Winner of the Labor History Best Book Prize
The exceptional weakness of the American labor movement has often been attributed to the successful resistance of American employers to unionization and collective bargaining. However, the ideology deployed against labor's efforts to organize at the grassroots level has received less attention. In Citizen Employers, Jeffrey Haydu compares the very different employer attitudes and experiences that guided labor-capital relations in two American cities, Cincinnati and San Francisco, in the period between the Civil War and World War I. His account puts these attitudes and experiences into the larger framework of capitalist class formation and businessmen's collective identities.
Cincinnati and San Francisco saw dramatically different developments in businessmen's class alignments, civic identities, and approach to unions. In Cincinnati, manufacturing and commercial interests joined together in a variety of civic organizations and business clubs. These organizations helped members overcome their conflicts and identify their interests with the good of the municipal community. That pervasive ideology of “business citizenship” provided much of the rationale for opposing unions. In sharp contrast, San Francisco's businessmen remained divided among themselves, opted to side with white labor against the Chinese, and advocated treating both unions and business organizations as legitimate units of economic and municipal governance.
Citizen Employers closely examines the reasons why these two bourgeoisies, located in comparable cities in the same country at the same time, differed so radically in their degree of unity and in their attitudes toward labor unions, and how their views would ultimately converge and harden against labor by the 1920s. With its nuanced depiction of civic ideology and class formation and its application of social movement theory to economic elites, this book offers a new way to look at employer attitudes toward unions and collective bargaining. That new approach, Haydu argues, is equally applicable to understanding challenges facing the American labor movement today.
Reviews
"Bourgeois class formation is one of the most important, yet understudied, issues in U.S. history. Citizen Employers provides a theoretically sophisticated account of the making of the Gilded Age bourgeoisie, comparing the institutions, ideology, civic discourse and workplace politics of the merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and professionals of Cincinnati and San Francisco. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the trajectory of class relations in the United States."—Sven Beckert, Harvard University, author of The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie
“Citizen Employers is easily one of the best historical studies we have of America's economic elite. Jeffrey Haydu's thoughtful reflections on business leaders are smart and insightful. His book will appeal to everyone interested in class formation, social movements, and cultural sociology and will earn the respect and admiration of historians for its narrative integrity, solid evidentiary basis, and use of primary sources.”—Howard Kimeldorf, University of Michigan
"Citizen Employers is a very fine book. Jeffrey Haydu's analysis of class formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is thorough and persuasive."—Howell Harris, Durham University
About the Author
Jeffrey Haydu is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Between Craft and Class and Making American Industry Safe for Democracy.
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