class radicalism in the nineteenth century. Workers saw their oppressors, the "capitalists" and moneylenders, as outsiders more often than they saw them as members of their own communities—agents of a foreign power, in effect, of a "paper system" or an international "money trust" that robbed Englishmen or Americans of their inherited rights and threatened to reduce them to slavery.

The appeal to the past, in other words, also implied an appeal to local, regional, or national solidarity in the face of outside invasion—something far more substantial than the hypothetical solidarity of the international proletariat. For historians who inherit from the Enlightenment (in the form of Marxism) a belief that moral progress requires the replacement of local attachments and a parochial outlook by successively wider and more inclusive identities, culminating in the Workers' International, the intensely localistic element in nineteenth-century radicalism (not to mention the religious spirit that often informed it) comes as a disconcerting discovery. The new labor history represents the triumph of historical craftsmanship—a stubborn respect for the evidence—over ideology. It is not surprising that some historians seek to soften the blow to their old beliefs by insisting on the "transitional" character of nineteenth-century working-class radicalism. The last remnant of the Marxist assumptions that originally guided so much of this work, the telltale adjective "transitional" seems to imply that acceptance of the wage system should have led to a more accurate perception of workers' interests, a recognition of the "brotherhood of all workers" (as Sewell puts it), and an understanding that a socialist revolution would have to rest on the demonstrable accomplishments of industrial capitalism, not on blind resistance to them.

The steady decline of revolutionary fervor in the industrial working class, however, undermines our confidence in "transitions" of this sort. The "mature" and "progressive" solution usually turned out to be some version of Gompers's oxymoronic dictum that "the way out of the wage system is through higher wages." Alan Trachtenberg notes that Gompers was willing "to accept the wage system in exchange for a secure place within the social order." The same statement, however, applies to the twentieth-century labor movement as a whole, not just to Gompers's "pure and simple unionism."

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