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Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.

David Montgomery’s The Fall of the House of Labor is a historical overview of

the American industrial labor system from the end of the Civil War to the 1920’s.

Montgomery’s work is a study of the working-class activists’ efforts to foster a sense of

identity, unity, and purpose among the workers of late nineteenth and early twentieth

century labor. He argues that the beginning of scientific management, the impact of new

technology, and the dawn of government regulations combined to break down the house

of labor. The house of labor the Montgomery refers to is the craft unionism that was

established and became popular during the end of the nineteenth century in industrial

culture. Montgomery’s argument shows that this craft unionism was transformed by the

changes in industry of the twentieth century and homogenized the experience of the

skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled industrial workers.

Montgomery begins his study with an introduction to craft unionism and then

goes on to explain the different types of industrial workers: the craftsman, common

laborer, operative, and metal-worker. After establishing the types of workers,

Montgomery then explains how the introduction of scientific method created a

hierarchical system of business organization and eventually became problematic to the

craftsman and craft unionist. He then goes on to explain how the new technological

advances in factory machinery led to specialization of factory jobs and did away with the

importance of craftsmanship. After Montgomery established how the scientific method

and new technology had influenced the transformation of the labor world, he then goes

on to explain how World War I gave these working-class activists’ the opportunity to use

the importance of their work for their democratic cause; using the war to get the

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government regulations they wanted. The problem was that these workers failed to

realize that these conditions were only going to be temporarily. Montgomery ends his

book with the decline of the labor protests. He refers to the economic slump of the

1920’s, the employer’s open shop policy drive and the political plot of Samuel Gompers

of the AFL all combined to tear down the labor movement.

The Fall of the House of Labor provides a truly detailed work on the labor

movement of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Montgomery

provides a source that has been thoroughly researched and provides adequate

information. The chapters in his book do have a decent structure, but they can confuse

the reader on his direction at times, considering the length of each. It would have been

better understood if the reader was not overwhelmed with detailed information and he

provided more analysis than he does statistics. Altogether, Montgomery’s study provides

a very intriguing picture of the labor movement and provides a logical source for why

this movement was so much stronger in the beginning of the twentieth century than later.

John C. McKnight

Appalachian State University