The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (review)

Rosanne Currarino’s The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age explores the changing meaning of citizenship through the Gilded Age and into the Progressive Era. Scholars who have studied this period tend to lament its outcomes: political disengagement, acquiescence, and consumerism, rather than a radical leftwing alternative to an increasingly industrialized and capitalistic society. Currarino, however, challenges this negative assessment, arguing that Americans did not become apathetic. Instead, the sites of struggle simply changed. Citizens may have ceased looking to political organizations like the Knights of Labor or a socialist party as the vehicle of change, but they did continue to preserve and expand the meaning of democracy. Not only did this mean voting for candidates who represented their interests but it also meant demanding more of the good things in life.

According to Currarino, there are two distinct and competing ideas of citizenship that can be identified during this period. The first conception is the proprietary-producerist model that existed prior to and after the American Civil War. At this time, a citizen was defined as a property-owning male artisan who lived from the fruits of his labour – independent and self-sufficient. Beginning in the early 1870s, however, the independent artisan and his place in American society increasingly became threatened due to a series of historical events: a depression that began in the early 1870s and lasted the greater part of that decade, the de-skilling of labour processes, and an influx of immigrant labour. As labourers became more proletarianized – no longer independent or in control of the means of production – and the proprietary-producerist model of citizenship no longer spoke to the realities of life in America, debates surrounding a new form of citizenship began. According to Currarino, what emerged from these debates was a socialized (consumerist) version of democracy. Under this conception, citizenship moved beyond the narrow confines of the proprietary-producerist emphasis on owning property and on self-reliance to embrace “politics of more” – meaning more of the social surplus. Proponents of consumerist citizenship included economists, social reformers, and labour leaders. They all believed that workers had an entitlement to a certain standard of living which included shorter work hours, higher wages, the right to form unions, the ability to purchase consumer items, and the enjoyment of leisure activities during their free time.

But can the meaning of citizenship during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era really be reduced to only two versions? Considering the importance and activity of the radical left – socialists, anarchists, and later the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World – in the United States during this period, it seems necessary to address how these different groups viewed citizenship and what it meant. Did the radical left put forward a differing view of citizenship than those of the proprietary-producerist or consumerist models? Was the radical left more likely to endorse one over the other? Did socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies agree with certain aspects of these two types of citizenship and if so, which ones? The Chicago anarchists of the Haymarket era were in support of the eight-hour day but it is likely that their idea of citizenship would be quite different from that of the social reformer Jane Addams and the American Federation of Labor’s Samuel Gompers. Some consideration of the radical left is warranted here.

Currarino does an excellent job providing brief biographies of people like Addams and Gompers but does not give the same attention to detail to key historical events. For example, the Haymarket Tragedy and the Homestead Strike are mentioned only in passing. Though there is a footnote for the former, it tells us nothing about the event, why it occurred, or its outcome other than stating that, as a result, some progressive economists had to be careful about how they expressed their ideas if they wanted to keep their positions at universities. Even less is said about...