucial period that saw the large-scale incorporation of the working class into income tax (because of increased earnings), and, as a consequence, the introduction of pay-as-you-earn (in 1943). Some of the resultant dilemmas faced by the 1945-51 Labour government were encapsulated in the issue of food subsidies. Subsidies helped the poor, but the Treasury did not like them, and better-off working-class income tax payers were making a substantial contribution towards their cost; yet, their removal could trigger compensatory wage demands. The response was to freeze the subsidies, allowing the consumer to carry the burden of future increases in prices. The Conservatives, by contrast, cut the subsidies after they returned to office in 1951; and Whiting’s handling of the Labour movement’s subsequent responses indicate that he has not fully resolved the issue of "political purpose" that the book addresses. As he shows, in 1952 and 1953 the Trades Union Congress advocated an increase in the standard rate of income tax in order to help the poor by increasing subsidies. (119) Douglas Houghton, head of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation and also a Labour MP, asked "Should the TUC as a matter of policy make taxation proposals which are to the disadvantage of its more highly paid members?" Yet the answer, apparently, was "Yes," so it seems difficult to completely accept Whiting’s conclusion "that Labour was not a party of the poor but of the trade unions." Labour may have had problems reconciling the needs of its differing constituencies, but, as this episode shows, even the union leaders themselves showed some sensitivity to the needs of the poor.

      Chapter Three, "The Kaldor Era, 1951-1965," examines the time when the Hungarian émigré economist Nicholas Kaldor was particularly influential – although not always decisively so – on Labour’s tax plans. This era culminated, after Labour’s return to power in 1964, in the introduction of capital gains tax and corporation tax in the 1965 budget. As Whiting notes, "The fundamental point of the 1965 budget was that high income tax, paid unavoidably through PAYE, could be made palatable by making the tax system ‘fairer,’ in closing loopholes and removing tax-free capital gains." (166-7) This, he argues convincingly, was an important shift away from Labour’s earlier, more radically redistributionary tax ethic. Chapter Four, "Social Democracy Examined, 1965-70," shows how, after the 1965 changes, the government’s reforming impulse was checked, both by political exhaustion induced by its initial effort, and by the Revenue’s insistence that it lacked the resources to implement further alterations to the system.

      The final chapter, "Defensive Positions, 1970-1979," argues that, when in opposition in 1970-4, Labour reaffirmed its traditional commitment to developing further progressive direct taxation, in a rather unthinking way. This let the party in for "another painful learning experience" (257) in government in 1974-9, as the trade unions became increasingly awkward partners and the Conservatives exploited with increasing effect the public’s growing distrust of the state: "it is not surprising that Labour found it was beyond them to carry conviction in the new [post-1979] era." (258)

      The overall picture that Whiting paints, then, is rather bleak. He certainly points up many significant tensions and contradictions in Labour’s thinking, and in so doing makes a valuable contribution to the literature. Nevertheless, one cannot help wishing that the positive aspects had been drawn out a little more. For as Whiting concedes on the book’s final page, Labour’s pursuit of its view of taxation as an expression of obligation to community, "in a society whose political culture has been shaped by individualism rather than collectivism ... was to explore the limits of political action." (273) Indeed, it is only in the years since the disaster of 1992 that New Labour, by pledging to bind income tax rates (without promising that the tax burden as a whole will not increase), has struck an electorally fruitful compromise. It is an approach that is at least as intellectually problematic as many "Old Labour" solutions, yet the "tax bombshell" jibe is no longer an effective weapon in the party’s opponents’ armoury.

Ross M. Martin, The Lancashire Giant: David Shackleton Labour Leader and Civil Servant (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2000)

THIS IS A WORKMANLIKE biography of a working man. Shackleton, a cotton worker from the age of nine, became a leader of textile workers, a leader in the TUC, one of the first labour parliamentarians, and the first "workman" to become permanent secretary in the civil service.

      His election to the House of Commons came in a by-election in Clitheroe in 1902 running on an independent Labour Representative Committee ticket (not Lib/Lab). He won again in 1906 and 1909. He chaired the TUC executive in 1907 and 1908 and declined the post of Chairman of the Parliamentary Party in 1908 after acting as chair for a number of months. He straddled the union and party wings of the labour movement helping to hold it together by recognizing the importance of socialist as well as labourist members in the early formative years of an independent Labour Party. He was a "labourite," not a socialist, who always had liberal sympathies and this combined with his strong belief in reform and moderation led to a move into the civil service in 1910.

      Martin charts Shackleton’s rise through labour’s ranks and his shift from the heights of the labour movement to what was at first a moderate civil service position and later permanent secretary at the new Ministry of Labour in Lloyd George’s wartime government. He offers a number of interpretations of the reasons for this move and explains the context of the times including Shackleton’s concern for the working conditions of textile workers. He leaves it to the readers to draw their own conclusion as to the major motivation but anyone who has worked in the British Labour Party knows that those without clear socialist convictions are vulnerable to such seduction and even those with such convictions can fall. For a man like Shackleton, a straightforward, honest conciliator, there is no treachery involved in working for improved conditions inside the civil service as opposed to working inside the labour movement.

      The book is divided into two parts – The Life (eight chapters) and The Man (two chapters) – the latter having been added because the author managed to track down some personal correspondence and living relatives and acquaintances. The rise through the ranks of labour, Shackleton’s elections and positions held in the movement occupy the first six chapters and his leaving and roles played in the civil service are covered in chapters seven and eight. This is not a biography that leaps off the page, but this is not entirely the fault of the biographer as there are no fiery speeches or strikes led to be recorded. Shackleton was not an orator, but he was well-respected and he did good work in the service of labour representing labour’s views on the Trades Disputes Bill, Workman’s Compensation Bill, and old age pensions, and even advanced the cause of women’s suffrage before becoming a civil servant.

      The book is useful for anyone who wants a fuller understanding of the formation of the British Labour Party, of what it means to be Labourist and finally of how the establishment entrenched its own position in response to the political rise of labour.

Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921 -1971 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000)

THIS SPLENDID BOOK is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the phenomenon of Irish migration to Britain since the birth of the Irish Free State in 1921. Both well written and structured, it also draws on archival material that has not before been analyzed and published. The author’s remit is threefold: first, to examine the pattern of Irish migration to Britain from 1921 to 1971; second, to investigate the factors that account for this migration; and, finally, to assess the policy of both the British and Irish states in relation to large-scale migration between the two countries. To achieve these objectives, the book is organized into five chapters. The first provides an overview of the various theoretical frameworks used to try and explain migration, Ravenstein et al. This discussion of migration theory is set in the context of Irish emigration since the famine of 1845-51 and leads Delaney to conclude there is no single, all-embracing theory to explain migration. Chapter Two deals with the Irish migration to Britain from 1921 to the outbreak of war in 1939; Chapter Three covers the war years; while Chapter Four analyzes the post-war exodus between 1947 and 1957. The final chapter deals with the return to Ireland of migrants which took place between 1957-71. Though these chapters deal with events in a chronological sequence, each explores a number of different themes. The role of the state in facilitating or hindering migration from Ireland, its effect on the population size of individual Irish counties; the standard of living, the sex ratio and age distribution of the migrants; their religious composition; the factors giving rise to emigration; and the role of the Catholic Church in initiating concern over the welfare of Irish migrants in Britain, all receive detailed attention.

      Most Irish counties over the period under review lost population, with the exception of Dublin, but internal migration did not account for this. Within Ireland there was little incentive for population movement due to a lack of industrial development. Historically, emigration from Ireland was not always a famine phenomenon. Between 1839 and 1845, for example, the average annual emigration exodus numbered 30,000. The famine, however, introduced a further reason for leaving: to avoid starvation. The central conclusion of Delaney regarding post-independence Ireland, supported by evidence and a strongly argued case, is that people moved to better themselves economically, most ending up, as always, urban dwellers in Britain’s industrial areas. The decision to emigrate to Britain was strongly influenced both by the higher wages obtainable in Britain and by the existence of large Irish communities in Britain. Siblings, friends, and others were an important source of information concerning the labour market and the network of accommodation facilities for the newly arrived immigrants. The post-1921 emigrants did not move principally to the traditional areas of Irish settlement in the northwest of England but to the economically booming midlands, the southeast, and London.

      Delaney calls on a valuable but little used source of evidence regarding modern emigration. This is the Report of the Commissioners on Emigration and Other Population Problems, produced for the Irish government in 1954. The setting up of the Commission in 1948 was the first real sign that politicians in Ireland were prepared to recognize that emigration was an integral feature of Ireland’s economy, something that could not be attributed to British misrule. People left because of a lack of economic opportunities. Yet two years after the report came out it was still being discussed, revealing little sense of urgency. The investigations of the commissioners highlighted a variety of views regarding the decision to leave Ireland. Inheriting the family farm was no longer seen as attractive, since conditions in Britain were considered to offer a better life. For some young people, conditions in rural Ireland were too restrictive and offered a poor social life. Women were often influenced by the apparent affluence of the emigrants returning on holiday and judged marriage prospects in Britain to be more promising. Significantly, domestic service in Ireland was seen as inferior, in contrast to the situation in Britain.

      The scale of emigration was sensitive to the state of the economies in the US and Britain and Delaney skillfully takes the reader through the problems of measuring the number of emigrants to Britain. In 1957, 58,000 people, mainly young, emigrated, not all to Britain, and the 1950s were the worst decade since the famine. The next decade saw a marked reduction in the outflow. Over the years 1951-71, 80 per cent of those leaving went to Britain. This period was a time of great change in Irish agriculture, involving mechanization and the switch from tillage to pastoral famine, reducing the demand for labour. In addition, improved transport and the development of mass media communications brought unsettling visions of travel to young people in rural Ireland.

      A strong feature of the book is the treatment of the complex relationship between Ireland and Britain following independence in 1921. Delaney writes well and provides the reader with a lucid account of the labrynthine regulations regarding the movement of Irish people to Britain and their status once arrived, particularly during World War II. Both governments had concerns. The political élite in the newly independent Ireland had to accept emigration as a fact of life. The 1921 government did not like it but had more immediate problems, such as the armed challenge to its authority. Over the period 1921-39, Irish governments paid little attention to emigration, but during the 1939-45 war, both governments introduced controls, which were abandoned after 1945. With regard to British views, Delaney has utilised a little known report, that of AV Judge, on Irish labour in Britain between 1939 and 1945. World War II posed problems for Irish neutrality. The demand for labour arising from Britain’s war effort stimulated further emigration that could have been seen as a hostile development by Germany. The Irish government did not encourage emigration but did nothing to stop it. Censorship of newspapers in Ireland meant that public debate on the issue was muted. Emigration delayed the need for the government to deal with the problem of large scale unemployment in rural Ireland and there was concern over the prospect of large numbers of emigrants returning after the war to an underdeveloped economy, posing a potential threat to the social order. This did not happen. In Britain concerns over the scale of Irish immigration had surfaced in the 1930s, both in Scotland and in Liverpool. These fears were acknowledged but ignored. Under the British Nationality Act of 1948, Irish were free to enter Britain, could vote in local and parliamentary elections, claim social security benefits, and apply for British nationality after five years. The various immigration acts between 1962 and 1971 did not involve the Irish, the biggest ethnic group in Britain by 1971. Rising aspirations, not economic necessity, fuelled this emigration to Britain. The success of the "Celtic Tiger" is now reversing the flow, evidence further supporting Delaney’s conclusions. This book is recommended, unreservedly, to all interested in Irish emigration history.

Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, 1793-1795 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2000)

THIS BOOK is the final instalment of Kennedy’s three-volume history of the Jacobin clubs in the French Revolution. The tumultuous period between the Federalist Revolt and the Thermidorian Reaction forms the basis of this study, as Kennedy convincingly argues that the clubs were in the forefront of constructing a nation out of war and revolution. The life of the clubs during the Terror takes center stage here, and the author uses sources such as club minutes to allow the reader to enter the Jacobin world, which was far from being a monolithic political phenomenon. On the contrary, these organizations were deeply fragmented along political, social, local, regional, and in some places, religious lines.

      The clubs are portrayed in the book as representative of the authoritarian nature of the republican experiment. By the spring of 1793, 5,332 communes in France had a club. Radicalized by "répresentants en mission," who were charged with the levy of 300,000 men in March 1793 in response to the Vendée uprising and Dumouriez’s treason, the clubs quickly took upon themselves the dominant role in relation to the local governments of the communes. The informant culture that existed in France during this period was due in great part to the rivalries within the clubs themselves, and club meetings provided a forum for grievances and denunciations of "enemies of the Revolution" to be aired. The clubs were also part of the state-sponsored information campaign carried out by the Revolutionary Government, and therefore shaped public opinion by disseminating news in newspapers and journals sanctioned by Paris. In terms of dechristianization, clubs largely advocated forcing priests to marry, a policy that worried even Robespierre, who feared that the campaign would be seen as anti-Catholic.

      Despite the authoritarian tendencies and fractious nature of the clubs, these same organizations were agents of charity that replaced churches as providers of public assistance. During the subsistence crisis, many held charity balls and engaged in schemes to allow poor citizens to procure bread at a reasonable cost. Orphans were provided for by clubs and often were put up for adoption at club meetings. In order to prevent infanticide, clubs provided shelters where unwanted newborns could be left without harm. They oversaw the performance of local schools and were staunch advocates of a broad public education system.

      Kennedy credits the clubs for providing for the direct protection of France from its foreign enemies. The victories on the battlefield occurred with the help of club members, who took it upon themselves to recruit soldiers and officers. Sometimes the results were disastrous when experienced officers were denounced because of real or imagined political views. Clubs rooted out draft dodgers and spoke on behalf of those whom they believed should not go to war because of family commitments. Clubs inspected military barracks to make sure they were clean and tracked down black marketers. The clubs carried out the hard work that the war effort demanded, such as collecting clothes, saltpeter, scrap iron, and horses for the cavalry. They raised money for wounded soldiers and sailors and their dependants and provided job training and education for veterans.

      The book is particularly good when discussing the everyday life of the clubs. On a mundane level, the costs of running a local club were often high, from paying for the upkeep of meeting places to the cost for heating, candles, and postage. On an operational level, the book includes a view of some of the eccentricities of life in these organizations, including some of the more inane club "rules." For example, some clubs imposed strict dress codes that severely punished those who failed to comply. Men who did not wear the "tricolor cockade" could be fined or expelled, although forcing women to wear it often resulted in overreaction: "A cockadeless female at Coutances was escorted by club members to jail and held for a week." (83) Women were relegated to special places in the meeting hall, most often to prevent "disruption and scandal," since they were often the targets of advances made by men in the galleries. Naturally, most of the club debates of the time were serious, but Kennedy points out those that strike the modern reader as humorous. For example, the club at Auch advocated the creation of a public house of prostitution to be run by the local health official to prevent men from wilfully contracting sexually transmitted diseases to avoid military service.

      The clubs disintegrated rather quickly in the weeks and months following the execution of Robespierre and the onset of the Thermidorian Reaction. Internecine warfare in the clubs was heightened by the fact that those imprisoned during the Terror were released, and often returned to their towns and villages looking for revenge on their fellow club members. The law of Vendemaire An II prohibited clubs from assembling and interacting with public officials, and with the death of the Paris society, the final curtain was drawn. What is surprising is that most of the clubs disappeared quickly without so much as a whimper, despite their prominent role during the Revolution.

      The narrative of the book allows the reader to navigate the complicated life of the Jacobin clubs during the Revolution. Some weaknesses arise, however, as the tight narrative prevents a more thorough analysis of issues that have been of interest to historians of the Revolution for the past two decades. The author does not acknowledge the groundbreaking work done by historians such as Keith Michael Baker on the social and cultural meaning of revolutionary language. For example, the Bordeaux club briefly forbade applause as an antiquated form of privilege in favour of the use of the "masculine and republican word, bravo." (91) The masculine discourse of the club meetings is intriguing, given the fact that some clubs celebrated women who had served with distinction on the battlefield dressed as men. Also, the chapter entitled "Spectacles" is one of the shortest chapters of the book. This is surprising, since cultural historians have persuasively argued that the revolutionaries often used spectacle to generate enthusiasm for the Revolution. Although the author makes the correct claim that local clubs used theater to indoctrinate citizens in republican values, more could be said as to the content of each production and what purpose it served.

      These criticisms should not detract from what is essentially a solidly researched and well-written book. Kennedy has done much to provide new information regarding the inner workings of the Jacobin clubs in the Revolution.

Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000)

THE VOLUMINOUS secondary literature on early French socialism consists mainly of monographs on individual theorists, militants, trades, cities, or regions. A new attempt to make sense of the whole is therefore welcome. Pilbeam’s quite brief survey (205 pages, plus notes and bibliography) is organized around a limited number of themes: the social question, the Jacobin legacy, religion, education, women, utopian communities, workers’ associations, and the failure of the Second Republic. Her treatment of these topics varies considerably in depth, quality, and originality. One of her best chapters is on feminists within the Saint-Simonian and Fourierist groups. Her account of their ideas and activities is enthusiastic and informative, yet she is not uncritical. For example, she notes their frequent commitment to an evangelical form of Christianity, she makes no unwarranted claims about the originality of their ideas, and she recognises that they rarely agreed about anything, except possibly their moralistic rejection of the gospel of sexual liberation preached by Fourier and Enfantin. There is little new in her discussion of the visionary side of Fourier and Cabet but her treatment is judicious, and she includes useful accounts of the evolution of Saint-Simonism and Fourierism. Her sketch of Victor Considerant’s career is one of the highlights of the book.

      Pilbeam is also good at unravelling the ambiguous concept of "association," which she rightly regards as a fundamental notion (and slogan) of the French left in these years. She is aware of the fierce debate among historians about the nature of artisan associations, and, in the main, comes down on the side of those who see them as essentially defensive and conservative, a continuation of the old compagnonnages. Yet she recognizes the important critique of the guild system made by Agricol Perdiguier and other artisans in the 1830s and 1840s, and the emergence during these decades of mutual-aid societies, producer cooperatives, and some embryonic trade unions.

      The most innovative aspect of the book is its stress on the practical, even pragmatic, approach of many French socialists during the 1830s and 1840s. One individual who symbolised this was Ange Guépin, a Saint-Simonian doctor from Nantes who was later strongly influenced by Fourierism. Although not an original thinker, Guépin was an important provincial figure. He founded a mutual-aid association, ran a clinic for workers and their families, started a vocational training school for girls, and co-authored a pioneering study of poverty in Nantes. To gain a better sense of how socialist ideas penetrated beyond Paris to various provincial centres, we need more information on men like Guépin. Pilbeam’s research provides a valuable beginning, but most of her account is necessarily centred on Paris and on the theorists and militants who lived there.

      Other aspects of Pilbeam’s book are less satisfactory. The title is misleading. The ground covered runs from Saint-Simon’s articles in L’Industrie (1816) to Louis Napoleon’s legislation of 1864 legalizing workers’ associations. The 1840s were the most exciting and fertile decade within that 40-year period and the very time when Marx lived in France, participating actively in the intellectual life of the French left. His seminal works were written in Paris, and the central ideas of early Marxism – alienation, ideology, class conflict, capitalist crisis, surplus value, and the abolition of private property and the state – were born there. Indeed, Marx borrowed most of them from French writers on "la question sociale" whose works he read at this time or whom he met personally. In choosing her title, Pilbeam has perpetuated the myth that there was a fundamental difference between early (allegedly utopian) socialism and later (allegedly scientific) Marxism. There was no such break, chronological or intellectual. Utopianism was by no means absent from later Marxism and it was merely one strain of early French radical thought.

      Pilbeam discusses the political history of the Second Republic at some length. Her interpretation of the events of 1848-50 is controversial, a thoroughgoing repudiation of the tradition of Marxist historiography that began with Marx’s own Class Struggles in France. She views the revolution of February 1848 as fortuitous, and she claims that neither the national workshops nor the June Days had anything to do with socialism. On the other hand, she sees socialist elements in the work of the Luxembourg Commission and in the Cavaignac government’s loan of three million francs to 50 cooperatives. It is true that the national workshops were, in practice, a far cry from the state-financed producer co-ops that Blanc had called for, and that he had no real power in even the first, short-lived government of the Second Republic. But that government – in which Ledru-Rollin was Minister of the Interior – did accept the need for state action to mitigate unemployment and workers’ grievances, the June Days were a response, at least in part, to the dashing of hopes raised by its initial promises, and the barricades were manned mainly by artisans and the unemployed. Whether the government’s initial proclamation of the right to work and whether an uprising intended to enforce that right were socialist depends on one’s definition of the term. And the term, of course, is ambiguous and problematic, an issue that Pilbeam does little to address.

      Anyone writing about early socialism faces this problem of definition. Pilbeam tries to avoid it. She fails to provide her own criteria although she recognises that "many of those we think of as socialist called themselves, or were labelled by others, Jacobins, Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, communists, Icarian communists, Babouvists, and even neo-Babouvists." ( 9) The term "socialist," which was probably coined by Leroux, is a product of the 1830s, and at the time it merely indicated someone who favoured social reform and who was opposed to "individualism." Critics of "individualism" usually meant by the term both laissez-faire capitalism and the value-system espoused by its supporters. In accordance with this contemporary usage, anyone who tried seriously to address the massive problems of poverty and unemployment endemic in France was a "socialist," and the term was applied to such influential figures as Sismondi, Ledru-Rollin, Proudhon, Eugène Buret, and Constantin Pecqueur. Pilbeam, however, gives Proudhon and Ledru-Rollin short shrift, barely mentions Sismondi and Buret, and totally ignores Pecqueur. Why? Presumably because she counts none of these men as a socialist. It seems an arbitrary decision.

      Pilbeam’s lack of interest in political economy may have led her to ignore or downgrade the importance of these writers. Her book is weak on the most original and penetrating aspect of French socialist thought: its analysis of the economic roots of "la question sociale." Of Proudhon’s books only Qu’est ce que la propriété? gets a brief notice; neither De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité nor Système des contradictions économiques, let alone the later writings, are mentioned. Leroux’s ideas receive less attention than they deserve: there is no analysis of his major writings, De l’égalité and De l’humanité. Worse yet, Pilbeam ignores the two most important socio-economic analyses made during the early 1840s: Buret’s De la misère des classes laborieuses, and Pecqueur’s Théorie nouvelle d’économie sociale et politique. This disregard of economic analysis is a significant flaw in a work that is intended as an overview of the subject. Nowhere in French Socialists Before Marx will the reader find a penetrating discussion of how leading thinkers dissected the massive social and economic crisis to which they were responding. Nor is it ever explained precisely why they believed capitalism to be inherently unjust and inegalitarian. On the plus side, Pilbeam does a good job in surveying the solutions – practical as well as more imaginative – offered by French writers of various persuasions.

Linda Fuller, Where Was the Working Class? Revolution in Eastern Germany (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)

CLASS, as a concept, seems to have been taken out of the toolbox of many academics. As a result, studies of social change frequently lack analytical finesse. By reinstating the concept, Linda Fuller succeeds in adding a dimension to what the anthropologists, such as John Borneman and Daphne Berdahl, historians such as Konrad Jarausch, or political scientists such as Henry Krisch, have offered in trying to explain events in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during 1989/90. Some of her presentation of events can be questioned, but she forces a rethinking through her evidence and categories.

      Fuller had the advantage of conducting many interviews in 1988/89 and then being able to re-interview about half her subjects in late 1990. She acknowledges "The research questions I eventually settled on can be posed simply, though their answers have turned out to be complex: to what degree and in what ways were workers, the overwhelming majority of GDR citizens, involved in the politics of the 1989-90 revolution, and how can their involvement best be explained?" (1) Her answer includes noting class activism and especially non-participation at specific times and places.

      In the first chapter she defines "the working class and the intelligentsia, the two classes I view as fundamental for understanding GDR society and its revolution."(2) Later she points to the importance of education as a criterion by which to understand class configurations: "Approximately 21 percent (1,663,000) of GDR citizens employed in the socialist economy had earned technical college or university degrees in 1986; approximately 79 percent (6,861,000) of those so employed had no such degree at the time. The 1,663, 000 figure comes quite close to estimates [of] people doing largely mental labor."(14) She explains that "The two-class system was reproduced along the multiple strands of a very dense web of interpenetrating family, education, political, and occupational processes, institutions, and relations. The very density of this web meant that, from workers’ perspectives, their bosses, the doctors at the clinic, the managers at the supermarket, the teachers at the school, and the well-known figure skater and poet all approximated one another in important ways. They nearly all had higher education degrees as well as an office in the party, the union, the town council, or a mass or cultural organization. They spoke and dressed in a similar fashion, they sought out one another’s company, and they were confident their children were college or university bound....From where GDR workers stood, they were all ‘them’."(23) Though the book does not demonstrate such social relations and perspectives in great detail or through the use of case studies, the interviews illustrate aspects of that class relationship well. The issue of mobility between classes is left aside.

      Fuller acknowledges that workers are not alike in terms of gender or ethnicity but insists on "the comparative homogeneity of the GDR working class". She leaves "to others the worthwhile task of relating divisions within the working class to differences in political behavior in order to explore what differences between workers and the intelligentsia can reveal about the revolutionary process in the GDR."(3) With justified animus towards postmodernist preoccupations with emotions and personalized expressions of belief, she finds "the politics of social change keeps redirecting me toward a more materialist, more practice-oriented focus on what people do."(4)

      Three chapters define the main types of working-class activities on the political front during the great change (Wende). She seeks to illustrate that the majority of workers shunned political activities, though a small group participated in the form of creating a mini-council movement in their workshops and in seeking political influence. The second chapter, aptly titled "Workers in the Gallery: The Single-Class Character of Revolutionary Politics," argues that in all its three stages, the "Wende ... was a revolution of the relatively privileged in GDR society." (33) The theme is illustrated by interview statements from a wide range of workers, including clerks, brewery employees, construction workers, secretaries, and switchboard operators. She also examines the social composition of the main activitist groups, such as Neues Forum or Democracy Now, which she observes to be singularly middle or upper middle class.

      Those findings make her ask: "Why did so many workers absent themselves from politics during this period, a choice with decisive consequences for the outcome of the 1989-90 revolution?" She answers that "workers’ withdrawal from politics was deeply rooted in forty years of GDR socialism"(39) especially its problematic labour process. She illustrates with examples of shortages, disorganized workplaces, fake plans, weak discipline, and worse management: "Avoidance of active political involvement had thus become common among GDR workers long before the Wende, and for a significant number this did not change throughout the political crisis of 1989-90." (56) Her evidence includes such interview statements as "We feel betrayed by the constant media reports of success in fulfilling the plans. After all, everyone knows, from their own work, what reality looks like."(48) Or, "We’d get one set of orders from the bosses, only to get new ones half an hour later. Several times I’ve done work and had to demolish it the next day because they decided it should be different." (46)

      Workplace politics reinforced the workers’ outlook. At the lowest level of the Kollektiv most workers took active roles, but the higher levels remained the preoccupation of semi-professionals tied to the Socialist Unity Party. Fuller explores how the de-politicization of the working class proceeded, including through the unions trying to do too much to improve conditions and production while encountering "innervating centralism and formalism&qu