["Bread—and Roses: The Struggle of American Labor, 1865–1915"] is a one-dimensional story of battle by an infant labor movement against the forces of corporate greed in a period when all the institutions of government and polite society were on the side of the employer. The very fact that the book is episodic and often overdrawn adds to its usefulness in supplying a new generation of readers with some illumination on the atavistic hatreds and insecurities behind many of the seemingly irrational things unions do now that they enjoy large membership, huge treasuries and economic power sufficient to paralyze entire communities….

Mr. Meltzer's pages, prickly with eyewitness accounts of unionism's birthpains in the sweatshops, the factories, the railroads and the mines, are a goad to revitalized activity in defense of industrial democracy and higher economic standards for those who remain on the outskirts of American affluence….

Many will feel...