Joe McCartin is to be congratulated for achieving his goal of establishing the idea of industrial democracy as the central organizing concept in US labor relations during and immediately after World War One. His rightly praised work, Labor's Great War, traces industrial democracy from its flowering under Frank Walsh's 1913 US Commission on Industrial Relations through the disputes over its many contested meanings during World War One, to its sad result in 1920s company unions and welfare capitalism. He does a masterful job of sorting out the competing groups of employers, labor, government, and public, as well as the contests within those groups. Along the way we are treated to fine character sketches of Walsh, William Howard Taft, President Woodrow Wilson, Secretary of Labor William Wilson, Louis Brandeis, Samuel Gompers, and the International Association of Machinists president William Johnson. However, the book's successful strategy, its tight focus on American wartime industrial democracy, is also its weakness since it too severely limits itself in time and space.

The writing of history is defined by questions asked by the historian. Again and again historians return to the query of “why no labor party?” or “why no socialism in the United States?” on the premise that the absence of a labor party deviated from the norm, at least observed from a European perspective. For many historians this political development, or should I say, non-development, was indicative of “American exceptionalism,” part and parcel of the nation's unique political, economic, social, and cultural trajectory.