The Great Industrial War: Framing Class Conflict in the Media, 1865–1950 by Tony Rondinone (review)

Tony Rondinone has made a significant contribution to the field of American labour and working-class history. In this well-written and concisely argued monograph, Rondinone builds on the scholarship of Martin Burke and Gary Gerstle concerning popular understandings of class in the United States. Rondinone examines the ways in which the print media and public figures comprehended and depicted industrial relations in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Cold War. He argues that the American Civil War played a profoundly important role in shaping the popular discourse of class conflict in the late 19th and early 20th century. Media portrayals of strike actions employed the metaphor of an “industrial war,” an inevitable conflict between the “armies” of capital and labour, to explain the complexities of class relations in the still-forming world of American industrial capitalism.

The new rhetorical frame of “industrial war” differed considerably from the ways in which the press in antebellum America covered strikes. Newspapers of all political persuasions represented labour conflicts as community affairs rather than events of national importance. Rondinone argues persuasively that the Civil War changed the “whole landscape of rhetorical possibility.” (10) As a result, many Americans became increasingly inclined to find metaphors for warfare in a variety of circumstances. The idea that strikes could be understood as war-like events of national significance made a lot of sense considering the increasingly continental scope of corporate power, the emergence of nation-wide labour unions like the Knights of Labor, and, beginning with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the suddenly national scale of strikes, which were episodically violent.

Interpreting national strikes through a martial frame distorted reality to a considerable extent. Except for the labour press, which itself employed a similar martial frame, most newspapers portrayed the “industrial war” as a constantly shifting battle between two competing, relatively even armies. The two sides were led by “generals” of labour and capital, union leaders like Eugene Debs or factory owners like Andrew Carnegie, who deployed their forces like infantry units on a military campaign. Rondinone makes excellent use of illustrations from publications as different as Harper’s Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York World to demonstrate how periodicals depicted major strikes of the late 19th century in highly stylized battle scenes which, with a different caption, could have passed for images of the Battle of Antietam.

Beginning at the turn of the century, the “industrial war” was gradually reconfigured into a social model that included a “great third class,” as the labour relations expert John R. Commons put it, to which both capital and labour would have to appeal for legitimacy. This third class, “the public,” would soon appoint itself as the mediator between the two great industrial armies. Initially, “the public” was a rhetorical device used by many newspapers to account for the material and social impact that a battle between labour and capital had upon all those not directly involved in the conflict. According to the logic of “the public,” the battle could only be won by a return to a state of order, one that typically consisted of a return to the pre-existing conditions against which labourers struck in the first place.

During the Progressive Era, “the public” took on an institutional form as the mediator of the “industrial war.” Sometimes, “the public” took on a non-governmental form, as in the case of the National Civic Federation (ncf), an organization that brought together business and labour leaders, politicians, civil servants, and experts in the newly minted social sciences. The ncf attempted to foster understanding and cooperation between labour and capital as a means of ensuring industrial peace.

Increasingly, “the public” took on an institutional form within the federal government. During the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike, President Roosevelt asserted that his office required him to step into this latest episode of the “industrial war...