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Race and the Working-Class Past in the United States: Multiple Identities and the Future of Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

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The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It [post-Civil War Reconstruction in the U.S.] was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labour movement [ … ]1

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1993

References

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2 See Berlin's, introduction to Herbert Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class(New York, 1987), p. 46Google Scholar; the interviews with Mongomery, and Gutman, in Marho, , ed., Visions of History (New York, 1983)Google Scholar and “Dave Roediger Interviews George Rawick”, in Fitz, Don and Roediger, David, eds., Within the Shell of the Old (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar. As David Brody observes, however, Gutman took a range of positions on the placing of slavery and race within working-class history. See Brody, “On Creating a New Synthesis of American Labor History”, in Moody, J. Carroll and Kessler-Harris, Alice, eds., Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (Dekalb, IL, 1989), p. 216Google Scholar n. 9 and Rosenberg, Mimi, “An Unpublished Interview with Herbert Gutman on United States Labor History”, Socialism and Democracy, 10 (Spring-Summer, 1990), p. 58Google Scholar.

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5 See, for example, Hill, , “Mythmaking as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2 (Winter, 1988), pp. 132–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My own fuller reflections on race and the new labor history are found in ”Labor in White Skin: Race and Working Class History” in Davis, Mike and Sprinker, Michael, eds., Reshaping the U.S. Left (London and New York, 1988), pp. 287308Google Scholar.

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8 Rosenberg, “Unpublished Interview”, p. 58.

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11 Glenn, “The Dialectics of Wage Work: Japanese-American Women and Domestic Service, 1905–1940” in DuBois and Ruiz, eds., Unequal Sisters, pp. 345–72; Meyerowitz, Joanne J., Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago and London, 1988)Google Scholar; Frank, Dana, “Race, Class and the Politics of Consumption: Race Relations and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1915–1929”. (unpublished paper delivered at Organization of American Historians meeting, 1991)Google Scholar; essays by Hewitt, and Janiewski, in Baron, , ed., Work Engendered; Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia, 1985)Google Scholar; Ruiz, Vicki, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, 1987)Google Scholar; Cooper, Patricia A., Once a Cigarmaker. Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana and Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar. I particularly thank Tera Hunter for sharing a manuscript version of her powerful Contesting the New South: The Politics and Culture of Wage Household Labor in Atlanta, 1961–1920 with me.

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16 DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 700–01; Saxton, , The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; see also Lott, Eric, “That Seeming Counterfeit: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy”, American Quarterly, 43 (06, 1991), pp. 223–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lott, Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, forthcoming; Rogin, Michael, “;Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds his Voice,” Critical Inquiry, 18 (Spring, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ware, Vron, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (New York and London, 1992)Google Scholar; Frankenberg, Ruth, White Women Race Matters: The Social Construction of Wliiteness (Minneapolis, 1993)Google Scholar.

17 Hunter, in her forthcoming Contesting the New South urges the examination of “gender, race, and class in their simultaneity, in the way that human beings actually experience these social relations”.

18 See, e.g., the reviews of Wages of Whiteness by Bernstein, Iver in Journal of American Hbtory, 79 (12, 1992) pp. 120–21Google Scholar; by Trotter, Joe William, in Journal of Social History, 25 (1992), pp. 674676CrossRefGoogle Scholar and by Glickman, Lawrence B., in The Nation (02 17, 1992), pp. 207–09Google Scholar.

19 Watts, Steven, “The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststructuralism, Language and Politics in the Age of Self-Fulfilment”, American Quarterly, 43 (12, 1991), p. 653CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stein, , “Race and Class Consciousness Revisited”, Reviews in American History, 19 (12, 1991), esp. pp. 556559CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Johnson, James Weldon, Along This Way (New York, 1933), p. 355Google Scholar.

21 See Saxton, White Republic, pp. 6–7 for acute comments on this score.

22 Mongomery, , “Workers' Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century”, Labor History, 17 (1976), pp. 491–92Google Scholar; Freifeld, “American Working Classes”, pp. 514–22; Goldberg, “Beyond Free Labor”, pp. 407–12.

23 Davis, James J., The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It (New York, 1922), pp. 72, 108–09 and 158–59Google Scholar; Denning, Michael, Mechanic Accents: Dime Noveb and Working-Class Culture in America (London and New York, 1987), pp. 175–77Google Scholar; Tuttle, William M. Jr, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1984, originally 1970), pp. 142–43Google Scholar. See also Colin J. Davis, ed., Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South, pp. 113–34, on honor and segregation in the shop crafts. For an academic endorsement of the white craft unions' questioning of African-American manliness, see Commons, John R., Races and Immigrants in America (New York, 1913), pp. 4849Google Scholar; Glickman, Lawrence, “Inventing the ‘American Standard of Living’: Gender, Race and Working-Class Identity, 1880–1925”, forthcoming in Labor History in Winter, 1993Google Scholar. Glickman takes “white man's wages” from Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 254.

24 The American Thesaurus of Slang, 2nd edn, Berrey, Lester V. and Bark, Melvin Van Den, eds. (New York, 1962), pp. 724 and 850Google Scholar; A Dictionary of American Slang, Weseen, Maurice H., ed. (New York, 1934), pp. 73 and 82Google Scholar; Mencken, H. L., “Designations for Coloured Folk”, American Speech, 19 (10, 1944), p. 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roback, A.A., ed., A Dictionary of International Slurs (Ethnophaulisms) (Cambridge, MA, 1944), p. 55Google Scholar; for “niggerhead* as a white miners' term for impure, worthless coal, see Trottter, Coal, Class and Color, p. 115; on Mississippi, see McMillen, Dark Journey, p. 157; Dictionary of Americanisms, On Historical Principles [DA], Mathews, M. M., ed. (Chicago, 1951), 2:1117Google Scholar; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, p. 15.

25 Parr, , Gender of Breadwinners; Cooper, “Which Workers Built What?Labor History, 32 (Fall, 1991) pp. 570–72Google Scholar; Taillon, , “‘By Every Tradition and Every Right’: Fraternalism and Racism in the Railway Brotherhoods, 1880–1910” (Unpublished paper delivered at the American Studies Association meeting in Baltimore, November, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Faue, Suffering and Struggle and Baron, Ava, “Questions of Gender: Deskilling and Demasculinization in the U.S. Printing Industry, 1830–1915”, Gender and History, 1 (Summer, 1989), pp. 178–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Taillon, “Fraternalism and Racism”; Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, pp. 103–07; Kaufman, Stuart B. and others, eds., The Samuel Gompers Papers: TJie Early Years of the American Federation of Labor, (Urbana and Chicago, 1987), p. 297Google Scholar and Taillon, Paul, “That Word ‘White’: Racism and Masculinity in the Debate Over Black Exclusion in the International Association of Machinists, 1888–1895“ (unpublished paper delivered to the North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University, 1990)Google Scholar. On “nigger work”, see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, pp. 144–45 and 180. On physical labor, masculinity and class see Paul Willis, “Shop Floor Culture Masculinity and the Wage Form”, in Clarke, John, Crichter, Chas and Johnson, Richard, eds., Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (New York, 1979), pp. 185–98Google Scholar.

27 Attaway, , Blood on the Forge (New York, 1987, originally 1941), pp. 122–23Google Scholar.

28 Green, “Brotherhood”, is a superb early study which emphasizes class unity in the BTW. For a much cruder version, see my “An Injury to One: IWW Organizing in the Dee p South”, Industrial Worker, 65 9 April, 1988), p. 5. Eric Arnesen's Waterfront Workers is probably the best study of race and the labor process in one industry and place, and his current broader project, on black workers, promises to add a great deal to our knowledge in this regard.

29 For a lengthy attempt to address these, questions, see my “Labor, Gender and the ‘Smothering’ of Race: Covington Hall and the Complexities of Class”, in Roediger, David, Up from Whiteness: Essays on Class and Race, Past and Present (forthcoming from Verso, 1993)Google Scholar.

30 Higham, , Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, 1963), pp. 173and 66Google Scholar. On guinea, see Tricarico, Donald, “Guido: Fashioning an Italian-American Youth Style”, Journal of Ethnic Studies, 19 (Spring, 1991), esp. pp. 5657Google Scholar and Cassidy, Frederic G. and Hall, Joan Houston, eds., Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume 2 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), p. 838Google Scholar.

31 Bukowczyk, as cited in Goldberg, Barry, “Historical Reflections o n Transnationalism, Race, and the American Immigrant Saga' (unpublished paper delivered at the Rethinking Migration, Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism in Historical Perspective Conference at the New York Academy o f Sciences, 05 1990)Google Scholar.

32 Leading recent examples include Emmons, David, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town (Urbana, 1989)Google Scholar; Barrett, James R., “Americanization from th e Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930”, Journal of American History, 79 (12, 1992), pp. 9961020CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Making a New Deal; Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1989)Google Scholar and Gabaccia, Donna, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988)Google Scholar. Studies which begin to address the formation of white identity among immigrant groups include Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, pp. 133–63; Knobel, Dale T., Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, CT, 1986), pp. 8299Google Scholar and esp. Orsi, Robert, “The Religious Boundaries of an In between People: Street Feste and the Problem o f the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920–1990”, American Quarterly, 44 (09, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Lyman, Stanford, “The Race Question and Liberalism”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 5 (Winter, 1991), pp. 203–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jensen, Joan M., Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven and London, 1988), pp. 246–69Google Scholar.

34 Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up,” 1001–002; Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’… And Other Lies,” Essence (April, 1984), pp. 90 and 92. Noel Ignatiev's excellent “ ‘Whiteness’ and American Character”, Konch, 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 36–39 alerted me to Baldwin's article. For useful comments o n historicizing “white ethnic” consciousness, see Goldberg, Barry and Greer, Colin, “American Visions, Ethnic Dreams” in Kushnick, Louis, ed., Sage Race Relations Abstracts, 15 (1990), pp. 2931Google Scholar. My own unpublished paper “Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of ‘White Ethnics’ in the United States' explores the same issue. Its conclusions will appear in Roediger, David, Shades of Pale: American Whiteness in the Last Century (forthcoming from Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

35 Norwood, , Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878–1923 (Urbana and Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar.

36 Hunter, Contesting the New South, forthcoming; Katzman, David, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Janiewski, Sister-hood Denied, pp. 43–44 and 127–29; Byerly, Victoria, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (Ithaca, NY, 1986), pp. 99, 125, 147 and 152Google Scholar; Woodson, Carter G., “The Negro Washerwoman: A Vanishing Figure”, Journal of Negro History, 15 (07, 1930), p. 271CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trotter, Coal, Class and Color, p. 91; Whites, Lee Ann, “The DeGraffenreid Contoversy: Class, Race and Gender in the New South”, Journal of Southern History, 54 (08, 1988), pp. 477–78 n.82Google Scholar; Grant, H. Roger, ed., Brownie the Boomer: The Life of Charles B. Brown, An American Railroader (DeKalb, IL, 1991), pp. 138–39Google Scholar.

37 I am indebted to Eric Arnesen for sharing his parts of his forthcoming study of black railway workers for the point on engineers. On Detroit, see Sugrue, , “The ‘Slave Market' and Casual Labor in Postway Detroit’ (unpublished paper delivered t o North American Labor History Conference, Wayne State University, October, 1992)Google Scholar.

38 Hunter, Contesting the New South, forthcoming.

39 Kimeldorf, Howard, “Bringing Union s Back In: Or Why We Need a New, Old Labor History”, 32 (Winter, 1991), pp. 102103Google Scholar. Painter, Cf. Nell Irvin, “One of Two Things About The Fall of the House LaborLabor History, 30 (Winter, 1989), pp. 118121CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The study of racial identity, so profoundly a political as well as a cultural phenomenon, is bound to challenge fundamentally the tendency of labor historians to separate “culture” from (trade union and electoral) politics. See Eley, Geoff, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschicthe: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday – A New Direction for German Social History?Journal of Modern History, 36 (1991), 249260Google Scholar for insightful commentary on the tendency to separate cultural and organizational matters in working-class history.

40 See, especially, Linebaugh, Peter, “What If C.L.R.James Had Met E.P. Thompson in 1792?” in Buhle, Paul, ed., C.L.R. James: His Life and Work (London and New York, 1986), pp. 212–19Google Scholar and Tiie London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991), esp. p. 349; Fryer, Peter, The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984)Google Scholar. Perhaps the finest history of race and labor in an Atlantic economy is Rodney, Walter, A History of Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore and London, 1981)Google Scholar. See also Fryer, Peter, Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

41 Williams, Richard, Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The Creation of Black and Irish Identities in the United States (New York, 1990), esp. p. 2Google Scholar. See also Orsi, “Inbetween People”, p. 315 and McVeigh, Robbie, “The Specificity of Irish Racism”, Race and Class, 33 (0406, 1992), pp. 4043CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, Clive, “Configurations of Racism: the Civil Service, 1945–1960”, Race and Class, 33 (0709, 1991), pp. 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bristow, Joseph, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Phizacklea, Annie, Unpacking the Fashion Industry: Gender, Race and Class in Production (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.