Labor Market Politics and the Great War: The Department of Labor, the States, and the First U.S. Employment Service, 1907-1933

Labor Market Politics and the Great War: The Department of Labor, the States, and the First US. Employment Service, 1907-1933 By William J. Breen. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1997. rr, 233 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-87338559-4.)

As in his earlier book on the Council of National Defense (1984), William J. Breen here tackles a major theory of state making through the intensive study of a World War I agency, the United States Employment Service (USES). Breen wants to demonstrate the "crucial importance of the state itself," acting autonomously to extend its administrative control over the national labor market. The attempt failed, Breen says, because of a bitter organizational struggle between "federalists" (state officials enrolled in the American Association of Public Employment Offices) and "nationalists" (headed by William B. Wilson and Louis F. Post in the...