History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History by James R. Barrett (review)

Lewis Hine’s 1910 photograph Tenement Child with a Blank Wall to Stare At adorns the cover of this collection. It makes you wonder what this child could be thinking, and that is precisely the question the historian of Irish American labour and biographer of Communist Party USA leader William Z. Foster, James Barrett wants you to ask. For, as the title suggests, history from the bottom up will always be inadequate if we fail to fully integrate subjectivity. Barrett argues we need to understand workers as people, with complex, varied, and potentially cosmopolitan lives, if we are to understand the history of the working class. Opening with his own experiences growing up Irish Catholic and working class on the west side of Chicago, and later as an activist and graduate student at Warwick and Pittsburgh, Barrett not only illustrates why the personal is political but shows that it is historically meaningful.

He then explores, in light of this, a variety of relatively specific questions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American working-class history. How can we read autobiographies of American communists against the grain to see the personal amidst the political? How can the mental health crisis faced by William Foster help us understand his politics? How could one become a cosmopolitan worker in early twentieth-century America? What were the limits to cross-class conversations between bohemian intellectuals and cosmopolitan workers? What made the immigrant working class American? Where did European immigrants fit in the racially divided American working class? How did ethnicity play itself out on the stage? He concludes by returning to his own trajectory, to ask what is still relevant in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.

Seven of the eight essays in the collection are revised versions of earlier work that first appeared between 1992 and 2014; only one is entirely new. The revisions, sometimes extensive, mean that this collection is not a particularly good chronicle of how Barrett’s own thinking evolved. Instead, we are treated to the mature fruits of his long reflection. Hence, there was no need to place them in the order they were written; nor did he choose to privilege any particular historical order. These articles are best read as stand-alone pieces, and it is indeed as singular additions to senior and graduate-level course readings that the bulk of them are likely to be read.

I enjoyed reading the collection. The discussions of racially “in-between peoples,” written jointly with David Roediger, and on how ethnic stereotyping evolved in vaudeville offer much that is new, while his classic text on Americanization from the bottom up has withstood the test of time. My appreciation is perhaps generational: Barrett and I are only a few years apart, both coming to graduate studies a decade after the publication of Thompson’s The Making. We both read many of the classic socialist-humanist texts when they first appeared, and they clearly had a similarly profound impact on our research.

The main theme—that the subjectivities of working people matter—is well developed and clearly demonstrated in a variety of ways that I think will speak to those apprenticing in the craft now. I was, however, surprised by a revealing silence. Historians in the academy are overwhelmingly from the middle class, so the barriers that Barrett carefully delineated in his analysis of the relationship between Hutchins Hapgood (isn’t that a name!), the Harvard-educated, bohemian intellectual, and Anton Johannsen, the Chicago-based, anarchist labour organizer, are the barriers that in so many ways continue to hamper academic analyses of working people’s thoughts and actions. While Barrett had need to look no further than his elder brother for an example of a cosmopolitan worker, most students and scholars today...