Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97.

Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97. By Richard Schneirov (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. viii plus 390pp.).

Richard Schneirov has written an ambitious and important book. It is ambitious in that it aims to combine the concerns of labor history and of political history in order to offer a new perspective on both the origins of modern liberalism and the nature of the late nineteenth-century class formation and labor organization. It is important in that Schneirov's fusion of class and politics yields a set of fresh insights that are likely to engage historians for a long time to come. Foremost among these insights is the book's central argument. Schneirov demonstrates rather convincingly that modern liberalism predated the oft-cited crisis of the 1890s by as much as a decade and originated not in the quiet parlors of middle-class reformers worried about the effects of economic depression and political corruption, but out of the interaction between reformers, party leaders, and labor agitators during the labor upheavals that violently shook Chicago's political and social structure in the 1880s.

The narrative of this densely researched book is complex and subtle. In the book's opening chapters, Schneirov sets the stage for his argument about the watershed nature of the 1880s by analyzing Chicago's post-bellum history on three different levels. He traces the trajectory of the city's industrial growth and its rising immigrant population, describing how these processes in turn shaped the contours of class formation. He examines the development of labor organizations and their efforts to project their agendas politically. And he examines the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago party politics, where labor organizations were but one group of players in an often shifting constellation of alliances and counter-alliances. In this story, Schneirov makes clear, "mass parties and organization politics" were "as much terrains for the conflict and accommodation between classes and interest groups as they were autonomous political players" (47).

This story ranges from the radical Germans who nurtured the Socialist Labor Party, to the Bridgeport Irish who built the Knights of Labor in Chicago, to the Democratic party ward heelers who made the onetime Greenbacker, Carter Harrison, mayor in 1879. Harrison's administration is crucial to Schneirov's argument. He contends that Harrison realigned his city's politics, allowing the Democrats to play "an aggregating role for Chicago's heterogeneous working class, bringing unity where there would have been none, not only among workers but between workers and segments of other strata" (139). Harrison struck effective alliances with the city's labor organizations, stealing the thunder of many labor politicians in the early 1880s. The collapse of these alliances, precipitated when the mayor supported the busting of a streetcar strike in 1885, in turn provoked a backlash among Chicago workers which helped trigger the violence that erupted in Haymarket Square in 1886.

In the wake of the upheaval of 1886, both Chicago's political and labor organizations were shaken to their foundations. In successive waves, anarchist radicalism rose and fell; the Knights of Labor launched an abortive labor party before itself collapsing; the city's trades unions split from the Knights and stabilized themselves; and influential mugwump liberals came to revise their antiquated worldview amid the class warfare that engulfed their city. Out of these developments, a "new politics" (270) emerged. This politics, rooted in the budding relationships among concerned middle-class idealists such as Henry Demarest Lloyd, increasingly confident trade unionists, and opportunistic Democrats, demonstrated the "power of class-bridging reform" (279). Well before the depression of the 1890s set in, these allies began fashioning what were to become the central tenets of Progressive-era liberalism.

Adding to the power of its argument are two additional features of this book. First, Schneirov rejects the exaggerated dualities that have too often warped labor histories of this period: trade unions versus the Knights of Labor; independent labor politics versus the two-party system; radicalism versus reform. Rather than simply reworking these dualities, Schneirov has probed beneath them to uncover a hidden world of interconnections among all of these tendencies. Second, Schneirov writes with uncommon insight about labor's historically subordinate place within the liberal political order that it helped define. "We are nearly all agreed that it isn't good policy ... to draw the class line" too sharply in politics, one of Chicago's union leaders observed in 1889 (279). Even as they helped build a new politics, labor leaders recognized that in America such an undertaking would necessarily be a cross-class endeavor. To his credit, Schneirov appreciates this fact far more keenly than most labor historians.

This remarkable book deserves a broad readership among political and labor historians alike. Its powerful argument is very likely to help set the terms of debate for late nineteenth-century specialists in each of these fields for some time to come