| Since 1967 a number of historians have argued that workmen's compensation laws enacted during the Progressive Era were initiated or at least readily accepted by employers as a rational and cost-efficient solution to many financial, legal, and social problems caused by the preceding employers' liability system and mounting industrial accidents at the turn of the twentieth century. In their view, workmen's compensation epitomized a conservative reform (the general consensus), based upon a social compromise between employers and workers leveraged largely on employers' terms (the majority position) or opposed by organized workers (the minority position).; By critically re-examining the previous historians' source materials and consulting a far more extensive array of private and public primary sources that have never been explored before, this study refutes the previous studies conclusively. The vast majority of individual employers and every single local, state, and national employers' association went to all lengths to defeat the laws first in legislatures and at public hearings, and next in state and federal courts, characterizing them as "confiscation" and raising all manner of legal-constitutional, economic, and sociocultural objections imaginable. Far from a conservative reform or compromise, the legislation occasioned the "most rabid combat" or "war" to date between organized employers and organized workers and their allies.; In charting the historical development of the compensation movement, this study finds organized labor the vanguard of the movement. Nevertheless, indispensable was the extensive inter-organizational and inter-personal coalition of a number of religious, social, civic, political, and governmental organizations and their leaders as the compassionate supporters of the labor's cause.; Most significantly, along with a host of other protective labor laws of the era, workmen's compensation was an integral part of what this study terms "legal progressivism" as embodied in the waves of progressive statutes, court decisions, and public discourse on behalf of the interests and rights of American workers---whether organized or not. With all their shortcomings, workmen's compensation and legal progressivism evidenced a "radical departure" from the laissez-faire constitutionalism, reactionary judicial activism, and individualism of the late nineteenth century, and provided American workers with a new deal before the New Deal. |
