A perceptive but pedantic look at the socioeconomic and political
lot of America's 19th-century working class. Drawing on research
for a lecture series given at Oxford during 1991, Montgomery
(History/ Yale; The Fall of the House of Labor - not reviewed;
etc.) starts by discussing how democracy helped end onerous forms
of personal subordination - apprenticeship, indentured servitude,
slavery, etc. He goes on to show that the voting rights given white
male wage earners during the early 1800's provided them with the
clout to abrogate master/servant ordinances (which all but
precluded quitting hateful or otherwise unwanted jobs),
imprisonment for debt, and seizure of property for non-payment of
rent. During Reconstruction, similarly, southern blacks achieved
roughly analogous gains, albeit not without an appreciably fiercer
struggle. Ironically, Montgomery points out, imperatives attendant
upon expanding business activity and innovation, not the quotidian
needs of US labor, largely defined replacement statutes. In
addition, courts rather than elected legislators laid down the law
governing employers and employees. The judiciary's authority made
legal precedent of free-market doctrine and gave the state coercive
police powers (which were used to the very great advantage of
capital) to curb the individual as well as collective initiatives
open to working people. Asserting that diversity barred domination
of American life by an ideological consensus, Montgomery closes
with an inquiry into the role political parties played in
developing alternatives to laissez-faire's cruelly Darwinian laws.
In sum, an academic's informed and densely annotated reflections on
the paradox of freedom as it applied to earlier workers; offering
few substantive links to 20th-century circumstances, however, the
study's appeal appears limited to specialists. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the 1990s, democracy and market freedom are often discussed as
though they were synonymous or interchangeable. What the experience
of workers in the United States actually reveals is that as
government became more democratic, what it could do to shape daily
life became more restricted. This original and significant work
examines the relationship between workers and government by
focusing not on the legal regulations of unions and strikes, but on
popular struggles for citizens' rights. The extent and failures of
workers' efforts to exercise power through political parties
provide insights from the nineteenth century to guide our thinking
about the twenty-first.
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