| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2002)

OVER THE PAST 30 years or so, American social historians have directed much deserved attention to understanding subaltern groups. Important as these studies have been in coming to grips with American history, there have been comparatively few efforts to provide similarly oriented analyses of the equally important history of the bourgeoisie. Stephen Norwood's Strike-breaking and Intimidation is in some respects a useful contribution to our understanding of that history. Focussing primarily on private strike-breaking agencies between the late 19th century and the middle of the 20th century, Norwood argues that strike-breaking concerns were lucrative, uniquely American businesses that developed extensive networks of well-equipped men who could be quickly deployed to deal with crisis situations. (3, 12) Whether in the employ of Pinkerton, Burns, or Felts, men found this line of work appealing primarily because it provided them with a means of living out ideals of masculinity wherein "manliness" was conflated with physicality and aggression.

In Norwood's view the desire to live up to this ideal of masculinity was a common thread that linked those with such vastly different positions within the social order as privileged college students and impoverished African Americans, even if the reasons behind and nature of the ways in which members of each group worked to achieve the same end diverged. African American men, for example, engaged in combat on America's industrial battlefields as a means of challenging "white society's image of them as obsequious, cowardly, and lacking the ability to perform well under pressure." (80) According to Norwood, they chose strike-breaking as a means of mounting this challenge because other avenues were blocked by Jim Crow and a more diffuse racism which pervaded American society. On the other hand, despite their different social existence, college students also found that strike-breaking could serve as a way to prove their manliness in the face of perceived threats to it. According to Norwood, these students, often the sons of the American bourgeoisie, were, like their fathers, faced with a "crisis of masculinity" rooted in the increasing bureaucratization of early 20th-century corporate America. Norwood posits that strike-breaking closely approximated military combat, and thus provided these men with an opportunity to undergo "intense, violent experiences that provided feelings of power and mastery." (23)

The war-like atmosphere of early 20th-century American industrial relations abated as a result of shifting social and cultural realities — in particular, the "increasingly bureaucratized workplace" of the post-World War II period, and the fact that "the conflation of masculinity with physicality and aggression was less pronounced than in the early twentieth century, even in the working class." Norwood believes that bureaucratized workplaces "required individuals to suppress their intense feelings in the interest of group harmony." The emphasis of management, he contends, thus shifted to "restraining anger on the job." Norwood provides little analysis as to the reasons for the shift. Rather, he asserts that such a shift took place and, as evidence for this claim, he notes both the decreasing tolerance of aggressive behaviour in American public schools and the post-1960 disappearance of the Western, a genre of film and print which "glamorized male courage and righteous anger and climaxed in a dramatic walk-down confrontation." (229)

The bulk of Norwood's study centres on the early part of the 20th century and includes useful, albeit sometimes disjointed, explorations of cultural representations of strike-breakers and strike-breaking agencies that most historians of labour and the working class will have encountered at some point. The accounts of the agencies themselves — including Pinkerton, Felts, Burns, and others — as well as many of their leading figures and owners, including men like James Farley, Pearl Berghoff, James Waddell, and Archie Mahon — are carefully researched. Norwood's account of these actors and agencies provides insights as to why working-class men offered their services as the foot soldiers for what were anti-worker organizations. Drawing on examples from around the country — he discusses strikes in Arizona, Arkansas, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Chicago, among others — he affirms that well-organized, privately funded vigilantism was an integral part of the early 20th-century American industrial relations system.

Nevertheless, this study falls short in a number of areas. Despite his assertions to the contrary in the opening chapter of the book, private strike-breaking and anti-union agencies like the Burns detective agency were not a uniquely American phenomenon. Indeed, it will come as no surprise to students of Canadian labour history that American agencies such as the Thiel Detective Agency were used to break (or to attempt to break) Canadian strikes. In addition to what might be termed "branch plant thuggery," there were also Canadian agencies like the Macdonald Detective Agency in Winnipeg that were willing to act similarly.

More generally speaking, it is apparent that Norwood's lack of interest in placing strike-breaking within a politico-economic setting leads him to leave important questions unanswered. After reading Norwood's 247 pages on strike-breaking agencies and strike- breakers, it is not clear, for example, how strike-breakers were recruited, who constituted the bulk of the "private armies" of anti-labour mercenaries, approximately how many strike-breakers actually existed, or how much agencies paid their employees. Beyond this lack of information about the particulars of strike-breaking in early 20th-century liberal-capitalist America, the author's hesitancy to direct attention to political economy tends to preclude the exploration of other potential causal factors underlying the willingness of working-class men to break strikes. While, for example, Norwood mentions from time to time that "lumpenproletarians" constituted a considerable portion of the foot soldiers of strike-breaking agencies, the reader is left to wonder whether sheer desperation amongst impoverished men, rather than a desire to demonstrate masculinity, may have motivated a majority of strike-breakers to place themselves in harm's way.

Finally, as to Norwood's conclusions, even if we accept the validity of his drawing on vague developments in popular culture (in this case Westerns) to demonstrate causality, his examples do little to evidence a decline in the conflation of masculinity and physicality that allegedly was central to the appeal of strike-breaking. Though John Wayne and his ilk may well have declined in popularity by 1960, they were replaced by the toughguy cops played by Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood, and later by the boxers, soldiers, and paramilitary figures whom Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger helped to make mainstream.

In any event, while there is much about this book that readers will likely find wanting, as a socio-cultural analysis of a little studied aspect of America social history, it will hopefully be of some interest as a starting point for future studies.


Kurt Korneski Memorial University of Newfoundland

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.