Clerks, Classes, and Conflicts: A Response to Michael Zakim's "The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary"

"I would prefer not to," intones Bartleby the Scrivener in Melville's tale of the same name. Bartleby is the antithesis of the figures that populate Michael Zakim's splendid panorama of the "clerking class"—that amorphous, ambiguous stratum of society that emerged in the early republic. Zakim's clerks are striving, peripatetic, "homeless," and no longer attached to the land—or even to a particular place. They are, he says with characteristic eloquence, the living embodiment of "the perpetuum mobile of the commodity exchange." As the clerk Edward Tailer (whom Zakim quotes) once wrote, "There is no such thing as a stationary point in human endeavor." It's a rather different sentiment than that voiced by Bartleby when he elaborates on his motives at the request of his baffled employer: "I like to be stationary."¹

But most clerks weren't stationary—or the very least, didn't want to stay in one place. Historians have a similar disposition, even if our movements are measured in years and decades rather than hours and days. And so, after a longstanding focus on the working class, our profession has embraced the study of the less celebrated, seemingly more bland white-collar workers, investigating how these ordinary men and women worked and played, what they produced and consumed, and perhaps most important of all, what they thought. Foremost among the scholars leading the charge is Brian Luskey, whose dissertation on clerks in New York City will likely join Cathy Matson's growing series of books on the economy of the new nation. Luskey is not alone: Literary historian Thomas Augst has plumbed the letters and lives of clerks, reconstructing the language and worldview of the ordinary white-collar worker. Both studies join several recent monographs that focus on clerks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, most recently Jerome Bjelopera's study of Philadelphia white-collar workers.²

These works are part of a broader interpretive turn that seeks to grapple with and describe the "middling classes" that emerged in the eighteenth century—and who became, in the nineteenth century, the middle class, a term whose elasticity is more revealing than its ability to actually describe a discrete cohort within society. Whether in the groundbreaking work of Burton Bledstein, Mary Ryan, or Stuart Blumin, or more recently, the influential set of essays edited by Bledstein and Robert Johnston, the middle classes have begun to receive the attention they deserve—which is not, by the way, the same thing as saying that what constitutes the "middle class" has been defined to anyone's satisfaction, either in contemporary society or in the opening decades of the nineteenth-century United States.³

Whatever the name (middling sorts, middle classes, or Zakim's more felicitous and focused "clerking class") and whatever the definition, why the interest now? Why has it taken historians so long to scrutinize a class of people to which the majority of Americans (or a plurality, depending on which poll you trust) claim to belong? Much of the problem, Zakim suggests, derives from the simplistic division between capital and labor that a generation of historians eagerly embraced. The clerking class did not fit into the Marxist categories (and classes) of bourgeoisie and proletariat. While Marx acknowledged the existence of other more marginal classes (e.g., the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle class) he anticipated their absorption into the one of the two primary classes.⁴

This attachment to binary conceptions of class has been a persistent fixation among historians of labor in the nineteenth-century United States. While understandable, such a focus has pushed white-collar workers to the historiographical margins. Peruse the pages of the most cutting-edge journals in the field, and you will find articles on housewives, sex workers, migrant workers, and a host of other groups that an older generation of labor historians ignored. But white-collar workers toiling in the trenches of large capitalist enterprises? It seems that these "brain workers" need not bother to apply for admission into the sanctified circle...