The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations: Interwar America's Dangerous Experiment in Social Control [Hardcover]

Explores the largely forgotten but controversial history of America's lone experiment with labor courts.Revisiting the intense controversy over the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, this book shows how its defeat reshaped America's law and politics of labor. Ben Merriman explores why the US turned away from the world's most-used labor policy design and toward its unique New Deal model.Revisiting the intense controversy over the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, this book shows how its defeat reshaped America's law and politics of labor. Ben Merriman explores why the US turned away from the world's most-used labor policy design and toward its unique New Deal model.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.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;lÃK