The Fall Of The House Labor Review

1 Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1987. David Montgomery’s The Fall of the House of Labor is a historical overview of the American industrial labor system from the end of the Civil War to the 1920’s. Montgomery’s work is a study of the working-class activists’ efforts to foster a sense of identity, unity, and purpose among the workers of late nineteenth and early twentieth century labor. He argues that the beginning of scientific management, the impact of new technology, and the dawn of government regulations combined to break down the house of labor. The house of labor the Montgomery refers to is the craft unionism that was established and became popular during the end of the nineteenth century in industrial culture. Montgomery’s argument shows that this craft unionism was transformed by the changes in industry of the twentieth century and homogenized the experience of the skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled industrial workers. Montgomery begins his study with an introduction to craft unionism and then goes on to explain the different types of industrial workers: the craftsman, common laborer, operative, and metal-worker. After establishing the types of workers, Montgomery then explains how the introduction of scientific method created a hierarchical system of business organization and eventually became problematic to the craftsman and craft unionist. He then goes on to explain how the new technological advances in factory machinery led to specialization of factory jobs and did away with the importance of craftsmanship. After Montgomery established how the scientific method and new technology had influenced the transformation of the labor world, he then goes on to explain how World War I gave these working-class activists’ the opportunity to use the importance of their work for their democratic cause; using the war to get the

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2 government regulations they wanted. The problem was that these workers failed to realize that these conditions were only going to be temporarily. Montgomery ends his book with the decline of the labor protests. He refers to the economic slump of the 1920’s, the employer’s open shop policy drive and the political plot of Samuel Gompers of the AFL all combined to tear down the labor movement. The Fall of the House of Labor provides a truly detailed work on the labor movement of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Montgomery provides a source that has been thoroughly researched and provides adequate information. The chapters in his book do have a decent structure, but they can confuse the reader on his direction at times, considering the length of each. It would have been better understood if the reader was not overwhelmed with detailed information and he provided more analysis than he does statistics. Altogether, Montgomery’s study provides a very intriguing picture of the labor movement and provides a logical source for why this movement was so much stronger in the beginning of the twentieth century than later. John C. McKnight Appalachian State University

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