------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (October 2006)
Georg Leidenberger, _Chicago's Progressive Alliance: Labor and the
Bid for Public Streetcars_. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2006. vii + 202 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN: 0-87580-356-3.
Reviewed for EH.NET by David J. St. Clair, Department of Economics,
California State University, East Bay.
Georg Leidenberger seeks to redefine the role of Chicago labor unions
in the city's Progressive Movement at the turn of the twentieth
century. Union membership in Chicago surged from one hundred thousand
in 1900 to three hundred thousand in 1903. Membership growth
coincided with unprecedented labor solidarity and public support. In
addition, labor expanded its agenda beyond narrow work-related issues
to include broader social issues of city corruption and municipal
reform. Labor created alliances and coalitions with middle class
reform groups and became a driving force in the reform movement.
Leidenberger credits two new Chicago service unions with labor's
success: the teamsters and the public school teachers union. The
rapid growth of membership and inter-trade labor solidarity was
largely the work of the teamsters and their ability to use sympathy
strikes to promote the unionization of less powerful workers. On the
other hand, the teachers union and the Chicago Federation of Labor
were instrumental in expanding labor's agenda and hegemony and in
breaking down the barriers to building coalitions with other
progressive interests.
Leidenberger admits to feeling "nostalgia" for the day when labor
unions assumed center stage in municipal reform politics and he seeks
to understand the reasons for this earlier success (p. 4). While his
nostalgia extends to sympathy for the sympathy strike (yes, the pun
is intended), one need not be similarly disposed to benefit from this
book. Whether you rejoice or recoil at the sympathy strike,
Leidenberger draws on archival data to effectively document labor's
use of the tactic to expand its power and influence.
Leidenberger's primary focus is on labor and its role in politics.
Transit is essentially a case study for these issues. Transit
historians will not find any discussion of the history or economics
of transit per se. This may limit the book, but it does not diminish
its importance. Scholars have often gazed into the transit mirror and
seen different reflections: transit as city builder, transit as city
unifier, transit as competing technology, transit as a business,
transit as a regulated franchise monopoly, transit as a corruptor of
urban politics, and transit as a civic political issue.
Leidenberger deals with the political dimension of transit and he
correctly highlights the crucial issue: franchise monopoly. Indeed,
it is virtually impossible to understand the economic history of
transit at this time, or in subsequent periods, without an
appreciation of this issue. Leidenberger also explores Chicago's
campaign to resolve the abuses of the franchise monopoly system
through municipal ownership.
Leidenberger's story is ultimately a tale of coalitions forged, then
lost. Of labor solidarity and influence gained, then lost. Of strikes
won, then lost. He seeks to explain both the successes and the
failures.
An Introductory chapter describes the rapid increase in union
membership in Chicago in the early twentieth century. Along with San
Francisco, Chicago became the most unionized city in the country with
more than fifty percent of its labor force in a union. The
Introduction also lays out the Leidenberger's major themes, his views
on "public spaces," and his view of streetcars as important public
spaces.
Chapter One chronicles the defeat of Chicago's Building Trade Council
(an organization of the city's traditional building trade unions) at
the hands of the Building Contractors Council in the Great Lockout of
1900. Defeat resulted in the elimination of the sympathy strike by
the city's building trade unions. However, Chicago's labor movement
was soon transformed by the creation and ascendance of two new
service unions; the teamsters and the teachers union. The teamsters
were organized in 1901 and came to prominence in a 1902 city-wide
teamster strike in sympathy with union recognition for meat packing
workers. Being a service union at the core of the city's distribution
network, the teamsters were particularly well positioned to wield the
sympathy strike weapon and they aggressively employed it to promote
the unionization of less powerful workers in unrelated trades.
Success in the 1902 strike brought the teamsters to the vanguard of
labor organizing and was primarily responsible for the surge in union
membership and inter-trade labor solidarity in the city.
Chicago public school teachers also formed a union in 1901. This
service union was nominally white collar, overwhelmingly female, and
particularly well positioned to articulate labor's views to middle
class reform interests. The teachers union and the Chicago Federation
of Labor (CFL) promoted labor solidarity and were able to articulate
a labor agenda that transcended narrow job-related issues. Labor's
expanded agenda included issues of city reform and the teachers union
and the CFL aggressively reached out to establish coalitions with
middle class reform groups to secure a prominent place in the broader
progressive movement.
Chapters Two and Three discuss the role of streetcars in city
politics and reform. Leidenberger characterizes public transit as the
"central political question in turn-of-the-century Chicago" (p. 44).
Streetcar companies figured so prominently in city politics and
reform movements because they were widely perceived as abusive
monopolies responsible for unsafe transit, corruption, tax evasion
and abusive labor practices. At the core of the problem was the
monopoly franchise system that granted private owners a monopoly over
a vital urban utility. Rent seeking and corruption became the norm in
Chicago and across the nation. Chapter Three chronicles the efforts
of teachers to promote municipal ownership of streetcars as the
solution to the transit problem and municipal reform. These efforts
were bolstered by a strike by transit workers in 1904. The successful
strike garnered broad public support and thrust labor to the fore in
the campaign to have the city buy out the transit companies. Labor
thus achieved the status of a full participant in a vital city reform
issue.
Chapter Four describes the ill-fated teamster strike of 1905. The
strike began in April with the teamsters striking the Montgomery Ward
department store in sympathy with Montgomery Ward garment workers.
However, an aggressive response from the newly-formed Chicago
Employers Association escalated the conflict into a city-wide affair.
Leidenberger attributes the strike and especially the escalation to
an aggressive attempt by employers to crush union power. To this end,
Leidenberger asserts that Chicago's 62-mile network of underground
tunnels was developed to break the teamsters' hold on the city's
streets. Historians have usually viewed the tunnels, begun shortly
before the 1905 strike, as an innovative solution to moving goods in
and out of the congested central business district. Leidenberger's
assertion is a provocative departure from this view.
Strike violence, police intervention, and contentious accusations
polarized public opinion and broke the union's support from middle
class progressives. The motives of teamster leaders were challenged
by accusations of rampant corruption, charges that Leidenberger
claims were responsible for discrediting the teamsters "for
generations to come" (p. 110). In the end, the teamsters lost the
strike and were forced to abandon the sympathy strike.
Chapter Five describes the failure of the municipal ownership
campaign. With support for labor shattered by the violence of the
teamsters strike and a daunting list of hurdles to municipal
ownership posed by the courts, vacillating politicians, and
"functionalist" views of regulation, the municipal-ownership
candidate lost the race for mayor in 1907. In addition, the
referendum on municipal ownership on the 1907 ballot was also
defeated.
Chapter Six and a Conclusion trace the legacy of labor's failed foray
into progressive politics in Chicago. Leidenberger argues that with
labor's political defeat and the defeat of a unified plan for the
city's transit needs, Chicago became a politically and physically
fragmented city. Fragmentation ultimately paved the way for the rise
of the political machine and the automobile (initially, the only
non-political transit mode).
For all of its strengths, the book is not without weaknesses:
1. Nostalgia aside, Leidenberger's advocacy sometimes clouds his
objectivity. He invariably portrays labor's position and struggles as
progressive and democratic while the actions and positions of
employers and labor's opponents are always driven by baser motives.
Likewise, Leidenberger seems to see "democracy" as a favorable (to
him) outcome rather than a process. One is left wondering why the
defeat of municipal ownership at the polls is not a democratic
outcome.
2. Some important assertions are either not adequately supported or
not developed. For example, anyone familiar with Teamster Presidents
Beck and Hoffa will find Leidenberger's claim that the union's
reputation for corruption stemmed solely or even primarily from the
1905 strike less than convincing. Likewise, Leidenberger fails to
develop or support his assertion that Chicago's 62-mile network of
underground tunnels was developed in order to break the teamsters'
hold on the city's streets. While Leidenberger cites contemporary
statements that make it clear that some envisioned the tunnels for
this purpose, he does not delve into the claims or consider
alternative motives. Nor does he show how the tunnels were used to
break the 1905 strike or subsequent labor disputes. Unfortunately,
his assertion remains a provocative, but unproven, claim.
3. A related problem arises in his analysis of the municipal
ownership issue. While Leidenberger ties labor's interests in transit
politics exclusively to municipal ownership, he does not explain why
anything short of city ownership was so unsatisfactory to labor. Did
labor have no interest at all in any type of streetcar regulation
short of municipal ownership? Why was municipal ownership such an
all-or-nothing position for labor?
4. The reader will be left wondering what happened to the teachers
union. After figuring so prominently in the initial discussion of
labor's new role in progressive politics, the teachers union seems to
just fade away. Leidenberger describes the demise of teamster power
in the violence of the 1905 strike, but his treatment of the teachers
union is anti-climactic at best. A half-paragraph on p. 146 tersely
relates the hostility of the political machine to the teachers union
and the outlawing of teachers unions in 1915-17.
These shortcomings aside, Leidenberger provides an interesting,
provocative, and readable analysis of labor's role in the Progressive
Movement. The strength of his work is in documenting labor's active
participation in reform issues that went beyond job-related concerns.
Histories of the progressive era have often treated labor as an
issue; Leidenberger effectively adds labor to the cast of players in
urban reform and his book deserves the attention of anyone interested
in understanding the Progressive Era.
Georg Leidenberger is Professor of History at Universidad Autonoma
Metropolitana in Mexico City, Mexico.
David J. St. Clair is Professor of Economics at California State
University, East Bay. He is the author of _The Motorization of
American Cities_ and is currently doing research in the history of
transit in Los Angeles and nineteenth-century California economic
history.
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Published by EH.Net (October 2006). All EH.Net reviews are archived
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