Books About American Labor

Abstract

The labor movement has held the attention of radicals more than other aspects of American civilization. The resulting labor literature has evoked, in a period of nearly total acceptance of established institutions, some scholarly grumbling. "Only in the labor field," complains Vaughn David Barnet, "has there appeared a noticeable percentage of writings dedicated, not to telling the story, but to discrediting leaders, movements, organizations, our balanced two-party system, and an economy based on the profit motive." ("The New Labor History," The Historian, Autumn 1955.) Despite Mr. Barnet's alarm, many studies of labor advance no great criticism of our way of life. Indeed, the first, and still influential, trend of labor studies, the Wisconsin school of John R. Commons and Selig Perlman, has always been anti-radical.

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