| This dissertation explores the integration of labor unions and labor unionism into America's complex political and economic adaptation to an industrial society toward the end of the 19th century. By a combination of labor, social, legal, and business history, it approaches the protracted development of coal miner organization less as an alternative (whether benign or hostile) than as an integral component to the historical development of American industrial capitalism. It shows how, especially in the coal industry, ancient forms of community and workplace activism slowly coalesced into deeply conflicted but solid institutional structures in the United Mine Workers of America. But more, it shows dynamic relationships between changing forms of labor activism, business, and the state.; This broad focus brings to light the processes by which private and public institutions in the United States incorporated this nation's complex heritage of democracy, republicanism and liberalism in the late 19th century. The UMW's sheer institutional bulk, its deep penetration into the small towns, state houses, and boardrooms of America, as well as its unequalled capacity to bring the nation's industrial economy to a halt, make its protracted development a key entry point to America's national conundrum: how to reconcile a commitment to liberalism's free, individualist markets with the persistent, communitarian demands of economic justice. |
