The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations

Interwar America's Dangerous Experiment in Social Control

AvBen Merriman

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

Del i serien Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology

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Beskrivning

The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, founded in 1920, was the lone US trial of a labor court - a policy design used almost everywhere else in the industrialized world during the interwar period. What led Kansas to establish the KCIR when no other state did? And what were the consequences of its existence for the development of economic policy in the rest of the country? Ben Merriman explores how the KCIR's bans on strikes and lockouts, heavy criminal sanctions, and unilateral control over the material terms of economic life, resulted in America's closest practical encounter with fascism. Battered by the Supreme Court in 1923, the KCIR's failure destroyed American interest in labor courts. But the legal battles and policy divisions about the KCIR, which enjoyed powerful supporters, were an early sign of the new political and intellectual alignments that led to America's unique New Deal labor policy.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-08-14
Mått:157 x 235 x 20 mm
Vikt:496 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology
Antal sidor:264
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781009665278

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Mer om författaren

Ben Merriman is Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. Merriman is the author of Conservative Innovators: How States are Challenging Federal Power, as well as articles on political and administrative matters in the American Journal of Sociology, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, Politics & Society, and Theory & Society.

Recensioner i media

'Ben Merriman turns the collapsed shards of a brief and long-expired Kansas experiment in judge-led corporatism in the 1920s into a stunning review of the role of the state – both what it can do and what it cannot do – in workers' lives in the twentieth century. Comparing and contrasting the high-minded but failed efforts of William L. Huggins with those of more successful industrial relations reformers like Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, this book captures a dramatic political struggle; this is engaged legal history and political thought at its sophisticated best.' Leon Fink, Senior Research Associate, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, Georgetown University

Innehållsförteckning

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. The court that failed; Part I. The KCIR in Kansas: 2. Progressivism without experts: the colonial legacy and the arc of reform in Kansas; 3. Making the KCIR: institutional design and political philosophy; 4. The lost legal promise and political failings of the KCIR; Part II. The KCIR in the World: 5. The KCIR in national public life: divided reception in a stalemated era; 6. No intellectual haven: legal and economic divisions over the KCIR; 7. The KCIR before the US Supreme Court: reversal and reaction; 8. Locking into liberalism: the defeat of the KCIR and America's turn away from international labor policy models; Afterword: Shall the 2020s be new lean years?; Appendix: The cases and investigations of the KCIR.