Bad Ol' Boys: Scabs, Labor Spies, and Gun-Slinging Entrepreneurs

Stephen H. Norwood. Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii + 328 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95(cloth); $19.95(paper).

One of the questions which historians of the American working class find themselves compelled to periodically return to concerns the conspicuous discrepancy between the scale and intensity of labor violence in the United States and American labor's remarkable incapacity for building and sustaining political formations that might challenge the stranglehold of a deeply entrenched two-party system. As Stephen Norwood's new study makes abundantly clear, the transience of labor politics and the want of a labor-based, European-style social democratic tradition in the U. S. cannot be explained by the absence of either class antagonism or working-class determination. Indeed, it would be difficult, probably impossible to document a more volatile and confrontational record in any of the countries in which social democracy became a viable force. Part of the solution to that American paradox, the author suggests, lies in the efficacy of the powerful strikebreaking apparatus that emerged in the late nineteenth century and played a pivotal role in shaping American labor relations until the triumph of industrial unionism in the late 1930s. "[T]he nation that never experienced feudalism and that pioneered in introducing civil liberties," Norwood writes, "allowed corporations to develop powerful private armies that often operated outside the law, denying workers basic constitutional rights" (p. 4).

For the most part, the role of organized "mercenaries" in undermining union power has entered the historical literature in fragments, affecting the outcome of individual strikes or relations within particular industries. A number of articles have attempted to synthesize this material to identify general trends and offer conclusions about strikebreakers' motivations, the impact of strikebreaking on working-class race relations, public attitudes to scabbing, and its overall significance in sustaining the "open shop". ¹ As the publishers of this survey suggest, however, Norwood's investigation is "the first systematic study of strikebreaking, intimidation, and anti-unionism in the United States, subjects essential to a full understanding of labor's fortunes in the twentieth century" (back cover). In Strikebreaking and Intimidation, the author sets out to accomplish more than a mere chronicling of the rise and decline of the strikebreaking "industry." Bringing to his work an extraordinary command of archival sources and the relevant periodical literature, Norwood advances a novel interpretive argument: that the trajectory of anti-labor paramilitarism is closely related to changing notions of masculinity in the twentieth-century United States. The "culture of strikebreaking," he argues, "had at its core a defiant, highly aggressive masculinity, in sharp contrast to family-based middle- and working-class society, shaped in significant ways by women" (p. 12); its decline after World War II reflected "the long-term impact of the delegitimation of anger, and the increasing divide between masculinity and physicality/aggression" (p. 14).

Norwood pursues a thematic approach to excavating the record and significance of strikebreaking between the turn of the century and the Second World War. The narrative shifts from one industry to another and occasionally back again, beginning with urban transit strikes and moving to the docks, coal, copper, and iron mines, meatpacking, lumber, and auto. He is concerned with reconstructing the activities and public persona of both the "kings" of strikebreaking—men like James Farley, Pearl Bergoff, and Henry Ford's Harry Bennett—and lesser-known foot soldiers (both black and white) deployed on the New York underground; the streets of Richmond, Chicago, and New Orleans; and in the coal camps of southern West Virginia, Arkansas, and Colorado.

Long before they gained a reputation for left-wing dissidence and youth rebellion, the exclusive college campuses of the early twentieth century seemed wholly committed to upholding the existing order, providing a steady supply of eager strikebreakers for labor disputes that had become an endemic...