The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940, by Andrew Wehner Cohen

Andrew Wehner Cohen’s book, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940, is an intriguing and in-depth analysis of the Progressive Era through the time of the New Deal, using Chicago as the case study by which we can understand the time period. Central to the discussion are the Chicago city craftsmen, whose resistance to the growing corporate influence on a modernizing industrial economy formed the central counterbalance to that power. “This struggle [between the craftsmen and the corporate powers] shaped American law,” Cohen argues, “[and] these showdowns [between the two groups] greatly affected the shape of the nation Americans live in today.”

Cohen begins his examination of the evolution of workers’ rights in the forty years between 1900 and 1940 by describing the processes by which large firms entered the Chicago marketplace and the pressures they put on the smaller craftsmen. The corporate elite favored streamlining of manufacturing and the primacy of property rights in opposition to the driving concern of the craftsmen: a public economy built on cooperation and consensus. Industrialization played a large role in the growing incompatibility of the two groups. With the rise of corporate industrialization came lesser reliance on the traditional skilled worker of the craftsman’s trade and created a demand for low level, unskilled, and uneducated workers. The craftsmen, on the other hand, relied on community ties, their personal salesmanship, and their own drive within their trades, which were known as skilled trades, due to the technical expertise involved in the businesses. The conflict became violent, and the conflicting desires for power by both the craft unions and the business elite led to fundamental changes within the political economy of early twentieth century Chicago.

Hostilities between the two sides built up and the escalating battle assumed a cyclical nature. The craftsmen used their collective power to create a system of law within the law, ruling the trades in Chicago and determining what workers could and couldn’t do with regards to their agency within the workplace. At the same time, unions worked to defeat aggressively predatory behavior by employers, through picketing, labeling products as union friendly, and using government contacts to effect their desired changes and assist them in their conflict with the business elite. The business elite, in similar fashion, used their (quite more formidable) power and government contacts to keep the unions under control as much as possible, and, when this was not enough, they too formed unions of a sort, notably the Employers Association of Chicago, or the EA. These organizations worked mainly to counteract the growing influence and power of the unions and to promote the interests of the business elite.

By the end of the time period covered in the book, the legal gains made by the business elite had been countered and partially erased by the Roosevelt administration in the New Deal. Although the elite had won many legal victories in the earlier part of the conflict, particularly by rendering unions impotent by calling their activities evidence of “racketeering,” a term adapted from the nineteenth century word referring to illegal “rackets” such as gambling and prostitution, the craftsmen were able to use their political power and the mood of the country to sway the legal decisions about their future and power their way. Although the pendulum would swing the other way in the future, towards the interests of the business elite more often than not, the groundwork and base for the liberal era of the New Deal through the Great Society had been laid.