83: Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal

In Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, Lizabeth Cohen uses the new social history/ history from the bottom up to figure out "how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s."  Like E.P. Thompson, Cohen studies Chicago workers' slow progress to class consciousness and unionization in the 1920s and 1930s by looking at whole people embedded in complex communities instead of at the working class as a narrow block defined by productive labor.  Accordingly, she argues that daily life both inside and outside the workplace, combined with changes in politics and the developing consumer market, led to new choices in a new world where daily lives eventually lead to political decisions.

In other words, Cohen looks at how the cultural became political.  She shows that in the 1920s, Chicago, people may have worked together in factories, but they went home to ethnic enclaves and kept their money in their communities: shopped at local stores, banked with local banks, listened to ethnic radio stations, watch movies at local theaters, etc, even though national chains were already penetrating the city.  They participated in popular culture not as a homogeneous mass but as ethnic and racial communities, each interpreting cultural products differently.  Their only organizational experience was in forcing welfare capitalism to meet their needs.

76: Piven & Cloward's Poor People's Movements

In Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Piven and Cloward study four American social movements, two from the 1930s and two from the 1960s, to identify patterns in protester behavior, political and social context, and state responses that might inform lower-class political movements in the future.  And they determine that in any social social movement (and all social movements, for their purposes, come from the working classes), "whatever the people won was a response to their turbulence and not to their organized numbers."  In other words, uncontrollable mass insurgency, not SMOs, are what cause changes in society and win more rights for oppressed groups.

The reason SMOs kill a social movement instead of fueling it is that organizational development involves creating a disciplined, orderly membership and on getting resources, usually from elites, to sustain the organization.  Elites are more than happy to help fund these organizations, because they're a way of calming down angry people and bringing them into orderly obedience again - or at least a way of distracting them from their revolutionary goals.  "Organizations endure, in short, by abandoning their revolutionary politics, and therefore SMOs kill social movements.

75: Kathy Peiss' Cheap Amusements

In Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Kathy Peiss looks at the new spaces of leisure in New York - public halls, picnic grounds, nickelodeons, "pleasure clubs," and street corners to see how gender relations "played out."  In particular, she is interested in the process by which ideas about sexuality, courtship, male power, female dependency, and autonomy got legitimated by and for women.  Working from a wide variety of primary and archival sources, Peiss argues that working-class gender constructs were directly related to changing organizations and meanings of leisure in the new industrial capitalism, which rationalized and controlled labor even as it commercialized and commodified leisure time.  In other words, leisure both reflects and shapes working-class gender constructs.

Peiss focuses on the agency white working women had in constructing gender from 1880-1920.  While married women's leisure time generally occurred within the home and fit into the rhythms of daily life, single working women often led two lives: dutiful daughter on female work rhythms at home, wage-earner on regimented male rhythms at work.  Stuck between male and female worlds, young working women did not seek out the traditional domains of male leisure (saloons); instead, they flocked to the new commercial dance halls, amusement parks, and movie theatres.  Young men soon followed, and the connections between leisure, mutual aid, and manhood loosened as a result.  Instead, leisure became associated with pleasure, mixed-sex company, and individual consumption, and women were more than welcome to come spend their money.

60: David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness

In Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger argues that whiteness is an ideology that was constructed in the 19th-century, when working-class whites responded to the increased wage dependence, standardization, and discipline attached to the Industrial Revolution by separating themselves from blacks, demonizing them, and accepting the "public and psychological" value of whiteness as part of their wage.  The compensation of these "wages of whiteness" led to a kind of self oppression, which both made them willing to accept a lot more misery than they would otherwise have taken and kept them from organizing with black workers against their mutual exploitation.

This deceptively simple argument has several constituent parts, as Roediger pulls from an updated classical Marxism, new labor history, new social history, and theories of racism to delineate the development of whiteness and connect it to the formation of the working class in the early 19th century.  Critical to his argument is the expansion of Marxist theory to include race: he argues that race cannot be reduced to class, and that the two social categories work in dialectic with one another.  From the new labor/ new social history, he pulls the insistence that working class people are historical agents, not dupes controlled by capital, and that they are thus complicit in the construction of their own racism.  And he builds on existing theories of race, racism and slavery (most notably George Rawick) to show that racism developed as a response to early 19th-century capitalist development, of which slavery was a constituent part: nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, combined with frustration at their own proletarianization, resulted in white working-class racism and hatred toward black slaves as emblems of both preindustrial peasants and industrial capitalist workers.  From there, the step to racism as a constituent element of white working class identity was a small one.

The rest of the book includes two case studies that Roediger largely pulls from secondary sources: blackface minstrelsy as a way to provide an outlet for white racial tensions and frustrations; and the story of how the black Irish adopted racism against blacks to assume a white American identity.  In both cases, Roediger shows how racism both constructs and masks the blackness that is at the heart of whiteness.  While I was surprised to find that such an innovative and hugely influential thesis is built on secondary evidence and conjecture more than empirical research, I think the case studies illustrate Roediger's argument well, and I really like his innovative use of developments in studies of race, slavery, and the working class that came out of the new social history.

14: W.E.B. Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro

W.E.B. Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro is a sociological study of the black population in Philadephia at the turn of the century.  It was commissioned by Progressive reformers interested in understanding and reducing the high rates of poverty and crime then attributed to the black community, and it contains empirical data culled from thousands of personal interviews that Du Bois conducted with Philly's black residents.  It touches on everything from family structure, occupations, and health to the class hierarchies within the black community and the impacts of racism and segregation on the landscape.

Du Bois was kind of a badass.  He only had enough funding from U-Penn to spend a year on this study and not enough to hire anyone to help him, so he personally interviewed thousands of Philly's black residents and then compiled all of the data himself.  Where possible, he also compared the trends he found in his data to data from similar studies.  I have no idea how he slept or when he ate.

The results of this study, and Du Bois' interpretation of them, are freakishly similar to conditions and interpretations today. 

His map of the 7th ward, for instance, where roughly 40% of Philly's black population lived, shows evidence of enforced segregation, as black homes and white homes are rarely on the same block, and black families pay more for poorer housing than do white families. 

The map also shows evidence of social stratification within the black community, as middle-class black families may live on the same tree-lined sections of Lombard street as working-class families, but the poor and the "vicious and criminal classes" are concentrated in alley tenements and in Minister Street between 7th and 8th. 

His study of death rates and causes of death shows that the black population has much higher death rates than does Philly's population at large, that the highest death rates are in wards with the poorest sanitation and most overcrowding, and that the majority of these deaths (outside of stillbirths) are from diseases directly related to these poor living conditions: consumption, pneumonia, and urinary tract infections.

And his study of occupations and demographics shows that though the community does have its share of professionals and middle-class workers, the vast majority of black workers are employed in domestic service, and no one works in industry - an occupational composition he attributes to discriminatory hiring practices and industrial union racism.

Even though it was written more than a century ago, this book feels like contemporary work by William Julius Wilson or Massey & Denton, who argue, like Du Bois, that restricting housing and employment opportunities for an entire group of people and then blaming that group for being slow to raise itself out of poverty is racist, illogical, and unfair (not to mention essentialist and just plain ridiculous.)  That Du Bois' work languished in obscurity for almost fifty years due to that same racist, illogical, and unfair mindset, and that the problems he addressed empirically a century ago are still issues today - well, I can't think of any more frustrating or more powerful evidence of the enduring power of fear, racism, and hate.

13: Michael Denning's The Cultural Front

Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, for all its weighty historical detail and analysis, centers around a single theme: that the 1930s amalgamation of labor and cultural interests into a "Popular Front" might be little-known now, but it resulted in a "laboring of culture" that is still reverberating, at least in left-leaning circles, today.
What Denning means by "laboring of culture" is the tricky part, because he sees labor and culture as dialectically related parts, which means that each shapes the other and that they're therefore as difficult to separate as a codependent high school couple.  So he spends the first half of the book tracing their conjoined public appearances, including the shared language of the "labor movement," the "proletariat," and the "work," "toil," and "struggle" of labor activists and artists; the "proletarianization" of the culture industries, as children of working-class parents increasingly work as singers, artists, novelists, actors, cartoonists and make mass culture more like working-class culture; and the "social democratic" labor politics that influenced (and was influenced by) everything from textile strikes to fiction to dinner-table conversation.

The result of all this cross-pollination between labor movements, the people in the working-class, and cultural production, Denning argues, was a mass movement to permanently connect American labor with American culture.  That way, American culture could represent and be represented by the people, and Leftist and communist social visions could be realized. 

And lest his readers think he's making all of this up, Denning spends the whole second half of the book proving it by analyzing products of this labor-culture combo: John Dos Passos' U.S.A, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Billie Holiday's love songs, experimental musical theater, gangster films, and something he calls the "ghetto pastoral," of which A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is probably the best-known example.  By thoroughly examining each of these cultural productions formally (er, he spends a good 50 pages talking about metaphors and narrative structures in the Dos Passos section alone) and simultaneously situating them in their cultural and historical context, Denning shows that yes, in the 1930s, labor and culture were thoroughly intertwined.

Of course, mass culture is not super communist or particularly pro-Labor today; if anything, the profusion of reality TV shows, re-released remakes of Spiderman movies, auto-tuned pop music, and baby animal YouTube videos that populate mass culture serve more to distract us than to incite us to revolution.  But lest this decoupling of labor and culture prove that the Popular Front didn't have as much impact on American culture as Denning claims, he closes his book with this quote from cultural theorist Fredric Jameson:


history progresses by failure rather than by success…. It would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht (to pick a few illustrious names at random) as failures – that is, as actors and agents constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment of history – than as triumphant examples and models in some hagiographic or celebratory sense.

In other words, while the movement failed to permanently connect labor and culture, the people in it were both ordinary and extraordinary: they were totally human, but we are still trying to figure out the full implications of the things they produced, the ideas they had, and the politics they espoused.  And hey, maybe the most successful movements are those that show us how ordinary humans can create history.

11: Anthony Wallace's Rockdale

Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution is a long and winding 485-page "microhistory" of the Rockdale Manufacturing district in the first half of the 19th century.

Or, as Anthony Wallace summarizes it: "An account of the coming of the machines, the making of a new way of life in the mill hamlets, the triumph of evangelical capitalists over socialists and infidels, and the transformation of the workers into Christian soldiers in a cotton-manufacturing district in Pennsylvania in the years before and during the Civil War."  Does it get any better than that?  (On reading that, I started wondering if this book were somehow a reprint of something from the 1800s, but no, it was published in 1978, and as far as I can tell Wallace is still alive and kicking.)

The point of this book, I think, is to use the history of Rockdale to test his theory of "paradigmatic processes of cultural change," which he published as a separate journal article in 1972.  Basically, this theory expands on the ideas of a gentleman named Thomas Kuhn, who argued that scientific research alternates between periods of normal and revolutionary science.  In "normal" science, students are taught the dominant scientific paradigm in schools, where they replicate the experiments and learn the formulas that support the paradigm, and then, in their professional lives, they discover new applications of the same paradigm.  Revolutionary science happens when the sheer number of problems not addressed by normal science becomes so big that scientists have to devise a new paradigm; they start developing new ways to solve old problems instead of using old ways to solve new problems.

Wallace expands Kuhn's theory from two phases to five: innovation, paradigmatic core development, exploitation, functional consequences, and rationalization.  He also argues that scientists hum along happily doing research in their secret science communities (innovating and occasionally changing their research paradigm) until someone from the real world realizes that a scientist has devised a solution to their real world problem - at which point the exploitation, functional consequences, and rationalization phases come into play, because the innovation has made the leap from abstract research to real-world application.

I don't like his argument that scientists and regular people are in two separate worlds (er, scientists go to the grocery store just like the rest of us).  Also, I'm honestly not entirely sure how this whole paradigmatic cultural change thing applies to Rockdale.  But the application of a theoretical model of cultural change, especially that one, is by far the least interesting part of the book.  Wallace is an anthropologist who is fascinated by the everyday lives of real people.  He also, as it turns out, is one hell of a researcher: the book is chock full of old love letters, chatty notes between the wives and daughters of the manufacturers, rent account books, pay ledgers, census data, household accounting data, workers' letters, newspaper articles, and lots and lots of technical information about the mechanics of cotton mills - all woven together so skillfully that you can almost smell the cotton and oil and sweat and hear the grinding of the machinery and feel the old stone tenements the workers lived in.

One of the most interesting parts, I think, is his discussion of the internal workings of the cotton mills themselves, from the water-driven "power train" that uses a system of geared shafts and belts to transfer the power from the water to the various machines, to the flow of cotton from one machine - and one worker - to the next.  The cotton mills in Rockdale were built in the 1820s and 1830s, so they were basically smaller versions of English mills, filled with English spinning equipment and - at least at first - managed by English technicians and English mill managers.  Cotton came in 300-350lb bales that were first cleaned, then carded, then throstled (pre-spun, or converted into roving) and then spun on massive spinning mules - all, as it turns out, by real people who lived in particular houses (usually with 5 or 6 other people) and who made specific wages (anywhere from $4 to $50 a month), and the majority of whom, under Wallace's care, now have their names recorded for posterity.  Truthfully, what the book lacks in theory it more than makes up for in its remarkable ability to bring Rockdale to life.

8: Roy Rosenzweig's Eight Hours for What We Will

This book is so lovely and so clear, and, judging from the number of times Rosenzweig's name comes up in the Acknowledgement sections of other books, he's a wonderfully nice guy, too.

Eight Hours for What We Will is a study of the leisure time and space of the working class in the industrial town of Worcester, MA from 1870-1920.  Rosenzweig is a labor historian who was researching and writing in the late 70s/ early 80s, and accordingly his study bear a few hallmarks of the New Social History: he is committed to giving voice to people who were once silenced by history (i.e., working class people); he prefers to work within the specifics of a single community rather than to generalize about national trends; and he is interested in the holistic, everyday lives and culture of the people he is studying, not just a small segment of their lives.

Therefore, his study of working-class people in Worcester might not be generalizable to the nation, but it has a wealth of detail on Swedish wireworkers, the fight for a park in Ward 5, Irish drinking habits, the Protestant-Catholic divide, and what people really did in working-class movie theaters at the turn of the century (they brought their kids and talked - a lot!  Alamo Drafthouse would not approve.)

And as a result of these specific details, Rosenzweig is able to draw some interesting conclusions about why Worcester was considered a 'scab hole' with a chronic open shop problem: the immigrant communities there were so insular and so different from one another that they were unable to unite across ethnic, cultural, or religious lines.  Further, some issues, particularly the fight over working-class saloons, not only divided the working class (Irish Catholics vs Swedish evangelicals) but allowed for some cross-class alliances (particularly among non-drinking Protestants), thus splintering the working class further.  And this splintering worked to the benefit of the industrialists but to the detriment of the workers, who couldn't lobby for shorter days or higher pay as effectively as could workers in other towns.

However, like the workers in David Gartman's Auto Opium, the working classes in Worcester had a weakness for the new mass culture and mass entertainment, and they were eager patrons of amusement parks and movie houses when these came to town.  Unlike Gartman, however, Rosenzweig sees this working class obsession with consumption not as an opiate but as an incredible boon to his subjects.  To patronize amusement parks and movie houses, people had to come out of their ethnic enclaves and mingle with people of other religions, ethnicities, cultures, and sometimes even other classes.  This new mass mingling in new leisure spaces, combined with rising incomes and the development of a new ethnic middle class, led to less antagonism within the working class itself, which in turn provided a foundation for more radical political activism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Basically, modernization and the rise of mass consumer culture at the turn of the century was both the problem (creation of a culture of individual accumulation) and the solution (break down intra-class divisions so the working class can fight its oppressors later on down the line.)  Or at least Rosenzweig hopes so.