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"[...]shall employ, or to select those who may be best fitted to accomplish his work. An employe should expect employment according to his ability to perform the work to be done. A skillful artisan should not be expected to accept the reward of one unskilled in the same trade. An unskilled workman should not receive the same wages paid to a skilled workman. Had these rules been recognized by the bricklayers in Chicago there would have been no strike, no[...]".

"The Racketeer's Progress explores the contested and contingent origins of the modern American economy by examining the violent resistance to its development. Historians often portray Chicago as an unregulated industrial metropolis, composed of factories and immigrant labourers. In fact, the city was home to thousands of craftsmen - carpenters, teamsters, barbers, butchers, etc. - who formed unions and associations that governed commerce through pickets, assaults, and bombings. Working together, these groups forcefully challenged the power of national corporations and physically managed the development of mass culture in the city."--BOOK JACKET.

This book studies the changing ways in which American industrial workers mobilised concerted action in their own interests between the abolition of slavery and the end of open immigration from Europe and Asia. Sustained class conflict between 1916 and 1922 reshaped governmental and business policies, but left labour largely unorganised and in retreat. The House of Labor, so arduously erected by working-class activists during the preceeding generation, did not collapse, but ossified, so that when labour activism was reinvigorated after 1933, the movement split in two. These developments are analysed here in ways which stress the links between migration, neighbourhood life, racial subjugation, business reform, the state, and the daily experience of work itself.

"The author argues that Chicago--a city of rapid growth and severe labor unrest as well as a gateway to the West--offers the clearest lens for analyzing the history of the intellectual divide between countryside and city in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. She shows that Chicago served as a kind of urban laboratory where numerous public intellectuals experimented with various strains of environmental thinking"--

The attention of the world has been called to the great strike and lockout in the building trades in Chicago because it rested upon the question of individual liberty--a question which is not only vital alike to the employer and the employee, but which affects every industry, every class of people, every city, state and country. It is a principle which antagonizes no motive which has been honestly conceived, but upon which rests--or should rest--the entire social, political and industrial fabric of a nation.