Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas recent issues

Editor's Introduction

Fink, L. — 2009-09-01

Closing Time

Jeffire, J. — 2009-09-01

The Short, Radical Life of Pearl McGill

Rousmaniere, K. — 2009-09-01

This essay draws on the surviving letters of an early 20th century Iowa woman who moved rapidly from participation in a local factory strike, to activism in some of the most radical political movements of the day, to career as a rural school teacher, to victim of domestic violence. Pearl McGill's life is both typical of the struggles and tragedies of working women and political activists, and is exceptional in its drama. Also exceptional is that her story survives at all.

Primitive Accumulation

Holton, W. — 2009-09-01

Nearly every free American who lived through the recession of the 1780s blamed it, in part, on the thirteen state governments. However, two main camps staked out diametrically-opposed positions on what precisely the states had done wrong. James Madison, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and many of the other men who went on to write the United States Constitution believed the states had damaged the economy by caving in to farmers' demands for tax-reduction and debt-mitigation measures that brought temporary relief while wreaking long-term havoc. They believed the excessively-democratic state assemblies had bungled their way into a vivid demonstration of the perils of popular rule. On the other hand, thousands of other Americans contended that the assemblies had undercut farmers' productive capacity with stringent monetary policies and predatory taxes. They blamed the recession on elite, not popular, misrule. This debate is important if only because the elitist analysis associated with men like Hamilton and Madison became the basis for the adoption of the Constitution.

Schemes of Ambition

Edling, M. M. — 2009-09-01

Traditionally, the framing and adoption of the Constitution have been interpreted as an attempt by the social and economic elite to halt the democratization of American political life. In contrast, recent scholarship on the Constitution have argued that the rationale behind constitutional reform was the need to create a central government that could address political problems arising from inter-state and international relationships. An important aspect of this reform was the centralization of fiscal and financial powers that would allow the federal government to act vigorously on the international arena in defence of American interests.

The Marx of the Constitutional Era?

Kulikoff, A. M. — 2009-09-01

Using a political economy framework, Woody Holton argues that state fiscal policies during the 1780s constitute primitive accumulation, that violent process by which powerful men steal the means of subsistence of common folk, thus forcing them into waged labor and creating a class of proletarians. Clearly, the process was not completed in the nineteenth century. But this is not, I would argue, because the ruling class acquiesced in the demands of small farmers, as Holton argues, but resulted from a fierce conflict between small producers and capitalists and their allies that lasted more than a century.

Response to Woody Holton's "Primitive Accumulation"

Zagarri, R. — 2009-09-01

Holton's maintains that in explaining the origins of the U.S. Constitution historians have emphasized the concerns expressed by elites while overlooking the issues that most troubled large numbers of "ordinary" Americans. The strength of the argument is that Holton gives voice to the protests and grievances of small farmers and debtors, who believed that the state governments were imposing oppressive and unjust taxes during the 1780s. Yet his argument has several weaknesses. First, he overlooks regional differences within the country in the way that state legislatures responded to the taxation issues of the 1780s. Southern states, in which slave labor was most important, addressed the complaints quickly and minimized conflict among whites. Second, Holton overlooks the work of the historian Jackson Turner Main, which suggests that there was no definite connection between indebtedness and opposition to the U.S. Constitution. Finally, Holton's narrow focus on economic issues obscures the broader motives that led to writing and ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Rebuttal

Holton, W. — 2009-09-01

Death at the Machine: Critiques of Industrial Capitalism in the Fiction of Labor Activist Lizzie M. Holmes

Percy, R. — 2009-09-01

At the beginning of the twentieth century former socialist and anarchist Lizzie Swank Holmes wrote a series of eight fictional stories for the American Federation of Labor journal. Financial necessity was no doubt an important motivator, but Holmes likely also recognized the large and diverse potential readership American Federationist could offer. Examination of these stories thus pushes us to consider the complex rather than linear relationship between an individual's radical and labour politics and her journalist and literary production. Through Holmes we consider the ease with which many individuals moved between and through a number of different organizations, some of which appear in opposition with one another.

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Laurie, B. — 2009-09-01

Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class

English, B. — 2009-09-01

Glass Towns: Industry, Labor, and Political Economy in Appalachia, 1890-1930s

Licht, W. — 2009-09-01

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950

Thompson, H. A. — 2009-09-01

Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party

Boyle, K. — 2009-09-01

The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles

Leonard, K. A. — 2009-09-01

On Strike and on Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America

Gonzalez, G. G. — 2009-09-01

Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution

Lichtenstein, N. — 2009-09-01

Bitter Harvest: The Social Transformation of Morelos, Mexico, and the Origins of the Zapatista Revolution, 1840-1910

Caplan, K. D. — 2009-09-01

Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States

Lipin, L. M. — 2009-09-01

Citizen Docker: Making a New Deal on the Vancouver Waterfront, 1919-1939

Goings, A. — 2009-09-01

The Great Strikes of 1877

Brecher, J. — 2009-09-01

Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects

French, J. D. — 2009-09-01

Labor and Laborers of the Loom: Mechanization and Handloom Weavers, 1780-1840

Ouellette, S. — 2009-09-01

A Power among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

Merithew, C. W. — 2009-09-01

CONTRIBUTORS

2009-09-01

Editor's Introduction

Fink, L. — 2009-05-19

First Job

Scarff, K. — 2009-05-19

Introduction

Arnesen, E. — 2009-05-19

Racism, Society, and Law in Israel on the Appomattox

Schmidt, J. D. — 2009-05-19

James Schmidt evaluates the analysis of law and society in Israel on the Appomattox. Schmidt notes that Ely makes a signal contribution to our understanding about how the daily practice of law regarding free people of color in the antebellum South diverged significantly from the restrictive assertions of statute. Southern legal sources from outside Virginia support Ely's view. From a broader viewpoint, Schmidt suggests, these everyday legal enactments shored up social categories asserted through the raced language of the law, authorizing the in-between status of "free people of color" and constricting access to citizenship for free people of color.

Freedom, Slavery, and Homo Economicus

Stanley, A. D. — 2009-05-19

In "Freedom, Slavery, and Homo Economicus," Amy Dru Stanley explores two provocative claims advanced by Melvin Patrick Ely in Israel on the Appomattox—first, that the very existence of slavery allowed for the freedoms asserted by black persons who were not chattel and, second, that the worldview of Israel Hill's free blacks had much in common with that of other propertied persons in antebellum America. Focusing on the latter point, Stanley argues that Ely's work disrupts assumptions about the stark dualities of the Old South and the Yankee North. Accordingly, she suggests that questions raised regarding Northern white freeholders might fruitfully apply to Southern black freeholders: were the Israelites acquisitive, individualistic economic actors? At stake, Stanley writes, is ultimately the nature of sovereignty—the lived relations of personal dominion in Israel Hill. Invoking a recent debate between Douglas Egerton and Walter Johnson about the libratory power of money in the slave South, Stanley sketches the clashing worldviews that might have existed on Israel Hill—a possessive subjectivity animated by acquisitive individualism or a collective subjectivity rooted in racial kinship. Stanley claims that regardless of whether Israelites conceived of themselves as the "we" of the racial subject, the "I" of the bourgeois subject, or some fusion of the two, their market pursuits disrupted the Southern system of racial sovereignty and confused the relationship between bondage and freedom, rendering still more provocative Ely's argument that slavery itself enabled the freedom of black people not owned as chattel property.

Beyond the Appomattox: Comments on Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, by Melvin Patrick Ely

Saville, J. — 2009-05-19

Inspired by Israel on the Appomattox's imaginative reconstruction of the contingencies of manumission and conditional emancipation prior to the Civil War, Julie Saville considers gradual emancipation's resemblances to aspects of twentieth-century notions of "minimalist democracy." A premise that economic activities can be meaningfully separated from political participation and human rights undergirds many of the institutional and customary interactions that the book has uncovered. Melvin Ely also sheds new light on the symbolic work that racial stereotypes accomplished for their producers. Such features would seem to make the Virginians' projects of gradual emancipation less "visionary" but no less significant than this important study has revealed.

Freedom, Ideology, and White Supremacy: A Comment on Melvin Patrick Ely's Israel on the Appomattox

Capers, C. — 2009-05-19

This commentary focuses on the discrepancies between the use of the concepts freedom and ideology in Ely's Israel on the Appomattox. Though the slippage between the two terms is pervasive in the historiography and not limited to Ely's book, Corey Capers argues that we need a more scrupulous accounting of their historical and historiographic use. Through contrasting the deployment of both concepts in discussions of American Revolutionary discourse and practice by Ely and Bernard Bailyn (among others), Capers demonstrates how freedom and ideology function differently for free African Americans and free whites in Ely's book. For example, in Ely's discussion, revolutionary ideology motivates Richard Randolph's action to liberate his slaves, while racist ideology supporting white supremacy is presented as distinct from actual behavior. Similarly, for American revolutionaries freedom meant some form of political sovereignty (republican or popular), whereas for formerly enslaved African Americans freedom is limited to freedom from enslavement. Finally, Capers takes issue with Ely's interpretation of the impact of the capriciousness of white supremacy, arguing that such capriciousness is itself endemic to power and terror.

Comment on Israel on the Appomattox

Perman, M. — 2009-05-19

Israel on the Appomattox is a wonderful account of a large and successful settlement of freed slaves in antebellum Virginia. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the experience of former slaves as an anomalous social group in the slave South, but Michael Perman argues that it does not significantly alter current views about how the freed slaves fared and were treated, despite the claims of author Melvyn Ely and, to an even greater extent, the reviewers of the book.

Comments on Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, by Melvin Patrick Ely

Dailey, J. — 2009-05-19

Jane Dailey's commentary raises methodological issues at play in Ely's book but also of concern to the wider world of historical writing. Ely focuses on human behavior in antebellum Virginia rather than on human thought or ideology. This kind of division between behavior and thought visible in Israel on the Appomattox is reproduced at the methodological level in the historical discipline as a whole. Some historians claim the triumph of social history, others economic or intellectual or cultural history. This sort of oppositional choice—behavior matters more than ideas—needs to be thought of not dogmatically but strategically. It is one thing to divide thought and action heuristically, in order to discover something unknown about one or the other—we can separate x from y in order to see x more clearly. However, privileging day-to-day behavior over law and ideology does not take us any closer to a model of history that accounts for the complexity of society and for the possibility of that society to generate all types of potential and conflicting histories, many of which are never realized. Dividing cognitive and ideological structures from everyday behavior constrains our ability to explain why behavior matters. Histories are punctuated equilibriums. The behavioral model can go a long way toward explaining equilibriums, but it has a hard time explaining punctuations.

Response

Ely, M. P. — 2009-05-19

Premature Anti-Communists?: American Anarchism, the Russian Revolution, and Left-Wing Libertarian Anti-Communism, 1917-1939

Zimmer, K. — 2009-05-19

Initially among the Bolshevik Revolution's most ardent supporters in the United States, anarchists rapidly became its most outspoken left-wing critics. This article focuses on the transnational exchanges of information, analyses, and individuals that caused this about-face and its repercussions. Hundreds of Russian-born anarchists returned from the United States in 1917 and participated in the revolutionary upheavals in Russia, only to subsequently face repression and disillusionment. Their experiences in turn provided the basis for their American comrades' understanding of Soviet Communism as a betrayal of the popular revolution originating "from below" and an inherently authoritarian system. Anarchists' new anti-Communist imperative decisively shaped their activities in 1920s and 1930s, while simultaneously leading to their increasing marginalization within the labor movement and the Left. Conflict between anarchists and Communists erupted within the Industrial Workers of the World and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to the detriment of all. It also spilled over into the anti-Fascist movement and, subsequently, into anarchist understandings of, and participation in, the Spanish Civil War. The Bolshevik consolidation of power, the advent of the Popular Front, and the fall of Spain simultaneously provided anarchists with important insights into the nature of Soviet Communism, cemented their antiauthoritarian beliefs, and rendered them ineffective by placing them outside of the emerging Cold War dichotomy of the Stalinist "Left" and anti-Stalinist "Right."

Reforming Repression: Labor, Anarchy, and Reform in the Shaping of the Chicago Police Department, 1879-1888

Mitrani, S. — 2009-05-19

In the article "Reforming Repression: Labor, Anarchy, and Reform in the Shaping of the Chicago Police Department, 1879-1888," Sam Mitrani examines the dramatic strengthening of the Chicago Police Department in the 1880s. Beginning in 1879, Mayor Carter Harrison pulled the department back from its least popular activities, such as enforcing temperance regulations and breaking strikes, to increase the legitimacy of the force. This was part of Harrison's policy of class collaboration aimed at calming the tension in the city after the strike and riot of 1877. His administration also hired hundreds of new officers and funded an extensive police telegraph system. Meanwhile, the city's workers were organizing in new unions, anarchist organizations were growing, and the city's business leaders were preparing for new clashes by organizing themselves in a citizens' association and an organization known as the Commercial Club. When a new strike wave began in 1885 and his class collaborationist policies ceased to ensure civic peace, Harrison deployed the newly strengthened force against strikers and their anarchist allies, with telling effect. After the Haymarket bombing and the repression of the anarchists in 1886, the police department further consolidated and reinforced itself with increased support from the city's business leaders and their organizations. The article concludes that the Chicago Police Department was largely built in this era in reaction to the labor movement. The department's main task was to contain that movement and protect "order" as defined by businessmen.

A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York

Nelson, S. R. — 2009-05-19

Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?

van Voss, L. H. — 2009-05-19

Blacks, Indians, and Spaniards in the Eastern Andes: Reclaiming the Forgotten in Colonial Mizque, 1550-1782

Garofalo, L. J. — 2009-05-19

Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America

Striffler, S. — 2009-05-19

Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840

Zonderman, D. A. — 2009-05-19

Craft Capitalism: Craftworkers and Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario, 1840-1872

Palmer, B. D. — 2009-05-19

From Peasants to Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada

Satzewich, V. — 2009-05-19

Labor's Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context

Luff, J. — 2009-05-19

From Rights to Economics: The Ongoing Struggle for Black Equality in the U.S. South; For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865

Orleck, A. — 2009-05-19

Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights

Milkman, R. — 2009-05-19

Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon

Gutierrez, D. G. — 2009-05-19

Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit

Sutton, M. A. — 2009-05-19

A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York

Greenwald, R. A. — 2009-05-19

CONTRIBUTORS

2009-05-19

The Force of Faith: An Introduction to the Labor and Religion Special Issue

McCartin, J. A. — 2009-03-26

Sanctifying the Southern Organizing Campaign: Protestant Activists in the CIO's Operation Dixie

Fones-Wolf, E., Fones-Wolf, K. — 2009-03-26

When assessing the Congress of Industrial Organization's (CIO) postwar Southern Organizing Campaign, evangelical Protestantism shows up only on the debit side of the historians' ledger. Focus on anti-union hate sheets like Militant Truth and Gospel Trumpet conveniently substitutes for analysis of the shifting religious terrain of the South. In contrast, we argue that the potential for a sympathetic hearing from southern religious leaders was greater than scholars have previously believed, but that the CIO staff responsible for interpreting Operation Dixie's mission misunderstood the creeds and the theology of the most vibrant southern churches. By choosing individuals who boasted of their endorsement by the liberal Federal Council of Churches, the CIO incurred the wrath of southern denominations that had supported collective bargaining and an employee's right to join unions just a few years earlier. This missed opportunity is not the entire story, however. We also argue that the CIO's religious activists often challenged the Southern Organizing Campaign to promote racial equality and desegregation even when such challenges threatened to harm organizing goals. At the same time, they repudiated the claims of Communists to be the true supporters of black advancement in the labor movement. The connection of religious faith to the struggle for justice in the postwar South is surely far more complex than what exists in previous accounts.

Working for the Sabbath: Sabbath in the Jewish Immigrant Neighborhoods of New York

Polland, A. — 2009-03-26

This article analyzes the dilemmas and contradictions surrounding Saturday/Sabbath in New York City's Jewish immigrant neighborhoods at the turn of the twentieth century. How were working-class immigrants supposed to maintain allegiance to the commands and prohibitions of the Sabbath in a new, urban environment that encouraged Saturday labor? Though many immigrants breached Sabbath laws, either by working or by shopping, many also continued to value the traditional Sabbath. They engaged in activities such as Friday night celebrations and Saturday social events with friends and family that ritualized this value and embedded it into the week. This essay introduces the concept of what I call a "family religious economy," which allows us to examine the strategies immigrants developed to manage the tensions of work and religion. Scholars have shown the absolute importance of the family unit in analyzing the immigrant economy at the turn of the century. This emphasis holds especially true for Jews: more than any other contemporary immigrant group, Jews brought women and children with them and also often relied on the wages of their teenage children. In considering the religious life of Jews, daily, weekly, and annual observances often played out in the familial setting. The family religious economy involved the division of responsibilities of wage earning, household duties, and religious observances within a family and prods us to examine the various strategies families devised to ensure both economic and spiritual survival. By highlighting the religious work of preparing for the Sabbath—whether cooking, cleaning, or simply by earning the wages to finance the cooking and cleaning—this article expands our understanding of the Sabbath in the working-class immigrant neighborhood. It allows us to examine what immigrants did do to honor the Sabbath and how their Sabbaths, though not always observed in a strict halakhic (Jewish legal) fashion, had a profound impact on the rhythm and patterns of the immigrants' week.

An "Indestructible Right": John Ryan and the Catholic Origins of the U.S. Living Wage Movement, 1906-1938

Murphy, L. — 2009-03-26

The ongoing effort to establish a legal living wage in the U.S. has origins in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Catholic social teaching and activism. The priest-economist John A. Ryan presented a moral argument for a living wage, grounded in Catholic anti-individualism and natural rights traditions, which helped to fuel early minimum wage campaigns. Ryan was one of the chief advocates for minimum wage legislation in the U.S. His influential 1906 book A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects brought together Catholic social teaching with American republican ideals to argue that everyone has an "indestructible" God-given right to a "decent livelihood." Ryan collaborated with activists from varied religious and secular backgrounds to draft, lobby for, and implement several of the first minimum wage laws in the country—state laws which covered only women and children. These living wage advocates continued their work throughout the 1920s, when the Supreme Court declared the District of Columbia's minimum wage unconstitutional, and in the 1930s, when the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 built upon the foundations of the state laws to establish a federal minimum wage. Despite these accomplishments, a legal living wage is still not a reality in the U.S. However, twenty-first century activists have revived the living wage movement; they have built a broad coalition and strong public support on the foundation laid by Ryan and his diverse circle of minimum wage supporters a century ago: the moral imperative of a establishing a living wage for all workers.

Building the Interfaith Worker Justice Movement: Kim Bobo's Story

McCartin, J. A. — 2009-03-26

Challenging Binaries: Working-Class Women and Lived Religion in English Canada and the United States

Marks, L. — 2009-03-26

This essay argues that while historians of working-class women have generally developed a complex and multi-faceted approach to studying their subjects, that religion has remained largely invisible in such studies. This essay argues for the value of incorporating religion as a category of analysis in the study of working-class women. It provides some discussion of absences in the existing literature, primarily using American and English Canadian examples along with a few forays into relevant British work. More attention is focused on recent literature which does fully incorporate religion into the lives of their subjects, such as work in African-American women's history and within the field of "lived religion". Scholars of lived religion explore religion as part of working-class women's lives, and demonstrate the complex, messy and important ways in which the religious and the secular can combine in everyday lives. This essay explores reasons why most scholars of working-class women have largely ignored religion and argues that the approaches discussed here can point the way forward for the field of working-class women's history. The essay provides examples of particular areas of study, such as motherhood, consumption and women and unions, as areas where our ability to "see" religion as part of women's lives would deepen and strengthen our understanding of these topics.

CONTRIBUTORS

2009-03-26

Editor's Introduction

Fink, L. — 2008-11-25

Moments in the Kitchen

Bryner, J. — 2008-11-25

Labor Law Reform Thirty Years Later: Back to the Future with EFCA?

Early, S. — 2008-11-25

Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective

Laurie, B. — 2008-11-25

Model Defects: A Review of Bruce Laurie's "Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective"

Huston, J. L. — 2008-11-25

Workers and Whiteness Revisited

Melish, J. P. — 2008-11-25

Mapping Alternate Routes to Antislavery

Kelly, B. — 2008-11-25

Response

Laurie, B. — 2008-11-25

"Queen of the Picket Line": Beauty Contests in the Post-World War II Canadian Labor Movement, 1945-1970

Sangster, J. — 2008-11-25

This article examines the proliferation of beauty contests sponsored by the union movement after World War II, as a means of exploring the contradictions of the Fordist accord for women workers, and also feminist scholarship on beauty and the body. Beauty contests were articulations of labor pride and identity; they reflected the popular culture of the post-war period, labor's search for respectability, and labor's attempts to entice women into the movement by appealing to women's culture. A few contests even offered more subversive meanings of beauty by celebrating the `queen of the picket line.' However, most labor beauty contests promoted competitive individualism, consumption, and images of passive femininity that kept women marginalized on the sidelines of the labor movements. Le Bal des Midinettes, sponsored by the ILGWU, was an excellent example of these contradictions, espousing both faith in the Cinderella myth and a sense of French Canadian working-class pride. While theories stressing identity, agency, and subjectivity offer some insights into beauty contests, feminist-materialist analyses of commodification, exploitation, and ideology remain essential to our understanding of their meaning for, and impact on women workers in this period.

Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization

Fones-Wolf, K. — 2008-11-25

Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking

Higbie, T. — 2008-11-25

Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle

Fairclough, A. — 2008-11-25

From Colony to Nation: Women Activists and the Gendering of Politics in Belize, 1912-1982

del Moral, S. — 2008-11-25

Ireland's New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815-1922

Kirk, N. — 2008-11-25

Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia

Davis, C. — 2008-11-25

Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers, and the Political Economy of the American West

Currarino, R. — 2008-11-25

Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919-1933

Grunfeld, A. T. — 2008-11-25

Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America

Lause, M. A. — 2008-11-25

Auto Mechanics: Technology and Expertise in Twentieth-Century America

Wigderson, S. — 2008-11-25

U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of Revival from Below

Metzgar, J. — 2008-11-25

CONTRIBUTORS

2008-11-25