A Major History of American Labor

Since the early years of the twentieth century, historians have characterized the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the preeminent organization of American trade unionists from the 1890s through the early 1930s, as craft-dominated, procapitalist, and politically tame. America’s pioneer labor historians, members of the “Wisconsin school,” celebrated the rise of the AFL as a natural adaptation by American workers to a society that deemed the pursuit of private property the h...