Labor History and the Way America Works

LABOR HISTORY AND THE WAY AMERICA WORKS Herbert G. Gutman and Donald H. Bell, eds. The New England Working Class and the New Labor History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xvi + 296 pp. Illus. Alan Dawley and Paul Buhle, eds. Working for Democracy: American Workers.from the Revolution to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, I985. xv + 148 pp. Illus. Eric G. Nellis As with virtually all academic disciplines in America, the study of history in the twentieth century has been inexorably fractured into a set of narrowed specialties. As the number of historians has grown, the hyphenated historian is ascendant, and scholarly professionalism has been shaped in the last few decades into permanent careerist extensions of the doctoral thesis. Moreover, broad perspective and narrative have been replaced by models, methodology and quantification. The monograph and case study have triumphed as the dominant forms of history writing. This development can be seen as an inevitable consequence of contemporary society's perceived need for professional expertise and the scholarly community 's response to that need. But there is now a debate on whether or not the study and meaning of history has benefited from the refinement of the discipline. As Bernard Bailyn puts it, ''The great proliferation of historical writing has not served to illuminate the central themes of Western history but to obscure them." 1 As more is known with more precision, there is now an expressed doubt that historians are sacrificing a complete image of the past for sharper but isolated details of American history. It is to be hoped that this debate will encourage historians to reconcile the pa11icularand specific with general historical themes, and integrate the case study with more broadly defined issues in American history. This should not be a difficult task for political, economic or cultural historians, but it will require a creative, imaginative approach in such subjective fields as women's history, black history and labor history. For one of the oldest of the historical specialties, labor history, the problem of 196 Eric G. Nellis achieving a wide relevance for the subject is compounded by an ongoing weakness in the exact meaning of the specialty itself. For example, diplomatic history is the study of diplomats and diplomacy, plain and simple, and on that basis its findings can readily be made to be part of a larger American history. But what is labor history? If there is a question as to the meaning of the specialty and there is - then its usefulness in providing specific insight into any larger themes of American history is immediately limited. For a start, the concept and terminology of labor history is tricky. On a purely semantic level, if labor history is a "history oflabor," what does the word "labor" signify? Is it a verb, as in "to labor"? Or is it a possessive noun, as in "our labor"? Is it simply a synonym for "work," "working," or "worker"? Today, it seems, labor history can have any or all of those meanings, although until recently it usually took on a more precise designation as a collective pronoun that defined a social, political or economic group or plurality. Thus ''labor'' often referred to organized labor or labor movements. But even that mixture of sociology and ideology required and was compounded by the even more slippery concept of "class." And in American history, the notion of "class" has to confront the intellectual orthodoxy that has viewed American cultural experience as liberal, mobile, egalitarian and classless. It is not surprising that labor history has long been on the fringes of American scholarship, with self-conscious revisionism as its chief objective. As an academic specialty, labor history first appeared in the Progressive era. It coincided with, and responded to, the advanced capitalism, industrialism and urbanism of that age. The immigration boom and the circulation of international theories of socialism seemed to herald a new and more complex America. Progressive historians began to redefine their subjects on the basis of sociology and economics and discovered the existence of class not only in contemporary history but in all previous history. The great pioneer of American labor history was J. R. -Commons, and it was...