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

Why has American business been so distinctly and bitterly resistant to unions? Beyond any economic reasons, Jeffrey Haydu finds the roots of management ideology among late 19^th century entrepreneurs breaking loose from an earlier, cross-class regime of producer republicanism. In this sophisticated and well-crafted book, Haydu compares employer class formation and labor relations in Cincinnati and San Francisco to demonstrate the alternate paths of business’ collective action. In the course of industrialization, Cincinnati’s employers developed a familiar ideological mix of free market capitalism, civic reformism and virulent anti-unionism. Yet, during the same years small business in San Francisco took a very different road, choosing instead to ally with skilled labor in the economy and in politics. Haydu’s analysis of their divergence provides a stimulating account of the form and content of business class hegemony in industrial relations and in American political discourse.

The argument is built on a three-sided foundation. First, Haydu aims to show a trend of increasing class stratification between employers and employees, including the breakdown of vertical ties between groups and the strengthening of horizontal, intra-class ties among businesses. Second, he focuses on the discursive content and boundaries of class and civic identity for employers, showing how these were selectively mobilized from a menu of pre-existing cultural possibilities. Finally, he examines how these schemas were transposed across institutional borders, from the workplace to the polity and back again.

In Cincinnati, Haydu contends, employer concerns centered not on the relatively weak union movement but on a fading commercial economy, the corrupt political machine led by Republican boss George Cox, and a fear of urban mob disorder stemming from the Court House riots of 1884. Business class solidarity developed through mobilization for economic boosterism, cultural enrichment and civic improvement. Local merchants, manufacturers, managers and professionals elaborated a collective identity of “business citizenship,” achieving status closure and distancing themselves from working class culture. This shift allowed employers to see themselves as non-partisan protectors of the public interest, and to regard union-busting as a positive civic responsibility.

Unlike Cincinnati, employers in San Francisco faced a combination of stronger unions, corporate power (particularly in the form of the Southern Pacific Railroad) and a large immigrant Chinese population. Forced to contend with labor, small proprietors forged a grudging alliance with skilled white workers against both low-wage competition and greedy corporations, cemented by racism against the Asian other. This “practical corporatism” legitimized class representation in the economy and in politics, balancing class organization and interests with peaceful, industry-wide negotiations and tripartite mechanisms of civic mediation and arbitration. This path persisted until the years before WWI, when the conditions that sustained it reversed: a waning salience of anti-Chinese racism as a medium of cross-class unity, the collapse of the Union Labor Party and a decline of class representation in politics, and the turn of employers to a Cincinnati-style business citizenship model.

The analytic framework is robust enough to permit substantive historical argument. For Haydu, business citizenship in Cincinnati develops partially in opposition to urban machine politics. But, as Martin Shefter and Steven Erie have shown, machine politics itself can represent a form of class compromise, with party bosses brokering ties among capitalists and ethnic working classes. I would have liked to see more on the interests and alliances within the Cox machine (which endured for more than two decades), as well as in the pre-corporatist Buckley regime in San Francisco, the better to appreciate the terrain from which their subsequent paths emerged.

Similarly, while Haydu emphasizes the role of race in San Francisco, in Cincinnati it is simply absent. Haydu claims that, unlike San Francisco’s Chinese, blacks in Cincinnati were largely excluded from manufacturing and posed little threat to white workers or small entrepreneurs. Yet, the very success in segregating black workers indicates a degree of white racial unity. With industrialization...