Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
the American industrial labor system from the end of the Civil War to the 1920’s.
identity, unity, and purpose among the workers of late nineteenth and early twentieth
century labor. He argues that the beginning of scientific management, the impact of new
technology, and the dawn of government regulations combined to break down the house
of labor. The house of labor the Montgomery refers to is the craft unionism that was
established and became popular during the end of the nineteenth century in industrial
culture. Montgomery’s argument shows that this craft unionism was transformed by the
changes in industry of the twentieth century and homogenized the experience of the
Montgomery begins his study with an introduction to craft unionism and then
goes on to explain the different types of industrial workers: the craftsman, common
craftsman and craft unionist. He then goes on to explain how the new technological
advances in factory machinery led to specialization of factory jobs and did away with the
and new technology had influenced the transformation of the labor world, he then goes
on to explain how World War I gave these working-class activists’ the opportunity to use
the importance of their work for their democratic cause; using the war to get the
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government regulations they wanted. The problem was that these workers failed to
realize that these conditions were only going to be temporarily. Montgomery ends his
book with the decline of the labor protests. He refers to the economic slump of the
1920’s, the employer’s open shop policy drive and the political plot of Samuel Gompers
The Fall of the House of Labor provides a truly detailed work on the labor
movement of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Montgomery
provides a source that has been thoroughly researched and provides adequate
information. The chapters in his book do have a decent structure, but they can confuse
the reader on his direction at times, considering the length of each. It would have been
better understood if the reader was not overwhelmed with detailed information and he
provided more analysis than he does statistics. Altogether, Montgomery’s study provides
a very intriguing picture of the labor movement and provides a logical source for why
this movement was so much stronger in the beginning of the twentieth century than later.
John C. McKnight