From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (review)

This book provides a useful overview of professional antiunion activities in the United States. Smith has mined rich resources in manuscript collections, including the American Federation of Labor Papers and the papers of Alan Pinkerton, along with a host of state and federal government documents, to produce a narrative history of this little-studied topic. Smith offers a logical periodization of the evolution of commercialized strikebreaking. The book is also a fascinating piece of business history, as it traces the rise (and sometimes fall) of entrepreneurs and firms in an emerging industry.

Smith's study opens in the aftermath of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The strike demonstrated the inadequacy of existing police institutions, and the labor unrest of the 1880s and 1890s further stimulated demand among owners of capital for private security. Allan Pinkerton and his Pinkerton Detective Agency symbolized this first era of professional strikebreaking activity. Smith offers a portrait of Pinkerton as a model of the poor immigrant made good in America. The Pinkerton agency provided private security for use in labor disputes, including the infamous Homestead strike of 1892. The bloodshed at Homestead and other industrial battlegrounds in the early 1890s provoked a public backlash against such private armies. Smith offers colorful brief accounts of the history of the Pinkerton agency and the formation of the Baldwin-Felts Agency. Baldwin-Felts agents played a key role in enforcing management rule in the West Virginia coal fields, but their heavy-handed tactics provoked violence from the miners, leading to the Matewan massacre. Congressional resolutions and state legislation discouraged and limited (though never fully eliminated) the use of "the business community's mercenaries" in industrial disputes after the turn of the century.

As the use of private guards declined in the early twentieth century, a slightly different form of strikebreaking activity came to the fore. Men like James Farley and Pearl Bergoff began assembling "armies of strikebreakers for hire." Rather than using security forces to discourage union activity, these new firms recruited standby workers who could be called upon on short notice. Especially effective in combating labor unrest on transit lines, Farley was dubbed "a Captain of Industry" by awriter for the New York Times, who announced that the king of strikebreakers had "reduced strikebreaking to a beautiful and effective system" (p. 45). Farley and Bergoff boasted that they maintained lists of thousands of workers with a variety of skills. These workers had other jobs, but Bergoff and Farley made special arrangements with their permanent employers to keep them available for travel to industrial hotspots. Whenever a strike threatened a Bergoff client, battalions of professional strikebreakers—recruited for their toughness, as well as for marketable skills—would be mobilized to move in and operate the trains, streetcars, or whatever industrial machinery and deal with angry strikers until the employer could recruit and train enough new workers to replace strikers. This strategy proved a bit more palatable to middle-class Americans. After all, these "scabs" were only pursuing their right to work for whomever they chose. The introduction of outsider armies of strikebreakers often led to violence, however, and eventually the public developed a distaste for imported strikebreakers.

Strike activity and the vitality of the labor movement both ebbed significantly during the 1920s, so much so that the very existence of firms like Bergoff's was threatened. Demand for strikebreaking services clearly dried up along with strikes. The Great Depression brought renewed labor militancy and a new demand for such services. In 1935, Congress enacted the comprehensive Wagner Act and a measure that prohibited the transportation of people across state lines for use as strikebreakers. Sympathy for organized labor once again resulted in unfavorable publicity for the...