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Reviews of Books
This work examines labor relations in the copper
mines and smelters of the states of Arizona, Nevada,
New Mexico, and Utah and the city of E1 Paso in the
period set out in its subtitle. Through studying the
more important work stoppages initiated by spontaneous worker groups, benevolent societies, and unions,
Philip J. Mellinger proposes that three major factors
contributed to labor's inability until late in the period
to gain meaningful concessions from the large corporations which controlled the industry.
First and foremost was the ethnic make-up of the
work force, which he demonstrates was much more
complex and diverse than it has usually been described. As an example, he points out that the majority
Hispanic contingent included Mexican Americans,
Mexicans, Spanish Americans, and Spanish immigrants. Many divisions existed among the dozen or so
ethnic groups, which management skillfully enhanced
and manipulated through housing, job assignments,
and wages.
A second factor was the exceptional mobility of the
work force in these isolated desert communities where
almost no alternative employment existed outside the
industry. Based on examinations of company payroll
records, census data, and local tax rolls, Mellinger
concludes that prior to 1910 most copper workers
moved elsewhere in a couple of years. Even later, the
average stay on one job was seldom more than five
years.
According to Mellinger, these two conditions contributed mightily to the third. Two national unions
sought off and on to organize Southwestern Copper,
the Western Federations of Miners, and, after 1905,
the International Workers of the World. Both publicly
supported the organization of all workers, but until
1912, both debated internally about the best strategy to
follow in copper. Would it not be best to focus on the
more privileged and permanent Anglo-Irish miners to
gain a foothold or should they remain true to their
proclaimed principles and include all the diverse and
mobile ethnic workers? This ambivalence, Mellinger
holds, retarded union success until policies of inclusion
won out in both unions and among the workers
themselves.
Another major theme of the book is that as limited
as were the victories of the copper workers, over time,
a growing workplace cooperation among the various
ethnic groups led to a decline in social divisions in the
mining communities as well. The evidence in support
of this is not totally persuasive and even Mellinger
admits that the copper communities were still mostly
segregated into ethnic enclaves after World War I.
This work is built on a great deal of research in the
rather limited available materials as well as a thorough
use of the work of others who have addressed ethnicity
and the workplace. In an attempt to place his findings
within the context of this growing literature, Mellinger
often interrupts his narrative with long discourses on
the historiographic issues this literature has raised.
This disconcerting practice is illustrative of a funda-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
mental weakness in the book-a lack of overall organizational structure. In his desire to prove his theses,
Mellinger moves from one episode to another without
giving much guidance on how labor relations in Southwestern Copper developed over time.
This was a promising manuscript calling for the
sharp eye and heavy hand of an editor. It did not get
them. The book is marred by faulty sentences, careless
citations, and speculation without documentation.
What is one to make of a statement (without citation)
like this: "Some of the working people who took trains
out of El Paso in mid-1913 may have detrained at the
Arizona mining camps at which labor conflict next
erupted. Perhaps this was the way in which labor
consciousness spread" (p. 138). The University of
Arizona Press did not serve Mellinger or other historians well.
JAMES V. REESE
Stephen F. Austin State University
LESTER D. LANGLEY and THOMAS SCHOONOVER. The
Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs
in Central America, 1880-1930. Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky. 1995. Pp. 219. $29.95.
Lester D. Langley and Thomas Schoonover have combined to tell the story of U.S. imperialism from 1880 to
1930, a time that saw American entrepreneurs, politicians, and mercenaries go to Central America to
modernize its economy, its political culture, and its
social values and to leave a bitter legacy that played
itself out in the violence that swept across the isthmus
in the 1980s.
Schoonover sets the tone with his description of a
world in which the "banana men" operated. His "world
systems" approach places the United States among the
industrial powers that competed for markets, raw
materials, and investment opportunities in the latter
part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
Central America, U.S. entrepreneurs found liberal
political leaders anxious to imitate the more advanced
societies of the northern hemisphere without sacrificing their own political position and wealth. Theirs
became a marriage of mutual convenience that resulted in the exploitation of Central America. Following the construction of the Panama Canal, the United
States government joined the intrigue in its search for
Central American political stability.
Amidst this ambience, the banana men and mercenaries-Samuel Zemurray, Minor Keith, the Vaccaro
brothers, Washington Valentine, and Lee Christmascame to seek fortunes and influence politics. Langley
focuses attention on United States policy in Nicaragua
and the individual exploits of Zemurray and Christmas. In Nicaragua, the United States sought political
order by supporting the Conservative Party. Zemurray,
popularly known as "the banana man," plotted to build
an empire in Honduras, with Christmas as his mercenary accomplice. Later, in Guatemala, Zemurray
molded the United Fruit Company into an indomitable
DECEMBER 1996
United States
force. In both instances, while the ruling elites maintained their grasp on political power and social dominance at the expense of other groups, their countries
were raped of economic wealth.
In the early twentieth century, Washington's policy
makers wanted to "restore" order, to make the region
"safe for democracy," and to safeguard "national
interests." When the established order was challenged
in Guatemala in 1954 and across the isthmus in the
1980s, Washington policy makers again used the same
rhetoric, and just as the private entrepreneurs and
mercenaries made their way to the isthmus in the early
twentieth century, the United States found its mercenaries in the "armies" of Castillo Armas and the
Contras. Langley and Schoonover conclude that Washington again did little more than further entrench the
old order.
While the bibliographical essay is useful, but brief,
the chapter endnotes are a rich blend of primary and
secondary sources that add credibility to this provocative volume.
THOMAS M. LEONARD
University of North Florida
CARL SMITH. Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief'
The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the
Model Town of Pullman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1995. Pp. xi, 395. $35.00.
Carl Smith's book reconsiders the Chicago fire of 1871,
the Haymarket riot of 1886, and the Pullman strike of
1894. He examines the "imaginative dimension," by
which he means "the context of thought and expression
which suffuses individual and social life" (p. 1.). Smith
offers a cultural study of "how Americans discussed
the disorderly in relation to the development of an
understanding of the meaning of modernity" (p. 1).
This book ends with the notion that "urban disorder,
whose central theme is the breaking of imaginative
frames, has in many ways become the frame itself" (p.
279).
The book is divided into three parts: "Fire,"
"Bomb," and "Strike." In each, Smith takes both text
and pictures as the source of civil memory, the contemporary understanding of both "the city in disorder"
and "the disorderly city" (p. 1). The fire serves aS,the
first of three cataclysms. It burned homes and
churches, warehouses and factors; it evoked images of
rape, pillage, and terror. Neither Mrs. O'Leary (or her
cow) nor the city's communists were guilty of arson,
but someone had to be responsible. Military occupation, public relief, and municipal reform concealed
xenophobia and paranoia. And popular discourse,
especially a series of instant books, proves fascinating
here: "The most terrible reality of the fire was that the
unspeakable and the indescribable had happened,
furnishing a vocabulary and a conceptual framework
for a troubled future" (p. 98).
The fire had scorched a commercial city, the Haymarket bomb exploded in an industrial city. The
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anarchists exploited existing fears and recent memories of disorder; their newspapers, parades, slogans,
and words were designed to that end. The anarchists
were hung, "because both cities and dynamite existed,
and taken together, this was frightening" (p. 126). The
key words for understanding the Haymarket trial were
"foreign," "manly," and "natural" (p. 147). Accused
and accusers both used these keywords, but they meant
very different things to each. Smith's explication is
immensely useful.
The third part considers the model town of Pullman
and the Pullman strike. The palace-car prince fled the
city and built his company town outside the city limits,
where he could impose his own order. He owned the
shops, rail lines, and cars; he also owned the homes,
church, and theaters. George Pullman never saw the
contradictions between individualism and corporatism,
between democracy and capitalism, but many of his
employees did. In 1894 they struck the company, the
railroads, and the postal system. Martial law restored
order. Another trial, less dramatic, but just as perfunctory, ensued.
Chicagoans used a vocabulary of war to make sense
of the fire. They linked Haymarket to the memory of
the fire, and many linked the strike to the riot. Civic
memory, the memory of disorder, shaped belief.
Throughout this sustained argument, Smith concentrates on three voices: "a Protestant evangelical outlook," "the voice of liberal education and wordly
refinement," and a voice he characterizes as "professional, bureaucratic, and protoprogressive" (p. 13). In
a city, however, that was seventy-five percent foreign
born or of foreign stock, where Catholics outnumbered
Protestants at least two to one, and in which class
relations shaped industrial, residential, religious, and
recreational developments, there were other voices.
And most spoke in languages other than English. Their
perceptions and memories of disorder might also be
important.
If Chicago later became "the city that works,"
Smith's central argument that disorder, not order,
became the framework for understanding the city
remains historically ironic. Smith has usefully linked
these three catastrophes. The book is crammed with
insights and the argument is both nuanced and wonderfully researched. I recommend it not just to Chicago readers but to urban historians.
BRUCE C. NELSON
Des Plaines, Illinois
HENRY M. McKIvEN, JR. Iron and Steel: Class, Race,
and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1995.
Pp. xiii, 223. Cloth $37.50, paper $14.95.
This book has genuine strengths. The research is
strong, and the argument is basically plausible, yet it
leaves the reader with the uneasy sense that the real
situation was more complex. Henry M. McKiven, Jr.,
contends that the labor movement in Birmingham's
DECEMBER 1996