Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 
• Broad Contexts
• Recasting American “Exceptionalism”
• The State of Courts and Parties
• 2 
• Judicial Review in Labor's Political Culture
• Samuel Gompers and In re Jacobs
• Hours Laws in Illinois
• Hours Laws in Colorado
• Pressed toward a Minimalist Politics
• 3 
• Government by Injunction
• The Origins and Dimensions of Government by Injunction
• The Origins of Government by Injunction in Railway Strikes
• The Rise and Repression of City-Wide Boycotts
• 4 
• Semi-Outlawry
• The Usurpation of Local Polities
• Courts and the Uses of Police, Guards and Troops
• Labor's Resort to Injunctions
• 5 
• The Language of the Law and the Remaking of Labor's Rights Consciousness
• “Labor's Whole Gospel Is Liberty of Contract”
• Labor's Constitution
• A Great Popular Defiance
• Anti-Injunction Laws before Norris-LaGuardia
• The Norris-LaGuardia Act
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: 
• Labor Legislation in the Courts, 1885–1930
• Appendix B: 
• Approximating the Numbers of Labor Injunctions and Their Relation to Other Strike Statistics, 1880–1930
• Appendix C: 
• Judicial Treatment of Statutes Seeking to Protect Union Organizing and Action by Revising Equity and Common Law Doctrine
• Index