The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940 (review)

The Racketeer's Progress is an important contribution to the growing literature on the role of law in the relationship between labor and capital. It focuses not on legislation or government officials but on local and state courts, where, author Andrew Wender Cohen argues, a legal revolution was underway in the early decades of the twentieth century. Legal action shifted from the defense of property through the conviction of union leaders for conspiracy to the prosecution of corrupt union leaders for racketeering, and a legitimate space for unions appeared. In this interpretation, New Deal legislation on unions and workers' rights was a product of several decades of shifting public and legal opinion shaped by the violence and corruption that accompanied craftsmen's resistance to corporate dominance.

Cohen focuses on one city, Chicago, in order to analyze the conflicts that produced this change. He identifies three main participants in "the struggle for the modern American economy": a corporate elite, Progressive reformers, and tradesmen. Cohen insists that we refocus our attention from the corporate industrial sector of the economy to the "trades," the local sector organized on a craft basis—construction, trucking, service trades, and retail. The resistance of tradesmen to corporate dominance and their defense of "craft governance" fueled this struggle, and Cohen details the conflicts in the streets and the courts that created change.

The trades were characterized less by skill than by the assertion of control through unionization and by cooperation between unions and associations of employers that was designed to minimize competition from either national corporations or upstart entrepreneurs. Agreements between trade associations and unions were not legally enforceable, so the organizations governed and policed themselves, utilizing fines, pickets, strikes, and boycotts. The possibility for extortion and corruption in collecting fines always was present, and both unions and trade associations used violence when necessary. Their goal was high prices and wages, and they also limited technological innovation, both of which hurt consumers. Hence, Progressive reformers, although otherwise sympathetic to workers, became involved in attacking this regime of "craft governance." Reformers were particularly concerned with corruption and violence and with tradesmen's usurpation of the power of the state when they insisted on governing themselves without recourse to the courts.

Cohen identifies the socioeconomic composition of each group of participants in the struggle over craft governance, as well as specific individuals of importance. He also clarifies the groups' perspectives and ideologies and shows how their public rhetoric developed in tandem with their activities. Cohen insists that the corporate elite was dominated not by corporate liberals but by open shop adherents who were determined to undermine unions and those employers willing to deal with unions. He details the role of Chicago's elite in instigating, financing, and managing major assaults on union workers in the trades from the 1890s to the 1920s. The elite controlled and utilized local judges and the state's attorney in order to purge society of craft governance.

Cohen reveals how unions and trade associations did not acquiesce but fought corporate and reform initiatives in order to maintain craft governance. Open shop leaders found that the public and reformers were more likely to support an attack on unions based on defense of the public good than on defense of property rights. Chicago's Employers' Association first deployed the term 'racketeering' in 1927 to equate craft governance with extortion, to tar unions with the brush of Chicago's infamous Prohibition-era gangsters. Yet, Cohen argues, because tradesmen also endeavored to influence public opinion, the public came to support the unions' definition of racketeering—gangster infiltration of a union—rather than craft governance as extortion. Opinion had developed to the point that honest unions were seen as legitimate. Cohen argues that the New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act and Agricultural Adjustment Act were modeled on the tradesmen's concepts...