Workers in America

Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, by Alan Dawley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 300 pp.

“Labor now has become a commodity, wealth capital, and the natural order of things is entirely reversed . . . capital and labor stand opposed,” stated a labor newspaper, the Awl, written for the shoemakers of Lynn and surrounding towns in 1844—four years before the publication of The Communist Manifesto. The author shows in instructive detail that such cries of indignation and revolt against the nascent power of industrial capitalism were to be repeated throughout the 19th century in Lynn, a major center of shoe production throughout the century, as in many neighboring industrial towns. And yet, even though there were major strikes, large-scale union organization, the rise and fall of a number of workingmen’s parties in Lynn, the bulk of its working class remained still as much wedded to the American political system at the end of the century as it had been at its beginning. This sticks in the throat of the author, a young labor and social historian of the Neo-Marxist school. No matter how hard he tries to explain them away, the stubborn facts will not be denied.

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