As the introductory quotation from Samuel Gompers ² warns, how-
ever, many of these contemporary judgments proved to be overly
optimistic in the light of subsequent developments. The perspec-
tive of more recent students, sharpened by their opportunity for
observing the fate of some of the much publicized experiments in
union-management cooperation, led to a far different evaluation
from that offered above and served to confirm the thesis I had
originally advanced as to the ephemeral and rather unique char-
acter of the principal experiments of the period. At the time I was
writing, no published case studies of union-management coopera-
tion had appeared, with the exception of Louis A. Wood's Union-
Management Cooperation on the Railroads. ³ It was not long, how-
ever, before the gap was filled by the appearance of Carter Nyman
and Elliot Dunlap Smith's Union-Management Cooperation in the
"Stretch-Out" ⁴ (a study of the Naumkeag experiment); Mary Van
Kleeck's Miners and Management ⁵ (a discussion of cooperation at
the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company); Sumner Slichter's epochal
study, Union Policies and Industrial Management ⁶ ; and Kurt
Braun's Union-Management Cooperation: Experience in the
Clothing Industry. ⁷

On the basis of these studies later writers tended to conclude
that a program of union-management cooperation was likely to
succeed only under rare and unusual conditions and that the ex-
periments of the 1920's were rather more sporadic than enduring
aspects of labor-management relations. ⁸

Despite these sobering conclusions the flickering interest in
union-management cooperation has never wholly died out. In the
late 1930's the Steelworkers began a vigorous campaign of advocat-
ing cooperation in an effort to win union security clauses in their

-vi-