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As the Great Depression crushed the mining industry, Tri-State miners looked for ways to restore their standing as hard-working-white men and their faith in capitalism. The New Deal offered hope but brought labor unions back into the district. Some miners, but not a majority, looked to organized labor as the best way to roll back the power of the companies. This chapter explores their 1935 strike to regain what they had lost and the ways the New Deal labor regime was too weak to protect them. While strikers waited for allies in the nascent Congress of Industrial Organizations, the mining companies organized the majority of the district’s nonunion miners into a back-to-work movement that became a company union. This group rallied around old promises of racial superiority and high pay for loyal, hard-working white men who were willing to destroy the CIO union. The CIO, with the help of New Deal officials, eventually won this dispute in court, but it could not overrule the reactionary commitments in the hearts of the majority of Tri-State miners as a new world war brought the mining economy to life again.

This chapter discusses the age of Thomas Mitten, one of the nation's most famous transportation company managers and a key figure in the development of company unions and welfare capitalism. It mainly focuses on how Mitten tapped into broader intellectual currents of the 1910s and 1920s, when corporations more frequently sought subtler means of worker control, to develop the Mitten Plan. A combination of a company union, welfare capitalism, and an employee stock purchase program, the Mitten Plan at first captured the loyalty of much of the workforce and the imagination of pundits, academics, and government officials. By the late 1920s, however, critics began to question whether the Mitten Plan really helped workers or merely used different means to keep them under the control of management.

This chapter considers the labour relations during the conventional cargo era, twenty years before the introduction of the container industry. Reveley argues in depth that companies that hired watersiders were disempowered by the structure of the labour market. The chapter is divided into subsections as follows: Bargaining Structures; Union Bargaining Strategies; The Employers, Bargaining, and the WIT; The Unions Amalgamate Nationally; Work Relations and Managerial Control Strategies; Management Through the Wages System; Workplace Bargaining Over “Rates”; Informal Work Practices; and Labour Productivity and Costs. The chapter concludes by stating that though employers could individually profit from these circumstances, collectively they were in a worse position than the strengthened unions, and that this status quo, despite bargaining efforts, remained so at the start of containerisation.

Chapter 2, Bringing the Outside In, examines the industrial infrastructures within which the burgeoning profession of public relations coalesced: rail, steel, and coal, and the simultaneous development of information infrastructures to situate these industries as paragons of democracy in the American imagination. It was in struggles over labor rights, workers’ rights, employee welfare, and industrial reform that the practice of public relations forged its methods, as scions of power and privilege attempted to manage the “external environment” of public and political opinion to reduce friction for the machinations of heavy industry. While the “external environment” does not directly map onto the natural environment, we see in these struggles the porousness of the boundaries between the inside and the outside of industrial production, allowing industrial leaders to control the outside world in addition to the one within their walls.

Chapter 6 addresses Franklin’s inherently sociable nature, which led him to join many organizations such as the Masons in Philadelphia. He founded the American Philosophical Society, and the Junto, out of which emerged the Library Company. These institutions were based on high-minded discussion of ideas and provisions for public health as well as ordinary efforts to improve Philadelphia’s physical conditions. The chapter outlines the founding of the College of Philadelphia, the Union Fire Company, and the Pennsylvania Hospital, as well as the improvement of sidewalks, installation of streetlights, and the creation of a private militia. It discusses Franklin’s commitment to life in Philadelphia—another connection to Protestantism which started as an urban faith and in much of its early development depended on institutions and churches located in cities.