Projecting Whiteness: Race and the Unconscious in the History of 19Th-Century American Workers*

Projecting Whiteness: Race and the Unconscious in the History of 19th-century American Workers* Frank Towers Historical writing on American workers offers their case, in part because of problems in the way they scholars interested in the broader field of American theorize collective identity and behavior. Scholars culture a reference point from which to gauge the need to explain more carefully how the collective psy- problems and prospects of some important trends in chology of racial identity operates and attend to the the field. American labor history has undergone sev- hallmarks of good historical scholarship, i.e. local eral sweeping revisions since the 1960s which corre- context and differences in the time and place of every spond to similar changes elsewhere in the humanities event. and social sciences. In analyzing these changes, this From the dawn of the fields of labor history and essay pays particular attention to recent scholarly labor economics in the 1880s until the mid-l960s, the emphasis on “whiteness,” or the social construction of most influential scholars in the field focused on the racial identity, as an explanation for the history of the trade union and labor relations between unions and American working class. During the 1990s, the con- employers. What came to be known pejoratively as cept of whiteness has emerged as a category of analy- the “Old Labor History,” provided a teleological nar- sis in American cultural studies. Some assessment of rative of workers’ progress from early nineteenth-cen- its origins in one field and the strengths and weak- tury debilitation caused by absent organization and nesses of the concept as an analytical tool seem in misguided utopian politics to a triumphant present order as the decade closes. characterized by strong unions, tangible gains in Since the late 1980s, historians have grown pes- working conditions and wages, and a respected place simistic about the potential for the American working in the mainstream of society. For scholars like John R. class to be the carriers of egalitarian and emancipatory Commons, Selig Perlman and Norman Ware, the his- social values. As a product of the times, this new pes- tory of American labor was the story of union devel- simism reflects liberal disillusionment with the con- opment within the framework of capitalist market servative politics of many white, ethnic trade union relations .I members, or Reagan Democrats, and the decline of In the 1960s, the rise of the New Left and an unions and heavy industry as central features of increased attention to the lives of those excluded from America’s political economy. Within the academy, the powerful political institutions transformed the field of new skepticism about class-based social movements is labor history. This “New Labor History” drew inspira- an almost inevitable counterpoint to the rosy opti- tion from E. P. Thompson, whose 1964 Making ofthe mism of the New Labor History that emerged in the English Working Class avoided the conventional 1960s and ’70s and argued for a usable past of work- focus on unions and rejected a definition of class as a ing-class struggle against inequality. One proof of that pre-determined category identified in the objective, pessimistic counterpoint has been the deplorable material conditions of people’s relationship to the record of racial exclusion practiced by white, usually means of production. Calling for the study of the all male, trade unions. The concept of whiteness as a working class as a “social and cultural formation,” social-historical discourse that structured action and Thompson defined class as “an historical phenome- identity has been invoked to explain this pattern of non, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly racial exclusion. The study of white workers’ racial unconnected events, both in the raw material of expe- discourse has opened new avenues of research and rience and in consciousness” (9, 11). In the United brought to scholarly attention a fuller picture of divi- States, the New Labor History, most prominently sions within the work force that fragmented class soli- associated with the work of Herbert Gutman, pursued darity. But the pessimists have at times overstated this history of workers’ consciousness, or, more accu- 47 48 . Journal of American Culture rately, culture, in areas outside of the trade union hall, pretation of the UMW. Hill accused Gutman of “the and looked at the alternatives to craft unions that the failure to perceive the crucial significance of race con- Old Labor History dismissed as misguided anachro- sciousness in determining working class behavior and nisms. The New Labor History worked with a more in influencing class relations.” Hill persuasively flexible definition of what a worker was, one that showed the larger pattern of racial discrimination went beyond the archetypes of factory hands and practiced by the UMW. Despite its official policy and skilled craftsmen to include shopkeepers, apprentices, the prominence of a handful of black organizers like slaves, and women working outside the wage econ- Davis in its leadership, the top positions in the union omy. They challenged not only Commons, Perlman, remained in white hands. In the Deep South, where and Ware, but also the 1950s consensus historians Gutman argued the UMW had been most courageous Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter, who claimed that in defying Jim Crow, it segregated black and white class distinctions did not exist in U.S. history and that locals. In districts without enough black miners to most people shared a common set of aspirations for pose a credible threat as strikebreakers, the UMW material advancement and political liberty (Hartz, restricted membership to whites only. On national Hofstadter). Historians Alan Dawley, Thomas Dublin, issues, the UMW vigorously opposed Chinese immi- Leon Fink, Gutman, Bruce Laurie, David Mont- gration on the grounds that Asian labor degraded the gomery, Sean Wilentz and others amassed a mountain status of white men. So much for “the principle of of evidence showing an oppositional culture to that of human solidarity” and “evangelical egalitarianism.” property owners and professionals. The New Labor In Hill’s wake, a mix of radical long-time critics of History brought to life a past usable for 1960s New the New Left and younger scholars piled on to the Left activists battling the politics and culture of the attack with article titles like “Myth Making as Labor middle-class main~trearn.~ History,” “What Was So Great about Herbert Two works, one that pioneered the New Labor Gutman?” and “The Gutman School; At What History and another that represented its maturation, Intellectual Price?” They agreed with Nell Painter’s have become emblems of the blindness of those schol- charge that “the New Labor History has a race prob- ars to discriminatory practices and hierarchical rela- iem.795 tionships within the work force. One of Gutman’s A similar attack has been leveled against Sean early essays focused on inter-racial organizing by the Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City and the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) in Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. Alabama, one of the most anti-union and racially Published in 1984, Wilentz’s ambitious, prize-winning polarized areas of late-nineteenth century America. To study attempted to do for early U.S. workers what show the egalitarian potential of American workers, Thompson had done for those in England’s industrial Gutman seized upon the career of Richard L. Davis, revolution. Echoing Thompson, Wilentz stated that an African-American who served on the UMW’s “between 1829... and 1850, both a process and a strain national executive board in 1896 and 1897. Gutman of consciousness emerged ...in which people came at claimed that Davis’ prominence within the UMW and various points to interpret social disorder and the the union’s policy of inter-racial organizing occurred decline of the Republic at least partly in terms of class because its leaders “deeply believed in the principle of divisions between capitalist employees and employ- human solidarity and in a kind of evangelical egalitar- ers” (1 6-1 7). Wilentz celebrated the oppositional poli- ianism.” Gutman’s celebration of the UMW as “the tics of labor reformers Thomas Skidmore and Frances most thoroughly integrated voluntary association in Wright, workers in the General Trade Union, pro- the United States of 1900” bolstered hopes of liberals labor Loco Foco Democrats like Mike Walsh, and the like C. Vann Woodward that white workers would plebeian culture of the fire companies, theaters, and support civil rights by showing that even at the nadir taverns, a worldview encapsulated in the phrase of race relations in American history, forgotten alter- “Bowery Republic.” Especially noteworthy about natives of inter-racial solidarity could be found Wilentz’s work was his exploration of “artisan repub- (Gutman, 1968: 83; Woodward, 1974). The radical licanism,” a working-class variant on the political dis- past gave the lie to conservative claims that segrega- course of the Revolution (257, 295). Where the con- tion was an immutable in~titution.~ sensus historians of the 1950s had found an example In 1988, three years after Gutman’s death, Herbert of radicalism’s limited appeal in the defeat of New Hill, a white veteran of the Old Left who worked on York’s Workingman’s Party and a failed strike waged labor issues for the NAACP before entering the acad- by the General Trade Union in the early 1830s, emy, published a scathing attack on Gutman’s inter- Wilentz discovered a subterranean current of class Projecting Whiteness . 49 struggle. He admitted that “measured by their grand- worker hated and longed for” (Wages 14). In this for- est hopes the union had failed .... But,” Wilentz con- mulation, “status and privileges conferred by race tended “they also succeeded, despite the obstacles, in could be used to make up for alienating and exploitive uniting craft workers as a class” (1 7).

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