David Montgomery had a unique perspective from which to write The Fall of the House of Labor. Having spent several years in the workforce and involved in labor politics during the 1950s, he saw the culture and the challenges of labor movements first hand. Montgomery continued his activism for worker’s rights even after he established himself as a respected academic.[1] Montgomery’s time in the Communist Party also contributed to his view on Labor issues.[2] In creating the school known as “New Labor History”, along with historians E.P. Thompson, David Brody, and Herbert G. Gutman, Montgomery moved labor history from economic history to social history. He further cemented that position by writing The Fall of the House of Labor.

Montgomery states in his introduction, “The human relationships structured by commodity production in large collective enterprises…generated bondings and antagonisms that were…the daily experience of everyone involved.”[3] To study labor history is not only to study the economics of production, but the individuals who produced. The daily lives of workers both at work and at home are integral to the history of labor in the United States. Montgomery never separated the two. He also insisted that it is not only important to see the individual, but to heed the wide variety of individuals as well, “Before the 1920s, the house of labor had many mansions.”[4] From the lowest unskilled labor to the highly skilled artisans, “labor” encompassed a diverse array of characters and types alike. In some cases, this diversity could be wielded as strength, but in many ways, it was what caused the downfall of organized labor after 1920.

The first third of the book examined the different classes of laborers through individual positions. In so doing, he gave the reader an invaluable insight into the lives of the workers, while also demonstrating the importance of those lives to his work. Though workers of all levels came together briefly enough to give the Socialist Party some prominence in the 1916 election, they could not hold long enough to institute true lasting political change.[5] By the time of the 1920 Presidential election, the fervent patriotism that grew from World War I, coupled with a growing fear of Bolshevism created an atmosphere of distrust of the labor unions, and they were not able to unite against the growing tide of anti-unionism. The organizations fell to open-shop drives and nativist propaganda.

Additionally, the institution of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” created further divisions. Taylor studied organization of production and sought to increase industrial efficiency. His ideas were implemented with the addition of a new layer of management on the factory and shop floors. This new layer created yet another class within the working class.[6] Later in the book, Montgomery shifts from the individual to the whole, arguing that “social engineering had to be applied to the whole matrix” of the workers’ lives in order to “do more than simply increase the operative’s productivity.”[7]

With all of the various components arrayed against Labor, it is no wonder that the “House of Labor” fell after the 1920s. The only surprise might lie in that it held out as long as it did against a prolonged and profound assault that one reviewer called “the protracted socio-economic equivalent of a nuclear attack.” The combined power of industro-capitalists coupled with public perception and fear of Communism/Socialism/Bolshevism all but doomed the Labor movement. Governmental repression and strong anti-immigration legislation also played a part. “In the tight repression of the Coolidge era, all but a radicalized handful of workers reported quietly to whatever jobs they managed to hold, discarding wartime aspirations as the folly of youth,” and concentrating their efforts on their home lives instead of their working conditions.[8]