Where Are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites

Abstract

“Class is central to everyday life,” write Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti in the introduction to their new edited collection, Where Are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites. “Yet,” they continue, “the stories of how working-class people have fought for . . . things that make life worth living remain unfamiliar to large numbers of Americans” (1). Forrant and Trasciatti detail the reasons for this unfamiliarity, from the precipitous decline of organized labor (and, with it, the spaces and occasions in which workers and their communities once encountered this history) to the “abysmal” state of labor history education in public schools, as well as at many museums and public historical sites. Thankfully, they note, “public historians have called for more public histories of labor” over the past decade, and these calls have coincided with renewed worker militancy across many professions and regions of the United States (2). “The time is ripe,” Forrant and Trasciatti argue, “for an expansion of place-based public labor history” (4). Where Are the Workers? is their effort to catalog and analyze how and where place-based public labor history is happening already and why it is indeed so urgent.The collection is impressively wide-ranging and diverse. Forrant and Trasciatti are experienced practitioners in well-known public labor history projects, but in compiling this volume, they have reached well beyond the familiar. Workers of many races, generations, and occupations are represented herein, and the practitioners chronicling their struggles are equally varied. They include museum founders, curators reinterpreting beloved spaces, and archivists and organizers working together to preserve and present new records of working-class lives and labors. Many readers will find one or two chapters in Where Are the Workers? that speak directly to their interests, or belong on their syllabi, while those seeking surveys of both public history and labor history will find the collection useful as an overview.In keeping with Forrant and Trasciatti's charge to show how public history can inform and inspire present and future struggles, the authors in part I of the volume offer useful insights on the programs and partnerships they have built, as well as the history they curate. The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum was inspired by the state's 2018 teacher strike—in which educators donned the red bandannas worn by striking miners a century earlier—to establish annual “Red Bandanna” awards honoring the work of organizers in West Virginia today. In Barre, Vermont; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Columbus, Georgia, curators and educators have embraced ongoing processes of reinterpretation that incorporate new sites, new institutional partnerships, and new perspectives, with the goal of creating “spaces defined by doing, not by being” (44).Karen Sieber and Elijah Gaddis's chapter on the Loray Mill is exemplary in its discussions of process. The authors detail their efforts to engage and honor mill village residents whose “vernacular preservation and interpretation techniques” helped preserve the site and assemble rich records of the lives of its workers (102). In addition to creating a physical space for exhibition, the authors partnered with longtime community members to digitize their own collections (particularly photos) and 1920 census records for the mill village. They then developed their own cataloging system to “prioritize local categorizations and understandings” of these archives (107). Katrina Windon and Conor Casey further develop the theme of democratizing our labor history archives. This process includes interrogating and presenting the collections we hold afresh, as Windon did in her exhibition on the Elaine massacre in Arkansas, and engaging working people in the creation of new records that both serve and document present-day struggles, as Casey does at the Labor Archives of Washington.Part II examines challenges public historians of labor face, in two categories: efforts to avoid or minimize the conflicts at the heart of labor history, and more subtle co-optation stemming from neoliberal imperatives that link historical preservation and redevelopment. The US National Park Service (NPS), Erik Loomis notes, has worked hard to make its sites more inclusive, but even when work and workers are honored, the focus is on “innovation and cooperation instead of class struggle” (147). This interpretative frame has smoothed labor history's rough edges to serve urban redevelopment in places like Lowell, Massachusetts. Overall, however, Loomis argues that labor history remains marginalized at NPS sites because there simply is “no sanitized history of class conflict” to fit a celebratory story of the United States, of the kind many visitors expect (155).Rachel Donaldson's chapter offers a concrete case study of this problem. In the small town of Tyronza, Arkansas, where the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum is located, descendants of both sharecroppers and landowners comprise the “public” to whom the museum must appeal. The written labels in the museum thus avoid naming cruel landlords—whose evictions prompted the creation of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union—though interpretive guides are free to discuss the specifics with their tour groups (a practice that surely requires much local knowledge of who, exactly, has come into the museum, and with what expectations).Chapters on Paterson, New Jersey, and urban Texas both interrogate the relationship between public history, urban redevelopment, and present-day working-class residents of cities. In Paterson, as Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan observes, public labor historians must work to ensure that “culture-led redevelopment” and preservation serve the working people of Paterson today instead of buttressing revenue generation for a privileged few (187). In urban Texas, Rob Linné urges public historians to celebrate the “constant state of flux” in which Latinx murals and street memorials exist, even as he warns that gentrification and neighborhood change are regular hazards (204). Questions of gentrification and urban redevelopment appear in flashes in Where Are the Workers?, but they are central concerns for public labor historians across the world.Rebekah Bryer and Thomas MacMillan's final chapter, on Maine governor Paul LePage's removal of the Maine Labor Mural from the state's Department of Labor building, shows what public labor history is up against when it comes into direct conflict with labor's enemies. While LePage failed both to erase Maine's labor history and to establish Maine as a right-to-work state, the overall takeaway is clear. Capital knows the dangers of labor history, and its agents will do whatever it takes to marginalize, co-opt, and, in the last instance, erase it.Where Are the Workers? has no conclusion, an editorial decision that is equally sensible and provocative. Such a summary would likely put far too neat a bow on this wide-ranging collection. At the same time, the very urgency of these essays leaves us asking for more. “Place-based public labor history,” as Where Are the Workers? shows, is alive and well, challenging and correcting dominant narratives in innumerable locales across the nation. What, then, is the next step? As we hope, and organize, for the militant uprisings of the last few years to coalesce into a larger resurgence of the US labor movement, we must also imagine how these specific efforts might be combined into a new national narrative that puts working people and their struggles front and center. Where Are the Workers? is a step in this direction; what follows depends on the work, and collective action, of all those who practice labor history in public.