The labor question that emerged in the late nineteenth century, according to Rosanne Currarino, came down to this: could democracy survive in industrial America? This seemed to be an unsettlingly open question in the years between the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century. The extension of vast markets, the introduction of new forms of mass production, the influx of millions of immigrants, and the incredible concentration of wealth in the hands of an emerging corporate elite remade the country in ways that forced Americans to redefine democratic life.

In this slim, deeply researched, keenly observant, and engagingly written volume, Currarino provides a guide through the complex social, cultural, and intellectual landscape of Gilded Age America to trace diverse efforts that were undertaken to reconcile industrialism and democracy. She shows that American reformers responded to the challenge of industrialism with competing impulses. One impulse drew on the producerist ideology whose roots stretched back into the early republic and whose values extolled the virtues of a proprietary economy of citizen producers, one that called into question the very organization of a corporate-dominated industrial capitalism. The other impulse embraced the new politics of economic citizenship and economic democracy that took the structures of industrial capitalism as a given and sought to integrate them into a new, democratic industrial order in which citizens’ roles as consumers became increasingly important. Currarino shows how the first impulse gradually, haltingly, and painfully gave way to the second in the years between the Panic of 1873 and the economic crisis of the 1890s. Still, she makes clear that this transition was not straightforward, nor was it entirely complete or free from contradictions. As a result, vestiges of the producerist ethic lingered on in “spectral” form into the twentieth century and even persist in the present day.

The book's five chapters illustrate different moments in the shift from a producerist to a more consumerist understanding of labor and citizenship. The first chapter examines the responses to the depression of the 1870s, when the labor question first crystallized in American political discourse. The depression highlighted seismic changes in American life that had reshaped the nation's economy since 1850. As politicians and workers alike sought to explain the causes of the depression, most turned to “the language of producerism to assert mid-nineteenth ideals of citizenship and democracy” and argued that the violation of these ideals led to the catastrophe (12). However, a small group began to focus on the problem of overproduction as a cause of the economy's weakness. In the 1880s, this view gained ground, with important consequences.

Currarino's second chapter examines a central preoccupation of the white workers of the Gilded Age, especially in the West: the threat posed by Chinese labor. Although many scholars have written intelligently about anti-Chinese agitation in these years, Currarino adds something new. She points out that white critiques of Chinese labor were first rooted in the idea that “coolies” would subvert the republican ideal of a nation of self-sufficient producers. She shows that in time, however, the anti-Chinese discourse focused increasingly on questions of consumption and found an “especially malevolent” threat in the Chinese laborers’ “apparent refusal to consume American goods, which these workers were paid to produce” (53). Later anti-Chinese agitation, therefore, reinforced an ideal of citizenship that stressed “the male breadwinner norm, the importance of consumption, and the centrality of attainable desires” to the emerging industrial order (59).

Political economists such as Henry Carter Adams, John Bates Clark, Simon Nelson Patten, and Francis Amasa Walker are the focus of Currarino's third chapter. With Richard T. Ely and others, they challenged and overturned David Ricardo's wages-fund theory (which assumed that a fixed and limited pool of capital existed to pay wages, no matter how large or how productive the labor force). Patten advanced a theory of prosperity that emphasized the importance of leisure and comfort, prefiguring in some important ways the consumerist thinking of the twentieth century.

Chapter Four examines how the largest labor organization of the Gilded Age, the producerist Knights of Labor, was supplanted by the “politics of more” as espoused by the upstart American Federation of Labor and its most prominent leader, Samuel Gompers. When Gompers was asked what labor wanted, he famously responded: “More! More today and more tomorrow; and then . . . more and more” (110). The “more” demanded by Gompers and his union colleagues involved not only higher wages and shorter hours, Currarino argues. It “proposed that it was both right and reasonable for citizens to expect to partake in the economic abundance of industrial society” (112).

Currarino's final sketch focuses on the “end of the labor question” as the crisis of the 1890s gave way to the progressive reform impulses of the early twentieth century. The chapter looks closely at Jane Addams, the settlement house pioneer, George Gunton, the often neglected disciple of eight-hour crusader Ira Steward, and Walter Weyl, the progressive best known for helping to shape the reformist approach of The New Republic. Each in their own way contributed to the great shift that helped transform the labor question “from a question about wage work and democracy into a question about the extent and nature of participation in economic life,” posing what Currarino calls “the question of the new century” (145).

Currarino may overstate the extent to which a consumption-oriented perspective had begun to define the social question in the early twentieth century. Advocates of industrial democracy—of whom there were many among the ranks of unionists and reformers through the 1930s—argued that the main thrust of the labor reformers up through the New Deal was the effort to establish rights and democracy in the workplace. Regardless, Rosanne Currarino has provided a nuanced, deeply informed reading of the complex intellectual and cultural currents that shaped the labor question in the late nineteenth century. This is quite simply a marvelously informative book.