The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland by Toni Gilpin (review)

Toni Gilpin has written a splendid history of industrial conflict. Big capital in the title refers to the implacably antiunion owners of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which in 1902 merged into International Harvester (IH). The radical labor of the title are mainly the officers, shop stewards, and the rank and file of the United Farm Equipment Workers (FE), a left-wing union that successfully organized the McCormick/IH workers in the late 1930s. The resulting story of class war is powerfully told and deeply researched. It is also a story of contemporary relevance that opens windows on big historical questions.

The author began this study in the 1980s as a doctoral student in the Yale history department and part of a cohort mentored by David Montgomery. In many ways, Gilpin delivers on what was so exciting and promising about that historiographical moment. As her mentor does in his books, she centers her history on the places and processes of work, with special attention to Chicago's giant McCormick Works and its neighboring Tractor Works. In terms of process, Gilpin begins with the late nineteenth-century deskilling of foundry work, which provoked protests that led to the police murder of two McCormick workers at the factory gates on May 3, 1886, and to the fateful Haymarket bombing the following day. But even with deskilling, the complexity of making farm implements impeded the application of mass assembly techniques. At the same time, it allowed managers to enforce a byzantine system of piecework, the terms of which, according to Gilpin, served as a key point of contention in the "long deep grudge" at McCormick/IH.

Gilpin's book is a tour through a century of industrial relations. This includes the extraordinary measures that corporate managers took in the 1920s and 1930s to destroy autonomous labor organization through the techniques of "welfare capitalism" and company unionism, and how FE organizers defeated these measures within the context of CIO organizing drives and the legislative and legal framework of the New Deal. The McCormick/IH management was known for its ruthless antilabor tactics, and the FE was similarly known for its radicalism and combativeness, manifest in work stoppages and on picket lines. Yet in 1938 the IH managers accepted the results of a federally supervised election in which the employees of the Tractor Works voted to be represented by the FE, a victory gained relatively smoothly as compared to the sit-down strike at General Motors or the bloody strife of the Little Steel strike the year before. However, for the FE, which eventually won contracts across much of the IH industrial empire, the purpose of a contract was not industrial peace, but a starting point for further combat with management. Even under the World War II no-strike pledge, the FE activists relished the daily skirmishes—slowdowns and work stoppages—on the shop floor.

The FE was a communist-influenced union, with a number of its officers and activists belonging to the Communist Party or sympathizing with its policies. This influence was most striking in the matter of racial equality. The CP emphasized the connection between the fight against racism and the fight against capitalism, and in this spirit the FE fought for interracial solidarity in the workplace and promoted Black organizers into the leadership. They also engaged in political campaigns against segregation. Here Gilpin's story moves to Louisville and outside the framework of labor-management conflict and into the wider community, where, in the early 1950s, the FE local spearheaded efforts to desegregate city parks and played a key role in the Interracial Hospital Movement to break up the Jim Crow system in Kentucky hospitals. The account of FE's efforts on behalf of racial equality is one of the most provocative sections of the book and provides another piece...