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

Despite all the excellent social history scholarship dealing with working- and middle-class formation over the last generation, we often take the class development of business elites as a given. It is almost as if they establish shared interests by osmosis, while the same is such a struggle for working people or the middle classes. Jeffrey Haydu forces us to subject these assumptions to a critical analysis. By comparing two cities, Cincinnati and San Francisco, and drawing on social movement theory, he seeks to add historical specificity to the process by which businessmen developed class alignments, shaped civic identities, and pursued political and economic solutions. Despite experiencing many of the same social and economic trends, businessmen followed very different strategies, particularly in their relations with labor.

Haydu notes that Cincinnati's elites faced an uncertain path to unity. A strong producer ethic linked employers to workers both in the workplace and in the community, while industrial divisions and competitiveness fractured class solidarity. It was not until workers began to organize as a class in the last decades of the nineteenth century that businessmen did likewise. Once this began, Cincinnati employers developed trade organizations, cultural institutions, and civic improvement associations that only gradually articulated a strict class orientation, but that path enabled them to cultivate an identity that Haydu calls "business citizenship," which celebrated individual rights and duties and asserted business-class interests as identical to the interests of the city as a whole.

In contrast, San Francisco business leaders confronted a different set of forces. Racism strengthened the bond between white employers and workers as well as the sense of unity among the workers themselves. Consequently, the labor movement developed greater economic and political power and the employers adopted a more accommodating relationship with unions. Through the end of the nineteenth century, San Francisco employers also were better able to appease unions than were their counterparts in Cincinnati; their markets were somewhat insulated from national competitors. Thus, the business community resembled the corporate liberalism of such national organizations as the National Civic Federation but without the same commanding presence of the dominant huge corporations. As Haydu notes, there was "little high-minded idealism in this civic ideology"; rather, it was "a self-interested response to the realities of labor power" (89).

The final portion of the book discusses the extent to which employers in San Francisco and Cincinnati were able to transpose their group identities across a range of institutions. With some qualifications, Haydu argues that the solidarities and identities forged by employers in both cities provided "a common framework for evaluating worthy citizens, good employees, and the proper governance of city and workplace" (136). But the contrasts in the case studies also raise questions about the extent to which it is possible to talk about a national business-class consciousness.

One cannot do justice to the sophistication and nuance of Haydu's argument in a brief review. He utilizes a range of theories and concepts (framing, social boundaries, social movement theory, neoinstitutionalism, pathdependent processes, transposition, cultural scripts, et cetera) in an attempt to answer basic questions about how and why employers create a united front, what are the components of that shared identity, and how they apply that identity in other contexts. This makes for tough sledding in places, but it is worth it. Haydu deserves our thanks for significantly advancing the discussion of business-class formation and the barriers that it presents to the American labor movement.