"Is there something unique about Seattle's labor history that helps
explain what is going on?" the reporter for a San Jose newspaper
asks me on the phone during the World Trade Organization protests
that filled Seattle streets with 50,000 unionists,
environmentalists, students, and other activists in the closing days
of the last millennium. "Well, yes and no," I answer before
launching into a much too complicated explanation of how history
might inform the present without explaining it and how the West does
have some particular traditions and institutional configurations
that have made it the site of bold departures in the long history of
American class and industrial relations but caution that we probably
should not push the exceptionalism argument too far. "Thanks," he
said rather vaguely as we hung up 20 minutes later. His story the
next day included a twelve word quotation.[1]
The conversation, I realize much later, revealed some interesting
tensions. Not long ago the information flow might have been
reversed, the historian might have been calling the journalist to
learn about western labor history, a body of research that until the
1960s had not much to do with professional historians, particularly
those who wrote about the West. And his disappointment at my
long-winded equivocations had something to do with those
disciplinary vectors. He had been hoping to tap into an argument
that journalists know well but that academics have struggled with.
Call it western labor exceptionalism. It holds that work and class
have meant something different in the West than in other regions and
that labor relations have been as a consequence more turbulent and
more radical than elsewhere.
It is an argument that circulates widely in the celebratory popular
histories of the West. But it gains strength as well in many of the
textbooks used to teach state and regional history. These typically
include a chapter or two which narrate an exciting story of militant
uprisings and violent strikes beginning in the mines and railroad
camps of the gilded age, moving through early twentieth incidents
like the Ludlow massacre and the Seattle General Strike, continuing
with the maritime struggles that closed port cities in 1934 and the
followup titanic battles between Harry Bridges and Dave Beck and
their CIO and AFL brands of unionism, usually ending with the
farmworker struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Articulated or not, the
message is that the West's labor history is as special as its
settlement history, filled with riveting episodes of high drama and
danger. The Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) become in
these accounts the West's favorite labor movement, beloved for the
same reason as cowboys: for their recklessness, their violence, and
their failure.
That popular narrative stands in some tension to academic
understandings of work, class, and labor in the West. In the last
few decades historians have opened wide the field of labor history,
pushing into issues and terrains that had previously been segregated
or ignored. The result has been an impressive cross fertilization of
subfields and an important crop of new arguments and insights.
Today's labor history no longer fits neatly into a couple of
distinct chapters and no longer focuses so tightly on strikes and
radicals. Arguments about western labor exceptionalism have not
disappeared, but they have become more complicated as labor
historians have argued that issues of work, class development, and
industrial relations lie near the heart of western historical change
and regional identity.[2]
SEPARATE
STRANDS
Western history and labor history had a curious and awkward
relationship through most of the twentieth century. Professional
historians paid little attention to workers, unions, or class until
the 1960s. But outside of the history departments, a rich literature
of labor history began to develop early in the 20th century,
actually two literatures, one produced by left-wing novelists and
journalists, the other by economists.
Academic labor history was largely a project associated with labor
economists. The study of industrial relations had emerged in the
progressive era under the guidance of the University of Wisconsin
economists John R. Commons and Selig Perlman. Moving, they claimed,
away from the morality-based or revolutionary arguments about unions
and class, the labor economists tried to understand what they
thought to be the natural progress of an industrializing democracy
towards a collective bargaining system of labor relations. History
became important to their discipline because it enabled them to show
the evolutionary trajectory and pick out the conditions that
advanced or retarded the construction of what they regarded as a
rational and efficient set of relations between workers, unions, and
employers.
Their students took an early interest in the West, particularly in
San Francisco which by the early twentieth century had established a
reputation as the most tightly unionized major city in America. The
labor economists set out to understand why, tracing in careful
detail the history of unions, strikes, and labor radicalism from the
gold rush on, focusing much attention on the way that labor
shortages gave unions early advantages in the West. Some of those
early studies remain impressive today, especially Ira Cross's A
History of the Labor Movement in California (1935) which
displays the labor economists' trade mark methodology: deep
historical empiricism. There is nothing shoddy about the research
nor abstract about the conceptualization. The labor economists
treated history with a reverence that even the most archive bound
historian would admire.
Another subject also drew interest. The Industrial Workers of the
World with their commitment to revolutionary industrial unionism and
with their disdain for bargaining and negotiation over wages and
working conditions, challenged the labor economist’s model of
industrial relations almost as much as they challenged the craft
unions of the American Federation of Labor. Carlton Parker set out
to explain this aberrant movement, producing a classic study, The
Casual Laborer amd Other Essays (1920), that relied on
psychological concepts to argue that the movement was a response to
social conditions, that dangerous social environments produced
dangerous men.
In the decades that followed labor economists would branch out to
study all of the basic industries of the West and most of the cities
where labor movements had flourished. These books were notable for
their focus on institutional dynamics, on how unions were built and
how they functioned. Some remain classics: Paul Taylor, The
Sailor's Union of the Pacific (1923); Vernon Jensen's Lumber
and Labor (1945); Grace Stimson's Rise of the Labor Movement
in Los Angeles (1955).[3]
But the legacy of the labor economists is much bigger than any
specific list of books. In hundreds of dissertations and masters
theses that poured out of the economics departments and industrial
relations institutes they laid down a carpet of descriptive studies
of industries, unions, strikes, bargaining, and politics of labor.
The labor economists also built the archives that today preserve
invaluable collections of union and business records. At a time when
western history libraries like the Huntington and Bancroft were
rejecting such materials, much of the region's industrial and labor
history was being preserved as well as written by members of another
discipline.
Besides the strong institutional focus some other features of this
labor-economics literature are notable. One is that it paid little
attention to concepts of regionalism or the frontier development
issues that occupied western historians, relying more on the
specificity of industry than a specificity of place. As a result
much of this labor history was not explicitly western. It was set in
the West but the regional effect was not much explored. Another
characteristic that particularly catches the eye of today's
historians was the economists' inattention to solidarities and
fragmentations based race, ethnicity, gender, or even class. The
tight institutional focus on unions left little room for social
analysis. A third characteristic might also be mentioned: these
works tended to underplay conflict and violence. It was partly a
matter of tone--the clinical style of expression--and partly because
the economists theorized violent industrial relations as a passing
historical phase and often moved their studies through such episodes
to reach the stable systems of negotiation and controlled conflict
that they saw as modern and inevitable.
LABOR NOIR
This last tendency stands in sharp contrast with the other labor
history project that shadowed the work of the economists through the
first two thirds of the 20th century. Its modes of expression were
novels and journalistic histories and its tone was strident and
sensationalist. Out of this stream of literature would come some of
the most enduring understandings of western work and labor,
especially the understanding that the West claimed a uniquely
violent and uniquely radical heritage.
The founders of this tradition were socialist writers who at the
turn of the century tried to publicize the struggles underway in the
mining camps, wheat fields, and seaports of the West. Images of
industrial violence had figured in the fiction of late 19th
century regional colorists like Mary Hallock Foote whose 1894 novel
Coeur d'Alene had told the story of the Idaho mining wars
from the viewpoint of the owners and managers, making dynamite
throwing strikers into one more of the dangers that heroic
westerners must face on the road to civilization. The radical
writers flipped the perspective while building up the image of the
West as a zone of class violence. The early classics include Frank
Norris's The Octopus (1901), a haunting portrait of farmers
taking up arms against the Southern Pacific Railroad; Jack London's
Martin Eden (1908) and Valley of the Moon (1913),
semi-autobiographical tales of young people wandering through a
western workscape filled with brutality and terror; Upton Sinclair's
King Coal (1917), the nightmarish story of the Colorado
Ludlow massacre, and Oil! (1927) his saga of wealth and class
conflict in southern California.
In these works the West was gaining a labor noir literary tradition
that would blossom further in the 1930s both in fiction and
journalism. The novels of John Steinbeck, especially The Grapes
of Wrath (1939), Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go
(1945), and Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (1946)
Alexander Saxton Bright Web of Darkness (1958) are examples
of the rich vein of popular-front fiction that deepened the images
of the West as a land of repression for those who sought merely to
work and live. Violence by the privileged against the poor was key
to this regional counternarrative. Using and turning the west's
mythic associations with opportunity and violence, the labor
noirists preached that the region's dreams had become nightmares.
The labor noir historians worked with similar themes. Louis Adamic
was first. In 1931 the Slovenian-born writer published what quickly
became one of the best selling histories of American labor,
Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America. Notable for
its provocative primary thesis that class violence caused by
ruthless industrial conditions was endemic to American history, it
also seemed to argue a secondary theme that the West was the
location for the worst expressions of that violence. Moreover the
book resurrected and romanticized the IWW, lavishing a good portion
of its energy on stories of violence by and especially against
Wobblies, many of whom in 1931 were still languishing in prison.
Adamic had spent a number of years associating with Wobblies when he
lived in Los Angeles. They become the forlorn heroes of his book and
in a move that other journalists would follow, he regionalized them,
turning them into westerners. He celebrates the basic principles of
the organization, especially its plan for One Big Union as "a
typically Western idea--big: the sky was the limit."
[4]
Events in the 1930s added to the growing interest in labor's past
and the market for such books. The explosion of strikes and
organizing that attended the early New Deal found some of their most
dramatic expression on the West Coast where the 1934 longshoreman's
walkout led to a four-day-long general strike in San Francisco and
sympathy strikes in ports up and down the coast. The passage of the
National Industrial Relations Act in 1935 set off the greatest era
of labor activism in American history as two union federations (the
older American Federation of Labor and the new Congress of
Industrial organizations) competed to organize millions of workers
into unions. For the next twenty years labor would be big news and
labor history enjoyed its greatest era of public interest.
Professional historians still paid little attention, but journalists
and publishers now realized that there was a market for books on the
subject.
Many of the popular histories of western places and other regional
color journalism of the middle decades of the century emphasized
labor issues and labor history, their authors typically following
Adamic's lead and focusing on episodes of conflict and violence.
Among the volumes still worth reading are Richard Neufelder's
engaging portrait of the Pacific Northwest, Our Promised Land
(1938); Anna Louis Strong's westcoast observations in I Change
Worlds (1940); Murray Morgan, Skidrow: An Informal Portrait
of Seattle (1951).
More important still are Carey McWilliams's books: Factories in
the Field (1939) and Ill Fares the Land (1942) about farm
workers; Brothers Under the Skin (1943), Prejudice:
Japanese-Americans (1944), A Mask for Privilege (1948),
and North From Mexico (1948) about immigration, racial
prejudice, and the western industrial order; Southern California:
An Island on the Land (1946) and California: The Great
Exception (1949) McWilliam's efforts as regional interpretation
and historical synthesis. In those eight books written over the
course of ten years, the Los Angeles
attorney/journalist/editor/historian brought the labor noir
tradition to its pinnacle of sophistication and influence, creating
ideas and agendas that would reshape much more than labor
historiography.
An implicit thesis of western labor exceptionalism had been running
through the noirist literature all along, but apart from casually
reasoned assertions about western traditions of individualism and
violence, there was no theory to support it. McWilliams produced
one. Spelled out in his 1949 book, California: The Great
Exception, it formally argues the uniqueness of California's
labor history but easily extends to most of the rest of the West.
Describing what he calls the "total engagement" of labor and capital
in an unending no-holds barred cycle of industrial conflict,
McWilliams' explanation starts with Ira Cross's insight that tight
labor markets gave an early and fairly continual advantage to
western workers. But the heart of his thesis is a blend of Frederick
Jackson Turner's history and Robert Park's sociology. McWilliams
argues that class tensions in the West were continually exacerbated
by the pace of population growth and the "absence of
well-established forms of social organization." The lightening quick
development process caused labor movements to organize early and
demand much. It made capitalists just as aggressive and ready to use
"strong arm tactics." Absent what he took to be the usual
institutions of order and tradition, labor relations in the West
developed into a pattern of violence and militance on both sides.[5]
THE NEW
LABOR HISTORY
It was not until the historical profession started into its social
historical turn in the mid 1960s that labor history became part of
academic history. The journal Labor History was founded in
1960 and soon began to publish the work of a group of historians who
had veered from the institutional focus established by the labor
economists. E.P. Thompson's magisterial, The Making of the
English Working Class (1963) became the touchstone for the "New
Labor Historians" who followed its lead in using social history to
probe beyond unions into work and social life, class formation, and
the traditions of radical politics. The Northeast with its early
industrialization and its well preserved sources was the favorite
site for most of the new labor historians, but a few western studies appeared in the late sixties and early 1970s with many more
to follow in the next decades. Two regional labor history
organizations were founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s: The
Southwest Labor Studies Association based in California and the
Pacific Northwest Labor History Association which holds its annual
meetings in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Bringing
together academic historians, trade unionists, and non professionals
interested in the subject, the two organizations have provided the
principle institutional support for western labor history over the
past twenty-five years.[6]
The labor historians' biggest accomplishment has been to explore in
expanding detail the world of work, overturning singular images of
"the worker" and replacing it with "working people" of great
diversity and multiple contexts. From rural school teachers to
hard-rock miners, from oilworkers in southern California to cannery
workers in Alaska, from Native American hop pickers to African
American ship stewards, up and down the social structure and across
the broad geography of the West the labor historians of recent
decades have mapped, counted, and richly described who worked, at
what sort of jobs, under what sort of conditions.
Several challenging new understandings about the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era western working class have emerged from all of this
social history. One focuses on its industrial composition, the other
on its ethnic configurations. Carlos Schwantes is responsible for
the most ambitious argument about the complexity of the western
workscape. He argues that the western economy was distinct from
other regions because of the high proportion of wageworkers and
wageworkers of a particular kind. The Northeast and Midwest had
cities and large urban working classes. Much of the wage work in the
West took place outside the cities, in the region's mining towns,
lumber camps, cattle ranches, canneries, fishing villages, and in
the mobile encampments of railroad workers who laid and repaired the
tracks, farm workers who followed the crops, and on board the
thousands of steam ships, lumber schooners, and fishing boats which
plied the coastal and inland waters of the west coast. Seasonal and
economically unstable, these western industries depended upon a
highly mobile work force comprised largely of young men who often
moved from one kind of work to another and who also moved seasonally
through the western cities, working on the docks, filling up the
skidrows, getting through the winters. In several articles and an
attractive pictorial volume, Hard Traveling: A Portrait of Work
Life in the New Northwest (1994), Schwantes develops the concept
of the "Wageworkers' Frontier" arguing not only the distinctive
features of the western working class but also urging western
historians to put aside covered wagons and recognize the centrality
of wage work in the development of the region.[7]
Not everyone agrees with all aspects of this description. Richard
White, whose synthesis of Western history, "It's Your Misfortune
and None of My Own" (1991) incorporates many of the key insights
and contributions of the new labor history, stresses the continuing
importance of family-scale farming and household labor through the
early 20th century West. Obscured too in the wageworkers' frontier
argument are the working lives of most women, whose labors were
typically home centered. And it may be that wage work in other
regions shared some of the circulatory and unstable characteristics
that Schwantes assigns rather exclusively to the West. Still it is
clear that the scholarship of the past generation has given us a new
picture of not only the places and ways of work but of the West
itself in the formative late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Equally dramatic are the new understandings of who worked. The
economists and noirists imagined the worker as male, white, and of
no particular ethnic background. The new labor history has dug
deeply into the complexities of race, ethnicity, and gender and
discovered in these categories new reasons to contemplate the
distinctive nature of western labor. This region had different
patterns of ethnicity than any other: more Native Americans, Latin
Americans, and Asian Americans, fewer African Americans than the
South, and fewer southern and eastern Europeans than the Northeast.
And those ethnicities overlaid the patterns of work and class in
particular ways.
Scholars have mapped a kaleidoscope of ethnic occupational niches:
Norwegians, Native Americans, Italians, Portuguese, Chinese,
Japanese, and Filipinos in the fishing industries; lumber camps
filled with other Scandinavians, Germans, and old stock Yankees;
cattle ranches attracting Mexican Americans, African Americans,
Native Americans and various whites; Chinese, Irish, Italian,
eastern European, and Mexican men building the railroads;
Portuguese, Italian, and Mexican women canning the fruits and
vegetables; crews of almost every description harvesting the crops.
The mining camps were especially complicated, changing ethnic
compositions over time and place, with strong showings of Irish,
Cornish, Welsh, Mexicans, Italians, Slavs, Hungarians, Finns, and
Chinese in some settings and very different mixes in the next mining
region or the next generation. The cities were still more
kaleidoscopic. Some occupations were ethnically controlled others
not, with everything changing over time.
Deciphering the meanings behind these patterns has been a challenge.
Most historians see a two-tiered, racialized labor market in which
whites controlled jobs in any sector that offered reasonable wages
while racial minorities were pressed into marginal occupations,
principally service and unskilled laboring jobs. but others have
been struggle to reconcile that binary logic with a social system of
such diversity. The South had a two-tiered labor market. Does the
same term apply to the West? Quintard Taylor has argued that African
American opportunities in some parts of the West were situated in a
three-sided competition that involved Asian Americans as well as
whites. In The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites
in Texas Cotton Culture (1997) Neil Foley situates Latinos
within another triangulation and within an evolving discourse of
whiteness.[8]
The field has been slower to develop the issue of gender, despite
early and eloquent pleas by Joan Jenson, Darlis Miller, and others.
It was not until the late 1980s that books about female workers
appeared in any number and the coverage is still thin. There are now
books on waitresses, schools teachers, prostitutes, cannery and
field workers, and a few studies of unions and organizations like
the Women's Wage Earner Suffrage League of San Francisco.[9]
That some of the best studies focus on women of color can be counted
as one of the triumphs of recent western history. Evelyn Nakano
Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride (1986), Vicki Ruiz, Cannery
Women, Cannery Lives (1987); Sarah Deutsch, No Separate
Refuge (1987), and Judy Yung, Unbound Feet (1995) have
been breakthrough books on several fronts.[10]
But much more needs to be done. Something new has occurred in the
last few years as scholars have figured out how to bring homeworking
wives into labor history. In Dana Frank's Purchasing Power:
Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement,
1919-1929 (1994) the labor movement is understood to consist of
families and the family is understood to have consuming powers as
well as producing powers, all of which makes gender issues and
women's actions not peripheral but central to the fate of any labor
movement.
WESTERN
LABOR RADICALISM
While the labor history of the past generation has fractured our
images of work and workers, it has also reorganized understandings
of the West's labor movements and their relationship to the region's
politics. Forgotten organizations like the Workingmen's Party of
California have been rediscovered. Others like the Knights of Labor
and the Union Labor Party that had been disparaged by labor
economists and noirists alike have gained new glory. And the old
standards, the IWW and the AFL, have received full makeovers. As
with the project of demographic recentering, the scholarship on
labor movements has created an appreciation for the diversity of
labor related institutions, politics, and ideologies while raising
their collective profile. Thanks to these efforts, workers'
movements figure more prominently than ever in the newer
interpretations of Western political history.
Rethinking radicalism was one of the earliest and most consistent
projects of the new labor history, which has in general sought to
place radical movements within American political traditions and
establish their continuing importance. Not surprisingly, it began
with the Industrial Workers of the World. In the mid sixties a
number of books heralded the resurrection of interest in an
organization that seemed to speak to some of the concerns and styles
of a new protest generation. Joyce Kornbluh, Robert Tyler, Joseph
Conlin, and Melvyn Dubofsky turned the once feared Wobblies into
forerunners of the CIO, the Civil Rights, and the Free Speech
movements. They also more carefully than before distinguished
between the peculiarities of its eastern operations and constituents
and its western wing.[11]
The Wobblies became the jumping off point for a much wider
investigation of western radicalism. Dubofsky set this up in a
widely read 1966 article, "The Origins of Western Working Class
Radicalism" in which he drew attention to the Western Federation of
Miners, the militant, socialist-linked union that helped launch the
IWW. Dubofsky turned the WFM into the prototype for western
radicalism. He argued that the mining region had seen
industrialization in its most advanced, most rapid, and most brutal
form. Taking on the noirist Turnerians who saw labor militance as an
expression of western individualism and frontier conditions, he
argued it was instead a response to the West's mature corporate
structures. This was a West, he said, that Karl Marx understood
better than Frederick Jackson Turner.[12]
These ideas helped inspire a long stream of followup studies focused
on the region's resource extraction workers, especially miners.
Easily a dozen important books and many more articles and
dissertations have looked at hard-rock mining and coal mining in
various western settings. Many endorse the descriptions of class
struggle and miner radicalism, most recently in Elizabeth Jameson's
fine-grained social history of Colorado's mining district All
That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek
(1998) and J.Anthony Lukas' Big Trouble (1997), a 750 page
narrative centered on the trial of three WFM leaders charged in the
1905 bombing murder of Idaho's retired governor. But others
complicate the image of mining as the motherlode of western
radicalism. In The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an
American Mining Town, 187-1925 (1989) David Emmons focused on
the largest and most powerful local in the Western Federation of
Miners, finding not radicalism and class war but a relatively
conservative, ethnically based union that went thirty years without
a strike while dominating the city proudly called the "Gibraltar of
Unionism."[13]
Meanwhile another group of scholars has followed the trail of WFM
and IWW radicalism into different industries and spaces: into the
woods where a succession of radical unions of timberworkers and
shingle weavers culminated in the formation of the CIO affiliated
International Woodworkers of America in the 1930s;[14] into maritime transportation where, according to Bruce Nelson and
Howard Kimeldorf, the radicalism of sailors and longshoreman in the
1930s owed much to the traditions of syndicalist organizing that
wobblies and before them WFM activists had developed;[15]
and into the fields where it meets up with Mexican traditions of
radicalism in studies by Cletis Daniel, W. Dirk Raat, James Sandos,
Devra Weber, and Camille Guerin-Gonzales.[16]
The explorations of the WFM-IWW tradition of western radicalism have
paralleled and to some extent been in competition with another
stream of scholarship that has focused on western cities and their
labor movements. The cities saw the rise of craft unions of the
American Federation of Labor in the late 1880s and before that the
rise and fall of various Workingmen's parties and the Knights of
Labor. These movements have taxed the interpretative powers of the
new labor history much more than the recognizable radicalism of the
WFM and IWW. The unglamorous AFL had long been described as
conservative, exclusive, and apolitical, and along with the
Workingman's Parties and Knights Assemblies had been implicated in
the West's worst episodes of xenophobia.
The scholarship has gone in two directions, one emphasizing the role
and legacy of white supremacy, the other finding idealism and a
legacy of labor power. Alexander Saxton pioneered the first in
Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in
California (1971), a book that laid the groundwork for what was
later called "whiteness studies". Its subject was the Workingman's
Party of California which had come to power in San Francisco in 1879
and had played a large role in rewriting the state's constitution
that same year. The WPC had been largely ignored by earlier labor
scholars who found the party's combination of class-conscious and
anti-Chinese politics embarrassing and also confusing. Confusing,
because it was axiomatic that ethnic hatreds undermined labor
movements. Saxton turned that axiom around, showing that racism
helped the Irish, German, and native Protestant white workers of San
Francisco overcome their differences and the resulting
white-working-class solidarity laid the ground work for one of the
most effective urban labor movements of the Gilded Age. Subsequent
studies by Gwendolyn Mink, Sucheng Chan, Roger Daniels, Chris
Friday, and Tomas Almaguer have followed the scheme of xenophobia
through the anti-Chinese campaigns led by Knights of Labor activists
in various parts of the west in the late 1880s and the anti-Japanese
and anti-Filipino politics of the AFL unions after the turn of the
century.[17]
But other historians found more than xenophobia in these movements
and, while acknowledging their racism, have been equally intrigued
by their power to mobilize large numbers of white workers behind
labor-centered and transformative political visions. Dan Cornford,
Neil Shumsky, Jules Tygiel, and David Brundage are among those who
have explored the gilded age radicalism that animated WPC and
Knights activism.[18]
The American Federation of Labor has also been historiographically
refurbished, emerging in recent studies as more idealistic, class
conscious, and politically involved than earlier scholars believed.
Michael Kazin's Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building
Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (1987) explores
the sources of labor power in the decades when San Francisco was
known as "Labor's City," contending that the AFL practiced a form of
pragmatic syndicalism that while not revolutionary looked to
"workers to transform society in their own image." Dana Frank joins
Robert Friedheim and Jonathan Dembo in assigning a still more
radical countenance to the Seattle AFL that waged the General Strike
of 1919 and in the aftermath tried to build an infrastructure of
labor owned banks, stores, a laundry, a daily newspaper, a union
theater, even a film company in the early 1920s. Samuel Gompers
liked none of it and he warred often with these western city
federations.[19]
These studies of urban labor movements expose the uneven geography
of the most recent phase of labor history: the work has concentrated
on a few spaces (rocky mountain mining districts, Northwest forests,
California's valleys) and a few cities, especially San Francisco
where the volume of labor related studies has had a noticeable
effect on other aspects of the city's historiography. The political
and social history of San Francisco has been extensively revised in
the past two decades by urban historians sensitive to issues of
class formation and labor politics (Roger Lotchin, Peter Decker,
Phillip Ethington, William Issel, and Robert Cherney). Seattle's
history has also been extensively rewritten. Richard Berner's
three-volume city history may well be the most comprehensive
labor-centered study of a city's institutional development found
anywhere.[20]
But other cities await similar efforts, especially Los Angeles where
much important scholarship is still in the publishing pipeline. The
City of Angels was the West's fastest growing metropolis in the
early 20th century and different in so many respects from the spaces
that labor historians have come to know best. Because of its unique
economy (oranges, oil, and entertainment) and demography (large
numbers of Latinos and Jews instead of the Irish-Chinese axis) many
of the equations labor historians have used to understand other
parts of the West do not apply. That may be why no one has yet
figured out how to put labor into the LA story. Calling it the "Open
Shop city" and treating it as the flip side of San Francisco makes
for dramatic reading but bad history. The city was complicated. It
was the site of an aggressive open shop campaign but also home to an
impressive pattern of electoral radicalism (first by socialists,
later by Upton Sinclair's EPIC movement). It had a promising AFL
union movement early in the century which lost strength after World
War I, but unionism remained alive and often highly innovative in
the oil suburbs, the Mexican-American community, the Jewish
eastside, among municipal water and power employees, and in the
entertainment sector. As yet we know more about Mexican American
working class life and activism through the studies by George
Sanchez, Ricardo Romo, Gilbert Gonzalez, Francisco Balderama, and
Douglas Monroy than we do about most other parts of this
metropolitan working class. But there are a number of
soon-to-be-published books that should change that.[21]
The western labor history of recent years shows other weaknesses in
addition to its incomplete geography. The field's strength has been
social history and community or industry based studies and it is
only now beginning to appreciate cultural and political history. A
handful of recent works explore the relationship between labor and
the cultural institutions of the region. Mike Davis, Kevin Starr,
Anne Loftis, and Stephen Schwartz have called attention to the
literary radicalism that flourished in Los Angeles and San Francisco
and that helped remake images of the West and its workers.[22]
Steven Ross's Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the
Shaping of Class in America (1998) opens another window on the
laborist cultural crusades of the early twentieth century, as unions
and radicals struggled to control not just print media but some of
the dream machines of the young century. For years folklorist Archie
Green has been urging a different strategy for exploring the
cultural influences of workers and their movements. He introduced
the concept of "laborlore" almost three decades ago in Only a
Miner: Studies in Recorded Coalmining Songs
(1972) and demonstrated it recently in Wobblies, Pile Butts, and
Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (1993). Maybe it is time
for someone to follow his lead.
It is also time for labor historians to pay more attention to
political institutions. Much of the new labor history has examined
political ideas and actions without attending closely to the
governmental and party systems in which they are embedded. What did
it mean for labor that so many western cities lacked the entrenched
two-party or single machine political systems common in the
Northeast? How much did that contribute to the effectiveness of
Workingmen's parties, Union Labor parties, and labor's interest in
other political initiatives? Patterns of political development
helped make the West a distinctive region in both the Gilded Age
when many state constitutions were written or rewritten, and in the
Progressive era, when many western states reorganized governmental
capacity and party systems. Labor historians have been paying
attention to courts, parties, and governmental agencies in studies
that focus on other parts of America. We need to bring that focus to
bear on the West.[23]
Attention to politics may also encourage western labor historians to
think more about the West itself. Some already do, Schwantes
certainly, but others have been casually inattentive to the issue of
regionalism, using western cities and other spaces without worrying
about their westernness. This has its advantages: it has kept labor
historians from falling into the parochial habits that plague some
other western historical endeavors. But it robs both the western
field and the labor field of potential insights. New efforts at
synthesis are overdue; indeed it would be healthy if western labor
historians would just argue about some of the field- defining theses
that have been advanced. Schwantes "wageworkers' frontier" argument
needs a full airing. More than a decade ago, Michael Kazin advanced
a tentative but smart revision of Carey McWilliams' "great
exception" thesis for California's urban labor movements. It was
ignored. We need to change that. It is time to figure out how the
rich social history that has been compiled over the last few decades
adds up. What does it mean? It is fine to be cautious and empirical
and tell the journalists when they call that the West's labor
history is "complicated." But that can be risky in a sense too.
Nonacademicians have proved their ability in the past to take over
the subject and make it respond to felt needs.[24]
[1]. Elliott Almond, "Economic and Social Divide Dates from Mill
City's Birth," San Jose Mercury News December 2,
1999.
[2]. Two anthologies provide a good introduction to recent
western labor historiography: Hugh T. Lovin, ed., Labor
in the West (1989); Daniel Cornford, ed., Working
People of California (1995).
[3].
Also
important: Ruth Allen, Chapters in the History of
Organized Labor in Texas (1941): Vernon Jensen,
Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferrous
Metals Industry up to 1930 (1950); Philip Taft, Labor
Politics American Style: The California State Federation of
Labor (1968)
[4].
Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in
America (1931), 157.
[5].
McWilliams, California: The Great Exception, 133,172.
[6].
Both organizations hold annual spring conferences.
Information about them and other labor history organizations
can be found at the web site of the Labor and Working Class
History Association (LAWCHA): www.lawcha.org
[7]. Carlos A. Schwantes, "The Concept of the Wageworkers
Frontier: A Framework for Future Research" Western
Historical Quarterly (January 1987),39-55.
[8].
Two-tierred arguments are made in Ronald Takaki's many
books, including Strangers from a Different Shore: A
History of Asian Americans (1989) and by Tomas Almaguer,
Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White
Supremacy in California (1994). In addition to Foley,
multisided competitions are examined in Quintard Taylor,
In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the
American West, 1528-1990 (1998) and Gunther Peck,
Reinventing Free Labor: Padrone and Immigrant Workers in the
North American West, 1880-1930 (2000)
[9].
Two essays in the Pacific Historical Review have
shaped and prodded this enterprise: Joan Jenson and Darlis
A. Miller, " The Gentle Tamers Revisted: New Approachers to
the History of Women in the American West," 1980, 173-213
and Karen Anderson, "Work, Gender, and Power in the American
West," November 1992, 481-99. Important books include: Anne
M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery:
Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-1890 (1985);
Paula Petrik, No Step Backward: Women and Family on the
Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, 1865-1900 (1987);
Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their
Unions in the Twentieth Century (1991); Susan Englander,
Class Coalition and Class Conflict in the California
Woman Suffrage Movement, 1907-1912: The San Francisco Wage
Earner's Suffrage League (1992); John H. Laslett and
Mary Tyler, The ILGWU in Los Angeles, 1907-1988
(1989); Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in
Rural California 1850-1950 (1998); Mary Cordier,
Schoolwomen of the Prairies and Plains (1992); Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the
Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West
(1997).
[10].
See also Patricia Zavella, Women's Work and Chicano
Families, Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley
(1987), Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First
Generation Japaenses Immigrations, 1885-1924 Gretchen
Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American
Migrant Women in the East Bay Community(1996).
[11]
Joyce Kornbluh, Rebel Voices (1964); Robert Tyler,
Rebels in the Woods (1967), Joseph Conlin, Bread and
Roses Too (1969), and Melvyn Dubofsky's We Shall Be
All (1969)
[12] Melvyn Dubofsky, “The Origins of Western Working-Class
Radicalism, 1890-1905” Labor History 1966 7(2), 131-54.
[13].
Richard E Lingenfelter, The Hardrock Miners: A History of
the Mining Labor Movement in the American West, 1863-1893
(1974); Mark Wyman, Hard-Rock Epic: Western Miners and
the Industrial Revolution, 1860-1910 (1979); Alan
Derickson, Worker's Health, Workers' Democracy: The
Western Miner's Struggle, 1891-1925 (1988); Michael
Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the
Northern Frontier (1981); Ronald C. Brown, Hard-Rock
Miners: The Intermountain West, 1860-1920 (1979); Philip
J. Mellinger, Race and Labor in Western Copper: The Fight
for Equality, 1896-1918 (1995).
[14].
Tyler, Rebels in the Woods; Norman Clark,
Milltown: A Social History of Everett, Washington
(1970), Jerry Lembcke and William M. Tattam, One Union in
Wood: A Political History of the International Woodworkers
of America (New York, 1984); and William G. Robbins'
Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon (1988).
[15].Bruce
Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen,
and Unionism in the 1930s (1988), Howard Kimeldorf,
Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative
Unions on the Waterfront (1988).
[16].
Cletis E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California
Farmworkers 1870-1941 (1981); W.Dirk Raat, Revoltosos:
Mexico's Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 (1981);
James Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands (1992);
Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm
Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (1994); Camille
Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams:
Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor,
1900-1939 (1994); Nigel Anthonly Sellars, Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma,
1905-1930 (1998); Thomas D. Isern, Bull Threshers and
Bindlestiffs: Harvesting and Threshing on the North American
Plains (1990).
[17].
Gwundeloyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American
Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920
(1986); Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in
California Agricutlrue, 1860-1910 (1986); Roger Daniels, The
Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japaense Movement in
California and the Struggle for Exclusion (1977); Almaguer,
Racial Fault Lines; Chis Friday, Organizing Asian American
Workers: The Pacific Coast Canned Salmon Industry, 1870-1942
(1994).
[18].
Daniel Cornford, Workers and Dissent in the Redwood
Empire (1987); Neil Larry Shumsky, The Evolution of
Political Protest and the Workingmen's Party of California
(1991); Jules Tygiel, Workingmen in San Francisco,
1880-1901 (1992) David Brundage, The Making of
Western Labor Radicalism: Denver's Organized Workers,
1878-1905 (Urbana, 1994)
[19].
Kazin, Barons of Labor, 150; Frank, Purchasing
Power; Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General
Strike (1964); Jonathan Dembo, Unions and Politics in
Washington State 1885-1935 (1983).
[20].
Roger Lotchin, San Francisco 1846-1956: From Hamlet to
City (1974); Peter Decker, Fortunes and Failures:
White-Collar Mobility in Nineteenth Century San Francisco
(1978); Philip J. Ethington,
The Public City : The Political Construction
of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900
(1994;
William Issel and Robert W. Cherny,
San Francisco, 1865-1932 :
Politics, Power, and Urban development
Richard C. Berner, Seattle 1900-1920:
From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence, to Restoration(1991);
Seattle, 1921-1940: From Boom to Bust (1992); Seattle
Transformed: World War II to Cold War (1999).
[21].
George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity,
Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
(1993); Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a
Barrio (1983); Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Labor and
Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern
California County, 1900-1950 (1994); Francisco E.
Balderama, In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican
Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936
(1982); Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angles from
the Great Migration to the Great Depression (1999).
Examples of the new work include Clark Davis, Company
Men: White Collar Life and Corporate Culture in Los Angeles
1892-1940 (2000) and forthcoming books by Nancy
Quam-Wickham, Becki Nicholaides.
[22].
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los
Angeles (1990); Kevin Starr, Material Dreams:
Southern California Through the 1920s (1990) and
Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California
(1996); Stephen Schwartz, From West to East: California
and the Making of the American Mind (1998); Anne Loftis,
Witnesses to the Struggle: Imaging the 1930s California
Labor Movement (1998)
[23].
Melvin Dubofsky summarizes some of this effort in The
State and Labor in Modern America (1994).
[24]. Michael Kazin, "The Great Exception Revisited: Organized
Labor and Politics in San Francisco and Los Angeles,
1870-1940" Pacific Historical Review (August 1986),
371-402. See also David M. Emmons' provocative "Constructed
Province: History and the Making of the Last American West,"
Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 1994), 437-60.
|