“Rubber Barons”: The Fall of American Socialism in John A. Tully’s "Labor in Akron"

John A. Tully | Labor in Akron, 1825-1945 | The University of Akron Press | 2020 | 257 Pages

John A. Tully begins his new book, Labor in Akron, 1825-1945, by asking, “why has the American labor movement—despite episodic upsurges of extraordinary militancy—been generally so conservative?” This question may seem too sweeping for a local history of Akron, Ohio, but Tully sets out to prove that impression wrong. Beginning his work by diving straight into the question of why America’s labor movement has remained conservative and why socialism has never successfully taken root in the United States, Tully instantly breaks expectations. The title of his book gives the impression of a small-scale study of Akron, Ohio. Using Akron as a microcosm of the United States as a whole, Tully thoroughly shows how the labor movement in America was successfully tempered and blocked by the combined efforts of government and industry. Rather than limiting his work or making his argument seem too narrow, Tully’s study of Akron condenses an all-encompassing argument into a digestible book.

In Tully’s reasoning, America’s labor movement was a phenomenon born out of and killed by war. The Civil War spurred the country’s industrialization, creating jobs and economic inequalities that fueled the labor movement. Unluckily for the movement, it also generated governmental reliance on industry and its leaders, creating the conditions for alliances between the two. The World Wars then doused the flames of labor unrest. The massive effort to support World War I allowed the government and employers alike to weaponize the Red Scare against the labor movement. According to the government, to be a socialist was to be anti-war, and businesses immediately weaponized this sentiment against America’s labor organizations. Accusations of socialist or anti-war sentiment made labor leaders fearful of truly embracing radical socialism. A few decades later, the economic boom following World War II placated workers who had survived the Great Depression. After a decade of layoffs and money struggles, the post-war economic boom distracted American workers from the fact that production rapidly outstripped their pay.

Compounding these problems throughout the last century was the ongoing culture of racism in America. Diverse immigrant communities and the diaspora of formerly enslaved people from the South experienced a variety of racism’s manifestation at the turn of the century, preventing the formation of a cohesive working class. The strong presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Ohio, as white Southerners moved North in search of work, caused irreparable harm to workers of color and placed the attention of white workers on racial tensions rather than on the injustices all workers experienced in the workplace. The employers of Goodyear, BF Goodrich, and Firestone harnessed this racism, openly espousing anti-immigration sentiment in the early decades of the twentieth century. Their ploy worked. In the end, the white labor movement, lulled into a sense of security by World War II, fearful of true radicalism, and focusing its combative energy on their fellow black and brown workers rather than on their employers, acquiesced to the demands of business owners and fell into a culture of business unionism.

The strength of Tully’s argument comes from the steady pacing and chronological structure of his book. A slower-paced, straightforward chronological approach to history can sometimes bog down a topic and bore the reader, but it works well for Tully’s argument. His careful examination of each decade of the labor movement in Akron makes the reader experience the repetitive disappointments of the laborers as their employers worked consistently to thwart the movement’s organization. The reader emerges from Labor in Akron with a thorough understanding of how the American government and businesses worked together to successfully squash the socialist labor movement. In short, Tully accomplishes just what he set out to do—answer why socialism and communism never took root in America. He then leaves the reader with a compelling call the action. He calls on historians and average readers alike to remember and discuss the often obscured, long history of socialism in the United States. His discussions of racism and anti-socialist propaganda in American business compel the reader to examine the country’s current problems in this context. One closes Labor in Akron feeling angered and, by that anger, inspired to follow in Tully’s footsteps and “revisit the labor party idea.”