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(This Symposium was organized and overseen by Michael Kazin)
What Did Gompers Start?
MICHAEL KAZIN*
Sometimes, it is an historian's role to restore common sense to her subject. Perhaps the most significant thing Julie Greene accomplishes in her new book, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917, is to take up one of the oldest myths of U.S. labor history-the apolitical stance of the AFL in the Gompers era-and to destroy it with a closely argued narrative about the evolution and consequences of the Federation's political strategy. Without advertising herself, Greene has supplied the missing piece in the story of labor politics from the Civil War to the present. For almost a century, since John Commons began celebrating "pure and simple unionism" and Eugene Debs denounced it, only a handful of scholars have bothered to investigate how an intensely ideological group of union leaders struggled to advance their movement's power and status by any legal means necessary- including party politics.'
With Greene's book, we can now understand how Gompers and his closest allies learned from their predecessors-the labor republicans, some Marxist and some not, of the Gilded Age-to mistrust "party slavery" while rejecting their sweeping, romantic vision of a workers' commonwealth. At the same time, the early AFL headmen inched along a path later activists from both the CIO and an "industrialized" AFL would travel with more confidence-toward an American social democracy that dared not speak its name. Dorothy Sue Cobble and William Forbath both offer appreciative critiques of how Greene interprets this process; their comments are important, if brief, essays in their own right about a subject that, it is hoped, will now escape the margins of the working-class past where it has dwelled since the rise of social history and the decline of the kind of scholarship-the old institutionalism-that Selig Perlman and Philip Taft used to write.2
Greene's work is now indispensable to all students of American labor politics-but that status will inevitably lead her readers to wonder about the larger meaning of her skillful narrative. In particular, Greene might have explored the consequences of the AFL's ability to carve out a niche in the political order during an age when citizen-reformers and progressive politicians continually fretted...