Editor’s Introduction

The Roundtable with which this issue begins presents a serious stocktaking of the iconic, field-defining Working Class in American History (WCAH) series of the University of Illinois Press. Initially imagined as a modest series (see the original proposal document in Jeffrey Sklansky’s article) with the support of the then new press director Richard L. Wentworth (currently, Laurie Matheson), WCAH soon reaped a whirlwind of new scholarship. With some 140 volumes in print since it emerged in 1978 under the guidance of Herbert Gutman, David Brody, and David Montgomery, WCAH effectively positioned the social-history, bottom-up-centered “new labor history” as an important pillar of American historiography as a whole. Inevitably, the series has also regularly reflected not only the methodological swings but the mood swings of the surrounding scholarly community. Looking back on its forty years, three distinguished “outside” (i.e., outside the WCAH canon) scholars assess the series’—and thus effectively the field’s—strengths and weaknesses.

With a selection of studies of the nineteenth century, Sklansky kicks off the Roundtable, zeroing in on the treatment of a “congenitally conflicted working class . . . stamped from the start by opposing tendencies toward unity and division, resistance and acquiescence, autonomy and assimilation.” Effective focus over time on the “unmaking” rather than an original aspirational “making” of the working class ultimately reveals, argues Sklansky, a conceptualization of class as “a relationship of rule, not simply of reciprocity.” As revealed through the multiplying volumes of the series, moreover, such rule has become defined by “competing versions of property in labor—including family labor, slave labor, and wage labor.” Yet, Sklansky warns against accepting the recent record of labor’s decline and defeat in the public square as a signal for historians to give up on the promise of collective agency from below. Rather, he points to the still-instructive ways that nineteenth-century social movements “co-constituted” class “with other kinds of relations—racial, sexual, national, religious, or contractual—as many scholars have emphasized.”

Next in the Roundtable, appreciating the many “foundational texts” treating themes of race and gender that have documented the history of the working class from the bottom up, Talitha L. LeFlouria nevertheless wonders “about those stories that rest beneath the bottom.” The unfree, the unwaged, and the illegal, including sex workers, numbers runners, and others in the “informal” economy, to her mind, thus still make too little impression on major synthetic works in the field. If underground workers, for example, had been included in Ruth Milkman’s authoritative On Gender, Labor, and Equality (2016), she asks, “would Madame Stephanie St. Clair, the ‘Numbers Queen’ of Harlem, emerge as a key figure who fought to secure the same economic opportunities as men?”

A fundamental disconnect between labor history narratives of the workers’ world and the realities of twentieth- and twenty-first-century political culture, argues Jefferson Cowie in part 3 of the Roundtable, has long challenged contributors to the field. The validity of the assumption implicit in much new labor history scholarship that “connections of class” could explain “a central dynamic in how US history works,” he suggests, has not been proved. To the contrary, he argues, “the working class does not have “voice” but (quoting David Montgomery) “many different voices, sometimes in harmony, but often in conflict with one another.” For decades, however, bright young labor historians—with what he calls a “boomer-infused sense of their own capacity”—failed to fully reckon with this fractured universe and instead sought political-intellectual refuge in “what might be called the four Cs: culture, class, community, and control.” Only by abandoning this sticky “fetish of agency,” Cowie implies, can the field effectively reckon with the “hard truths” of American political reality ascendant since the Reagan era.

Explaining workplace militancy in two quite different contexts occupies the issue’s research articles. In the first, Michael Goldfield and Cody R. Melcher push back against “state autonomists” who would give primary credit for labor’s 1930s upsurge to state interventions beginning with Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1932 (NIRA), asserting the rights of workers...