Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry (review)

In Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939, Jo Ann E. Argersinger draws on the best of older and newer models of labor history. Blending a structural analysis of unions, strikes, and industry organization with a cultural analysis of the effects of gender and ethnicity on labor relations, Argersinger presents a nuanced study of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACW) in Baltimore. The book examines "the forces for unity and the factors that led to division in the industry and the union while underscoring the role of power in both the Amalgamated's search for 'industrial democracy' and the garment industry's rise and decline" (p. 7). Jewish garment workers, union officers, "sweaters," managers, and owners were involved in every aspect of the ACW's development and play a prominent part in Making the Amalgamated.

As the garment industry's labor force grew to include more women, immigrants, and unskilled operatives, the traditional craft orientation of the United Garment Workers (UGW) seemed less and less effective to many clothing workers. When a convention called by Sidney Hillman in December 1914 founded the ACW, the delegates acted on their growing conviction that all garment workers should combine into a single industrial union. As a result of a strike the previous October, Baltimore's immigrant garment workers flocked to the new union, which seemed to represent their interests far better than either the UGW or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also then active in Baltimore. The UGW and the IWW were widely perceived as anti-Semitic, and both groups had a history of inflaming ethnic tensions. In advocating inter- ethnic cooperation and industry-wide organization, the Baltimore ACW, one of the first and most prominent chapters of the national union, appealed to local garment workers, a large percentage of them Jews. By 1916 the ACW had successfully organized 75 percent of the clothing workers in the Baltimore's men's clothing industry.

The bulk of Argersinger's study proceeds chronologically and thematically from the ACW's early successes in Baltimore. For the next several decades the ACW struggled with the "hierarchies based on gender, ethnicity, and skill" that inevitably developed within such an inclusive union (p. 59). The Baltimore ACW was rife with ethnic divisions that prevented Jewish, Italian, and Lithuanian workers from harmoniously pushing for a form of industrial democracy that would ensure shared management and union control of the workplace. As in other ACW chapters and other unions nationwide, ACW women "envisioned a union in which sisters and brothers were companions working toward common goals and standing together against common enemies" (p. 99). Toward that end they participated heavily in union education, although they were frequently disappointed by their male counterparts' marginalization of women workers and educational activities. During the 1920s the Baltimore ACW went into a decline reflecting worsening wages and conditions in the weakened garment industry as well as increased ethnic tensions in the union. "[A]t the start of the Great Depression the union was at rock bottom" (p. 140), but ACW organizational activity eventually revitalized union membership and garnered some public support. By the end of the 1930s, the ACW had rebuilt the union, but the significant shrinkage of the garment industry in Baltimore made the victory a rather hollow one.

Despite the clear narrative and admirable mix of old and new labor history in Making the Amalgamated, the book, at times, raises more questions than it answers. Students of American Jewish history will be intrigued but ultimately disappointed by the discussion of the ethnic ties that supposedly eased negotiations between Jewish factory owners like Henry and Siegmund Sonneborn and Jewish union activists like Hyman Blumberg and Dorothy Jacobs. The dichotomous relationship posed between "German Jews" and "East European immigrant Jews" is...