Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917 (review)

In April 1909 the management of the Georgia Railroad triggered a bitter and violent strike by complying with the firemen brotherhood's hard-won seniority rules. Barred from progressing to become engineers, long-service black firemen had acquired so much seniority in the occupation that they were eligible for the more desirable assignments to the exclusion of whites. A federal arbitration board sustained the seniority system and the employment of black firemen but ordered equal pay for blacks and whites. This in turn spurred renewed efforts by the railroad brotherhoods to drive black workers from running trades employment, efforts that were most successful in the 1930s after the Railway Labor Act introduced the apparatus of New Deal-style compulsory collective bargaining.

Exclusive bargaining agency by majority vote "came as nothing less than a disaster for black railwaymen," as Paul Taillon explains : "Because whites constituted the majority in the operating crafts, the provision deprived black railwaymen of effective representation, killing many of their independent unions and clearing the way for the brotherhoods to contractually eliminate them." (206)

This image of the running trades brotherhoods - the Engineers, Firemen, Conductors, and Trainmen - as the conservative racist craft unions of the labour aristocracy in the vanguard sector of American industrial and financial capitalism, too exclusive even for membership in Samuel Gompers's AFL, has become iconic in labour history. Academics have generally preferred the Knights of Labor, Eugene Debs's American Railway Union (formed after he split with the firemen's brotherhood over its exclusivism), and the Industrial Workers of the World, all of which struggled with the brotherhoods for organizational supremacy in the running trades and failed. Taillon's study acknowledges the truths in the conventional image, but goes on to show that they are only partial truths, and that the brotherhoods played a much larger and more complex part in the shaping of American labour relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than the conventional view allows.

This more comprehensive narrative is full of profound ironies, as the Georgia Railroad strike suggests. Taillon is most persuasive in setting out a 'new institutionalist' account of the brotherhoods' changing organizational forms, and strategic and political engagements, against the transformation of the US political economy between the Civil War and World War I. The brotherhoods were dynamic trade unions that took on the largest and most powerful corporations in the country, learned from their failures as well as their successes, and led the way not only in their collective bargaining policies and practices but also in their encounters with the state. From effective lobbying for industrial safety legislation to tripartite involvement in mediation and arbitration to direct political action to ensure Woodrow Wilson's reelection and the acquisition of the eight-hour day, the brotherhoods dealt directly with legislatures and state agencies on behalf of their members. Although at first they shared Gompers's distrust of state activism, they came to favour legislative and bureaucratic intervention and to use it in their interests. This occurred first in the series of legislative schemes for federal intervention in labour disputes and later, when the interest arbitration system foundered under the shipper-driven downward pressure of freight rate regulation, in the Progressive-era corporatism of the National Civic Federation in the lead-up to compulsory collective bargaining.

Taillon is also very good on the ways in which the development of the railroad industry, its increasing concentration and interchange, and the emergence and organization of professional management interacted with and shaped the brotherhoods institutionally, strategically, and politically. However, there is little in the way of a close analysis of grievance-handling, bargaining, mediation, or arbitration from which to draw conclusions about the emergence or elaboration of labour relations techniques.

Taillon's account of the culture of railwaymen and their families, while generally interesting and at points fascinating, is not quite so successful. He gives an informative account of the quasi-Masonic fraternalism of the early brotherhoods, which withered away as the [End Page...