Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement, by Clayton Sinyai, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2006, x, 292 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4455-5.

In this new political history of the American labour movement, Clayton Sinyai argues that the history of the American labour movement records an ongoing dialogue of American workers with one another and with other concerned citizens about the nature of democracy and the demands of citizenship. Although American labour has shown relatively little interest in socialism, neither have American trade unions practiced a “business unionism,” exclusively preoccupied with improving members’ wages. Rather, they have acted as organs of civic education preparing working people for the demands of political participation. The early American Federation of Labor (AFL) tried to achieve this end by encouraging unions to act as voluntary associations cultivating “civic virtue” among their members. The growth of modern industrial capitalism and of the liberal state created a hostile environment for traditional republican notions of civic virtue and political participation, however, and forced the labour movement into the new departure represented by industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). According to Sinyai, modern industrial capitalism and liberal politico-legal institutions have thus compelled American workers to moderate their republican ideas concerning the demands of democratic citizenship. Still, the author—a researcher for the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) and Political Director for the Laborers’ Local 11, who also completed a doctoral degree in political science at Rutgers University—insists that the labour movement remains a rare force in American society still actively educating citizens for self-rule. The first two chapters of Sinyai’s book lay out the heritage of democratic thought on the question of the worker as citizen. The first chapter surveys the Western tradition of political thought, highlighting how political theorists—whether ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, British liberals or American successors of both—argued that certain habits or virtues were necessary for political participation under democracy. Figures such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln, using the Western tradition as a foundation, began to build “a uniquely American corpus of political thought, creating the conventional wisdom with which American labor would think and act” (p. 8). Their premises and ideas would even more directly influence the coming debate about the meaning of democratic citizenship in a rapidly industrializing republic. It was not until the post-Civil War burst of industrial-capitalist development that labour and capital, rather than the yeoman farmer, would begin to dominate American politics and society. And it was only at this time that the American working class would adopt an enduring institutional expression. The trade unions, rather than a political party, would be labour’s principal locus for debate and reflection and a repository of the American tradition of republican working-class politics. We find that in the early republic, many Americans looked to preserve in workers the virtues and talents of the dwindling ranks of yeoman farmers and small proprietors that were the traditional mainstays of American democracy. Amid the development of capitalism in the United States, however, “citizens were sorting themselves into unequal classes with astonishing speed. The American conventional wisdom that ‘all men are created equal’ seemed increasingly at odds with observed facts” (p. 14). As Sinyai argues, the development of modern capitalism and “[t]he small proprietor’s eclipse by the capitalists and workers of the great industrial concerns and trusts challenged fundamental tenets of American democratic thought. Americans had inherited the idea that a community of small property holders of modest but secure means was ideally suited to democratic government—and that a society dominated by polar classes was a poor candidate for republican self-rule” (pp. 47-48). The labour movement, as exemplified during the Gilded Age by both the Knights of Labor and by the trade …