American labor

The quest for an American Standard of Living has haunted the American imagination and has unified the working energies of Americans regardless of their jobs. Among the peculiarly American features which have made this unifying notion pos sible are the variety of working conditions, the high wages, the agricultural background of the economy, and the vagueness of classes. Because of these unique haracteristics it is especially difficult to separate the history of "American labor" from the whole story of American civilization. We must not look for a class of workers but for Americans at work.

One of the many virtues of Mr. Pelling's interpretation is that he is sensitive to these peculiarities of the American situa tion. After the middle of the nineteenth century, militant leaders of the European labor movements made the romantic mistake of assuming that "the laboring classes" had an interna tional character and that the history of labor in every country would repeat familiar motifs found in England, France, and Germany. In this volume, Mr. Pelling shows us how working conditions and labor organization have been shaped by all the circum stances of life in the New World. And he lets us observe how the crises of national life--the American Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the two world wars-have affected the fortunes of workingmen and of their organizations, and how these in turn have affected national politics and the ideals of American society.