1. Karl Marx, "American Pauperism and the Working Class," in On America and the Civil War, vol. 2 of The Karl Marx Library, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 7; Karl Marx, "The Possibility of Non-Violent Revolution," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 523.

2. Gerald N. Grob, in Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), pp. 74-78, places the eight-hour movement in its historical perspective. Also see Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor's Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1955), pp. 87-91.

3. Friedrich Engels, "Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky, London, June 3, 1886," in The Correspondence of Marx and Engels, ed. Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1935), pp. 448-449.

4. Grob, Workers and Utopia, pp. 78, 176-179.

5. Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? ed. C. T. Husbands, trans. Patricia M. Hocking and C. T. Husbands (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976).

6. The literature on the failure of socialism is already voluminous and still growing. A good overview can be found in John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). For a more unified statement of the problem, see Seymour Martin Lipset, "Why No Socialism in the United States?" in Radicalism in the Contemporary Age, vol. 1 of Sources of Contemporary Radicalism, ed. Seweryn Bialer and Sophia Sluzar (Boulder: Westview Press, 77), pp. 31-149. Recent worthwhile contributions to the debate on exceptionalism include Michael Shalev and Walter Korpi, "Working Class Mobilization and American Exceptionalism," Economic and Industrial Democracy 1 (February 1980): 31-61; Theodore J. Lowi, "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? A Federal Analysis," International Political Science Review 5, no. 4 (1984): 369-380; Eric Foner, "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 57-80; and Mike Davis, "Why the U.S. Working Class Is Different," New Left Review 123 (September-October 1980): 3-44.

7. Wilbert E. Moore, "Sociological Aspects of American Socialist Theory and Practice," in Socialism and American Life, ed. Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), vol. 1, p. 553.

8. The logic of analyzing "deviant cases"—cases that operate in ways not anticipated by an established body of social theory—is not to refute the theory in question, but to refine it through a more precise specification of its parameters. Rather than treating unexpected outcomes as a source of embarrassment or, worse still, as something to be tidied up and explained away, deviant case analysis can "play a positive role" in theory construction by focusing on why the received explanation is inadequate; see Patricia L. Kendall and Katherine M. Wolf, "The Two Purposes of Deviant Case Analysis," in The Language of Social Research: A Reader in the Methodology of Social Research, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Morris Rosenberg (Giencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955), p. 167. Unfortunately, the social sciences have been slow to appreciate the advantages of deviant case analysis. For students of American exceptionalism, this has meant that deviations from the anti-socialist rule either go unnoticed or are dismissed as inconsequential. As a result, theories concerning the absence of socialism have rarely had to contend with the stubborn reality of its presence among certain segments of the population.

9. Sombart's way of posing the problem has recently come under fire from several writers, mostly American historians, who argue that the antisocialist trajectory of the U.S. labor movement was not so exceptional after all. There are two versions of this argument—one "hard," the other "soft." The "hard" version maintains that "the European model," far from representing a coherent pattern of class formation against which all other industrialized countries can be compared, was itself characterized by a high degree of national diversity; see Aristide R. Zolberg, "How Many Exceptionalisms?'' in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 397-455. The "soft" version of the same argument faults the exceptionalist school for exaggerating the differences between American and European working-class experiences, pointing out that Western European workers, despite their more flamboyant rhetoric, were animated by many of the same concerns as their American counterparts. Thus, although the language and strategies available to both groups differed along several critical dimensions, the workers' basic objectives did not; see Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790-1920," International Labor and Working-Class History 26 (Fall 1984): 1-24. But arguing that workingclass consciousness was comparable on both sides of the Atlantic—if indeed it was—does not change the historical fact that only in America did a socialist party based in the working class fail to survive. As a nation, the United States is still paying for this failure through the underdevelopment of the American welfare state; see John D. Stephens, The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

10. Recent studies of Communist trade union activity include Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Harvey A. Levenstein, Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); and volume 4 of the research annual Political Power and Social Theory (1984), which is devoted to historical sociological studies of American labor and the left. The assessment of Communist strength is from Bernard Karsh and Phillips L. Garmen, "The Impact of the Political Left," in Labor and the New Deal, ed. Milton Derber and Edwin Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 111.

11. Lincoln Fairley, Facing Mechanization: The West Coast Longshore Plan, Monograph no. 23 (Los Angeles: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, Los Angeles, 1979), pp. 2-4. Also see Paul T. Hartman, Collective Bargaining and Productivity: The Longshore Mechanization Agreement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), chap. 2, for a discussion of how the ILWU acquired job control.

12. Paul Eliel ("Industrial Peace and Conflict: A Study of Two Pacific Coast Industries," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 2 [July 1949]: 499) writes of the ILWU's unique brand of political unionism: "While left-wing officers of some other unions may hold similar views, some of them effectively divorce their economic beliefs from their union activity, so that, as to the latter, they are hardly to be distinguished from business unionists. From 1934 to 1948 this was not the case as to the officers of the Longshoremen's Union."

13. Wallace's 1948 campaign caught many left-wing unionists off guard. ILWU leaders, while stopping short of formally endorsing the Progressive Party, did speak out against "the evils of the two-party system"; see Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 166, 167. The rank and file got the message, and in a coastwide referendum they narrowly voted to support Wallace's candidacy; see Eliel, "Industrial Peace and Conflict," p. 497. On the ILWU's successful efforts to overturn federal legislation barring Communists from holding union office, see Philip Bart, Theodore Bassett, William W. Weinstone, and Arthur Zipser, eds., Highlights of a Fighting History: 60 Years of the Communist Party, USA (New York: International Publishers, 1979), pp. 379, 380.

14. Estimates of Communist strength on the docks are from "Comparative Absolute Figures of Basic Industry," on microfilm, reel 3, series 2-47, p. 3, Earl Browder Papers, University Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; and Archie Brown, interview with author, San Francisco, September 12, 1981. For a sampling of opinion regarding the ILWU's left-wing credentials, see especially Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), pp. 111, 117; David J. Saposs, Communism in American Unions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), pp. 208, 212; and Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, p. 286n.

15. The American Communication Association, a white-collar union representing about seven thousand radio and television engineers and technicians—most of them employed at the New York Metropolitan Western Union offices—also survived the Cold War anti-communist offensive. F.S. O'Brien, in "The 'Communist-Dominated' Unions in the United States Since 1950," Labor History 9 (Spring 1968): 184-209, surveys the post-expulsion performance of the left-wing unions. In the case of the ILWU, the Teamsters reportedly spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on a series of raids against the union's warehouse stronghold in San Francisco, netting a total of 250 members. But the longshore division, which is the focus of this analysis, was never pierced; see Robert E. Randolph, "History of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1952).

16. Richard L. Neuberger, "Labor's Overlords," American Magazine 125 (March 1938): 17.

17. Richard L. Neuberger, "Bad-Man Bridges," Forum 101 (April 1939): 195.

18. The views of the West Coast shipowners are quoted in Neuberger, "Labor's Overlords," p. 169. Bridges's legal difficulties with immigration are covered in Charles P. Larrowe, Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the United States, 2d ed. (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1977), chaps. 5-7; and Harvey Schwartz, "Harry Bridges and the Scholars: Looking at History's Verdict," California History 59 (Spring 1980): 66-78.

The presiding judge at the 1939 deportation hearing concluded that "Bridges' aims [were] energetically radical" but did not conflict with the Constitution; see Estolv Ward, Harry Bridges on Trial (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940), p. 230. Coverage of the trial is found in Time, August 14, 1939, pp. 15-16. The Seattle banker is quoted in Neuberger, "Labor's Overlords," p. 170.

19. David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism: A History of the Communist Party of the United States Since 1945 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), p. 217; Business Week, July 29, 1950, p. 64. The classic theoretical statement about the importance of delivering the goods is Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949). For elaborations of Perlman's thesis, see Arthur Max Ross, Trade Union Wage Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1948), p. 110; Philip Taft, "Theories of the Labor Movement," in Interpreting the Labor Movement, Industrial Relations Research Association, Publication no. 9 (Champaign, Ill.: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1952), p. 34; Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of American Workers, 1933-1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 783; and Saposs, Communism in American Unions, pp. 184-185. In the case of Bridges, those who attribute his durability, in the main, to economic performance include Randolph, "International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union," p. 227; Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 377; and Robert S. Keitel, "The Merger of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers into the United Steelworkers of America,'' Labor History 15 (Winter 1974): 36.

20. Eliel, "Industrial Peace and Conflict," pp. 480, 500.

21. John H. M. Laslett, "Socialism and the American Labor Movement: Some New Reflections," Labor History 8 (Spring 1967): 136-155; David A. Levinson, "Left-Wing Labor and the Taft-Hartley Act," Labor Law Journal 1 (November 1950): 1086; Robert W. Ozanne, "The Effects of Communist Leadership on American Trade Unions" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1954), p. 321; James R. Prickett, "Some Aspects of the Communist Controversy in the CIO," Science & Society 33 (Summer-Fall 1969): 319.

22. For similar critiques of economic instrumentalism as it applies more generally to problems of union loyalty and strike activity, see Douglas E. Booth, "Collective Action, Marx's Class Theory, and the Union Movement," Journal of Economic Issues 12 (March 1978): 163-185; and Michael Mann, Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 50, 51.

23. Jack Barbash, Labor Unions in Action (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 217; Max M. Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. the CIO: A Study in Power Politics (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 251; Saposs, Communism in American Unions, p. 221. Organizational factors also figure prominently in the analyses of Glazer, Social Basis of American Communism, pp. 120-121; Albert Epstein and Nathaniel Goldfinger, "Communist Tactics in American Unions," Labor and Nation 6 (Fall 1950): 36; Henry Pelling, American Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 192; and Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), pp. 195-215. The passage of time has apparently done little to calm the political passions that are aroused whenever the issue of union democracy and communist leadership is raised; see James R. Prickett, "Anti-Communism and Labor History," Industrial Relations 13 (October 1974): 219-227; and Walter Galenson, ''Communists and Trade Union Democracy," Industrial Relations 13 (October 1974): 228-236.

24. John H. M. Laslett, "Giving Superman a Human Face: American Communism and the Automobile Workers in the 1930s," Reviews in American History 9 (March 1981): 113. Regarding the charge of organizational domination, British socialist Harold Laski, an uncompromising critic of communists, writes that such arguments do "not go more than a little way to explain the volume of their influence in the trade unions. The fact still remains that the Communist Party secures from its members an energetic loyalty that is far and away greater than anything the ordinary member of the rank and file is likely to display"; see Harold Laski, Trade Unions in a New Society (New York: Viking Press, 1949), p. 167.

25. Ozanne, "Effects of Communist Leadership," pp. 47, 103, 104.

26. Fairley, Facing Mechanization, pp. 3-4; Larrowe, Harry Bridges, p. 127. For a more general and critical discussion of such practices as they influence leadership accountability within unions, see the classic study by Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962), esp. pt. 5.

27. Wayne Wilbur Hield, "Democracy and Oligarchy in the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1949); Jay Selwyn Goodman, "One-Party Union Government: The I.L.W.U. Case" (M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1963); Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow, and James S. Coleman, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (New York: Free Press, 1956), p. 132n.

28. Bridges is quoted in Lipset, Trow, and Coleman, Union Democracy, p. 5.

29. In the early 1960s, Bridges was accused of not respecting due process in the dismissal of 82 "B-men." The classification "B-men" had been created in 1959 when 743 workers were added to the labor force as probationary members of the union. Four years later a joint union-management committee evaluated the work records of the 561 remaining "B-men" and found 82 of them lacking. Stan Weir, one of the aggrieved longshoremen, lays out their case in "The ILWU: A Case Study in Bureaucracy," in Autocracy and Insurgency in Organized Labor, ed. Burton Hall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1972), pp. 80-92. Bridges vigorously denied allegations of any wrongdoing.

30. Congress of Industrial Organizations, Proceedings of the Eleventh Constitutional Convention, Cleveland, Ohio, October 31-November 4, 1949, pp. 252, 258.

31. Paul Jacobs, The State of the Unions (New York: Atheneum, 1963), p. 90.

32. Kampelman, Communist Party vs. the CIO, p. 251.

33. Much of this research is summarized in Albert Szymanski, The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1977), chap. 3. Indicative of the growing concern with industry at the time, Robert Blauner, in his classic study Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), argues for a "systematic, self-conscious sensitivity to the diversity of industrial environments" as a prelude to developing a genuine "sociology of industries" (pp. 186, 187).

34. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), chap. 7, esp. pp. 263-267; Clark Kerr and Abraham J. Siegel, "The Interindustry Propensity to Strike—An International Comparison," in Labor and Management in Industrial Society, ed. Clark Kerr (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 105-147. For critical examinations of the Kerr-Siegel thesis, see P. K. Edwards, "A Critique of the Kerr-Siegel Hypothesis of Strikes and the Isolated Mass: A Study of the Falsification of Sociological Knowledge," Sociological Review 25 (August 1977): 551-574; Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Harold Berenson, "The Community and Family Bases of U.S. Working-Class Protest, 1880-1920: A Critique of the 'Skill Degradation' and 'Ecological' Perspectives," Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 8 (1985): 109-132; and Joel I. Nelson and Robert Grams, "Union Militancy and Occupational Communities," Industrial Relations 17 (October 1978): 342-346.

35. In the Chilean countryside, for example, the radicalism of agrarian communities varies inversely with their degree of contact with the Communist-led miners; see James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin, "Miners and Agrarian Radicalism," American Sociological Review 32 (August 1967): 578-586.

36. Stanley Weir, interview with author, San Pedro, California, April 22, 1981.

37. On the isolation of New York's dockworkers, see Elizabeth Ogg, Longshoremen and Their Homes (New York: Greenwich, 1939), p. 48; and Glazer, Social Basis of American Communism, p. 120.

38. Ryan's obsessive anti-communism is readily admitted—in fact, celebrated—by a sympathetic historian of the ILA: see Maud Russell, Men Along the Shore (New York: Brussel & Brussel, 1966), esp. pp. 122-124, 137-138. Ryan's support for European fascism is mentioned in Maurice Rosenblatt, "Joe Ryan and His Kingdom," The Nation 161 (November 24, 1945): 550. The secret anti-communist fund is discussed in George Morris, A Tale of Two Waterfronts (New York, 1953), p. 29. Lundberg is quoted in Edward Rosenbaum, "The Expulsion of the International Longshoremen's Association from the American Federation of Labor" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1954), p. 397.

39. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), p. 165.

40. Mathew Josephson, "Red Skies over the Water Front," Colliers 118 (October 5, 1946): 17; Morris, Tale of Two Waterfronts, p. 21.

41. Guided by what is essentially an industry-based analysis, Raymond Charles Miller, in "The Dockworker Subculture and Some Problems in Cross-Cultural and Cross-Time Generalizations" ( Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 [June 1969]: 310), concludes with Lipset and others that "dockworkers are generally liberal or leftist in their political views." The ILA stands as a powerful rejoinder to this kind of industrial reductionism. For similar critiques of industry as a determinant of working-class politics, see the provocative comparative studies by Duncan Gallie, Social Inequality and Class Radicalism in France and Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Scott Lash, The Militant Worker: Class and Radicalism in France and America (London: Heinemann, 1984).

42. Developments on both coasts since the 1950s are covered in Larrowe, Harry Bridges; and Vernon H. Jensen, Strife on the Waterfront: The Port of New York Since 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). The major challenge of this period—containerization—is thoroughly discussed in Fairley, Facing Mechanization . A comparison of how both unions responded to containerization can be found in Philip Ross, "Distribution of Power Within the ILWU and the ILA," Monthly Labor Review 91 (January 1968): 1-7.

43. Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); Herbert G. Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Ira Berlin (New York: Pantheon, 1987); David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For an insightful criticism of Gutman's and Montgomery's work, see Lawrence T. McDonnell, "'You Are Too Sentimental': Problems and Suggestions for a New Labor History," Journal of Social History 17 (Summer 1984): 629-654.

The other major figure in working-class historiography is of course E. P. Thompson, whose The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963) spans the "culturalist"—"syndicalist" divide. William Sewell, Jr. ("Classes and Their Historical Formation: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson's Theory of Working-Class Formation," in E. P. Thompson: Critical Debates, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, forthcoming]) argues that The Making of the English Working Class actually represents a third camp, which he terms "experientialist."