Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century.

By David Montgomery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. x plus 189pp. $21.95).

Originating in the Tanner lectures delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford, Citizen Worker is the richest and fullest Montgomerian portrait of America's working class in the nineteenth century. In this succinct book, Professor Montgomery adds to his lifelong examination of "the experience of workingmen and women with the simultaneous evolution of political democracy and a capitalist economy." He points out that the needs of a capitalist mode of production severely restrained the possibilities for reform presented by the achievement of voting rights for white male wage Barnes ("political democracy"). As Professor Montgomery writes, "social priorities were set by people whose accumulated wealth proved decisive in determining the uses to which factors of production were put" (p. 2). And as always, armed force and the courts were at the disposal of the elite in times of crisis.

Yet the right to vote was not without its uses, and of course, wage workers did not simply succumb to the dictates of capitalist industrialization. Voting rights for white, and for a time, black, male wage Barnes "hastened the destruction of onerous forms of personal subordination to masters, landlords, and creditors" (p. 50). The right to vote was a weapon wage Barnes brought to bear on imprisonment for debt and landlord-appropriation of personal property for failure to pay rent, for example. As detailed throughout the book, key facets of capitalism--otherwise known as the "free market"--evoked intense working class opposition.

This book devotes itself not only to subjects typically deemed the purview of labor specialists, such as the debate over "just when and how criminal sanctions against quitting (`specific enforcement of labor contracts') came to an end in the United States," but also to topics traditionally defined as elements of social and urban history (p. 25). The ultimate superficiality of all such demarcations is recognized and erased in Citizen Worker. For example, Professor Montgomery, in common with most historians, has previously viewed the Great Strikes of 1877 as the dramatic expression of working class militancy based on grievances generated chiefly at the workplace. Now, however, conflicts and tensions created

by capitalism outside of the workplace, as well as inside the workplace, are seen as significant factors in the nature of the 1877 strikes (pp. 104-105).

As evidenced in this book and many other studies, capitalism generated numerous forms of dependency and exploitation in the 19th century. Men and women with little to sell except their labour power were not only dependent on employers for wages, and therefore, the means to subsist, but also landlords for a place to live. Alienation from land and real estate went hand in hand with alienation from the means of production; most wage earners were renters.

As Professor Montgomery observes, "the brutality of an industrial life shaped only by market forces was evident not only on the job, but also in the apartments, washrooms, and streets where men and women carried on their daily lives" (p. 154). In fact, he asserts that "among working people, struggles over land, rent, and housing--the physical domain of the reproduction of daily life" were as potent a form of class struggle "as the more famous battles that arose directly out of working for wages" (p. 114). In Citizen Worker, it is abundantly clear that "workers' homes played as decisive a role as their jobs in the class conflict over the social discipline required by a market-driven capitalist economy" (p. 111).

The value of home and neighborhood in the lives and consciousness of working people expressed itself on the level of electoral politics, as well, as Professor Montgomery outlines in his final chapter. A case in point is Henry George's 1886 campaign for mayor of New York city under the banner of the United Labor Party. The campaign targeted the rentier class as "the wealthy parasites living off the toil and suffering of others" and derived its strength--George received many more votes than Republican Theodore Roosevelt in a three way race won by the Democrats--from precisely the kinds of struggles over the physical terrain of urban life that Montgomery discusses (p. 112).

Historians may never be able to write the concluding chapter to the history of the working class in 19th century America, but all contributions need a concluding chapter, including this book. Based on numerous secondary sources as well as the accumulated research and insights of the author, this book is an interpretive synthesis of much of the work produced by historians of 19th century America. Given a current intellectual climate which spawns a profusion of tightly circumscribed studies, we need more products akin to Citizen Worker.