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After Thirty Years of ‘new’ Labour History, there is still no Socialism in Reagan Country*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Robert J. Norrell
Affiliation:
The University of Alabama

Abstract

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Type
Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Brody, David, ‘The old labor history and the new: in search of an American working class’, Labor history, XX (1979), 111–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Labor history in the 1970s: toward a history of the American worker’, in Michael Kammen (ed.), The past before us: contemporary historical writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), pp. 252–69; Montgomery, David, ‘To study the people: the American working class’, Labor history, XXI (1980), 485512CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schatz, Ronald W., ‘Labour historians, labor economics, and the question of synthesis’, Journal of American History, LXXI (1983), 93100Google Scholar; Kazin, Michael, ‘Struggling with class struggle: Marxism and the search for a synthesis of U.S. labor history’, Labor history, XXVIII (Fall 1987), 497514CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zieger, Robert H., ‘Industrial relations and labor history in the eighties’, Industrial Relations: a Journal of Economics and Society, XXII (1983), 5865Google Scholar; idem, ‘Workers and scholars: recent trends in American labor historiography’, Labor history, XIII (1972), 245–66; Wright, Gavin, ‘Labor history and labor economics’, in Field, Alexander J. (ed), The future of economic history (Boston, 1987), pp. 313–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Commons, John R. et al. , History of labour in the United States (4 vols., New York, 19181935)Google Scholar; Perlman, Selig, A theory of the labor movement (New York, 1928)Google Scholar.

3 For a good discussion of the significance and problems of the Sombart question, see Kraditor, Aileen S., The radical persuasion 1890–1917: aspects of the intellectual history and the historiography of three American radical organizations (Baton Rouge, 1981), pp. 3754Google Scholar. Sombart is quoted in Shergold, , Working-class life, p. 9Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Taft, Philip, The A.F. of L. from the death of Gompers to the merger (New York, 1959)Google Scholar; Galenson, Walter, The CIO challenge to the AFL: a history of the American labor movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)Google Scholar; Dunlop, John, Industrial relations systems (New York, 1958)Google Scholar; Jensen, Vernon H., Nonferrous metals industry unionism, 1932–1954 (Ithaca, 1954)Google Scholar.

5 Brody, David, Steelworkers in America: the non-union era (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)Google Scholar. The best discussion of the new left's effect on labour history was Zieger, ‘Workers and scholars’.

6 Hartz, Louis, The liberal tradition in America (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Potter, David, People of plenty: economic abundance and the American character (Chicago, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boorstin, Daniel, The genius of American politics (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The American political tradition (New York, 1940)Google Scholar.

7 Thompson was quoted in Gutman, , Work, culture, and society, p. 44Google Scholar.

8 Montgomery, , Beyond equality: labor and the radical Republicans 1862–1872 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.

9 Bailyn, , The ideological origins of the American revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar; Wood, , The creation of the American republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969)Google Scholar; Pocock, , The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar.

10 Montgomery, , ‘To study the people’, pp. 502–3Google Scholar. For a sampling of the new labour history see Working-class America: essays on labor, community, and American society, Frisch, Michael H. and Walkowitz, Daniel J. (eds.), (Urbana, 1983)Google Scholar; a survey of twentieth-century labour history that reflects the basic values and concerns of the new left labour history is Green, James R., The world of the worker: labor in twentieth-century America (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

11 Gutman, , Work, culture, and society, p. xiiiGoogle Scholar.

12 Norrell, Robert J., ‘Caste in steel: Jim Crow careers in Birmingham, Alabama’, The Journal of American History, LXXIII (1986), 669–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a provocative discussion of historians' tendency to ‘present-centredness,’ see Wilson, Adrian and Ashplant, T. G., ‘Whig history and present-centred history’, Historical Journal, XXXI (1988), 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Present-centred history and the problems of historical knowledge’, Historical Journal, XXXI (1988), 253–74.

13 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene, ‘The political crisis of social history: a Marxian perspective’, Journal of Social History, X (1976), 205–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Fruits of merchant capital: slavery and bourgeois property in the rise and expansion of capitalism (New York, 1983); McDonnell, Lawrence, ‘You are too sentimental, problems and suggestions for a new labor history’, Journal of Social History, XVII (1984), 630Google Scholar; Aileen Kraditor, The radical persuasion: Bodnar, John, The transplanted: a history of immigrants in urban America (Bloomington, 1985)Google Scholar, and idem, ‘Immigration, kinship, and the rise of working-class realism in industrial America’, Journal of Social History, XIII (1980), 44–64.

14 Hill, Herbert, ‘Myth-making as labor history: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, II (1988), 132200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wright, ‘Labor history and labor economies’.

15 Among the best works focused on unions and organizing efforts were Bernstein, Irving, The lean years: a history of the American worker, 1920–1933 (Boston, 1960)Google Scholar and Turbulent years: a history of the American worker, 1933–1941 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar; Fine, Sidney, Sit-down: the General Motors strike of 1936–37 (Ann Arbor, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ozanne, Robert, A century of labor-management relations at McCormick and International Harvester (Madison, 1967)Google Scholar. Brody's, later works included The butcher workmen: a study of unionization (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)Google Scholar, Labor in crisis: the steel strike of 1919 (Philadelphia, 1965)Google Scholar, and Workers in industrial America: essays on the twentieth century struggle (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. For work that evidenced none of the new labour history's tendency to romanticize the workers, see Nelson, Daniel, Frederick W. Taylor and the rise of scientific management (Madison, 1980)Google Scholar; idem, Managers and workers: origins of the new factory system in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison, 1975). On Debs and Lewis, see Salvatore, Nick, Eugene V. Debs, citizen and socialist (Chicago, 1982)Google Scholar and Dubofsky, Melvyn and Tine, Warren Van, John L. Lewis: a biography (New York, 1977)Google Scholar. Good studies of national unions included Schatz, Ronald W., The electrical workers: a history of labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1023–60 (Chicago, 1983)Google Scholar; Zieger, Robert H., Rebuilding the pulp and paper workers union, 1933–1941 (Knoxville, 1984)Google Scholar; Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliott, Black Detroit and the rise of the UAW (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Nelson, Bruce, Workers on the waterfront: seamen, longshoremen, and unionism in the 1930s (Urbana, 1988)Google Scholar. On railroad workers, see Licht, Walter, Working for the railroad: the organization of work in the nineteenth century (Princeton, 1983)Google Scholar; Ducker, James H., Men of the steel mills: workers on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad (Lincoln, 1983)Google Scholar; and Stromquist, Shelton, A generation of boomers: the pattern of railroad labor conflict in nineteenth-century America (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar. For the relationship between labour and management under greater government control, see Harris, Howell John, The right to manage: industrial relations policies of American business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982)Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, Labor's war at home: the CIO in World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar; and Tomlins, Christopher L., The state and the unions: labor relations, law, and the organized labor movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)Google Scholar. Among the better community studies were Hareven, Tamara K., Family time & industrial time: the relationship between the family and work in a New England industrial community (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar; Dawley, Alan, Class and community: the industrial revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976)Google Scholar; Gottlieb, Peter, Making their own way: Southern blacks' migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30 (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; and Bodnar, John, Simon, Roger, Weber, Michael P., Lives of their own: blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Chicago, 1982)Google Scholar.

16 Hobsbawm, E. J., ‘Labour history and ideology’, Journal of Social History, VII (1974), 375Google Scholar.

17 It should be noted that Segmented work owed much to Braverman's, Harry highly influential Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century (New York, 1974)Google Scholar.

18 See Schatz, ‘Labor historians, labor economies’.

19 Harris, , ‘Give us some less of that old-time corporate history’, Labor history, XXVIII (1987), 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Zunz, , ‘The synthesis of social change: reflections of American social history’, in Zunz, O. (ed.), Reliving the past: the worlds of social history (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 80Google Scholar.

21 Wright, ‘Labor history and labor economies’.