Published by EH.NET (January 2000)
Gerald Friedman, State-Making and Labor Movements: France and the United
States, 1876-1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. xiv + 317
pp. $55 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8014-2325-2.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Melvyn Dubofsky, Departments of History and Sociology,
Binghamton University, SUNY.<
dubof@mailbox.cc.binghamton.edu>
Gerald Friedman, an associate professor of economics at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst, has written a book that resonates with the spirit of the
last decade of the twentieth century. Although his subject is the growth,
character, and composition of the French and U.S. labor movements in the era of
the Second International, the apogee of Marxism, Friedman views the past
through the lens of the present, a time when labor retreats,
Marxism has been declared dead, and “there is no alternative (TINA)” in sight
to a voracious global capitalism. Based on his comparison of the U.S. and
French labor movements between the 1870s and World War I, Friedman concludes
first, that workers cannot advance their interests without non-working-class
allies and a sympathetic state, and, second, that “orthodox” Marxists, then
and later, were wrong in their economic determinism (historical materialism)
and revolutionary teleology.
Friedman uses the comparative history of U.S. and French labor movements to
make his case. Not only that; he also attempts to reverse the conventional
portrait of the two national labor movements. He suggests that an increasingly
radical and militant French labor movement led by revolutionary syndicalists
grew more rapidly than its U.S. counterpart;
better served the material interests of its members; and succeeded in
organizing the “towering heights” of the French economy, its mass-production
enterprises. By way of contrast, after 1904, a
“conservative” “pure and simple” U.S. labor movement failed to advance; did
little or nothing for the great mass of workers; and failed absolutely to
penetrate the dominant “Fordist” sector of the economy. How does Friedman
explain the relative success of French labor and failure of U.S. labor?
Simply put, he argues that trade unions and the labor movements in both
countries were too weak alone to counteract the greater power of capitalists.
In France, however, Republicans could not defend the Third Republic against
Monarchists and reactionaries (with whom businesspeople allied) without the
support of labor. Hence the French state protected unions against attacks by
capital and encouraged public mediation in place of private or public
repression. In the U.S., however, a liberal state faced no challenge from
anti-Republican reactionaries, hence had no need to build alliances with labor,
and thus enabled employers to crush unions and,
on occasion, used public power to the same end. Put another way, as Friedman
does, the dynamics of French politics and state-making enabled labor to drift
left and remain rhetorically revolutionary while the political process in the
U.S. left labor no choice but to practice
“prudential unionism” and the principle of sauve qui peut.
Does Friedman establish his case? Here I remain less convinced. As an
economist trained in the use of statistics and quantification, Friedman deploys
a variety of data bases, tables, graphs, standard deviations, and regression
analyses to prove his points. A review of this length is not the place to
engage in a debate over the validity of such quantifiable evidence. Suffice it
to say that the meaning of Friedman’s numbers can be interpreted in more than
one way. I prefer to focus on more substantial shortcomings. Are
France and the U.S. actually a good comparison, and is it true, as Friedman
claims (p. 12), that the economic and political differences between the two
nations “were relatively small.” Yes, the U.S.
and France were both capitalist economies and republican polities. Beyond
that, however, it seems to me that enormous differences loomed. One nation was
a centralized, unitary state administered by a trained bureaucracy and governed
by codified legal principles under Roman law. The other was a decentralized,
federal state lacking a trained cadre of administrators and governed by a
common law regime that gave judges enormous autonomy and authority. One nation
had a relatively, large and stable agricultural sector characterized by
small-scale peasant farming and a manufacturing sector dominated in the main
by relatively small enterprises dependent on skilled craftsmen adept at
small-batch production. The other had an agricultural sector that declined
quite rapidly relative to the non-agricultural sector and in
which large holdings increasingly characterized the dynamic staple-producing,
export-driven side of farming;
it also had an industrial sector increasingly characterized by gargantuan
enterprises employing armies of machine operators to mass produce capital and
consumer goods. Should one expect comparable trajectories for labor movements
in Fordist and pre-Fordist economic regimes?
And what of Friedman’s portrait of the histories of the French and U.S.
labor movements? Was the French movement relatively successful as compared to
the one in the U.S.? Did French unions really succeed before World War I in
unionizing among employees in large-scale, mass-production enterprises?
Were U.S. unions as loath to organize the less skilled and as disdainful of
workers in the mass-production sector as Friedman claims? Friedman’s own
statistical and written data fail to answer those questions. If typical French
locals were as small as Friedman’s data indicate, indeed on average far smaller
than U.S. union locals, how could they be characterized as examples of
successful industrial unionism? For an economist trained in quantification,
Friedman provides precious little data in the way of comparative wage rates,
annual earnings, hours of work, working conditions,
and consumption standards, to judge the relative impact of French and U.S.
unions on the lives of their members. Did U.S. unions fail to organize less
skilled mass-production workers because their leaders were narrow-minded,
selfish, chauvinistic, and sexist individuals or because their adversaries
were too powerful, as Friedman’s own evidence suggests?
Does Friedman’s explication of comparative business history and politics in the
two nations work any better? His businesspeople on both sides of the Atlantic
proved equally anti-union but were French entrepreneurs more reactionary, even
Monarchist, hierarchical paternalists than their U.S.
republican, individualistic brothers in capitalism? Did French employers seek
to keep their employees out of unions by playing the “good father” to
obedient, deferential workers, while U.S. employers designed welfare capitalism
to encourage competitive individualism among their more skilled employees? I
suggest that Friedman read carefully the testimony of leading
“welfare capitalists” before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations
(1913-15) to see how they perceived their loyal workers as children who
preferred not to think or to act on their own. Or that he visit Binghamton,
New York, the home of one of the most notable practitioners of welfare
capitalism, the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company (mistakenly called
Endicott-Peabody in the text, p. 197, and index) and view the statue of George
F. Johnson erected in George F. Johnson Recreation Park which features the
patron patronizing two adorable children, or the two arches erected by local
shoe workers to honor their patron. Finally, what of politics? Was the French
state and its republican majority more dependent on working-class votes and
more solicitous of working-class interests than its U.S. counterparts? Again I
find Friedman’s evidence problematic. One of French labor’s friends in power,
Georges Clemenceau, as described by Friedman, in 1906 sent troops to the Nord
and the Pas de Calais to break a coal miner’s strike and
repress riotous behavior by the strikers. Yet in Friedman’s words, Clemenceau
“restrained labor militancy…to preserve republican order, to protect the
Republic. But he never acted merely to bolster capitalist authority, never
acceded to the demands of
employers and the right that he crush organized labor or reject the right of
workers to form unions and to strike. Instead he continued to support labor
organization and to promote collective bargaining as the basis for social peace
and a new republican order (p. 202).” How did this differ from Theodore
Roosevelt’s logic four years earlier during the strike of anthracite coal
miners in northeastern Pennsylvania, when he threatened to send troops not to
repress labor but to seize the mines? Or from the lab or policies of Woodrow
Wilson on the eve of World War I or Herbert Hoover in the 1920s? Workers voted
in the U.S. as well as in France; their leaders also sought to practice
coalition politics; and some, if not all,
office-holders sought labor’s votes.
Friedman also might have done well to temper his criticism of Karl Marx and
“orthodox Marxism.” After all, Marx’s voluminous writings are like scripture,
subject to multiple interpretations and open to the principle that “seek and ye
shall find.” Moreover,
in his haste to make a case for historical contingency and human agency,
Friedman might have done well to recall Marx’s sage words from the
Eighteenth Brumaire, that man indeed makes his own history, but only
“under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain
of the living.” In his neglect of that astute advice, Friedman misconstrues
Marx’s faith in human agency as well as his “third thesis on Feuerbach.” In
that thesis Marx did not write declaratively, as Friedman cites him (p. 297)
“that it is men who change circumstances and that it is essential to educate
the educator himself.” Rather, Marx asked in response to those who believed
that education could alter society, “Who educates the educator?”
Lest I appear too critical of Friedman’s effort to make us think more
critically about the past and also to remind us about paths not taken as a
result of human volition, let me close by suggesting that this is a book well
worth reading and pondering. Whether its author is right or wrong in many of
his claims, he does make readers consider carefully significant historical and
contemporary issues. And he is certainly right that labor cannot advance its
material and moral interests without non-working-class allies in state and
society, a truth perhaps more to the point today than ever in the past.
Melvyn Dubofsky is Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at
Binghamton University, SUNY. This spring the University of Illinois Press will
publish a collection of his essays titled Hard Work: The Making of Labor
History. It will also publish a new abridged paperback version of his
history, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of
the World.