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  • The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago by Cedric de Leon
  • Chad Pearson
Cedric de Leon, The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2015)

The topic of anti-labour unionism in the United States has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years. In particular, numerous scholars have explored the development of “right-to-work” laws – state rules designed to weaken unions by protecting the individual rights of non-members – in the decades after organized labour won its most significant workplace and legislative battles in the 1930s. The political historians [End Page 301] responsible for producing these studies generally focus on the influential roles played by post-New Deal conservative organizations and individuals: Republican politicians, powerful managers, corporate lawyers, cold-hearted economists, and provocative journalists. This scholarship has taught us much, but few writers have properly come to terms with the nation’s long, bipartisan traditions of antiunion ideas and actions.

Refreshingly, Cedric de Leon’s The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago is neither historically shallow nor politically imbalanced. In five original and forcefully argued chapters, de Leon, a Toronto-native, explores both national and local politics, demonstrating how elites and ordinary people related to the century’s dominant issues: the mounting sectional tensions that led to the Civil War, questions concerning slave and free labour, the conflicts between individualism and collectivism in the labour market, and the relationships between political parties and workers. He believes we must investigate the interactions between unionized craft workers and political parties to understand the origins of laws designed to protect the rights of non-unionists against organized labour’s solidarity-building activities.

First, he introduces us to the critical, pre-Civil War political and ideological battles, highlighting how sizable numbers of northern Democrats and the Whigs praised self-sufficiency while denouncing forms of labour dependency, including slavery and wage work. Chicago’s wage earners shared these critiques, and campaigned against slavery by supporting the Free Soil cause, which sought to prevent slavery’s westward spread in the 1850s. Fearing the growing power of the slave owning class, many supported the new Republican Party, which promoted “free labour” over slavery. Shortly afterward, they rallied around Abraham Lincoln, enthusiastically championing the Union cause in the Civil War.

But, as de Leon explains, many “felt robbed of the promise of the Civil War.” (78) The Republicans, he explains, had praised those who took up arms against the Confederacy, but sharply criticized the same people for their involvement in the labour movement during and after the war. Both the Republicans and the Democrats viewed collective bargaining “as a new form of slavery” because, in their collective view, it undermined “the wage bargain” and enslaved “one or both side(s) of the agreement.” (97) And both established anti-union conspiracy laws while recurrently promoting what de Leon calls “individualistic liberalism.” He points out that these political elites did not see meaningful class divisions, believing that “workers and their employers were equal and free.” (106) Above all, he argues that “America’s transition out of slavery was not toward just any kind of democracy, but rather toward a specifically anti-labor democracy.” (98) This is nicely put, and in making this case, he reintroduces us to several anti-union developments in Illinois, including the Republican-sponsored 1863 LaSalle Black Law and two Democratic Party-initiated laws passed in 1887, the Merritt Conspiracy Law and the Cole Anti-Boycott Law.

The Origins of Right to Work is especially useful in demonstrating the ways anti-union individuals, through their ownership of newspapers, disseminated the central idea that workers and employers enjoyed a genuine harmony of interests, and that post-Civil War America offered its citizens the promise of upward mobility, which contrasted sharply to conditions under slavery and in Europe. Anti-union spokespersons condemned independent working-class activism for threatening those relationships and for challenging classical economic [End Page 302] principles. Writing about an 1867 strike, de Leon cites a Chicago Times article condemning labour unrest for damaging “the natural law of supply and demand” and for...

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