The discovery that artisans dominated working-class movements in the nineteenth century leads almost irresistibly to several other conclusions, although these are not always stated explicitly and might be disowned by scholars who still hope to square the new labor history with Marxism. Since artisans struggled above all "to save their craft," as Scott puts it, working-class radicalism should be understood as an "attempt to halt the process of proletarianization rather than an indication that the process was complete." This helps to explain why workers, not only in the United States but in England and even in France, did not more readily embrace ideologies of class struggle, why they often identified themselves as middle-class "producers," and why they directed so much of their indignation not against their employers (who could be regarded as fellow producers) but against bankers, speculators, monopolists, and middlemen. In Philadelphia, many radical artisans believed that it was "futile," according to Bruce Laurie, "to assail bosses ... if avaricious financiers ... lurked behind the degradation of craftmanship and the erosion of earnings." Although the growing rift between masters and journeymen made it less and less likely that journeymen would become masters in their own right, journeymen refused to accept the legitimacy or permanence of the new order. They could see that their masters had begun to act more and more like capitalists and that many industries were now controlled not by masters at all but by men without any knowledge of a craft. Their first impulse, however, was to eliminate the distinction between capital and labor, not to accept their position as laborers and attempt to improve it.

A convention of New England mechanics resolved in 1844, "Labor now becomes a commodity, wealth capital, and the natural order of things is entirely reversed." Socialists urged workers to forget about the "natural order of things" and to accept the new conditions as a fact of life. A Cincinnati socialist declared in 1875, "Sons and daughters of the laboring classes ... have no other choice than to become factory employees for lifetime, ... without the least hope ... to become their own masters." Gompers offered exactly the same advice. In 1888, in one of his frequent

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