A Bit of Labor History

Historiography

The Human Tradition in American Labor History

Eric Arnesen, 2004

In his introduction to this volume of essays on Labor History, Eric Arnesen began with a quote from an 1886 issue of the Journal of United Labor, extolling the virtues of work for individuals and society. Arnesen missed the point, I think, that if labor papers were waxing poetical about the positive aspects of labor, it was because someone else was running labor down. Though that may have seemed obvious to him, I don’t think it was necessarily so for his readers. But these things never appear in a vacuum.

Similarly, I think Arnesen accidentally misrepresented “mid-nineteenth-century Free Soilers and Republican Party members” who “argued that labor might be noble, but workers’ goals should be to escape from the ranks of those who work for others and instead try to achieve a modicum of economic independence.” This desire for what an earlier generation called “independence” may have been a remembered ideal for leaders and politicians, but was it for actual workers? Arnesen saw contempt for workers in the Free Soil emphasis on economic independence, when I suspect many of the people actually in touch with workers were really acknowledging that work was hard and employment was uncertain, so it was up to wage laborers to continually work to improve their circumstances. In an era before monolithic, monopolistic, gigantic corporations, this often meant by getting out from under the control of a small employer and going into business for oneself. Many people saw this as a reasonable progression — the chasm between employer and worker was not nearly as deep or wide as it seems to be today.

Paul Krause’s article, “Beeswax Taylor: The Forgotten Legacy of Labor Insurgency in Gilded Age America,” highlighted some of the issues faced by recent labor historians.  Taylor was an English Chartist who came to America and became active in the Knights of Labor and AFL. Krause had some trouble with the fact that Taylor “was as great a republican as anyone of his era, and he located within the republican tradition the seeds of his criticism of the emerging corporate order.” Following traditional labor-historical practice, Krause tried to tell Taylor’s story as a conflict between an ideal of “cooperative, noncapitalist social order” on the one hand, and a “diversion” into the “competitive marketplace” brought about by Taylor’s inability to resist the “truly transformative power of the ‘capitalist enemy’.” But Taylor didn’t “fall” into liberal republicanism, he brought it with him from England. American labor historians don’t seem to believe that labor advocacy can lead anywhere but toward socialism, or that nineteenth-century workers could embrace free markets but want to protect themselves from monopolists and oligopolists.

Colin Davis’s article on Eugene V. Debs mentioned his speech before the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce, at the invitation of James Jerome Hill. Hill thought it would discourage Debs, but his plan backfired. This might be an interesting way into a piece on chambers of commerce.