Fink Shrink
Stephen H. Norwood. Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii + 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2705-3; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5373-9.
Reviewed for H-Business by Paul Moreno, Department of History, HillsdaleCollege
Published by H-Business (May 2004)
Stephen H. Norwood has produced a lively, imaginative, and well-written history of strikebreaking that focuses (at least initially) on the strikebreaker's desire to display masculinity as a motive. Strikebreaking served as a substitute for military combat, and provided an outlet for males who faced a "crisis of masculinity" in the increasingly feminized and bureaucratic world of urban and industrial society, Norwood claims. The result is a curious mixture of labor history and cultural studies, treating the traditional narrative of anti-unionism through the lens of gender. While intriguing and creative, the argument is ultimately strained and unconvincing.
The early chapters of the book, which make the gender argument most clearly, are the most valuable. Norwood's stories of the role played by college students and Boy Scouts in early twentieth century strikes are sure to spark interest. His chapter on African-Americans as strikebreakers provides a surprising addition to the complicated historiography regarding the antipathy between blacks and unions. Later chapters, detailing the growth of large-scale professional strikebreaking firms, are derivative and unimpressive. Certainly, the argument that there was an element of joie-de-combat in strikebreaking is plausible-in the same sense that competition among business firms is often expressed in martial terms. One would assume that "manliness" was as much a part of striker violence, though Norwood deals with this phenomenon only indirectly. The element of "manliness" in these conflicts is evident, but gender analysis usually overinterprets the commonsensical. It is more likely that, in both cases,men were trying to control or get jobs. One aspect of strikebreaking culture is an interesting aside, not a key to historical understanding.
Norwood's treatment of African-Americans is perhaps the most interesting-for, while college students and Boy Scouts quickly faded from the ranks of strikebreakers, blacks increased their presence. Many labor historians have moved into a cultural studies explanation of racism in organized labor. They have largely abandoned any economic explanation of union racism, as well as the old argument that employers used race to "divide and conquer" their work forces. (Though Norwood provides convincing evidence that this was exactly what Ford did to combat the United Auto Workers in 1941.) Instead, they have articulated a theory of the "wages of whiteness" and the cultural construction of race, on often fanciful grounds. Norwood continues in this vein, but with a different twist, arguing that strikebreaking improved both black self-image and white estimation of black courage and ability.
At a more fundamental level, though, Norwood's book shares the weakness common to almost all labor history, what might be called a "proletarian bias." The cover intones, "Paradoxically, the country that pioneered the expansion of civil liberties allowed corporations to assemble private armies to disrupt union organizing, spy on workers, and break strikes." Labor history would be improved if more labor historians took seriously the argument that it was precisely the theory of civil liberty that produced the mercenary strikebreaking situation: strikes violated the deeply engrained American belief in liberty of contract and the right to work. All of these conflicts ultimately originated in the strikers' determination to prevent employers from carrying on their business with new workers (referred to by the strikers-and not a few historians-as "scabs" or "finks.") Of course there were abuses and atrocities as employers and public officials enforced the right to work. But this should not obscure the fact that violence and intimidation were part and parcel of union strategy-as the martial terms "strike" and "picket" indicate. The continuation of strike violence even after the New Deal gave unions legal privileges and disarmed employers (such as the 1954 Kohler strike and the 1999 New York Daily News strike) reminds us of this fact. We today may assume that if A does not want to work for B, A can use force to prevent C from working for B; but it did not appear that way to most Americans before the New Deal, and does not to a few Americans today. It is incumbent upon historians, even those in the ideological closed shop of labor history, to consider the fact.
[For another review, see www.iisg.nl/~ialhi/news/i0308_14.html.]
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