Review of Thomas Ralph Clark's Defending Rights: Law, Labor Politics, and the State in California, 1890-1925

Several years ago, labor historians returned to studying institutions. In the process, they began to examine the relationship between labor and the state, specifically the relation of labor, policy, and the law. Important conceptual work by Melvyn Dubofsky, Colin Gordon, Joseph McCartin and a few others have neatly mapped out the contested relationship between labor and the state on the national level. And Julia Greene's recent reappraisal of labor and politics in the age of Samuel Gompers has forced us to all rethink our view of volunteerism and labor politics. In addition, works by labor law scholars Christopher Tomlins, Victoria Hattam, and William Forbath have traced the development of national labor law. But until now little work was done at the local or state level. Scholars have asked repeatedly what preceded these important national efforts. Clearly, these national efforts (the National War Labor Board during World War I and the Wagner Act in the 1930s, for example) did not spring from whole cloth. And, while there have been studies of certain aspects of local labor law, namely, workman's compensation or protective labor legislation for women, little else on the state level exists. Thomas Ralph Clark's Defending Rights: Law, Labor Politics, and the State in California, 1890-1925 is a much-needed local study of law, labor, and politics. It fills a void in the historical literature by bridging two important, growing, and often unconnected areas of historical inquiry: the intersection of labor and the state, and labor law. Because Clark's book is one of the first such efforts, there are tremendous expectations. Clark offers us a detailed study of city labor politics in Los Angeles and San Francisco, labor's statewide political efforts, and struggles against the dreaded labor injunction.

Clark clearly rejects the long-held view that labor was active in the Progressive Era, retreated into antistatist voluntarism in the 1920s, and was reborn anew in the 1930s. Instead, Clark demonstrates in this history of California labor through Los Angeles and San Francisco that local labor was continuously politically active and therefore not antistatist. His book, like that of Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal, Colin Gordon's New Deals, and the work of Steve Fraser, seeks to explore the roots of what is now referred to as the New Deal Order.

Clark's unions are not antistatist or apolitical. Clark's book offers us painstaking detail of labor's political efforts during the Progressive Era. Indeed much of his book deals with the injunction and labor's efforts to combat it. It was management's use of the injunction against picketing and the use of private armies and "special" police that forced California unions into politics. Labor was in fact politicized by the injunction and entered politics to stop it and to stop the police from using it as an antilabor instrument.

Los Angeles and San Francisco seem like polar opposites when it comes to labor: San Francisco was a labor town and Los Angeles was as antilabor a city as one could find. Yet, the stories are remarkably similar in purpose if not outcome. In an effort to stop the use of "special police" to break strikes and local antipicket laws, labor founded the Union Labor Party (ULP). The ULP was formed in both cities about the same time (1901-2). The ULP was more successful in San Francisco for a number of reasons, including better established unions and less hostility from employers; Los Angeles saw greater labor violence, which employers used politically to their advantage. Clark argues that the ULP represented a blending of the languages of class and rights. Labor's political efforts locally to curb police brutality were successful enough that it forced employers to run to the courts (labor...