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

It has been some time since I read Herbert Gutman. My version of Work, Culture, and Society, a dog-eared, used copy that I bought in the early 1990s to prepare for graduate qualifying exams, had taken on a mustiness that sent me into a sneezing fit as soon as I reopened it. They say you never know as much as the day after those exams, and in this moment, I felt the wisdom of that observation. What I remembered was that Gutman had been the foundation of the new social history in the 1970s and that a generation of labor historians in the 1980s saw him as the American equivalent of E. P. Thompson, though I recalled little else. I hoped that my handwritten notes on six-by-four index cards stuffed inside the front cover would help rekindle my memory of what made him relevant to my studies, and my generation of graduates, three decades ago. No luck. My scribbles only captured the broadest outlines of Gutman's arguments, plus a cryptic message about the “collective passivity” of Lowell mill girls that I must have picked up from his essays.As I reread it, I noted how conditions in the economy and emphases in labor history had changed since his time. Reflecting on economic transitions and labor resistance in the nineteenth century, Gutman evoked this history in a moment of despair among workers in the 1970s that had yet to be fully interpreted by scholars or union leaders. Organized labor had begun a retreat in those days that culminated in the fateful PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan broke the union by firing air traffic controllers for violating his return-to-work order. Before he died at the far-too-young age of fifty-seven in 1985, Gutman contributed two significant books, his monograph The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 and his collection of essays in Work, Culture, and Society, both in 1976. He separated himself from previous generations by abandoning a focus on trade unionists and instead writing about a culture of adaptation and resistance among workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly immigrants and African Americans.I remember that Work, Culture, and Society was seen by my graduate professors as a paean to the American workers who first exercised their conscience as a laboring class by engaging in everyday acts of resistance to exploitation. This had been the foundation of the approach taken by a generation of scholars just ahead of me, perhaps no one more influential than Robin D. G. Kelley, whose Race Rebels taught us to respect the “infrapolitics” of everyday workers who had received scant attention from historians prior to the 1990s.1 His celebration of the resistive power of McDonald's workers reminded me of my time on the grill at my local franchise and inspired me to write about the origins and variety of working-class culture among mostly Mexican people living and working “East of East” Los Angeles in Southern California.2Studying the culture of workers seemed right then, and still is important now, but what stood out to me when reading Gutman again is his attention to the ideology of “industrial laissez faire”—the belief that the economy, and therefore society, are better off when industrialists are unfettered by regulation. Gutman appreciates the work of his predecessors to catalogue the thoughts and actions of workers into categories (from “business” unionists to “socialist” radicals) but laments the relative lack of attention to the influential “modes of thought and perception” among the owning class (79). To remedy this oversight, he explores what he calls “pre–Gilded Age Protestantism” and the virtues of “Acquisitive Man” in the nineteenth century.3 By dissecting the assumptions and excesses of owners of industry, he uncovers the exploitative assumptions and practices that compelled workers to mobilize. He shows how Protestantism, with its emphasis on individuals and their relationship to God, elevated these beliefs to a “social science” and “divine,” “scientific” laws.4 While the imposition of these beliefs led to the embitterment and mobilization of workers, Gutman shows how such “culture-bound” Christianity also “drained the rich of conscience and confused or pacified the poor.”5 Gutman challenged labor historians in his own time to study such laissez-faire economics to understand the potential for working-class consciousness and its subversions.Subsequent generations have mostly heeded his call, especially in recent times. While a focus on the “bottom up” still dominates the field, working-class historians have interpreted “top-down” ideologies and practices that continue to fracture working people and thwart labor organizing in this country. In what amounts to the adoption of Chinese philosopher and military leader Sun Tzu's axiom “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” many working-class scholars have chosen to explain and demystify a history of conservative, antilabor ideology in this country. Dissection of how corporations avoided unionization by moving over time and across regions and national borders; how conservative economists cultivated the current antidemocratic policies of the Republican Party in fights against desegregation; and how companies use just-in-time sourcing of merchandise and religious messaging to keep labor organizing at bay represent just some of these projects.6 I myself have embraced this approach, exploring how one of the world's most notorious corporations, United Fruit, played working people against one another across the hemisphere to bolster its economic position. For a time, United Fruit's last CEO, Eli Black, advanced an agenda of “social responsibility” by working with union leaders in California and Honduras to improve its image before jettisoning this project when natural disasters and the oil crisis threatened the company's share price.7Such histories are needed now more than ever. The wealth gap between CEOs and the common worker is greater today than it was in the Gilded Age that Gutman studied. We need to know how these conditions came to be and to understand and be able to explain the methods and beliefs of corporate leaders who use their profits to extend their control over their employees. Although David Gelles is not a labor historian, he answers some of these questions in The Man Who Broke Capitalism, a biography about the former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch. Pitched to a general audience, Gelles's book reveals the culture of manipulation and fraud that Welch wrought at GE for more than three decades. Welch's endless pursuit of continual growth through the acquisition and restructuring of companies undermined once-dependable careers for many American workers, ruined a venerable company, and outsourced production over the arc of his tenure as the “CEO of the [Twentieth] Century.” Cast as the quintessential “Acquisitive Man” in his own time, Welch enjoyed a reputation as a model businessman, revered by presidents of both parties, especially Donald Trump, who called him a friend. Gelles's biography challenges Welch's legacy by questioning the cultural logics of eternal growth and showing how Welch's reliance on stock prices as an indicator of economic and social health created a false sense of security in this country.Gutman would have seen the value of these lessons for the current labor movement. As workers mobilize across the country, creating new unions at Amazon fulfillment centers and Starbucks cafés, they stand to benefit from knowing how their employers think and act. Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Starbucks's Howard Schultz now articulate a version of Blacks’ gospel of social responsibility by supporting worker-friendly benefits policies or advancing liberal causes in one corner of their conglomerate while pursuing union busting in another. Gutman would have endorsed the interrogation of these contradictions and woven them into a comprehensive treatment of the pitfalls and opportunities present for workers seeking to claim greater say over their workplace and lives. With so much at stake in today's economy, it behooves us to understand the culture of the corner office so that we may strengthen the leverage of the shop floor.