Exceptionally Knights

Voss’s book is in many ways a model monograph. Her preface and introduction tell one precisely where she is coming from, why she chose her topic, and why it matters. Questions for examination are laid out, choice of comparative examples and case-study justified, sources and methodology introduced. Her essential thesis is propounded, and then developed in the next three synthetic chapters: that, through the 1880s, neither the American working classes nor their labor movements were that “exceptional.” If they are examined alongside those of Britain and France, then their occupational composition and experience, their languages and ideologies, their forms of organization, seem to fit into a common transatlantic pattern. In all three countries, artisans were the essence of whatever working-class labor, social, and political movements existed, and they shared comparable grievances, common oppositional (radical, “republican”) worldviews.

But in the 1880s — for her, the critical period in which American exceptionalism was made — American skilled workers pioneered in the attempt to build a wider labor movement that reached out across the skill and other divides within the working classes, and failed — or, better, were beaten; while in Britain and France in the 1890s the foundations of more inclusive, stronger, and more politicized labor movements were laid. The American working class was not born exceptional, but it became so as a result of a distinctive historical experience of organizational breakdown and defeat.

These chapters rest on a broad and sensitive reading of a large secondary literature, and will reward study. They impress me as a much more respectful use of written history and the historical record than historically minded sociologists often engage in. Voss’s reading is not driven too hard by her own theoretical agenda, and as a result one is rarely troubled by it in matters of detail. Voss is careful, honest, and nontendentious.

But why should a late-developing and quite undynamic economy like France be included for comparative purposes alongside the first and second industrial nations? Why not Wilhelmine Germany, which made far greater ethnic and ideological contributions to the development of the American working classes and their politics, and was the third great power center? The reason seems to be that Anglo-American labor and social history rarely reaches beyond France when it crosses the English Channel. This is an interesting phenomenon — having to do, perhaps, with the notoriously poor linguistic endowments of Anglo-American historians, and the great prestige of post-Annales school French social history. But it is hardly a sufficient reason for choosing France. A case could be made on grounds of the greater comparability of liberal political cultures, but Voss does not make it.

Again, one can question how far the comparison between the leading cases, Britain and the United States, can be pressed. The essential fact is surely that between the 1850s and the 1870s British craft-based unionism acquired strength, institutional solidity, public acceptance, some national political influence, and — crucially — a protected legal status. The American labor movement did not begin to match it in these particulars before the 1890s, 1900s, or even 1930s. It is no surprise that leaders and members of the extremely insecure American crafts looked longingly eastward; no surprise, either, that out of their weakness they should have been so prepared, not just to emulate the British “New Model” unions, but also, for a while, to engage in the very different organizational strategy of the Knights of Labor.

Four-tenths of Voss’s main text is consumed in her comparative chapters. Explanation of the Knights’ brief success in bridging the skill divide, and rapid collapse thereafter, depends on the detailed examination of their experience in New Jersey, which takes up the rest of the book. Why New Jersey? No argument is made for its representativeness — it was, in fact, unusually highly urbanized and industrialized, in a nation distinguished for having about 70 percent of its population living in...