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

It is a pleasure to join this fiftieth anniversary celebration of historian Herbert G. Gutman's seminal collection of essays, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. Historians of US and African American urban, labor, and working-class history owe a special debt to Gutman's groundbreaking essay on the Black coal miner and labor leader Richard L. Davis, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America.” This essay was first read as a paper at the 1966 meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Baltimore, Maryland. Before appearing in Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society, the essay was first published in an anthology edited by labor historian Julius Jacobson, The Negro and the American Labor Movement (1968).Set in the larger context of Gutman's growing interest in a new social history of American workers, initially a focus on Blacks in the United Mine Workers union might seem a bit incongruous. In his essay “Work, Culture, and Society,” published some five years after the Davis piece, Gutman embraced the work of E. P. Thompson and other British historians and labor scholars seeking a more bottom-up perspective on workers’ lives and labor. As he explained, “The pages that follow give little attention to the subject matter usually considered the proper sphere of labor history (trade union development and behavior, strikes and lockouts, and radical movements) and instead emphasize the frequent tension between different groups of men and women new to the machine and a changing American society” (12). Together, though, these two essays advanced the larger project of reconceptualizing and interpreting the history of American workers from below. They influenced an entire generation of young labor and working-class historians and had a profound impact on my own framing of research on the Black working class. Gutman's scholarship not only helped to answer a series of thorny intellectual and practical political questions that many of us brought to graduate studies in history but also suggested a fruitful way forward, politically and ideologically, in social movement terms.In 1975, when I enrolled in graduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota, I had just completed a six-year career as a high school teacher in the public schools of Kenosha, Wisconsin. During my high school teaching years, in order to help unload student loans, I combined teaching with a number of part-time evening jobs (as dishwasher in a local restaurant, as night clerk in a YMCA in nearby Racine, and, during the final two years, as a full-time factory worker at the Snap-On Tools Corporation, located next door to Tramper Senior High School, where I taught school during the day). In addition, especially during my first four years as a public high school teacher, I maintained an intense schedule of community organizing activities—first among students and then among their parents, and the larger community. During these years, my community organizing activities aimed to help transform the city's civil rights movement into the emerging Black Power movement. The notion of “race first” and the kinship of African people on a global scale governed my ideology and my politics, but a profound debate on the relevance of class to the Black Power struggle soon broke out and gained increasing print in popular journals like the Black Scholar. Like many other young activists during the period, I found myself struggling with ways to reconcile very different but intersecting ideas about class and race in the lives of Black people, past and present.It was against the backdrop of these changes in my personal and professional life that I enrolled in graduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota. Among many disparate and overlapping influences from my fellow students, mentors, and extensive seminar readings on African American, Caribbean, US, African, and African American history, Herbert Gutman's essays offered a roadmap forward in my career as a professional historian of African American and US labor and working-class history. His impact was especially apparent in my earliest publications on Black workers and their communities and continued to influence my subsequent work on the subject as the twenty-first century got underway. In my first and second books, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (1985) and Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32 (1990), I enthusiastically built on the work of two earlier scholars, Richard Walter Thomas and Peter Gottlieb, who had embraced Gutman's call for a more sensitive history of the African American working class in studies of the Black experience.By then, Gutman had also produced his broader synthetic essay on American-born white workers, immigrants, and artisans in industrializing America. Hence, my cohort of students who entered graduate school in the mid-1970s joined the reading of Gutman's Davis essay with his later influential contribution to understanding the lives of successive waves of rural white people as they moved from their “preindustrial” mostly rural but also artisan roots into the American urban-industrial environment. In reading the labor migration and skilled craftsman essay for the first time, I was happy to see how Gutman added a word about other ethnic and racial groups (including Asian Americans and African Americans) moving into urban industrial America before, within, and beyond the temporal dimensions of his tale about white workers. In Gutman's words, “These groups [including earlier enslaved Black factory workers in the Old South], too, were affected by the tensions [between old world cultures and the new modern world of the machine] . . . described here, a fact that emphasizes the central place they deserve in any comprehensive study of American work habits and changing American working-class behavior” (13).In addition to encouraging research on the African American experience from below, Gutman's scholarship also illuminated a variety of issues and themes that attracted the attention of my generation of historians of the African American working class. This research included most notably, a relentless quest for details on the lives, ideas, and work history of Indigenous Black labor leaders and activists like Richard L. Davis. In crafting the Davis essay, Gutman repeatedly called attention to the partial nature of his evidence over merely a decade of time and without the benefit of manuscript collections among other conventional historical records allowing a fuller and more complete portrait of workers’ lives and labor. Nonetheless, drawing on a rich set of letters penned by Davis and printed in the journal of the United Mine Workers of America, Gutman offered a fresh perspective on the history of Black workers in industrializing America.He creatively used the United Mine Workers’ Journal letters not only to construct a helpful labor biography of Davis but also to document his stand on controversial race and class issues; illuminate Davis's commitment to interracial working-class solidarity; and ultimately to provide an alternative bottom-up perspective on African American life during a period dominated by Black elites like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. By highlighting Davis's firm commitment to the labor movement and his belief that the future of all workers depended on building solidarities across the racial divide, Gutman's scholarship played an important role in countering the widespread racial stereotype of Black workers (within and outside the labor movement) as a “scab race.”With heretofore few details on the lives of Black workers except as strikebreakers in the labor struggles of industrializing America, Gutman's study illustrated the complicated cross-currents of class and racial dynamics in Davis's career. We learn how Davis migrated to southern West Virginia and took his first job as a coal miner in the newly opened Kanawha and New River coalfields. Within a year he moved to Rendville, Ohio, a small mining town in the Hocking Valley region, where he married, supported a family, and worked until he died from lung failure in 1900. Before his death, however, he had gained prominence as a Black labor leader in the UMWA as a member of the executive board of District 6 (Ohio) and later the national executive board, the highest position held by an African American in the UMWA. As such, Davis's influence penetrated all levels of the labor movement—local, regional, and national—at a time when Blacks faced the violent onset of what the US Supreme Court dubbed “separate but equal” institutions across the country.In 1892, a Rendville mine moved to segregate the workforce, creating an all-Black crew and paying them at a lower rate than the previously integrated workplace, but Davis soon rallied Black and white workers against the company's effort to divide workers along racial lines. “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America” also illuminated the ways that Davis retained his strong Black nationalist consciousness and pride in his race. In referring to comrades who used the N-word to refer to Black workers, on one occasion he emphatically declared, “I assure anyone that I have more respect for a scab than I have for a person who refers to the negro in such way, and God knows the scab I utterly despise” (179).Finally, and perhaps most important, Gutman's essay established a framework for exploring the disproportionately high cost that a Black labor leader paid for his commitment to interracial unionism during Jim Crow's ascent to dominance in the American economy, politics, and society. Davis assisted the cause of interracial working-class solidarity during bitter industrial disputes in West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and Alabama as well as Ohio. In some cases, he had to flee for his life. In the end, however, his tremendous sacrifices on behalf of his Black and white comrades brought little comfort. He faced the brunt of hostile elite reactions to his struggle on behalf of worker rights and economic democracy. Sometimes, as Gutman notes, Davis nearly despaired: “I have been sandbagged; I have been stoned, and last of all deprived of the right to earn a livelihood for myself and family. . . . It makes me almost crazy to think of it.”Today, as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Gutman's important contributions to our knowledge of the nation's multiracial and multiethnic working class, we continue to face entrenched forms of class and racial inequality in the politics and economy of the unfolding postindustrial age. Activists seeking to dismantle today's system of inequality might revisit “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America” for helpful insights, inspiration, and a path toward a democratic future.