Book Reviews

Petro has tackled this particu lar job of reporting with a mind singularly free of cliches. Although it was apparent to him almost from the start that it was a par ticularly stupid strike, he ap proached the strikers as human beings who have the normal hu man attribute of pride, which can make people persist in ineffectual action for the noblest of motives. In the same even-handed way he resisted categorizing workers who decided to go back to the shop and who crossed the picket lines, or who took the jobs of last-ditch strikers, as "scabs" or "rats." He capped all this by putting the hardest of questions to the Kings port Press management, and to those among the national officers of the five unions who were will ing to talk with him. The book grows out of recorded conversa tions and eye-witness descriptions. So direct and circumstantial is Petro in his reporting that the reader must believe him when he says, in conclusion, that the Kings port strike was a vast mistake which a majority of the workers at the press did not desire. It has been kept going by the national leadership of the printing trades unions for reasons which have very little to do with local desires in the Kingsport, Tennessee, area, which happens to be an island of comparative affluence in a moun tain region which qualifies gen erally as a depressed area.

571 572 THE FREEMAN September Acting Without the Facts What were the reasons given for the strike in the first place? Petro talked with Jack Rhoten, a pressman who was still out in 1965, two years after the strike had been called. Jack had been making at least $10,000 a year in top day-shift pay, overtime, fringe benefits, and the profit-sharing plan. He had listened to some of the men who were upset over pro motions, but he himself had no gripes at all. He loved his work, and to the very end he was con vinced that there would be no strike. He explains the 500-to-30 strike vote as one that was "in tended only to give the union a firmer bargaining position." Pet ro's suspicion is that Jack Rhoten was among the thirty who opposed giving the leadership a blank check, though he never could bring himself to ask Rhoten how he had voted. Jack Rhoten despises those who agitated vehemently for the strike before it started and then went back to work, but he does not resent the return to work of those who never wanted the strike in the first place. Petro surmises that Jack has stayed out himself because he shrinks from "the sus tained act of living as a 'scab' in a community in which a large proportion of his acquaintances either stood on the picket line or had family members there." In other words, Jack Rhoten is trapped by an attitude that dates back to an era in which unions were few and weak and needed to cultivate the idea that, like a nation, they were entitled to loy alty no matter what they did.

Charlie Heffner, the former pro fessional ball player, would never have complained over money any more than Jack Rhoten. But he had listened to union leaders who were spreading the rumor that the company was going to try to strip the older men of benefits acquired through seniority. Char lie had been working nights for thirteen years, and he was in line for a steady day job. So, out of fear and anger over the prospect of losing seniority, he went out on strike "full of conviction." He was one of the noisiest among the pickets, bolstering morale "like a shortstop keeping the chatter go ing to raise his own and others' spirits." To augment his strike benefits he did a good deal of baseball umpiring, going as far afield as Allentown, Pennsylvania. One day an old high school friend in Allen town who ran a print shop asked Charlie what he had been making in Kingsport. When Charlie said that he often made $11,000 a year, and when he explained about the profit-sharing plan, the friend said, "What the hell are you 1967 STALEMATE IN KINGSPORT 573 striking about?" "That," said Charlie, "shook me· up." He was even more shaken - in fact, he was virtually torn loose from his union moorings - when he found out that at the very time when the union leaders were telling him that he was in danger of losing seniority privileges, the president of the Pressmen's Union and the manage ment of the Kingsport Press had already jointly initialed a new seniority agreement. "I trusted them," said Charlie of his leaders, "and they lied to me." So Charlh~, always a man to stand on his own feet, stopped picketing and, after much soul searching, went back to his job. Fraud, he argued, releases a man from any contract, even one with his union.

Outside Interference After many talks with the Jack Rhotens and the Charlie Heffners, and with Kingsport Press manage ment people like Ed Triebe, the company president, and Cliff Fritschle, the vice-president for industrial relations, Petro was con vinced that local conditions were not enough to justify the strike. There had obviously been some failure of communication between management and the workers in the shop. And there was the con viction of Anthony J. DeAndrade, the national president of the Pressmen's Union, that the Kingsport Press represented unfair com petition to firms in New York City and elsewhere in the North, which, supposedly, had higher labor costs. As to the failure of communica tions, Petro comments on this in his concluding chapters. The great General Electric Company, follow ing the policy of its famous vice president, Lemuel Boulware, had long had an effective employee communications program. But "Boulwarism" ran afoul of a de plorable ruling by the National Labor Relations Board which ac cused GE of "unfair labor prac tices" in talking directly with workers. Direct communications, said the Labor Board, amounted to "bargaining with the union through the employees" rather than "with the employees through the union."

Congress, of course, had never intended to trample on an employ er's right of free speech (it had only forbidden threats and prom ises), but the obvious NLRB in fringement of the First Amend ment to the Constitution is, ridicu lously, the law and will remain the law until it is reversed by a court of appeals. The point, insofar as the Kingsport Press management's failure to explain things to the men in the shop goes, is that if Cliff Fritschle, the Kingsport vice president for industrial relations, had adapted "Boulwarism" to local 574 THE FREEMAN September Tennessee conditions, he would have been guilty of "unfair labor practice." Wage Rates Were Competitive As for the Pressmen's Union President Anthony DeAndrade's contention that the Kingsport Press must be struck in order to bring local labor costs into line with those in other sections of the country, it turns out that "DeAn drade .i ust didn't do his home work." Petro discovered that Kingsport Press wage rates were higher, at the time of the strike's beginnings in 1963, than rates paid by similar plants in Bay City, Michigan, Brockton, Massachu setts, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Read ing, Pennsylvania, and many other towns and cities both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The "pure wage rates" paid to printing trades workers in New York, Detroit, and San Francisco were higher than the Kingsport rates, but in San Francisco, for in stance, both day shift hours and overtime were so limited that the weekly take-home pay of a San Francisco pressman was less than the total pay of many pressmen in Kingsport. The contention that "low Kingsport wages" menaced New York printers falls to the ground when we discover that total labor costs in Kingsport were on the high side, and that there were many other cities, all larger than Kingsport, with lower wage rates, some very much lower. Hindsight, says Petro, estab lishes "that the strike should nev er have been called in the first place, and that the longer it went on the stupider it became." But, with the NLRB to back them up, union leaders persist in stupid strikes because they know that, with government help, they can win. ~ ~ THE SOCIOLOGICAL TRADI TION by Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 349 pp., $7.95 Reviewed by Gary North IN 1953, Oxford University Press released Professor Nisbet's study, The Quest for Community (now titled Community and Power), a book which has become a classic in sociology and intellectual his tory. In it, Nisbet explored the effects of the Industrial Revolu tion and the French Revolution on European social and intellectual life. The loss of the sense of com munity, the disappearance of local ties, the collapse of traditional re ligious institutions, and the aliena tion found in modern urban life all combined to isolate the individ ual. The result, Nisbet argued, has been the quest for community which has given us modern radi1967 OTHER BOOKS 575 cal movements like Marxism, Naz ism, and mass democracy.

The Sociological Tradition re turns to many of the same themes. Nisbet has selected the years 1830-1900, since he believes that the foundations of modern socio logical theory were laid in this period. He takes five basic themes - community, status, authority, aliena tion, and the sacred - and examines the treatment given to each by the major sociologists of the time: Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber. Where relevant, he also discusses the contributions of other think ers, e.g., Fustel de Coulanges, Fer dinand Tonnies, Comte, and Le Play. It is the author's thesis that great periods of intellectual cre ativity come during epochs in which a transition is made be tween two major cultures. Fifth century Athens would be one ex ample, at least in the areas of philosophy and drama. Nisbet calls 1830-1900 a "minor golden age" which resulted from the col lision of traditional European cul ture with the "two revolutions" the industrial and the French. All three streams of nineteenth cen tury thought - conservative, lib eral, and radical - found their focus in the effects of modernism on the old Europe.

The book is a detailed study of the writings of these early socio logical thinkers, and as such it is enlightening and cogently organ ized. Beyond this survey, however, the r~ader is impressed with the profo~nd changes that modernism has brought to Western culture, and the terrible problems that face us. How can we find a meas ure of freedom in a world which is experiencing the total bureau cratization described by Weber, or the expansion of egalitarian pow er which Tocqueville analyzed? How can modern men find meaning in a world so secularized that con temporary scholarship has reject ed the quest for meaning as mean ingless? How can society escape the "polar night of icy darkness and hardness" foreseen by Weber? Marx appealed to a total revolu tion which would bring social sal vation through a regenerating chaos, yet even he ignored the vast problems which would confront the builders of a post-revolution ary world.

Nisbet does not attempt to answer these questions. But at least he has shown how these is sues were handled by the found ers of the sociological tradition, and how their various contribu tions have established the frame work for twentieth century so cial science. While this book is more limited in scope and intent than The Quest for Community, 576 THE FREEMAN September and therefore less likely to have a comparable impact in the aca demic community, it is neverthe less a useful and even eloquent study of the sociological issues which concerned nineteenth cen tury thought. The same problems are with us today, intensified by time and compounded by the com ing of totalitarianism. In socie ties that minimize men's imme diate and personal responsibility, how can men retain personal freedom? In a society which scoffs at the search for meaning, what can one expect besides the continual quest for power? ~ ~ FREE MARKETS OR FAMINE.

Edited by V. Orval Watts, Ph. D. (Midland, Mich.: The Pendell Co., 1967) 582 pp., fully indexed, $9.50. Reviewed by Henry Hazlitt THIS IS a collection of 63 readings on economic. subjects from 41 au thorities. It contains articles on the Industrial Revolution by Lud wig von Mises, on automation by Yale Brozen, on property rights by Murray N. Rothbard, on mo nopoly by Hans F. Sennholz, on labor by Sylvester Petro, on urban renewal by Martin Anderson, on the TVA by Dean Russell, on the farm problem by Karl Brandt, on half a dozen subjects by Professor Watts himself. Most of the second half of the volume is drawn from material published by The Foundation for Economic Education. The editor's immediate purpose in preparing this volume was to provide supplementary readings for economic courses at North wood Institute in Midland, Michi gan. Let us hope it will be used in many more colleges. A compre hensive textbook on economic prin ciples is indispensable; but a vol ume of this sort, by numerous au thorities on special subjects, is hardly less so, not only to put flesh and blood on an abstract theoreti cal skeleton, but to supply the au thoritative detailed information in a score of fields that no single writer today can hope to command.

It is an added virtue of Dr. Watts' anthology that the selec tions are not made with the aim of presenting "both sides," or "all shades of opinion," but for the purpose of promoting a true un derstanding of the principles of capitalism, of the workings of the free market, of the necessity for limiting government and preserv ing individual liberty. For the purpose of making this under standing comprehensive, many of the selections are studies of the dire results which coercive inter vention, however well-intentioned, has produced in one place after another where men have tried it.