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Moreover, Singer seeks to correct historians' focus on
the failures of federal antitrust activity during this time
in order to see that, in fact, some states had willingly
taken up the torch, and he rightly points out that
similar action on the part of the states is well in
evidence today.
Book reviewers should always be cautious in suggesting that the author might have written a different
book, and in making the remarks that follow, I want to
note that this book ably recounts the events in the legal
battles. Singer is extraordinarily careful in detailing the
narrative of the courtroom dramas. He never shies
away from the intricacies of the cases, and by providing
a glossary of terms at the end of the book, he helps the
nonspecialist reader to understand the facts. Singer
frames the substantive chapters of the book so narrowly, however, that nonspecialists-those readers
who are not specifically interested in the historical
relationship between antitrust enforcement law and oil
corporations-will find this book slow going. The
author has a tendency, for instance, to recount the
trials on a day-by-day basis and to describe the depositions of fairly minor characters in his story. Although
it is understandable that, as an attorney himself, Singer
would relish the details of the litigation, the excessive
nature of those details often makes it difficult to follow
the larger trajectory of the story and to understand the
broader implications of this period of Texas trustbusting.
Of course, this is another way of saying that Singer
has trouble seeing the forest for the trees, but what
precisely is the forest that he might have kept in view?
In his introduction and epilogue, he briefly points to a
wider landscape of questions that his book addresses,
framed primarily by scholars' conclusions regarding
the effectiveness of antitrust litigation during the
Progressive period. (Singer's response, as noted above,
is that the Texas example shows that it both is and is
not effective.) But given his interest in the actual trials,
Singer might have pursued paths that would have
taken him beyond the venue of the courtroom. He
notes at the outset, for instance, that like other states
Texas had a handful of options for trying to rein in big
business, antitrust law enforcement being only one of
them. Relying on the structures of the courts and the
form of the trial itself surely must have had profound
influences on how Texans thought about big business,
and it would have been fascinating to see how Singer
explored such territory. The adversarial nature of the
law, the rhetorical devices of the lawyers, the reliance
on historical precedent, the formal procedures involved in trying to convict the firm: these are very
different forces than, say, the administrative processes
of antitrust regulation. Were such forces at the heart
of the distinctive political-perhaps even culturalflavor of antitrust ideology in Texas? One can hope
that Singer will seek to answer such a question in his
future work.
KAREN R. MERRILL
Williams College
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
THOMAS RALPH CLARK. Defending Rights: Law, Labor
Politics, and the State in California, 1890-1925. Detroit,
Mich.: Wayne State University Press. 2002. Pp. 297.
$39.95.
How did the remarkable hostility shown by courts
toward workers and their unions at the turn of the
twentieth century shape the history of the United
States labor movement? Thomas Ralph Clark focuses
on this question in his fine book. Historians have long
agreed the labor injunction provided employers with
one of their most formidable tools for containing the
expansion of the labor movement in the United States
during the decades between 1890 and 1930. In the
early 1990s, however, important works by William
Forbath (Law and the Shaping of the American Labor
Movement [1991]) and Victoria Hattam (Labor Visions
and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in
the United States, 1806-1896 [1993]) argued much
more ambitiously that judicial hostility explained the
relatively conservative and antistatist evolution of U.S.
labor politics. In their view, constant injunctions discouraged labor activists from seeking political solutions to their problems. Clark frames his study as a test
of Forbath's and Hattam's arguments, noting that their
studies ignore the state and local levels: that is, the
realm where most workers actually encountered the
courts. Based on careful research into labor politics in
California, Clark demonstrates that the relationship
between labor politics and the law was far more
complex than Forbath and Hattam suggest. He argues,
in fact, that "the need to defend rights of collective
action pushed the California labor movement into
politics with greater urgency" (p. 14). Forced by
judicial hostility into political engagement, California
activists worked to enact a broad set of social reforms
that required more extensive state intervention. Although their efforts to pass anti-injunction legislation
ended in failure, California activists did develop a
careful defense of workers' rights, which "anticipated
the New Deal transformation of both labor law and
labor politics" (p. 15).
Clark explores these issues through a fascinating
comparison of labor's fortunes in California's two
major cities. He demonstrates persuasively that judicial hostility and police intervention pushed labor
activists into experiments with third-party politics,
most notably in San Francisco where the Union Labor
Party (ULP) rose to power. Curbing police power
remained the ULP's only positive contribution to labor
relations, and corruption charges and its own incompetence soon brought about the party's demise. Yet
the party's very successes regarding the police nudged
employers toward a more aggressive use of injunctions.
By the 191Os, activists turned their attention to drafting anti-injunction legislation, and transformed their
political strategies to focus on lobbying and coalitions
with other reformers.
Next Clark turns to the impact of World War I and
its aftermath, showing how, as Progressivism waned in
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California, labor activists found themselves losing familiar allies even as judicial hostility intensified at the
local level. Unions continued to fail in their efforts to
pass anti-injunction legislation, yet their positive view
of politics and the state's role did not wane. Rather,
Clark argues, "organized labor increasingly looked to
the federal government as the most likely guarantor of
labor's rights" (p. 26). In a concluding chapter, Clark
builds on his findings to argue that labor activists of the
Progressive era, in their positive regard for politics and
state intervention, can help us understand the emergence of broader social unionist goals in the 1930s.
Historians demonstrated many years ago that labor
activists at the state and local levels perceived the state
more positively than did their counterparts at the
national level (for example, see Gary Fink, Labor's
Search for Political Order: The Political Behavior of the
Missouri Labor Movement, 1890-1940 [1974)). More
recently Julie Greene (Pure and Simple Politics: The
American Federation of Labor and Political Activism,
1881-1917 [1998)) and Gwendolyn Mink (Old Labor
and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 [1986]) have
shown how deeply and energetically the national leaders of the American Federation of Labor engaged in
political activism. While building on the work of all
these historians, Clark makes an important contribution through his emphasis on the courts and careful
attention to the continuities linking labor's vision in
the New Deal era to that of the Gilded Age and
Progressive era. Also noteworthy is Clark's nuanced
argument regarding the language of labor activists: he
suggests that California unionists developed a "rightsbased" language and that this coexisted with and
sharpened class consciousness rather than blunting it,
as critical legal historians have typically argued.
Clark's study will be essential reading for any scholar
interested in the history of the law and labor politics.
JULIE GREENE
University of Colorado,
Boulder
GEORGE I. LOVELL. Legislative Deferrals: Statutory Ambiguity, Judicial Power, and American Democracy. New
York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xxi, 290.
$65.00.
George I. Lovell's careful analysis of the legislative
history of labor laws and the relationship between
Congress and the judiciary will interest political scientists, historians, and legal scholars. His reappraisal of
interest group activity surrounding the Erdman Act,
Clayton Act, Norris-LaGuardia Act, and Wagner Act
and the motivations of lawmakers who enacted those
statutes provides a significant contribution to labor's
political history. Lovell also draws general conclusions
about the interaction between Congress and courts.
Lovell argues that Congress often delegates policy
making to judges without formulating a precise intent
about how courts should deploy that power. Although
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
he claims that this insight brings into question traditional methods of interpretation, his conclusions are
compatible with most current legal thinking about
statutory interpretation. Nonetheless, this book is important to legal scholars because it provides a wellresearched example of legislative delegation to courts.
Lovell offers a fascinating description of the legislative deliberations surrounding enactment of the labor
laws. He persuasively argues against the traditional
depiction of labor history from 1898 to 1935 as a
period of radical prolabor legislation that was undermined by a hostile judiciary, heedless of congressional
wishes and too solicitous of the owners of capital. He
demonstrates that, with the exception of the NorrisLaGuardia Act, Congress intentionally adopted provisions that courts could interpret in ways that hindered
labor's agenda. He describes drafting history to prove
that Congress did not inadvertently enact open-textured language, and that legislators had a good idea of
the way judges would decide cases. He concludes in his
assessment of the Clayton Act that the American
Federation of Labor's (AFL) problem was not that
unelected, conservative judges gutted a prolabor law
but rather "that the AFL could not find a majority in
the divided Congress that would enact stronger legislation that better secured the AFL's policy goals" (p.
156). The AFL leadership put the best spin on the
legislation that it could, contending that Congress had
accepted their goals, but the reality, Lovell maintains,
is that labor's top priorities were seldom embraced by
Congress.
The Norris-LaGuardia Act, often characterized as
the response of an angry Congress irritated by judges
who disregarded legislative wishes, was passed in a
different political environment and was supported by a
coalition including "political and economic elites who
were otherwise unsympathetic to the goals of labor and
labor organizations" (p. 211). Furthermore, Congress
was not unequivocally supportive of labor in passing
this act; instead, legislators also hoped that it would
"defeat labor radicalism" (p. 215). This new political
reality encouraged legislators to enact specific language reducing judicial discretion, but Congress reverted to vague text in the Wagner Act when it
delegated substantial policymaking authority to the
National Labor Relations Board and courts.
Lovell's conclusions are less satisfying for legal
scholars because he does not appreciate that many
theorists of statutory interpretation have a sophisticated sense of institutional interactions. Particularly
when they consider regulatory statutes, legal scholars
have long understood that Congress can choose to
delegate to agencies or to courts, and they have
pointed out various statutory techniques to effectuate
such choices, including relative vagueness and ambiguity. For example, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), where the Supreme Court instructed judges to defer to reasonable agency
interpretations of ambiguous statutes, was justified in
part because expert and accountable agencies are
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