Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations used in text and notes
- Introduction
- 1 The manager's brain under the workman's cap
- 2 The common laborer
- 3 The operative
- 4 The art of cutting metals
- 5 White shirts and superior intelligence
- 6 “Our time … believes in change”
- 7 Patriots or paupers
- 8 “This great struggle for democracy”
- 9 “A maximum of publicity with a minimum of interference”
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations used in text and notes
- Introduction
- 1 The manager's brain under the workman's cap
- 2 The common laborer
- 3 The operative
- 4 The art of cutting metals
- 5 White shirts and superior intelligence
- 6 “Our time … believes in change”
- 7 Patriots or paupers
- 8 “This great struggle for democracy”
- 9 “A maximum of publicity with a minimum of interference”
- Index
Summary
To write about the working class is to discuss many disparate individuals. At any moment in the American past the researcher encounters such variety in personal aspirations, talents, and sense of self among working people as to defy stereotypes. Moreover, socially prescribed differences in gender, race, religion, and nationality have influenced various workers' behavior in powerfully different ways. Instead of listening for the “voice of the working class,” therefore, we must be attuned to many different voices, sometimes in harmony, but often in conflict with one another.
Nevertheless, it remains not only possible but imperative to analyze the American experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of conflicting social classes. The human relationships structured by commodity production in large collective enterprises devoted to private gain generated bondings and antagonisms that were, in one form or another, the daily experience of everyone involved. “As a worker yourself, you're ‘inside’ with a vengeance,” noted Smith College graduate Alice Kimball of her sojourn in a Paterson silk mill.
You face the same sense of wearing monotony. You too swallow your injured pride when you have to kow-tow to the boss. You rage like the others at any attempt to overthrow the precious eight hour day. And just like the rest you sit around when unemployed and watch your savings ooze away and wonder why industry runs on such a stupid basis when you want work and can't get it.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Fall of the House of LaborThe Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987