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

I first encountered Herbert Gutman's work as a PhD student at the University of Oxford in 1988 when I was working on my thesis comparing the experiences of the German Social Democrats and the British Labour Party during the first three decades of the twentieth century.1 A friend of mine introduced Gutman to me with these words: “This is the American E. P. Thompson.” When I first read Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, its author had already been dead for almost three years, but his reputation was huge. Memory is a fickle thing, but if I recall it correctly thirty-five years later, I was as impressed with Gutman as I was with Thompson. Not only did I cherish both as engaged historians—Thompson's campaigning on behalf of European Nuclear Disarmament and Gutman's work with trade unionists, on the American Social History Project and his teaching at Black colleges in the United States, I was also intrigued by their common insistence on the agency of ordinary working people and the importance of working-class cultures in explaining their beliefs and behaviors. It was highly significant that Thompson visited Gutman in 1964 and a sign that they recognized each other as kindred spirits, both deeply influenced by Marxism, both unorthodox in their adaptation of Marxist ideas, and both insistent that the reaction of working people to industrial capitalism, both in England and in the United States, had much to do with preindustrial traditions and values.Like Thompson in Britain, Gutman in the United States was often associated with the move of the “New Labor History” from organizational and institutional histories of labor to the study of ordinary workers and their everyday surroundings and experiences. In my native Germany, historians of everyday life, such as Alf Lüdtke, Hans Medick, and Thomas Lindenberger, were the earliest historians receptive to this New Labor History. They were also interested in exploring the lifeworlds of ordinary workers rather than studying the labor movement. As someone who had just started a comparative study on the labor movements of two European countries that had developed some of the strongest labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I was taken aback by that dichotomy between “ordinary workers,” on the one hand, and “organized labor,” on the other. Surely it remained important not to see the two as entirely separate, even if one could have a lot of sympathy with the claim that one should not only study organized labor and that there was a difference between the worlds of organized labor and the worlds of working people. Hence, I was relieved to find many years later that Marcel van der Linden had been making very similar arguments, finding enormous value and inspiration in the new labor histories, exemplified in Germany by Alf Lüdtke, in Britain by E. P. Thompson, and in the United States by Herbert Gutman, while at the same time insisting that historians should also pay attention to the places where these worlds overlapped and interacted.2 And in fact, returning to the work of Herbert Gutman, it seems to me to be particularly valuable because he arguably remained very much aware of precisely such overlaps.Rereading Gutman's work thirty-five years after I first picked up Work, Culture, and Society, I felt overwhelmingly confirmed in my memory that while he paved the way for a labor history interested in ordinary working people, he also paid attention to organized labor. Even though he stressed in his own introduction that the “New Labor History” was interested in working people, while the “Old Labor History” was concerned with organizations like trade unions, in the articles themselves Gutman talks about working people but also about trade unionists and those organized in the labor movement. For all his explorations into working-class cultures, he was adamant about relating culture to questions of resistance against exploitation and of unequal power relations in society, something that David Roediger has also stressed in his defense of Gutman against some of his powerful critics.3As I am not a historian of American labor, my own reading is not really concerned with questions such as to what extent Gutman's interpretations of American labor have stood the test of time or which of his arguments need revising. Others in this review symposium are much better placed to do this necessary work of critical reevaluation than I am. Instead, I have read Gutman's classic collection of essays with an eye to asking where he has influenced agendas of labor historians beyond the United States and where these agendas remain relevant to contemporary labor historians regardless of their geographical specialisms.The collection starts with two of his most iconic essays. In the title-giving “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” Gutman provided a masterly survey of the emergence of industrial labor in three periods that, he argued, were fairly distinct. The first period, from 1815 to 1843, was when factories were still relatively new and when most of the workers in the factories were more used to preindustrial rhythms and lifestyles, as he exemplified with reference to the Lowell mill girls. Between 1843 and 1893, according to Gutman, industrial society radically transformed the United States. Artisanal ways of work and life were replaced by those of industrial workers—not without resistance and tensions. Finally, between 1893 and 1919, the United States was developing into the leading industrial society globally. In each of the three periods Gutman is keenly aware of the tensions brought about by the massive in-migration of labor from different parts of Europe, Asia, and Latin America who brought quite distinct ethnic subcultures to the United States. His attention to the manifold subcultures of these workers throughout draws from the work of anthropologists like Eric Wolf and Sidney W. Mintz and sociologists, especially Zygmunt Bauman. Gutman's insistence on the usefulness of both disciplines, anthropology and sociology, for labor historians is, to my mind, a refreshing perspective given that in the decades following his work, those leaning toward anthropology and those leaning toward sociology were often seen as being on opposing sides in debates about where labor history should move. Instead, I tend to agree that labor history has much to gain from bringing sociological and anthropological perspectives (as well as other disciplinary perspectives) together.What is also noticeable about his writing on American labor history is a keen comparative eye, especially to Britain and British labor historians—for example, in relation to Luddism and food riots. The new industrial order, according to his key argument, had to be established against major forms of resistance and over a long time period—not just in the United States but also elsewhere. Once again, this implicit comparativism of Gutman's work is something that inspired generations of comparative labor historians after him and is, at least to my mind, still an extremely fruitful avenue to explore.Furthermore, I find intriguing Gutman's awareness, which he takes from Fernand Braudel, that any moment in the past offered several trajectories into the future. Any path taken meant several others not taken. Such an insistence on the fluidity and contingency of historical junctures was important for the historians’ positioning in their own presence and their work as engaged historians seeking to influence which trajectory American society would take into the future. Reinhard Koselleck's work on “futures past” points in a similar direction,4 and it has arguably been very useful in recent years to underline the openness of any given present toward the future.5 Labor historians can take those insights to heart in their examinations of working people's lives, including their attempts to forge organizations that would further their particular interests. Rather than producing backward-oriented teleologies, any historical present has to be examined with a view of exploring the manifold futures that were available in any past moment and explaining why a particular path was taken under which specific circumstances and whether it might make sense to be aware of the paths not taken, especially if those can be actualized in the contemporary struggles to find ways into a future that serves the interest of working people.The second essay in the collection is the classic “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement,” first published in the American Historical Review in 1966, which cemented Gutman's considerable reputation as one of the key figures in the American New Labor History. Here he examined the influence of Protestantism on some of the key ideas and values that American workers brought into the new factories. Religion provided a moral compass for workers that guided them through the labyrinths of the new industrial society. Protestantism influenced the moral stance of the American workers in manifold ways, as Gutman showed here, and I still find his explorations extremely powerful, as they point to the need to understand the emerging capitalism as not just an economic order but also a moral order. Much still needs to be done to comprehend the precise relationship between morality and capitalism in different parts of the industrializing world. Moral belief systems, including religious ones, have been influential in both legitimating and delegitimating capitalism at various times and places. The moral critique of capitalism has been structured by a set of moral values that have been constantly renegotiated by various actors, including workers, labor movements, social movements, and social protest groups, along with entrepreneurs and states.6 In Gutman's work it is one of the many instances where he successfully relates the belief systems of ordinary working people with their ability to form organizations defending their Interests, such as trade unions. In the language of American trade union leaders, Gutman found the religious and moral language of social Christianity that gave sections of the labor movement the resourcefulness and power to resist the capitalist logic.Gutman is, of course, known not only as a representative of the New Labor History but also as a historian of slavery and of Black families in the United States. The third essay in this collection is one of his attempts to connect these two fields of research. Focusing on the Black trade union leader Richard L. Davis, Gutman underlines how the American labor movement, at times famous for its racism, could also work as a solidaristic culture for whites and Blacks, and how Black workers could find a home in working-class organizations like trade unions. The influence of evangelical Protestantism loomed large over Davis's lifeworld in southeastern Ohio that Gutman goes on to examine in detail. Using the United Mine Workers of America as an example, Gutman explores the difficulties of building a multiracial industrial union through the focus on one Black union activist, thereby underlining the potential of labor biography to depict wider social and cultural histories of labor. And his bringing together of Black history and labor history foreshadowed a whole host of innovative and pathbreaking monographs and articles that emphasized how we can understand class only in relationship with other identifications, such as race.7The next two essays in the collection deal with factory towns, mostly with a specific factory town: Paterson, New Jersey. They ask about the interrelationship between class, community, and status. Gutman here is, above all, concerned with the struggles over urban space between different social groups in the city, above all the industrialists and the urban workers. His intense interest in the local shines through both essays, and it has become a hallmark of labor history almost everywhere. Linking labor history to urban history and to specific localities is an ongoing challenge for labor historians today and one where they can still find inspiration in Gutman's articles. The first of his articles is a detailed and finely crafted investigation into the social mobility among the locomotive, iron, and machinery manufacturers in Paterson, which concludes that the industrialists who built up the industry after the 1830s overwhelmingly came from very modest working-class and artisanal backgrounds—which inspired Gutman to title the piece “The Reality of the Rags-to-Riches ‘Myth.’ ” The second is again challenging a widely held view at his time of writing, namely that the economic power of the industrial elite in Paterson matched their social and political muscle. Instead, Gutman argues that the period of transition to an industrial society in Paterson was one in which the industrialist symbolized the new order, which violated many of the rules and regulations of the old preindustrial order. As such, it was a constant struggle not just to push through a new economic regime but also to establish a new political, social, and cultural order in the town. To establish the industrialists’ status and authority in the urban geography was the end result of a long struggle. Local politics was dominated by skilled workmen of independent means and retail shopkeepers—both groups were not favorably inclined toward the new class of industrialists who seemed to turn the everyday reality of the town upside down. Striking workers and socialist journalists, Gutman shows, could actually find support in the community against the industrialists. Arguing that these local circumstances were replicated across other factory towns in the country, Gutman not only underlined the importance of local studies of labor; he also pointed to the conflictual process that brought about the new industrial order. In a thirty-two-page “brief postscript” he returned to the career of the socialist journalist Joseph P. McDonnell, who had also featured in the previous article. Gutman argued that McDonnell's activism and the activism of like-minded people were vital in bringing about welfare reforms in the United States, thereby calling on historians to pay more attention to the radical activists on the fringes of American society, as they allegedly had been far more influential than previous generations of historians had thought. And we have here another fine biographical study that is highly illuminating about the worlds of labor in nineteenth-century America.The final two articles in the collection are on strikes and lockouts—in some respect classic studies of labor protests, both located in 1873–74. The first one is on the railroads, involving often unorganized workers in small railroad towns that nevertheless instigated powerful, albeit short-lived forms of protest, including workshop occupations and acts of sabotage disrupting railway traffic. Gutman paid due attention to the community support that the striking railway men could often depend on. Yet the state also used the military and martial law to defeat the strikers, underlining again how the power of the state was often stacked against the labor movement in the United States. The second article is on two lockouts in Pennsylvanian coal mines, located in semirural areas and characterized by forms of industrial paternalism where the company controlled the area's social life along with its economic life. The two are compared, as the outcome of the conflict was so startlingly different, thereby revealing some interesting insights into the development of industrial relations in the 1870s. Whereas the coal owners in Johnstown defeated all attempts to build a union, a union could be established in Tioga County, largely, Gutman shows, because of the different reactions of the communities. In Tioga County, farmers and townspeople began supporting the workers, whereas this was not the case in Johnstown. Furthermore, the coal owners in Tioga County found it nearly impossible to bring in new workers. Local conditions once again were crucial in explaining success or failure of organizing workers in defense of their interests.Overall, then, my rereading of Gutman's classic essays points to the ongoing relevance of these essays for contemporary scholarly and political agendas of labor historians in several ways. First, while abandoning orthodox Marxism, Gutman found in Marx many interesting questions that were worthwhile pursuing in the present. Labor history, I would argue, could do worse than exploring to what extent it can still find inspiration in Marxist attempts to understand capitalist development. Second, Gutman's turn to culture and to ordinary workers did not mean an abandonment of his interest in their organizations, politics, power relations, and exploitation, and labor history today is thriving where it pays attention to the social and the political in the cultural. Third, Gutman taught labor historians to integrate insights from a variety of different disciplines, in his case mainly anthropology and sociology, and I would argue that labor history today is at its best when it seeks to develop the linkages of that history to other disciplines, including not only the two mentioned but also geography, cultural studies, memory studies, and literary studies, among others. It is no coincidence that Gutman himself in his articles often used poetry and literary references to underline his arguments. Fourth, Gutman paved the way for the attention that labor historians have lavished on the intersectionality of social and cultural identifications, including those of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and religion, to mention just the most obvious. Fifth, his close attention to transnational and comparative developments, in his case especially with Britain, is also still relevant to contemporary labor historians seeking to overcome the national tunnel vision that has long characterized labor history and moving toward more global perspectives. Sixth, his insistence on the specificity of local contexts is something that surely is still relevant for labor histories today. In this sense, the interest in the transnational will often be in fact an interest in the transregional or translocal, as it makes more sense to compare highly localized conditions. Seventh, Gutman wrote labor biography, as we have seen in the case of Davis and McDonnell, and this remains, in my view, one of the fruitful ways of investigating labor's many intersections with a variety of different histories, including those of gender, migration, and urban history, as well as the history of social policy, protest, and a variety of others subfields of historical writing. If today's labor historians are making their field of study speak to other fields of study, rather than isolating labor history in a little niche of their own, they can also look back to Gutman as inspiration. Eighth, in his insistence on the many past futures, he opened the present toward a variety of different trajectories and not only highlighted the agency of people over their fortunes in the past but also underlined their agency for the present. This was an eminently political message and one that is of high relevance today. In many parts of the world, the labor movement would be well advised to make use of their history as powerful resource for their contemporary struggles for good work and decent living conditions for working people.8 Hence, in many ways the work of Herbert Gutman is still pointing to agendas in labor history that have led to a renaissance of labor history in different parts of the world.9 Regardless of the shortcomings that a fifty-year-old work such as Work, Culture, and Society is bound to have, Gutman's oeuvre should rightly be seen as one of the rocks on which our contemporary labor history is built.