Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Abstract

Along with the late distinguished historian Ira Berlin, my colleagues and I at CUNY's American Social History Project (ASHP) had the privilege of being the people who worked most closely with Herb Gutman in the final half-dozen years of his all-too-short life and career. In his final years, as he had for much of the previous three decades of his work, Herb remained deeply committed to questioning accepted historical truths and using new methodologies to transform historical analysis and to popularize the writing of American history for a broad public audience. In pursuit of these connected goals, Gutman constantly posed difficult questions about the past to his colleagues, collaborators, and students: What are the proper subjects of historical inquiry? How can we conduct the most effective scholarly research? How do we evaluate and best present the results of that research? In addition to being an innovative scholar, Herb was also an inspired teacher who always challenged all who came in contact with him to discover innovative ways to convey what happened in the past and to rethink its larger meaning for American society in general and for the writing and rewriting of American history in specific.At the outset of his academic career in the 1950s, rather than focusing on the institutional history of unions, radical parties, and labor leaders or seeing workers as mere “factors of production,” Gutman set out to uncover what ordinary working people had believed, and how they had behaved in their disparate responses to the rise of industrial capitalism in local communities and workplaces. And while he was always interested in writing about strikes and what happened in the workplace (the standard fare of labor historians), he was even more engaged by the diverse cultural and social forms of multiethnic/multiracial working-class activity. Gutman's early scholarly work emerged from two basic premises: the often hidden history of working people needed to be uncovered for the light it would shed on larger historical issues and questions; and working people were active agents in the historical process rather than its passive victims. Gutman's early work drew heavily on the pioneering historical scholarship of Edward Thompson and the cultural anthropology of Sidney Mintz. His early methodology (as embodied in the various essays published in the 1976 collection of his early work, Work, Culture, and Society) centered on close readings of local primary sources—initially in working-class newspapers in small towns, industrial cities, and coal mining communities in the old Midwest. Gutman believed these local sources held the key to uncovering how and in what ways working people had responded to the dramatic transformations wrought by US industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age.Gutman's pioneering methodology allowed him to ask new questions about old historical issues. In “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” arguably his most consequential essay, Gutman posited a new conceptualization of the long nineteenth-century arc of US historical development, arguing for the centrality of working-class experiences in the years from 1815 to 1919. The reperiodization that Gutman presented in the article focused, in his own words, “on free white labor in different time periods: 1815–43, 1843–93, 1893–1919.”1 That reperiodization consciously decentered the Civil War as the transitional event in US history, the standard historical dividing point in most US history writing, especially in high school and college textbooks. While I disagreed with Gutman's decentering of the Civil War and his too narrow focus in “Work, Culture, and Society” on “free white labor” (which obviously left out far too many aspects of the United States’ uniquely multiracial working-class experience, issues that he had himself addressed earlier in his work), that did not obviate the essay's power to provoke new ways of thinking about US history. Clearly inspired by Thompson's work on English working-class formation, Gutman wove together in the “Work, Culture, and Society” article a rich tapestry of primary sources about working-class behavior and beliefs, including letters, poems, songs, and articles from local working-class newspapers. In addition, the published article included ten iconic photographs of early twentieth-century working-class life and labor by the legendary Lewis Hine (curated by Herb's wife, Judith Mara Gutman, an established scholar of Hine).2 “Work, Culture, and Society” revealed a complicated story of residual preindustrial work and cultural habits and practices that emerged during the repeated making and remaking of the US working class across the long nineteenth century. Gutman's writing was sure-handed and nimble, moving easily and freely among the diverse primary sources and stories he deployed. The result allows us to enter the world of the white working class in the nineteenth century in unexpected and provocative ways, much as Edward Thompson's classic December 1967 Past and Present article, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” had done so brilliantly half a dozen years earlier in his depiction of the transition to industrial capitalist work habits in England.3I almost always assigned both the “Work, Culture, and Society” essay and Thompson's “Time” essay in the initial class sessions I taught over several decades at the City University of New York (CUNY), whether in MA-level labor history classes or doctoral-level education history or digital humanities seminars. I did this largely because I wanted my students to see how two master historians posed provocative historical questions and then used local primary sources to craft possible and often compelling answers to those questions. Gutman's essay, now half a century old, still possesses the power to provoke and challenge even if, to my mind, some of his larger conclusions are less on target. Ira Berlin's concluding words about “Work, Culture, and Society” in his brilliant introduction to Power and Culture, a collection of Herb's unpublished articles published four years after Herb's death, is worth quoting at length here: “Work, Culture, and Society” was a significant achievement. It suggested how the American working class, fragmented by national and racial differences as well as by the vast expanse of the continent, could be understood as a whole. It joined “labor history” and “immigrant history” with “family history.” It demonstrated how the American experience was different without being exceptional. It pushed back the frontiers of labor history from the industrial period to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by showing how labor shaped the culture and politics before the factory. It connected the study of American history with the live questions of European historiography: moral economy, customary rights, and crowd actions.4The 1976 Work, Culture, and Society collection also includes Gutman's pathbreaking article on Richard L. Davis, the Black UMW national organizer (originally published in 1968).5 Gutman had uncovered through his close reading of mineworkers’ letters to the United Mineworkers Journal in the 1890s a trove of Davis's organizing reports from the field. Davis's frequent UMWJ letters not only called out the racist actions of white coal miners against Black strikebreakers but also revealed the tentative first steps toward interracial cooperation and unionization among Black and white miners in the southern and midwestern coalfields in the final decade of the nineteenth century. The prevailing scholarship on Black and labor history in the 1960s and 1970s, Gutman concluded, saw the 1890s as the Age of Booker T. Washington and Samuel Gompers, an era of racial and class accommodation and outright repression of both African Americans and new industrial workers (many of whom were Black). Always looking to disrupt traditional historical interpretations, Gutman posed a provocative question in the conclusion of the essay, as he would about the Civil War in the “Work, Culture, and Society” article five years later: Might it not be more fruitful to think of a different way to define the late nineteenth century, renaming it instead “the Age of R. L. Davis”? Gutman posed this question because of the importance he attributed to Davis's and his fellow Black miners’ fundamental challenges in those years to the nation's racial and class hierarchies. Gutman could pose this question because he detested what he always derided as the Whig Fallacy, the idea that historians choose subjects for study by a process of looking at history's result (the “winners”) and then searching backward for the inevitable “causes” of that result. Washington and Gompers were just such “winners” in traditional Black and labor histories, respectively, and Gutman always wanted historians to be alive to contingency, to the possibility of alternative historical trends and potential alternative outcomes. In his early deep dives into working-class newspapers, both local and national, his unexpected discovery of a Black rank-and-file union leader who embraced interracial organization in the Age of Jim Crow suggested exactly such alternative possibilities and explanations with respect to questions of the enduring interplay of race and class in US history. This was the ultimate “meaning” that Gutman implied in the article's rather nineteenth-century-sounding title.6In the end I believe that the “Work, Culture, and Society” and R. L. Davis essays, along with Gutman's subsequent monographs on the experience of enslaved African Americans, helped a generation of labor and social historians appreciate that by carefully reading local, regional, and national sources with sensitivity and nuance and by being attuned to the possibilities of working-class and African American agency, we could uncover new and unexpected layers of historical reality that would allow us to rethink and reimagine traditional historical analyses. It was these two Gutman essays that inspired me when I set out on my own doctoral research journey in the early 1970s to understand interracial and interethnic union organizing among West Virginia and Colorado coal miners. And I suspect that if one carefully read the acknowledgments in the effusion of social, women's, Black, and labor history monographs and articles published since Herb's death in 1985, one would find many younger scholars like myself who were similarly inspired by Gutman's writings on race and class.7 I believe that the penultimate sentence in my contribution to the 1989 symposium in defense of Herb Gutman is worth quoting here as a summary of the enduring impact of Herb's work: “A final assessment of the relationship between race and class questions in American working-class history awaits careful and thoughtful analysis by historians who possess a willingness to comprehend the complexity of those important questions as they play themselves out through particular events and in particular places” (394). As Herb was fond of repeatedly telling all who would listen, “Much work remains to be done.”