Howard Kimeldorf's Battling for American Labor explores “the distinctive industrial radicalism of American labor” during the Progressive Era (5). He takes to task the whole tired notion of an ideological battle for American workers waged between the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that has interested generations of scholars since at least the time Eugene Debs said there was a clear “choice between the A.F. of L. and capitalism on one side, and the Industrial Workers of the World and socialism on the other” (3). Kimeldorf states that too much of the labor history of the early twentieth century has been told as simply an ideological war for the hearts and minds of American workers. This smart book deals with two case studies of groups of workers who, over time, start out in the IWW fold and eventually join the AFL. This story traditionally has been told as the growth of either “job consciousness,” a case of “false consciousness,” or the growing conservatism of American workers. Kimeldorf suggests a fresh way of looking at this important issue. Rather than seeing the workers as having changed, he suggests that, through a careful study of the workers' actions, it was the AFL who in fact was transformed because of the workers.