Citizen Employers: Business Communities and Labor in Cincinnati and San Francisco, 1870-1916 (review)

Anyone who reads American labor and working-class history will quickly find that it has often focused on certain regions of the United States. In particular, post-World War II labor and working-class history has taught us much about the struggles of mill workers in Lowell and autoworkers in Detroit. We have learned much from such analyses, but there is a need for a broader historiography that encompasses the labor and working-class experience across the entire United States. Efforts to move in this direction have been made in recent years, and Jeffrey Haydu's book is a welcome contribution to achieving that objective.

Haydu argues in favor of the utility of case studies as tools of historical analysis and presents an analysis of employers in Cincinnati and San Francisco from 1870 to 1916. This was the Gilded Age and is more often associated with the great wealth and outsized capitalist personalities of places like New York City and other northeastern metropolises. So, Haydu's decision to focus his gaze westward is a welcome analytic change. In this book, we see Cincinnati suffering from relative economic decline after the Civil War, while San Francisco is described as an "instant city" fed by the economic gains of the Gold Rush (p. 62).

Haydu emphasizes the role of medium-sized businesses in both the Cincinnati and the San Francisco economies. There are no capitalists on the scale of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, or Cornelius Vanderbilt in this narrative. The smaller scale businessmen of both Cincinnati and San Francisco sought to accumulate profits like other Gilded Age business owners, but they were also interested in civic life. They formed clubs and associations, socialized with each other, and otherwise formed a class-based identity. However, as Haydu shows, there were not entirely homogeneous groups. Most importantly, they had considerably different views on organized labor.

Employers in Cincinnati stood collectively steadfast against labor, while those in San Francisco were divided on how to deal with unions. However, they also interacted with unions in differing demographic environments. San Francisco was home to a large Chinese population, and San Francisco businessmen consciously constructed "white" barriers in response to the Chinese workers and business owners (p. 114). In contrast, Cincinnati had a much smaller African-American population, and it did not loom as large in white consciousness as did the Chinese population in San Francisco. As David Roediger suggested years ago, and indeed W.E.B. DuBois did before him, appeals to whiteness were effective employer methods of blunting working-class militancy. This is essentially the process that occurred in San Francisco. White employers and unions in San Francisco often cooperated with each other out of a common distrust of low-wage, low-skilled immigrant labor.

Haydu's analysis is generally strong when comparing the two cities on which he focuses, but there are some surprising omissions in his narrative. He discusses labor's political activity, but he does not talk about the overall ideological orientation of unions in Cincinnati and San Francisco. Gomperism is not specifically mentioned in this analysis, but it was clearly an approach favored by unions in both cities. Haydu argues that San Francisco was unique as its employers did not endorse the open shop (p. 138). This fact would surely have been sufficient to have drawn Samuel Gompers' attention. There are a couple of references to the Knights of Labor, but the American Federation of Labor does not appear nor does the Industrial Workers of the World. Geography is also an issue. Comparing two cities is a useful analytic method, but those cities need to be placed within a wider geographic framework. For example, Haydu notes that Cincinnati lost industries to other cities, but a fuller description of San Francisco's place in California's economy would have helped this narrative.

This book is still a welcome...