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particular character of its social division of labor and the history of working-class
struggle in the city.
Comparatively speaking, Baltimore was not known as a leading center of
workplace struggle in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the common
wisdom has been that the Baltimore trade-union movement of the era was
extremely weak. In its efforts to attract out-of-town capital investment, the bulletin
of Industrial Bureau of Baltimore proclaimed, "Baltimore has always maintained its
position as an open shop" town. And local business boosters of the 1930s listed the
favorable labor conditions of the city as varieties and levels of skill similar to the
North, wages similar to the South, and labor's "manifest willingness to cooperate
with management in the amicable solution of mutual problems." This was not
entirely just self-interested mythologizing by business, for labor historian Rod
Ryon, writing of the period before World War I, has remarked on the "notorious
weakness" of Baltimore unions. The Baltimore trade-union movement was, if
anything, even weaker at the end of the 1920s than in the pre-war period, for the
trade-union struggle receded over the last half of that decade. The strike statistics
for the city suggest this. After a post-war explosion of between 22 and 34 recorded
strikes per year in 1919-21, and a second smaller wave of 15,23, and 15 in 1923-25,
the Monthly Labor Review reported only 4, 7, 7, and 10 respectively for the
remaining years of the decade. With the ebbing of struggle went the organizational
retrenchment, and by the early 1930s no more than 10% of the Baltimore working
class was organized.
The weakness of Baltimore's trade-union movement can, however, be
overemphasized. The 1920s were a rough time for the trade-union movement
across the United States, and locales everywhere witnessed a decline in both
militancy and organizational strength over much of that decade. The commonality
of this decline is illustrated by Table 4-5, which shows the number of reported
strikes per every one million residents in each of the country's eleven biggest cities
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