American strikes are not like European strikes: they are usually bigger and longer. They have been a lot bloodier as well, because, to nobody's surprise, there are often lots of guns around. People get killed when Americans goes on strike. There was a “classic” period of strikes in America, roughly from the 1870s to the 1930s, when this was true in excelsis. Take for example the strike of miners in the Trinidad District of Colorado, 1912‐1914. This, and the Ludlow Massacre which accompanied it, resulted in over 20 deaths, most of them strikers and their families.
Conversely, the violence was sometimes, although less commonly, meted out by the strikers themselves. An instance of this was the massacre at Herrin, Illinois in 1922 – also a miners' strike. The enraged miners corralled a bunch of blackleg workers, who had been imported by the mine bosses, into a barbed wire pen and then shot, beat or knifed them to death: 20 people lost their lives. There has been an elemental quality about American strikes, a struggle for survival which European strikes have never equalled. The aim was not simply to win but to annihilate the other side.
In the past 50 years, however, the situation has changed. Strikes have been civilized. For one thing, that level of violence has been transferred to the big inner city riots like Newark, Detroit and LA. Today, the office workers and grape‐pickers who go on strike are more likely to parade around with placards instead of guns. Second, today's new militants are often public service workers such as postmen and teachers instead of the “big battalions” of miners and factory‐workers. Third, methods of conciliation are more sophisticated and highly developed than in the days when the steelworkers went head to head with Carnegie and Frick. And lastly, employers cannot ship in truckloads of scab labour to break the strike. With a trained and skilled workforce, such tactics are impossible. Putting the new and the old patterns of striking together, the authors of The Encyclopedia of Strikes have plenty to write about.
The book begins with a useful Timeline and a Topic Finder. Then there is a short piece by Aaron Brenner on Types of Strikes. Brenner believes there are fourteen overlapping categories of strike and he details each one. The main sections of the book begin with some Theories of Strikes, followed by the Corporate Strategies adopted by management to cope with strikes, then a section on the value of strike‐breakers (Mercenaries as the author generously calls them) and an interesting piece by Jeremy Brecher (who wrote the valuable historical survey, Strike! in 1972) on why strikes are on the decline. Then we look at some of the key themes and dimensions of the strike phenomenon – strikes and the news media, and the Catholic church, and the civil rights movement, and so on.
The remaining three parts of the book are more empirical and narrative in content. (They make up 75 per cent of the whole). They offer descriptive accounts of the strikes: 44 chapters in all. The going rate is about ten pages each. However, they are presented with a difference: to drone through the thousands of stoppages since the middle 1800s, one by one, would gives us a jumbled miscellany of strikes, in chronological or alphabetical order but otherwise unorganized. Instead, the strikes are presented in clusters: the main disputes concerning each occupational group or industry have been gathered together in one section. This makes a lot of sense. (If you want chronology, use the Timeline at the beginning.) All the Automobile Workers' Strikes are treated in one section, the Teamsters Strikes in another, the Railroad Strikes in a third. Big industries with a big strike record get more than one chapter: steel and textiles gets two chapters each, mining gets three.
There are some unlikely occupations on the list. Newsboys, Waitresses and Professional Athletes seem to have been surprisingly militant; they are all included along with Nurses, Musicians, Plumbers, Rubber Workers, Office Workers, Social Workers and Aerospace Engineers, to name but some. It may be true that most Americans have never dallied with political radicalism and that very few of them are unionized, but they know how to fight for their rights. Anybody who believes that they are compliant pawns of the free market or the submissive creatures of City Hall had better think again.
Here are some nuts and bolts of the book. The editors, Brenner, Day and Ness are, respectively, a consultant and labour union researcher, a campaigner and professional lobbyist and a professor of political science in New York. There is also a list of the sixty contributors who have written the book. They are mostly college professors along with a few journalists and independent scholars. We do not know whether they are historians, sociologists, economists or something else. Each of their chapters concludes with a reading list. The items quoted in them are very tightly focused around the subject of the chapter and include some fairly abstruse books and articles. All told, there must be over five hundred entries in these lists. They are augmented by a short Additional Bibliography at the end which contains another 150 items; these are all equally specialised and relevant. The book has two indices – one for Subjects, the other for Names.
The Encyclopedia of Strikes has very few weaknesses, considering its size and the ground it covers. For my money, it is a first class reference book. I feel, however, that some themes suffer from relative neglect; they could have been developed and perhaps given a section of their own. Firstly the response of politicians and official authorities to strikes deserves examination. This ranges from the local sheriff, through the National Guard and the state Governor to the White House itself. In the early days (the Railroad Upheavals of 1877, the Haymarket, the Homestead strike, the Pullman Strike and southern textile strikes of 1929‐30), the state intervened blatantly on behalf of capital. But was that pattern repeated later on? There is lots of scattered material on this but perhaps a dedicated chapter would be appropriate. Secondly, how successful were strikes in bridging the racial divide between workers? Did black workers and white strike together? There is a chapter on strikes and the civil rights movement as such, but that is different matter. To see my point, consider the 1921 Chicago meat‐packers' strike. It was a white man's strike; most of the black meat‐packers stayed on the job rather than join a white man's union. In the US Steel strike of 1901 white workers and their union, the Amalgamated, remained adamantly hostile to blacks. How long did such attitudes last? A third possible theme for development was the relationship of the law and the courts to strikes. The index has some references to court injunctions but there may be more material to be mined here (In re Debs, Supreme Court, 1895 for instance). Until Muller v. Oregon (1908) the Court was certainly anti‐labour and pro‐business in every respect. (I refer readers to the Sugar Trust case, Holden v. Hardy, Lochner v. NY and Adair v. United States.)
What does the book look like? One day all big reference books will be electronic and work with a Kindle reader, but until that day comes, we must learn to cope with hefty tomes like this. The Encyclopedia of Strikes is a quarto in one volume, thick but quite compact. It is soundly bound and printed for years of wear. The editors have thrown in a few pictures but the book is almost all double‐column text. Sadly, there are no statistics. It is easy to read and handy to use and the hefty price will come as no surprise to librarians. Messrs Brenner, Day and Ness and company have produced a very good book.
