Labor History Bibliography

Timothy G. Borden

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History 11 (Winter 1997): 27-30.
Copyright (c) 1997, Organization of American Historians

The field of American labor history remains one of the most dynamic and diverse arenas of historical inquiry today. The following list, organized roughly by chronological and topical concerns, represents some of the leading works of the literature of American working-class studies. A few "classics" are thrown in as well. 

Colonial/New Nation  

Alfred F. Young's article "George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 38 (October 1981): 561-623, explores the private and public meanings of the American Revolution over the lifetime of one member of the working class. Although Hewes himself claimed social equality and full citizenship based on his participation in the Revolution, artists, intellectuals, and politicians would debate the contemporary meaning of the Revolution for other purposes. By the end of Hewes's life, the workingmen of Boston had lost the battle to claim the legacy of the Revolution. 

In A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 444 pp., Laurel Thatcher Ulrich demonstrates through a biography of a New England midwife that the American Revolution accomplished more than just ending British rule. The vast changes in the domestic and public spheres altered the political power structure and even intimate family relations, as Ballard's experience as a working woman shows. 

Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 446 pp., discusses the meaning of the Revolution in the development of the artisan republican tradition. Wilentz argues that workers came to use the language of the Revolution to express their demands of achieving independence through labor; an active citizenship for workers; equality of civil and political rights for each member of the Republic; and the declaration of public good over private gain. Over time, however, the entrepreneurial vision of a free labor market economy--with its ability to combine the rhetoric of reform, populism, and equality--destroyed the artisans' hopes for a commonwealth system of labor. 

Mary H. Blewett's Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 444 pp., examines the ability of women in the shoe industry to draw on artisans' traditional demands for equal rights to counter their employers' use of market economy principles to control their work. Although these shoe makers were able to articulate demands for equality through artisan republicanism, they eventually found their gendered identity as dependent family members and moral agents shut them out of the larger debate over strikes, wages, and other vital issues. 

Slavery and Race  

In Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 345 pp., Charles Joyner describes the many ways that enslaved people controlled their labor, family lives, and cultural expressions in spite of living under a brutal system of slavery. In his examination of life on rice-growing plantations, for instance, Joyner demonstrates that slaves used the task work system of labor to give themselves a degree of choice in the work they undertook and how they performed it. Giving his subjects a dignity that has often been lost in historical narrative, Joyner renders a fully-realized portrait of daily life under slavery. 

David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso Books, 1991), 191 pp., provides another example of the importance of race in shaping American society. Interpreting the concept as a variable independent of class, Roediger presents social, economic, and linguistic evidence of the impact of race and racism on the formation of white, working-class identity. As white workers increasingly referred to slavery to measure their own status in the nineteenth century, for example, a racist ideology that defined African-Americans as separate and unequal to whites became part of a working-class consciousness. Even as the working class changed its composition in the twentieth century, it retained this race consciousness. 

Nineteenth Century/Industrialism  

Leon Fink, in Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and Americans Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1983), 249 pp., describes a dynamic labor movement that tended to merge with dominant political parties or change its policies to reflect similarities with political parties. This process of co-optation--together with values such as individualism, faith in progress, and middle-class aspirations within the Knights of Labor--rendered the labor movement more reformist than radical in nature. Political coalition-building, not unilateral activism, would continue to characterize the labor movement throughout the nineteenth century. 

Herbert Gutman's classic, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working Class and Social History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976), 343 pp., addresses the importance, independence, and vitality of a workers' culture in American history. Through his pioneering essays, Gutman broadened the field of labor history from the institutional framework that had previously characterized it. Demonstrating that each new group of workers used its own culture to adapt, or adapt to, the industrial order, Gutman demonstrated that the conflict between employer and worker carried far beyond the shop floor. 

David Montgomery's contributions to labor history include two outstanding works, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 189 pp., and Worker's Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 189 pp. In his more recent work, Montgomery places activities of workers to gain full citizenship in the context of the political arena. Although "democracy hastened the destruction of onerous forms of personal subordination to masters, landlords and creditors that American working people had historically faced," Montgomery concludes that free-market principles continued to limit working-class demands for an American commonwealth. In Worker's Control, Montgomery surveys the battle between working-class traditions and the ascendancy of industrialists in the changing American order. While workers fought to maintain their autonomy through traditions such as the stint (which limited production output) and respect for their fellow workers, employers used measures such as welfare capitalism and scientific management to challenge this control and solidarity. Like Gutman, Montgomery describes a tension between workers and employers that carried into the political, legal, and social arenas. To the extent possible, workers brought their culture into the workplace; when necessary, they abandoned control of their labor and relied on their community for sustenance. 

Gender  

Thomas Dublin's Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 312 pp., offers a view of a paternalistic industrial order that attempted to control the lives of women workers both in the workplace and in the home. Despite these controls, however, Lowell mill workers maintained a strong voice in public and in private. Peer control, socialization of newcomers, and work routines among the women themselves characterized the factory floor, while economic independence mediated relations outside of it. 

Susan Porter Benson's Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 322 pp., explores the interaction of the women's, business, and consumption cultures in the service sector. Forming a gendered class analysis, Porter Benson's survey shows that department store workers used their gendered identity to encourage consumption among store patrons, but that they also used their class identity to demonstrate solidarity in the face of management control of the sales floor. 

In Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 213 pp., Ruth Milkman addresses the central role of gender in shaping the American economy. In Milkman's analysis, gender-based job segregation resulted from an array of economic, political and social constructs. Unions such as the United Auto Workers and the United Electrical Workers, in attempting to overcome hiring, promotion, and wage discrimination during and after World War II, could not fully overcome internal differences and management resistance when they attempted to make fundamental changes to the gendered capitalist order. 

Nancy Gabin, in Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 257 pp., describes the efforts of women unionists to use their institution to advance their gender-based concerns, such as equal pay for equal work and non-discrimination in hiring and promotion. Linking the labor movement with later efforts to foster women's rights, Gabin notes that during this period the UAW "not only debated the issue of gender equality . . . but also significantly shaped the agenda of the new feminist movement and contributed to some of its principal victories" (p. 231). 

Twentieth Century/New Labor History  

Irving Bernstein's landmark two-volume study, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960), 577 pp., and Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1971), 873 pp., encouraged a new generation of scholars to examine American working-class history. In his masterful narratives, Bernstein describes a labor movement concerned with higher wages, job security, and grievance procedures in the workplace rather than radical political goals. Reform of capitalism--not its overthrow--brought workers into FDR's coalition, where they voiced their demands through the bureaucracy of the state instead of sitting down on the job. 

Lizabeth Cohen's work, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 526 pp., also describes the incorporation of workers into FDR's New Deal order. Coming to believe in a sense of reciprocal responsibility on the part of the government during this era, ethnic workers in Chicago came to view themselves as equal partners and contributors to the nation, not as the subjects of industrial paternalism. This new identity, which brought workers together across ethnic and racial lines, also gave them an increased class consciousness, one of the most important characteristics of the New Deal years. 

John Bodnar's collection of oral histories in Workers' World: Kinship, Community, and Protest in an Industrial Society, 1900-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 200 pp., demonstrates that the expression of traditional values based on family ties, ethnicity, and religion remained a central feature of working-class life even after generations of industrial experience. These values, reflected in the New Deal's concerns with economic security and social stability, brought workers into unions and FDR's coalition while simultaneously dampening enthusiasm for more radical measures. 

In Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 356 pp., Gary Gerstle describes the struggle of workers in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, as encompassing both bread-and-butter concerns and workers' rights issues. As they would come to be embodied in the CIO, workers' demands included economic security, dignity in the workplace, and social equality. While government institutions and policies would prevent them from determining production choices or redistributing wealth, workers did gain a degree of control over the workplace as well as a greater public voice. 

Elizabeth Faue's Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 295 pp., looks at the labor movement through a study of the public (or community-based) and institutionalized (or work-based) arenas that women inhabited in the first half of the twentieth century. Contrasting the community-oriented labor movements of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s that was "fundamentally gendered in ways that authorized the participation of women," Faue concludes that by the end of the Second World War, unions followed "bureaucratic, centralized, and workplace-oriented practices of solidarity in the labor movement, the consequence of which was the exclusion of women from union leadership and, to a lesser extent, from union membership" (p. 169). 

Nelson Lichtenstein's biography, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 575 pp., presents a breadth of vision and wealth of detail that are as dynamic as the life of America's most famous labor leader. Demonstrating that American labor found a limited set of available strategies in the post-New Deal era, Lichtenstein describes a pragmatic idealism that energized Reuther's UAW and the movements it supported. Among the many accomplishments of this work, Lichtenstein reminds us of the labor movement's central place in modern American history. 

Peter F. Drucker's recent article, "Age of Social Transformation," in Atlantic Monthly (November 1994): 53-80, presents a structural, international analysis of the issues of American labor in the twentieth century. Describing an economy that has independently functioned according to long-term transformative forces, Drucker indicates that the state must now end "the futility of politics" by taking a fundamental role in shaping "the knowledge-based society of organizations" (pp. 54, 80). Through this argument, Drucker also demonstrates an innovative way of thinking about labor, workers, and a post-industrial society. 

Theoretical Perspectives  

David Brody's essay, "The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of the American Working Class," in Labor History 20 (Winter 1979): 111-26, defines the new labor history as one that encompasses both workers and their institutions--most notably, unions. While institutional frameworks are still vital, Brody issues a directive to labor historians to look beyond the workplace to capture the dynamism as well as the continuities of the American working-class experience. 

In Howard Kimmeldorf's round table discussion, "Bringing Unions Back In (Or Why We Need a New Old Labor History," in Labor History 32 (Winter 1991): 91-129, labor historians offer several additional perspectives on the new labor history. Kimmeldorf notes, for example, that in the rush to study the culture of workers, labor historians have seemingly forgotten that unions have been the vehicles of protest and change. In response, Michael Kazin agrees that unions need to remain central to labor history; however, he does not view with apprehension the new focus on women, society, religion, and language as part of labor history. Other historians, including David Montgomery and Bruce Nelson, concur that although unions are one means of historical inquiry, there are other cultural institutions--such as churches, neighborhoods, and ethnic or social clubs--that can offer a dynamic description of working-class history. 

Among the many other important works in the field of American labor history are the following publications: 

Charles Baird, "Labor Law Reform: Lessons from     History," Cato Journal 10 (Spring/Summer 1990): 175-209. 

Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 

Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream (reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 

Howard Dickman, Industrial Democracy in America: Ideological Origins of National Labor Relations Policy (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987). 

Katherine Marie Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 

David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). 

Richard Feldman and Michael Betzold, eds., End of the Line: Autoworkers and the American Dream (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 

Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974). 

Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 

Laurie Graham, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu: The Japanese Model and the American Worker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 

Jacqueline Dowd Hall, et al, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987). 

Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 

George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 

Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: 

Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 

Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). 

Christopher Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

Richard K. Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993). 

Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). 

---

Timothy G. Borden received his B.A. in Economics and International Business Relations from Brown University in 1989. He earned an M.A. in American Labor History at the University of Toledo in 1994, and is currently completing his Ph.D. in American History at Indiana University. He is also a graduate researcher at the IU Oral History Research Center, where he has worked as a principal investigator for the Indiana Labor History Project and the current program Economic Development in Indiana: Past, Present, and Future.