Norman Markowitz: The Backlash Against Labor History
[Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. ]
Author's note: The following is the text of a paper that I gave at the Conference of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA)/ Southern Labor Studies Association on May 18, at the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University. LAWCHA is the kind of scholar activist group that deserves support from anyone interested in understanding and contributing both the past and present struggles and advances of labor and the working class. The title of the panel was “The Backlash Against Labor History."
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The term "backlash" came into popular usage in the late 1960s. It served as a mass media headline explanation for opposition and resistance to the Civil Rights movement generally and of course to Black militancy specifically, a sort of negation of the negation for those of us who are or were politically hip. I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan at that time.
There were many things going on: student strikes to admit Blacks, and on many campuses student initiatives to establish Black and other minority studies programs.
A little later there were initiatives in which female faculty (often at real risk to their careers in our careerist society) played a much bigger role to establish women’s studies programs and encourage research on women’s history as part of the struggle that the many groupings of the women’s rights movement were making against male chauvinism and male supremacy.
Michigan was a strong labor state, and one of the prominent student leaders in the late 1960s was the son of a UAW leader. But labor, although students generally supported workers rights and unionization, was not in my memory a factor in the struggles that produced the new programs, even at the University of Michigan and in Michigan where the face of labor was Walter Reuther and not George Meany, who came from my old neighborhood in the South Bronx and whose most famous comment or addition to American mass culture was that he never walked a picket line.
Nor was labor history really much of a factor in the courses that I took at both at the University of Michigan and at City College before that. (At City College, a professor warned me about citing Philip Foner’s work positively in a term paper. He even called him “Philip Funny” an expression of those times and for some of course today, where even in death red-baiters seek to warn potential readers to “keep their noses clean” by avoiding Phil Foner at all costs).
My major professor, Sidney Fine, was an historian of the UAW Sit-down Strike, but someone who was very much of a traditionalist political historian in the courses that he taught and in his world-view, training his students to be generalists in modern U.S. history, which I still believe was the right thing to do. (Mel Dubofsky in his post emphasized much the same thing.)
What Labor history was there that we were expected to know when I was a student? We had to learn a little bit about the “Commons School,” which was taught pretty much as a minor footnote in the history of American exceptionalism—namely Commons was anti-Marxist and anti-Communist, and he and his students proved that class consciousness didn’t work in the United States. Phil Taft was seen as the most important historian of the Commons school and no one took Phil Taft seriously.
He was sort of a second tier political historian writing political histories about a second tier subject: labor. Labor was the history of unions first and strikes second and few took it seriously, not the traditionalist political historians frightened by young radicals and particularly a historian they like to call “William Appleton Williams," not the “new social historians” who bounced around between theory and quantification, not the so-called new left radicals the traditionalists feared who among students looked to and often sought to copy the diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams, the by then late sociologist C. Wright Mills, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse along with many academic popularizers of feminism, ethno-cultural themes and the counter-culture.
"Backlash" is a very dubious term because there wasn’t much of a front lash in the 1960s or the 1970s. I also believe that Marc Stern and others were quite right to contend that the decline of the labor movement is certainly a factor in making labor history and labor historians “invisible” or narrowly pigeonholed in academic work. But the decline or rather the stagnation is a much longer process, than merely the Reagan regime of the last nearly three decades, its Republican partisans and Clinton Democratic appeasers. The decline is connected to the postwar political reaction against left and Communist led and influenced labor, in which labor ceased in the minds of most people and to some of its leaders to be a movement and became an interest group living off of the victories of the past and submerging itself in defensive democratic party politics and the liberal wing of the cold war consensus
I’m exaggerating of course, and among labor historians there were many important exceptions. There was Herb Gutman (seen as an American E. P. Thompson, a great labor history hope so to speak) and Jesse Lemisch and others like David Montgomery and Staughton Lynd who bridged two generations. There was an opening to the left, which lasted a relatively short time, less than a decade. And since the universities are usually behind rather than ahead of the time, this opening influenced universities largely in the 1970s rather than the 1960s.
There were and are scholars like my former Rutgers colleague, Alice Kessler Harris, the leading historian of women’s labor history, and Mel Dubofsky, James Green, Nelson Lichtenstein, Jim Barrett, Michael Honey, and even Leon Fink and Josh Freeman (who I am proud to say was a student whose dissertation I supervised) and others.
But, unlike scholars in other fields enhanced by the social movements of the 1960s, they did not have either the critical mass in universities or the constituencies among students and in the larger society to build enclaves for themselves, weather the storms, and even make small gains. ...
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Author's note: The following is the text of a paper that I gave at the Conference of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA)/ Southern Labor Studies Association on May 18, at the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University. LAWCHA is the kind of scholar activist group that deserves support from anyone interested in understanding and contributing both the past and present struggles and advances of labor and the working class. The title of the panel was “The Backlash Against Labor History."
***
The term "backlash" came into popular usage in the late 1960s. It served as a mass media headline explanation for opposition and resistance to the Civil Rights movement generally and of course to Black militancy specifically, a sort of negation of the negation for those of us who are or were politically hip. I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan at that time.
There were many things going on: student strikes to admit Blacks, and on many campuses student initiatives to establish Black and other minority studies programs.
A little later there were initiatives in which female faculty (often at real risk to their careers in our careerist society) played a much bigger role to establish women’s studies programs and encourage research on women’s history as part of the struggle that the many groupings of the women’s rights movement were making against male chauvinism and male supremacy.
Michigan was a strong labor state, and one of the prominent student leaders in the late 1960s was the son of a UAW leader. But labor, although students generally supported workers rights and unionization, was not in my memory a factor in the struggles that produced the new programs, even at the University of Michigan and in Michigan where the face of labor was Walter Reuther and not George Meany, who came from my old neighborhood in the South Bronx and whose most famous comment or addition to American mass culture was that he never walked a picket line.
Nor was labor history really much of a factor in the courses that I took at both at the University of Michigan and at City College before that. (At City College, a professor warned me about citing Philip Foner’s work positively in a term paper. He even called him “Philip Funny” an expression of those times and for some of course today, where even in death red-baiters seek to warn potential readers to “keep their noses clean” by avoiding Phil Foner at all costs).
My major professor, Sidney Fine, was an historian of the UAW Sit-down Strike, but someone who was very much of a traditionalist political historian in the courses that he taught and in his world-view, training his students to be generalists in modern U.S. history, which I still believe was the right thing to do. (Mel Dubofsky in his post emphasized much the same thing.)
What Labor history was there that we were expected to know when I was a student? We had to learn a little bit about the “Commons School,” which was taught pretty much as a minor footnote in the history of American exceptionalism—namely Commons was anti-Marxist and anti-Communist, and he and his students proved that class consciousness didn’t work in the United States. Phil Taft was seen as the most important historian of the Commons school and no one took Phil Taft seriously.
He was sort of a second tier political historian writing political histories about a second tier subject: labor. Labor was the history of unions first and strikes second and few took it seriously, not the traditionalist political historians frightened by young radicals and particularly a historian they like to call “William Appleton Williams," not the “new social historians” who bounced around between theory and quantification, not the so-called new left radicals the traditionalists feared who among students looked to and often sought to copy the diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams, the by then late sociologist C. Wright Mills, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse along with many academic popularizers of feminism, ethno-cultural themes and the counter-culture.
"Backlash" is a very dubious term because there wasn’t much of a front lash in the 1960s or the 1970s. I also believe that Marc Stern and others were quite right to contend that the decline of the labor movement is certainly a factor in making labor history and labor historians “invisible” or narrowly pigeonholed in academic work. But the decline or rather the stagnation is a much longer process, than merely the Reagan regime of the last nearly three decades, its Republican partisans and Clinton Democratic appeasers. The decline is connected to the postwar political reaction against left and Communist led and influenced labor, in which labor ceased in the minds of most people and to some of its leaders to be a movement and became an interest group living off of the victories of the past and submerging itself in defensive democratic party politics and the liberal wing of the cold war consensus
I’m exaggerating of course, and among labor historians there were many important exceptions. There was Herb Gutman (seen as an American E. P. Thompson, a great labor history hope so to speak) and Jesse Lemisch and others like David Montgomery and Staughton Lynd who bridged two generations. There was an opening to the left, which lasted a relatively short time, less than a decade. And since the universities are usually behind rather than ahead of the time, this opening influenced universities largely in the 1970s rather than the 1960s.
There were and are scholars like my former Rutgers colleague, Alice Kessler Harris, the leading historian of women’s labor history, and Mel Dubofsky, James Green, Nelson Lichtenstein, Jim Barrett, Michael Honey, and even Leon Fink and Josh Freeman (who I am proud to say was a student whose dissertation I supervised) and others.
But, unlike scholars in other fields enhanced by the social movements of the 1960s, they did not have either the critical mass in universities or the constituencies among students and in the larger society to build enclaves for themselves, weather the storms, and even make small gains. ...