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Book Review: Historical Studies: Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present

In the early nineteenth century a hatting industry emerged in the United States centered in Danbury, Connecticut, and Orange, New Jersey, with major firms also operating in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Increased production, mechanization, and division of labor in the trade oddly enough did not spell a simple dilution of skills, but in some instances led to the creation of new craft positions. Highly skilled hat finishers-responsible just for the final shaping and polishing of hats-are the subjects of David Bensmaan's investigation of nineteenthcentury craft work and craft unionism. In the first decades of the century, hat finishers formed a succession of locally based protective societies aimed at maintaining their skill monopoly in the industry. Their demands included union regulation of apprenticeship, hiring, and work scheduling, as well as strict enforcement of the closed shop, In 1854, the groups then existing amalgamated into the Hat Finishers National Trade Association. Bensman documents the fluctuating forty-year history of this organization. Business cycles, intense competition among hat makers, technological innovation, and craft jurisdictional disputes were ongoing obstacles to successful organizing, but the author repeatedly emphasizes another factor: the strength and persistence of traditions of local autonomy. The cultural portrait of the hat finishers that Bensman invokes stresses their artisanal spirit of independence, mutuality, and manliness. Several key strikes lost in the 1880s because of obstinacy on the part of local officials and the rank and file, the author argues, forced a reevaluation of the union's structure and activities. The results included centralization of decision making, concentration on the union-label strategy and campaigns, and more efforts at conciliation and arbitration with management groups. Bensman concludes that in this way hat finishers became more class-conscious and classoriented and less craft-motivated, allowing for the formation of the more industrially based United Hatters of North America in 1896 and for greater impact in general. By 1902, only twelve of America's 190 hat manufacturers were producing on the basis of the open shop. Bensman seems on firm ground when he narrates events and developments-his fine chapters on the hat finishers' opposition to prison labor, the boycotts and strikes of the 1 880s, and the union-label efforts quickly come to mind. His attempt to create a cultural history is less successful; the documentation is spotty and the presentation disjointed and highly speculative. Most troubling is the distinction he deliberately draws between craft and class orientation, for here confusion abounds. At one point he argues that the hat finishers were not politically or socially minded because "they thought of themselves primarily as craftsmen" (p. 58)-which makes no sense. That the hatters lost their craft sensibilities and supposedly became more class aware after 1890 (whatever that means) is also in doubt, since Bensman provides little history after that date.