Anglo-American Labor Reform in Chicago

When they were active in the labor movement, the native-born and non-Irish immigrants from the British Isles were usually reformers. These workers founded and led many of the early craft unions, which often tried to establish good relations with their employers in the economic sphere and proposed legislative reform and attempted to elect sympathetic candidates to office in the political realm. But few Anglo-American workers supported actions to overturn the existing economic and political institutions; unlike the predominandy German socialists and anarchists, they accepted capitalism and representative democracy as institutions that served the interests of the working class. It is