ABSTRACT
The "old" labor history, born and raised at the University of Wisconsin in the 1910s and 1920s and fathered by John R. Commons, was devoted to a generally sympathetic study of trade unionism and its leadership. Green promises to look at a wide context of union growth, but he ignores employer repression, and his scanty coverage of employer "relations" with workers is submerged in descriptions of the misdeeds of union leaders. For both sound and unsound reasons, the pioneer figure in the old labor history, John R. Commons, has become a prime target of criticism, mainly because of his sympathetic focus on unionism and his support during the troubled 1920s for some forms of labor-management cooperation. Although much labor history more than measures up to the rich materials available for research, the debates among labor historians sometimes resemble nagging tribal feuds over who did what, who was right, and who gets credit or blame for what happened.
