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

Abstract

It has, admittedly, been a long time since I have read Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. The essays in this volume were foundational to my PhD training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an alma mater I share with Gutman, and I remember them as core texts in the labor history seminar that I took there as a second-year graduate student. As time went on, though, my research interests during my dissertation work and as an early career professor seemingly took me far afield from Gutman's emphasis on working-class formation and culture. I primarily identified as a historian of the US West and of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. My research, which dealt with unfree and quasi-free labor systems in California from the 1850s to the 1870s, did focus on work and workers. But as with many other Civil War and Reconstruction historians, my preoccupation has almost always been with the state. I want to know how labor and immigration exclusion policies shaped the lives of workers; how workers engaged with the state by contesting these laws and policies; how the state acted violently against workers; and how the outcomes of these struggles changed the overarching political history of the United States during Reconstruction.Given my research commitments, my first impression on rereading Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America was dissatisfaction at the weak emphasis on the state. There was precious little about the law, politics, and judicial proceedings that were at the heart of my own interpretations of labor history and inherently central to the Civil War and Reconstruction.In fact, one of Gutman's most provocative claims in the title essay of this volume is that the Civil War and Reconstruction may not have mattered all that much in the broader scheme of labor history. Gutman purposely disrupted the familiar periodization of national history that pivoted around the Civil War and Reconstruction as major turning points. Instead, he treated the period from 1843 to 1893 as a single unbroken era characterized by continuity, “common patterns of behavior,” rather than change.1 The “profound tension” between “American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism” remained the constant theme of American life, relatively uninterrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath.2After quieting my initial kneejerk protest—how could Gutman possibly discount the impact of emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments on labor history?—I gave serious thought to his argument about continuity across the pre–and post–Civil War periods. I concluded, to my surprise, that Gutman was ahead of his time in questioning whether the Civil War and Reconstruction were actually moments of tremendous rupture in national history.For decades, historians had emphasized that the United States victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War resulted in the consolidation of the power of the liberal US nation-state. The federal government emerged from the Civil War a powerful, muscular entity capable of crushing challenges to its authority across the nation. It quelled the slaveholder rebellion and installed free labor in the South, subdued and incorporated the Native peoples of the West, and crushed worker dissent in the North and Midwest.In the past ten years, however, Civil War and Reconstruction historians have begun to dismantle this image of the postwar American state. Their focus has instead been on the continuities between the pre–and post–Civil War United States: the uneven and ineffectual power of the federal government, the persistence of unfreedom after the end of slavery, and the hierarchy and violence that still structured social relations in a republic (allegedly) dedicated to liberal individualism and equality before the law. The picture of post–Civil War America that emerges from this new scholarship is much more chaotic and ambiguous, and more eerily similar to the antebellum era, than we have often imagined.3Gutman's delineation of workers’ struggles and working-class formation between 1843 and 1893 anticipated this new interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. More importantly, his arguments suggest that a renewed focus on labor history—which many Civil War and Reconstruction historians abandoned after the 1980s—can help us trace the threads of continuity that bound together the antebellum and postbellum eras.First, Gutman's focus on workers’ persistent resistance to the ethos of liberal capitalism, which he highlights in both “Work, Culture, and Industrializing Society” and “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement,” undermines any notion that the US victory in the Civil War was also a victory for the Republican Party's vision of liberal citizenship. Scholars often blame the failure of Republican policy on recalcitrant former slaveholders in the South who refused to adopt free wage labor or acknowledge Black Americans’ equality before the law. Gutman reveals, however, that the nation's working people were themselves often rightly skeptical of a Republican liberalism that emphasized individual acquisitiveness over communal good, as well as Republicans’ vision of citizenship rooted firmly in the defense of private property over the right to economic justice. Workers’ resistance clearly shows that a liberal consensus did not triumph after the Civil War. Instead, the post–Civil War era saw the continuation of a battle over the legitimacy of liberal capitalism's cornerstone concepts that started long before the war and lasted long afterward.Second, and relatedly, the essays in the volume speak to Civil War and Reconstruction historians’ current emphasis on the inefficacy and unevenness of state power in the postwar era. Gutman's two lesser-known early articles at the end of Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America—“Trouble on the Railroads in 1873–1874” (1961) and “Two Lockouts in Pennsylvania, 1873–1874” (1959)—are especially worth revisiting because they show how the strength of workers’ community ties derailed (sometimes literally) industrialists’ efforts to harness the power of the state.4 Gutman's intensely local community studies reveal that the image of a muscular postwar state intervening on the behalf of capital to squash workers’ protests does not always resemble reality. In the smaller railroad towns of the Midwest and the coal towns of Pennsylvania during the early years of the Long Depression, the relationships that working-class people forged with middling shopkeepers, white-collar professionals, and small manufacturers often diluted the coercive power of the state. Middle-class leaders in local and municipal governments, who were often bound to their working-class neighbors through long-standing ties of friendship, common working-class origins, and a shared hatred of corporate autocracy, might side with protesting workers against large industrial operators or refuse to deploy state power against them. Together, working- and middle-class residents could frustrate capitalists who wanted to bring down the heavy hand of the postwar state on workers in the name of defending private property. Gutman's community studies remind scholars always to be attentive to the contested and highly contingent nature of state power over and in workers’ lives in the postwar era.Finally, Gutman's emphasis on the incomplete imposition of capitalist labor discipline on working people across the entire nineteenth century can transform our understanding of emancipation. Civil War and Reconstruction historians, including myself, frequently portray the abolition of slavery as a massive social, economic, and cultural transformation. The federal state tried to remake the lives of formerly enslaved people (and the lives of enslavers) by installing free wage labor, along with all of its coercive features—contracts, at-will employment, and time discipline—in the South. This interpretation of the postwar period rests on the assumption that free wage labor and all its disciplinary trappings were already fully developed in the North and that enslaved people had to be acclimated to ways of life that northern wageworkers had already been living under for at least one generation. Gutman's insight that capitalist labor discipline was still very much contested and in flux across all of the nineteenth century forces scholars to reevaluate both the significance of emancipation and the experience of the formerly enslaved. In particular, former slaves’ postemancipation labor struggles seem less disconnected, and less radically divergent, from those of northern wageworkers when we discover that both groups were actively shaping an incomplete, fluid, and contested capitalist vision of labor discipline still very much in the making. In this context, then, emancipation could be read as a continuation of pre–Civil War struggles over worker autonomy rather than as a complete break with antebellum labor history.On the whole, my rereading of Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America in my academic middle age convinced me that I needed to revisit classic works in labor history more often. My work does not fundamentally focus on working-class formation, identity, or culture. Still, Gutman's distinctive periodization of the nineteenth century presents a different way of looking at the questions that concern me the most, including the meaning of freedom in the age of emancipation, the character of the post–Civil War state, and the policies and practices of labor coercion. Returning to labor history generally, and to Gutman specifically, may well be one of the most fruitful paths for revising our understanding of the world that the Civil War made.