In American Labor and American Democracy, William English Walling drew on his close association with Samuel Gompers and other leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to write the authoritative history of the labor movement in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Walling's position was that twentieth-century American democracy was not stagnant. It was a living, developing trend in society, with the AFL as its most progressive force. There could be no passive acceptance of American institutions as they stood: government in the twentieth century would need to develop into...