Labor History in the United States
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imm BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTRIBUTIONS NO. 6 LABOR HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES A General Bibliography INSTITUTE OF LABOR AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LI B RARY OF THE UNIVER.5ITY.. Of ILLINOIS 0163310973 St8£ Hii/juiii tr.'jiiorty suKVfet LIBRARY BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTRIBUTIONS NO. 6 LABOR HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES A General Bibliography Compiled by Gene S. Stroud and Gilbert E. Donahue INSTITUTE OF LABOR AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA, 1961 Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. A6 1-9096. 0/<i, 33/6773 PREFACE In 1953, the University of Illinois Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations published Ralph E. McCoy's History of Labor and Unionism in the United States: A Selected Bibliography as the second in its new Bibliographic Contributions series. In the preface of that compilation of 1,024 titles. Professor McCoy stated: This contribution is largely an assemblage of secondary works published sepa- rately, i.e., books and pamphlets. Some of the items are surveys of existing conditions rather than histories, but have attained historical value with the passing of time. The term "labor" is used in a broad sense to include working conditions, labor-management relations, and government regulation of industrial relations. This broad approach to the compilation of materials on labor history as well as the bibliography itself were favorably received, and the publica- tion was soon out of print. Basic to the McCoy bibliography were standard books, monographs, and pamphlets on labor history and related accounts of specific events, movements, or organizations which influenced the development of trade unionism in the United States. Those works, whether scholarly or pop- ular, which reported the political, economic, and social conditions by time periods also were part of the basic list. A few non-statistical government documents and publications were included, as were some pamphlets which concerned events and issues not reported in other forms. Addi- tional items, referred to in the preface as "marginal material," were listed for convenient reference. Professor McCoy's compilation excluded government statistical reports, union proceedings and journals, unpublished theses, articles in periodi- cals, and most general histories containing only chapters or sections on the American labor movement. Also excluded were business histories and general works on radicalism, Utopias, and cooperatives, unless they related specifically to trade unionism. The continuing need for a reference tool of wide scope and the desir- ability of including recently published materials led the Institute's Library Committee, in 1958, to approve and encourage preparation of a successor to the original bibliography. Labor History in the United States: A General Bibliography is the successor. In selecting material for the new bibliography, McCoy's definition of labor history was extended to include a wide range of concepts, forces, events, and issues that influenced, however slightly, the development of the labor movement in the United States up to the end of World War II in 1945. Hence, material from what has traditionally been defined as the core area of labor history is supplemented with tangential data. In part, the problems of definition in labor history are posed because labor history has been treated by economists and industrial relations specialists rather than by general historians. It is hoped that this bibliography not only documents the range of forces that shaped labor unionism in the United States, but also stimulates fresh approaches to the writing of labor history. The scope of this bibliography is best described by comparing the bases of inclusion and exclusion used in it with those of the earlier work. Most of the items in the McCoy list have been retained; types of materials deleted were those in mimeograph, manuscript, or microfilm form, un- translated foreign publications, works on Canadian labor, and pamphlets of fewer than fifty pages published since 1886. Pamphlets which were retained, or added to the original list, were those especially relevant to a specific topic or providing information not found elsewhere. At best, the present pamphlet selection represents only a minute sampling of what is available. A separate bibliography of pamphlets is needed to give ade- quate coverage to the thousands which have been published on labor unionism and related subjects. Separate bibliographies of Canadian labor history and of untranslated foreign publications on American labor history would also be useful. This bibliography has been expanded in scope to include some of the materials excluded in the McCoy compilation: statistical summaries and studies relating to wages and hours, living cost, productivity, employment and unemployment, work stoppage, social security, and health and wel- fare activity. Bulletins and reports of the U.S. Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics were examined, and those germane to the scope of this bibliography were included. Resources did not permit a detailed search of all the reports and documents of Congressional com- mittees, industrial commissions, and investigatory and fact-finding boards, but the best known and most frequently cited were listed. Partial cover- age also has been given to the histories and activities of state and federal administrative and regulatory agencies in labor areas. Additional biographies and autobiographies of labor leaders, as well as some public figures and industrialists who have been prominent in the history of the labor-management relationship, were located. Books and monographs using the case study approach to collective bargaining, arbi- tration, labor law, and human relations appear also. While the earlier work explicitly excluded articles in periodicals, the new bibliography cites a number of articles and collections of articles which appeared in special or topical issues of journals, anthologies, or encyclopedias. Again, only partial coverage is given to this important area.* Journal articles and symposiums which are included provide summaries of contemporary thought regarding labor at a particular time period. Other additions to the earlier compilation have been largely the result of extending the coverage, in depth and in terms of numbers of items, of the various subject areas. As in the McCoy bibliography, a certain amount of "marginal material" has been listed. An attempt has been made to maintain consistency in style and in the information included in both individual and series entries. Publishers were identified, where possible, by the name used in the Cumulative Book Index. Such notations as and "n.d." were eliminated where "n.p." ; information about place, publisher, date, or pagination does not appear, it was not available in the sources used in the compilation. Parenthetic notations identify series or otherwise describe the origin of the material and are not intended to present any normative connotations. Where the sources used indicated that subsequent editions of a book differed ma- terially from earlier editions, the latest edition was listed and a paren- thetic notation provides basic information about the original version. Experience demonstrated that the arrangement of the McCoy com- pilation was both practical and useful in a bibliography which embraced a variety of separate, though often interrelated, subjects. Consequently, the 2,022 items in the new listing are numbered in alphabetical order by author, or by issuing agency in the case of publications of governmental agencies and some private organizations, as they were in the earlier work. If the issuing agency credits an individual as author, editor, or compiler, an unnumbered entry is made under his name, and a cross reference to the numbered entry is provided. Preparation of the Subject Index has also followed the general arrange- ment used by Professor McCoy, and a majority of the entries from that bibliography have been retained with no change in their indexing. Where changes were made, it was to reclassify the items to conform to the additional index heads and subheads needed to preserve the usefulness of such a large compilation. Wherever possible, the added items were examined before they were indexed. Some, however, were not available, and in these cases the classification was based on Library of Congress catalog cards, book reviews, or the suggestions of persons acquainted with the publication. An effort was made to classify the subject matter of each item by its * A comprehensive bibliography of journal articles related to labor history is being prepared as Number 7 in the Institute's Bibliographic Contributions series. It will list articles from various local, state, regional and subject history journals. major emphasis as well as by the principal events, concepts, persons, or organizations considered in it. Many decisions as to where an item should be indexed were, of necessity, arbitrary. It was also necessary, whenever a large number of books would be classified under a very general heading, such as "labor problems," to make some mechanical distinction among the items. These distinctions, based on the period during which the items were published or on the period of time covered by them, were made to break large blocks of index numbers into smaller, more usable groups. Liberal use of cross references has been made, and many items which are indexed under one or more main subject headings are also listed