Labor History as Progressive Economics

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[The article is drawn from James Green's recently
published book "Taking History to Heart: The Power
of the Past in Building Social Movements"
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.)]


HISTORIANS AS ALLIES OF
THE LABOR MOVEMENT
By James Green

For several years now, we've been hearing about the
shortcomings of so- called public intellectuals. Their
efforts are neither new nor daring; they mistake the
word for the deed; they are unable to bridge the
chasm between academe and the public and,
therefore, they make little impact on culture or
politics.

For scholars like myself, who study labor history and
seek to influence the current union movement, the
problem is especially troubling. Many of us came of
professional age in the 1960's, with the hope that we
could  affect public policy or build movements for
social justice. My own work was inspired by
Progressive-era historians who had large public
audiences and made a significant impact on the
social-justice movements  of their time. Mary Ritter
Beard held no academic position, but she wrote a
fine popular history of the labor movement, actively
participated in the educational efforts of the
Women's Trade Union League, and made intellectual
contributions to the women's suffrage  movement.
Her spouse, Charles A. Beard, the great historian of
class conflict, also contributed to worker education
and shaped popular understanding of how propertied
interests limited the possibilities for democracy in
the United States.

One of the last Progressive historians who followed
in Beard's footsteps  was my graduate-school mentor,
the Southern historian C. Vann Woodward  (whose
study of the New South, The Strange Career of Jim
Crow, was called the Bible of the civil-rights
movement by Martin Luther King  Jr.). Woodward
encouraged us to read W.E.B. Du Bois's Black
Reconstruction, with its classic "history of the part
which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct
democracy in America." When I arrived at Yale in
1966, it was a time for reading the previously
unrecognized writings of Philip Sheldon Foner, the
prolific Marxist labor historian. It was also a period
when we joined in the New Left's criticism of some

of the Old Left's writers, for whom class struggle had
defined just about everything. We were attracted to
the unorthodox  Marxism of E.P. Thompson and
C.L.R. James, who understood class struggle  and
class consciousness in more- subtle ways, and who
wrote with grace  about the cultures of common people.

But by 1981, most of us had to agree with Herbert G.
Gutman, a pioneer of working-class history, who
charged that our "new social history" had  failed to
reach its intended audience. Not much progress had
been made by 1997, when the labor historian
Leon Fink, who had studied with Gutman in the
1960's, commented on the scene. In his book
Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of
Democratic Commitment, Fink argued  that no one
of our generation has accomplished what Progressive
intellectuals like John Dewey achieved as a public
educator and philosopher. No professor of our time
has matched the influence of the economist John R.
Commons, who not only shaped labor policy, but
also founded the "Wisconsin school" of
interpretation, which governed academic
understanding of workers and unions for several
generations.

To be sure, none of the historians of my generation
can compare our contributions to those of historians
like the Beards, Woodward, Du Bois, or Thompson.
But we can measure our efforts by more-modest
standards.

As some scholars in African-American studies have
recently pointed out, intellectuals can be active in
supporting popular struggles in many ways  (even if
they are not treated as stars in the media). The
Columbia University historian Manning Marable
recently noted in The Chronicle that activism among
people of color has created opportunities for
academics. "Intellectuals don't create history," he
said. "They follow it."

That is a good way to summarize what I have been
doing in labor studies and public history since 1976.
And it suggests how today's scholars might think
about their work as public intellectuals.

In 1976, I spent the year in England lecturing at
Warwick University on labor history, and I became
involved with activist historians in the History
Workshop movement. The first History Workshop
had been started by a disaffected Oxford tutor in the

1950's, to provide classes for working people and to
enable them to write their own history. When I
returned home and began teaching at the University
of Massachusetts at  Boston, a public university with
an urban mission, I looked for a  similar way to break
out of the academic isolation that I had found
so  stifling in the United States.

The books I wrote in the 1970's were undertaken in
the hope that I could reach the working-class
students and union activists I was beginning to
encounter in my classes. The Massachusetts History
Workshop, which two graduate students and I set up,
focused on helping working people stage events
commemorating their past. The labor-studies-degree
program that I started in 1980 was designed to attract
adult trade unionists who wanted to become more
effective activists.

In two decades, I learned from those students that
historical narratives  can do more than just redeem
the memory of past struggles; they can help  people
think of themselves as historical figures who, like
those who  came before them, have crucial moral and
political choices to make.  Sometimes, stories of the
past provide hope, sometimes guidance. They don't
provide anything as concrete as solutions to current
problems, but  they do impart a sense of how tough
choices were made in the past, how history was
shaped by human intervention, how certain decisions
explained what happened to the labor movement,
what went right - and wrong.

In my various efforts, I tried to emphasize historical
moments when the labor movement broke out of its
institutional constraints and embraced  diversity and
experimented with bold tactics: I talked, for example,
about the multiethnic, largely female work force that
paralyzed the 19th- century textile industry in
Lawrence, Mass., with a strike for "bread  and
roses." But I also noted that the strike, though led by
radical unionists, was opposed by the American
Federation of Labor, and that it failed -- either to
improve conditions for workers or to revitalize the
union movement.

In reaching out to trade-union members, I also
encountered opposition from some union officials.
Like other New Left radicals who were attempting to
engage the labor movement, I found myself traveling
a rocky road. It was a toll road, manned by
gatekeepers from powerful labor organizations with
conservative leaders. We found that it was one thing
to write an academic book with a sharply critical
view of union bureaucrats and frozen ideas for a
leftist audience; it was quite another matter to present
radical history to a working-class audience.
Some local union officials in Massachusetts found
my teaching and writing far too critical of their
organizations and forerunners; a number of hostile
encounters gave me firsthand experience of the deep
suspicion of academics and intellectuals among
union officials that goes back to Samuel Gompers's
crusade against "utopians" and socialists in  the ranks
of his A.F.L.

Nevertheless, I did find allies in the union
movement, particularly among the trade unionists
who came to our program as adult students.  Even in
the discouraging Reagan years, when unions were
attacked by employers and Republican officials and
weakened by their own conservative leaders, my
students shared with me a sense of urgency about
rebuilding and changing the labor movement. They
seemed hungry for history, wanted to recover a sense
of a past when unions were part of a vibrant
campaign for social justice. And they wanted to re-
create that past in the present. They urged me to tell
"labor's untold story" in public, to counter the
negative image of unions being promoted by many
of their employers, the mass media, and politicians.

And so I turned to newspaper editorials that applied
history to current problems, to television and radio
interviews, museum exhibits and public- library
lectures, and more. As a public intellectual, I was
doing what I do best: being a writer and teacher of
people's history. I came to see the work I do as a
college professor as the best medium for me to link
up with labor activists. In the process, I also came to
realize the truth of an observation by the British
writer and critic John Berger: that the passion for
history is most intense, not in the university, but in
popular movements for struggle and survival.

Back then, in the 1980's, I could not imagine that
many of the union insurgents with whom I made
common cause would one day lead large unions in
Massachusetts and, even, hold high positions in a
newly reformed national A.F.L.-C.I.O.

Nor could I imagine that I would be asked by one of
those national leaders to write a new short history for

A.F.L.- C.I.O. members -- a history that would
replace the old uncritical, celebratory pamphlet that
scarcely mentioned women and workers of color, or
the ways that those people had been excluded from
unions. Democracy@Work, which will be published
in the fall, provides union members traditions from
their past  that offer hope and encouragement, as
well lessons about what went wrong  in the past.

The changes in the labor movement have, not
surprisingly, created a new  will among labor
historians to overcome the pessimism that overtook
many intellectuals after the Reagan revolution in
politics. Witness the  efforts of historians like Nelson
Lichtenstein and Steven Fraser to  create a new
alliance between students and workers, which
culminated in  the formation of a national association
Scholars, Artists, and  Writers for Social Justice - in 1996.

As is usually the case with intellectuals, ideological
debate marks such efforts. The sharpest argument
pits those who call for a class-conscious politics *
uniting working people around common concerns *
against  others who embrace a multifaceted identity
politics that recognizes the  way in which divisions
among workers have negated class solidarity.

Those who seek to build a stronger labor movement
based on economic  interest and class identity call for
shifting from what some call the  "victim studies" of
particular groups. They want to revive the study of
what the sociologist Todd Gitlin terms "the common
dreams" that once  united labor and liberal
campaigns to end poverty and expand democracy.
Others, like the historian Robin D.G. Kelley, argue
that union  organizers need to pay attention to culture
and identities based on  race, ethnicity, national
origin, and gender. Only that way, Kelley  believes,
can labor be at the center of a diverse movement for
social  justice.

That debate is of great importance to those of us who
teach working- class history to trade unionists. In my
own work, I have placed the struggles of working
people within a larger narrative of the expansion  of
democracy. However, I have also had to come to
grips with recent  historical scholarship that seems to
cast a shadow on any picture of  unity. In The Wages
of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class, for example, David R. Roediger has
shown how much racial  distinctions were at the
center of white working-class consciousness.

Similarly, the essays in the collection Work
Engendered: Toward a New  History of
American Labor, edited by Ava Baron, show how
male  constructions of the terms "solidarity" and
"democracy" subordinated  female workers.

In my classes with trade unionists, I have asked
students to explore the causes and consequences of
such exclusionary practices within the labor
movement. I have found that discussions that
focus on these issues in  terms of current practices
provoke sharp divisions; but discussions of  the past
seem to help us open up the topic of who has been
excluded, and  why. Many of my students
including white males from traditional union
backgrounds -- have been willing to read the
historical record  objectively and to learn from
past mistakes. But the balance is a  delicate one,
particularly with women and members of minority
groups,  who sometimes find their faith in the
movement shaken by the "horror stories" from the
past.

The field of labor history, as well, has been shaken
by the new scholarship on difference. Studies of
deeply ingrained sexist and racist  identities among
white male workers seem to negate the very notion
of a  class-conscious labor movement and to cast a
pall over a field that has  suffered from pessimistic
predictions of labor's future and declining  class
enrollments.

Recently, however, scholars like Roediger have
begun to argue that a more inclusive working-class
studies can revitalize the field. Two years ago, some
of those scholars created a new group - the Labor
and Working- Class History Association, led by
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Joe William  Trotter Jr., and
Vicki Ruiz, whose own research has focused on
women and  people of color. The organization aims
to expand the field of labor history to include the
lives of those who have been excluded from  unions.
It is also dedicated to forging a new alliance between
intellectuals and union activists, based partly on a
more critical understanding of the past.

The debate over the politics of identity has also
surfaced, with its own variations, among the people
who offer courses to workers and members of  trade
unions. Until very recently, that group viewed labor
historians as  too academic to be useful in their
courses. When I became a member of  the University
and College Labor Education Association in 1980, it
had  one division for university- based teachers and
another for union-based  teachers.  Each harbored
suspicions of the other; neither was much interested
in critical perspectives on the labor movement;
neither used  the scholarship of labor historians in
their classes for opening up  questions about how
unions evolved. All that began to change in the
1990's, and was greatly accelerated by the reform of
the national A.F.L.- C.I.O.

Last spring, I attended a meeting in Milwaukee
where the old bifurcated  labor educators' association
was dissolved and a new organization, the  United
Association for Labor Education, was born. The
conference centered on the impact of globalization
and the issues raised by the  vast population of
immigrants who now work in the United States. In
the past, none of the few labor-history sessions
offered attracted much  interest. This year was
different. What I and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.  education
director, Susan Washington, had planned as a small
workshop on  integrating labor history into labor
education ended up attracting some  75 people.

It is, indeed, an exciting time to be a labor historian.
Scholars who  once felt isolated in university history
departments are organizing  teach-ins on labor issues
and supporting the new student movements  against
sweatshops and for the promotion of living-wage
standards.  Discarding older suspicions of
intellectuals, the present A.F.L.- C.I.O.  leaders have
welcomed scholars and students, and they joined
environmental activists in demonstrations in Seattle
and Washington  against the World Trade
Organization and International Monetary Fund.  For
those of us who teach labor history, it is a
particularly important time to bring decades of
scholarship on working people to the subjects  of our
studies.

For the first time since the Progressive era of the
early 1900's, historians and intellectuals are being
invited to be allies of unions  and workers. A century
ago, public intellectuals who participated in  building
progressive social movements did so, for the most
part, outside  the academy. Our generation of
socially conscious scholars need not  leave academe
in order to reach out to others who are trying to build
new movements for social justice and economic
equity. As we try to revive the Progressive tradition
of intellectual activism, let us  remember what the
social movements of our time need most from us:
what  we have to contribute as teachers and scholars.



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