Labor History Roundup

Rebecca J. Rosen, "Augmented-Reality Game Brings a Story of Jewish Labor Organizers Back to Life," Atlantic, June 6 2013

There is a feeling you get when you stand on, say, the ground at Gettysburg or the steps of the Lincoln Monument and you know that something momentous, a piece of history, occurred right on that part of the Earth right beneath your feet.

But what about the history that went down at less noted locations, places that you pass every day on your way to work or when you take your dog out for a walk? It's easy to never see those stories, to relegate them to museums and books, away from the physical locations where they took place. But what if the city itself became our history museum, and its sites bore their pasts more prominently?>>>

Rich Yeselson, "Fortress Unionism: Decades after its passage, the Taft-Hartley Act still casts a shadow on labor. Unions have a future—but only if they accept some difficult realities," Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (Summer 2013)

. . . . With the long decline of the labor movement has come a parallel decline in our historical memory of its once-extraordinary influence, and of the effort to curtail that influence. Books about Truman give only passing mention to the most contentious law passed during his presidency. Taft, the son of a President and a man who might have become President himself, is barely remembered. And it is unimaginable today that a President would give a national address vociferously defending labor unions.>>>

Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe, "Belabored Podcast #9: Who Stole My Wages?" Dissent, June 7, 2013

Uprisings in Turkey and the role of labor unions, international actions targeting McDonald’s, ongoing conflict at Palermo’s Pizza, and an independent organizing campaign at an upscale New York deli. Plus the debut of Belabored Explainers!>>>

"The Desperate Would-be Housewife of New York," Smithsonian, June 13, 2013

In the early evening of January 30, 1857, a middle-aged dentist named Harvey Burdell left his townhouse at 31 Bond Street, a respectable if not truly chic section of Manhattan, and set out for a local hotel. Burdell had recently been taking his dinners there, even though he had a cook on his household staff. His relationship with one of his tenants (and a regular at his table), Emma Cunningham, had become strained. Burdell had accused Cunningham, a 34-year-old widow with four children, of stealing a promissory note from his office safe. She in turn had had Burdell arrested for breach of promise to marry, which was then a criminal offense.>>>

Labor Battles and Exploring the Past Online

Randall Stephens

Nelson Lichtenstein writes about "The Long History of Labor Bashing" in the March 6 Chronicle. What are the antecedents of the current struggles over benefits and bargaining? What light does history shine on all this? asks Lichtenstein.

This right-wing critique of trade unionism has often been contradictory and inconsistent. At the turn of the 20th century, many establishment figures in the news media and politics saw the unionism of their era as but a manifestation of immigrant radicalism, often violent and subversive. After World War I, the business offensive against the unions went by the name of "The American Plan," with the American Legion and other patriotic groups often serving as the antilabor militants who broke picket lines and physically manhandled union activists.

At the very same moment, a quite contradictory discourse, which portrayed the unions as retrograde rather than radical, was emergent. Progressives, as well as conservatives, often denounced unions as self-serving job trusts, corrupt and parasitic enterprises linked to ethnic politicians and underworld figures.>>>

After reading that I went over to the Library of Congress's Chronicling America website, an excellent, free historical newspapers resource. My search for the exact words "labor," "anarchists," and "immigrant" brought back 8 results for 1890-1900. Here's a fairly typical article from the Chicago Eagle, June 15, 1895. Notice that the author acknowledges that the Haymarket Riot at least drew the public and the experts to acknowledge the labor troubles of the day.

A little over nine years ago Chicago's Haymarket tragedy occurred. On the night of May 4, 1880, a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police, who had gone to disperse an anarchist meeting. One policeman was killed outright, six were mortally wounded, and sixty more or loss injured. The number of the crowd killed or hurt was never known. Chicago never witnessed excitement so intense, and she at once achieved the reputation of being the center of anarchism for the whole world. No one event ever brought labor troubles and agitation to the notice of so many people, and probably no other influence has done so much to cause a widespread study of social economy. Four men wore hanged for the Haymarket crime, and one killed himself in jail by blowing his head to pieces with a dynamite cartridge exploded in his mouth. It was never discovered who threw the bomb. When it exploded it blew Chicago anarchy to pieces and answered the directly opposite purpose its thrower evidently intended.

A similar search on Google Books (from 1890-1900) for "anarchy," "labor," "unions," "immigrants," and "radical" returned 21 results. Of course, word searches like this cannot pick up on the subtleties of meaning and the distances between the words on the page. But they still represent a huge leap in the way we do or can do our research. Journalists, too, must be taking advantage of these relatively new ways to access the past. (One could spend hours and hours searching and browsing through countless other databases to harvest similar sources.)

(In the coming days I'll be posting here a video interview I did with Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard University Library. I ask Darnton about what is being called the Digital Public Library of America, the range of digital resources on the web, and the ways historians are using these new materials.)

Thirty years ago a historian who knew little about labor history, but wanted to learn more about how the present compared to the past, might have had to spend hours in the library, browsing indexes, thumbing through moldy card catalogs, or roaming the stacks. Not any more. Though, I still love to browse the stacks!