The Origins of Right to Work

Cedric de Leon traces the antagonism between pro-business politicians and labor to the Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment equated collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men.

Cedric de Leon is Associate Professor of Sociology at Providence College. He is the author of Party and Society: Reconstructing a Sociology of Democratic Party Politics and co-editor of Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society. Before becoming a professor he was by turns an organizer, a local union president, and a rank-and-file activist in the U.S. labor movement.

Refreshingly, Cedric de Leon's The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago is neither historically shallow nor politically imbalanced... de Leon has made an important contribution, one that all future scholars of anti-unionism must read.

William A. Mirola:

Political rhetoric is shaped by historical context. De Leon does an excellent job in using this point to help explain the historical foundations oftoday's antilabor political climate. This analysis refreshingly reorients ourattention from the macroforces shaping the industrial and now postindustrial landscape to the more microlevel, examining how what groups sayabout these issues influences what they will later do about them.

Victoria Hattam:

Cedric de Leon's stunning new book, The Origins of the Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago, offers a powerful reinterpretation of race, class, and party in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.... The right to work, de Leon shows, was not a twentieth-century invention developed to dismantle long established New Deal accomplishments. On the contrary, right to work politics have much deeper and more interesting antecedents reaching back to the anti-slavery politics of the mid-nineteenth century.

Chris Rhomberg, author of No There There:

In an important and timely book, Cedric de Leon finds the historical origins of antilabor politics in the United States in the emergence of a liberal capitalist order after the abolition of slavery. In the face of rising corporate power, his focus on political elites' ideological promotion of individual 'freedom of contract,’ and forceful suppression of workers’ collective action, has resonance for the challenges facing the American labor movement today.

Richard Lachmann, author of What Is Historical Sociology?:

In The Origins of Right to Work, Cedric de Leon offers a new answer to an old question: Why is there no socialism in the United States? He identifies parties rather than the state or classes as the decisive actors in nineteenth-century America, arguing that parties, to further their own strategic interests, appealed to workers as individuals or as members of a race or ethnic group rather than as a class. De Leon shows that process at work in the ways the two major parties appealed to voters over the issues of slavery and the rights of free labor. This book will reorient our understanding of the United States in the nineteenth century and deserves close reading by anyone who hopes to understand the limits and possibilities in contemporary American politics.

Jeffrey Haydu, University of California, San Diego, author of Citizen Employers: Business Communities and Labor in Cincinnati and San Francisco, 1870–1916:

The Origins of Right to Work addresses the enduring puzzle of American exceptionalism, asking why certain class interests and identities are privileged and others marginalized in politics and industrial relations. Cedric de Leon's questions about labor and race in American politics are of both historical and contemporary importance; his answers, which highlight the causal role of political parties, have a broad theoretical payoff for historians, sociologists, and political scientists.