classes"—"clung to the idea that wage labor functioned as a temporary incubator," as Fink puts it, "conditioning the hard-working young man to the qualities necessary to rise to independent status." Those whom it is appropriate to call populists, on the other hand, looked the facts in the face and decided that the substance of proprietorship could be restored only through the agency of farmers' and artisans' cooperatives.

Unfortunately the discovery that cooperatives could not succeed without state support came too late to enable workers and farmers to make common cause. By the I890s, the Knights of Labor had fallen into disarray, the AFL was in the saddle, and the subject of cooperatives had been relegated to the labor movement's eccentric fringe. The struggle for "workers' control" continued, but it was now carried on within the narrow limits imposed by a more and more elaborate division of labor. Skilled workers attempted with little success to enforce union work rules, to retain control over apprenticeship, and to prevent their displacement by unskilled operatives. They read Frederick Winslow Taylor and knew that Taylor and his followers would not rest "until almost all the machines in the shop," as Taylor explained, were run by men "of smaller calibre and attainments" than the old craftsmen—men "therefore cheaper than those required under the old system." But the influx of unskilled workers diverted attention from the defense of craftsmanship to the seemingly more urgent need for more inclusive forms of unionization. By the time of the First World War, radicalism in the labor movement had come to be identified not with opposition to the functional differentiation between capital and labor but with industrial unionism. This kind of radicalism, however, posed no challenge to Taylorism or to the new interpretation of the American dream proposed by Taylor, among others, according to which the promise of American life rested not on "manly independence" but on the abundance generated by never‐ ending improvements in productivity.

Hardly anyone asked any more whether freedom was consistent with hired labor. People groped instead, in effect, for a moral and social equivalent of the widespread property ownership once considered indispensable to the success of democracy. Attempts to achieve a redistribution of income, to equalize opportunity in various ways, to incorporate the working classes into a society of consumers, or to foster economic growth and overseas expansion as a substitute for social reform can all be consid

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