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Going Public: Archie Green's Lifelong Commitment to Laboring Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2009
Abstract
Known as the “Dean of Laborlore,” Archie Green, who died this past March, spent much of the twentieth century developing innovative public sector projects at the intersection of labor history, occupational folklore, and cultural studies. In 1971, for example, he helped initiate the Working Americans Exhibition on the Washington Mall of the United States Capitol. Using this exhibit as a starting point, this article examines Green's orientation to publicly presenting labor culture and history. I draw from Robert McCarl's reflections on the challenges of the Working Americans Exhibit and suggest that several life experiences uniquely qualified Archie Green to meet these challenges. Excerpting from interviews with Green, I explore how his childhood in East Los Angeles combined with his years as a union shipwright in San Francisco to develop a strong analysis of, and civic commitment to, public workers' folklife. Central to this commitment is a generative, if uneasy, pairing of syndicalist ideals with pragmatic New Deal-inspired politics. I examine how immigrant Scottish shipwrights, educated in the militant syndicalist and Marxist tradition of John Maclean, particularly influenced Green. Raising questions of historiography, I conclude by suggesting we should view Green's integration of scholarly and public sector work as vitally contributing to the emergent cultural sensibility in New Labor History, folklore, American Studies, and public history in the late 1960s and 1970s.
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References
NOTES
1. For information on the development of public folklore see: Feintuch, Burt, ed., The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector (Kentucky, 1988)Google Scholar; Baron, Robert and Spitzer, Nicholas R., eds., Public Folklore (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Hufford, Mary, ed., Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1994)Google Scholar; Bauman, Richard and Paredes, Americo, eds., Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (Austin, 1972)Google Scholar. In her Ph.D. dissertation, “Culture and Politics: A Legislative Chronicle of the American Folklife Preservation Act” (Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1995; p. 16), Sandra Gross Bressler specifies that the American Folklife Festival initially owed much to Jim Morris, a director of the Smithsonian's Division of Performing Arts. Morris hired Rinzler to direct the Festival.
2. Robert McCarl, “Occupational Folklife in the Public Sector,” in The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, ed., Burt Feintuch, 139.
3. Rinzler, for example, designated one of the three thematic sections as “Native Americans.”
4. Throughout much of the 1960s, Green was the faculty sponsor for the enormously popular Campus Folksong Club at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
5. Green developed his doctoral dissertation from University of Pennsylvania into Only A Miner: Studies In Recorded Coal-Mining Songs (Urbana, 1972). This interdisciplinary laborlore study remains a key text in American music scholarship, cultural studies, Appalachian studies, folklore, and working-class history.
6. McCarl, “Occupational Folklife in the Public Sector,” 132.
7. Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front (New York: 1997), xiii–xxGoogle Scholar.
8. “Iron Workers Perform at Smithsonian American Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C.”, The Ironworker 71, (1971): 14. According to Green, once the Ironworkers Exhibit was approved and funded, a college intern, Ron Stanford, was brought on to complete important logistical work for the program. Stanford worked closely and instrumentally with Preston George of Local 5, Washington, D.C., to launch the exhibit.
9. Jacobson, Aileen, “At the Folklife Festival: Hard Hats and Hard Songs of Union Dues and Blues,” Washington Post, (July 3, 1971), B1Google Scholar.
10. McCarl, “Occupational Folklife in the Public Sector,” 135–140. The strength of McCarl's analysis, as his article evidences, stems in part from his own experiences as a metalworker.
11. Ibid., 142–143.
12. Ibid., 148–149. It is worth highlighting that the Ironworkers Exhibit, as has been mentioned, did not draw workers from one work crew. The nature of the work did not require this kind of worker-to-worker historical familiarity. Other kinds of worker exhibits, such as the tool and die makers exhibit of 1976, did require this. See McCarl's reflection on coordinating this exhibit. Ibid., 135.
13. Ibid., 148.
14. Ibid., 149.
15. Ibid., 146.
16. Ibid., 138.
17. Ibid., 140–141.
18. Interview with author, February 21, 2006.
19. Ibid.
20. “Another Tool in the Carpenter's Chest” in 1973 Festival of American Folklife, eds., Ralph Rinzler and Gerald L. Davis (Washington, D.C., 1973), 40–43.
21. Interview with author, February 21, 2006.
22. McCarl, “Occupational Folklife in the Public Sector,” 141.
23. In June of 2007 the Library of Congress recognized Green's seventy plus years of academic and civic labor with their highest honor: The Living Legend Award.
24. For a historical account of the passing of the American Folklife Preservation Act, see Sandra Gross Bressler, “Culture and Politics: A Legislative Chronicle of the American Folklife Preservation Act,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennslyvania, 1995). On p. 38 she discusses the link to the success of the Festival and the subsequent legislation.
25. “Stitching Patchwork in Public” in The Conservation of Culture, ed., Burt Feintuch (Kentucky, 1988): 31.
26. Interview with author, February 21, 2006.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. “What's Good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside During the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56 (September 2004), 635.
30. Interview with author, January 8, 2008.
31. Denning, The Cultural Front, xiii–xx.
32. Western Pipe and Steel was located between Oyster Point and Sierra Point, just south of Brisbane, CA.
33. Green, Archie, Harry Lundeberg's Stetson & Other Nautical Tales (Crockett, CA., 2006), 23Google Scholar.
34. For discussion of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike see Nelson, Bruce's Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988)Google Scholar and Quinn's, MikeThe Big Strike (Olema, California: Olema Publishing Co., 1949)Google Scholar. On the concept of “social warrant” and the “‘34 men” see Lipsitz's, George essay “Stan Weir: Working-Class Visionary” in Stan Weir's Singlejack Solidarity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
35. Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront, 160–166.
36. Interview with author, March 27, 2008.
37. For a detailed account of Green's work experience on the war-production waterfront, see interview by Fredric L. Quivik (November 12, 2001) conducted for the “Rosie the Riveter Project” of the Regional Oral History Office of UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
38. Maclean's courses and public lectures during WWI would sometimes draw over two thousand participants. On John Maclean, see Ripley, B.J. and McHugh, John, John Maclean (Manchester, 1989)Google Scholar and Hinton, James, The First Shop Steward's Movement (London, 1973)Google Scholar.
39. “Workers, Unions, and the Politics of Public History”, 11 (Fall, 1989).
40. Gross Bressler, “Culture and Politics: A Legislative Chronicle of the American Folklife Preservation Act.”
41. Interview with author, March 27, 2008.
42. New York, 1924.
43. Green discusses the centrality of Kallen's, work to public sector folklorists in his essay “The Archive's Shores,” in Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays on Vernacular Culture (Chapel Hill, 2001), 143–147Google Scholar.
44. Rossman, Harold, “Brother Archie Green: S.F. Carpenter Helps Preserve Labor's History and Lore”, Organized Labor (November 17, 1957), 1Google Scholar.
45. Green explores this “triadic mode” of folklore advocacy in his essay “Stitching Patchwork in Public” in Feintuch (1988).
46. Rosenberg, Neil V., ed., Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, (Urbana, 1993), 11Google Scholar.
47. Archie Green (Urbana, 1972).
48. Some of Green's, more recent books: Calf's Head and Union Tale: Labor Yarns at Work and Play (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Harry Lundeberg's Stetson & Other Nautical Tales (Crockett, CA, 2006); Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (Chicago, 1993); eds., Roediger, David, Rosemont, Franklin, and Salerno, Salvatore, The Big Red Songbook (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar.
49. See interview with Gutman, Herbert in Visions of History, MARHO, eds., (New York, 1983): 188Google Scholar.
50. Green, Archie, “American Labor Lore: Its Meaning And Uses,” Industrial Relations 4 (1965): 51–58Google Scholar.
51. As Robin D.G. Kelley's Race Rebels makes clear, black historians W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James have also been insufficiently recognized as paramount to making the analytic, interdisciplinary connections through which New Labor history found life. Kelley helps us see, for example, how their absence might account for the overly white and Eurocentric focus of the first wave of New Labor historians. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 6.
52. Baron, Robert and Spitzer, Nicholas, eds., Public Folklore (Jackson, 2007)Google Scholar; Feintuch, The Conservation of Culture; Hufford, Mary, ed., Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage (Urbana, 1994)Google Scholar.
53. Archie Green participated enthusiastically in dozens of interviews to make this article possible. I would also like to thank Robert McCarl for generously sharing his perspectives on the topics of labor history, workers' culture and public presentation.