International Labor and Working-Class, Inc.

Labor History and Public History: Introduction

Author(s): Thomas Miller Klubock and Paulo Fontes
Source: International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 76, PUBLIC HISTORY AND
LABOR HISTORY (FALL 2009), pp. 2-5
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-
Class, Inc.
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 Labor History and Public History: Introduction

Thomas Miller Klubock

University of Virginia

Paulo Fontes
Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United
States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to
Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor histor-
ians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the "Old Left," made labor history
public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party.
Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the "New Left" and inspired
by E.R Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history
"from the bottom up" beyond the confines of the academy, even as they
shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political
parties, to make the history of "ordinary people" and "everyday life" public
history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral
history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made
their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while
expanding the sphere of both "the public" and "labor" to include histories of
women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.
There are countless versions of similar, if varying, trajectories of the
public-labor history alliance throughout the world. In the countries we work
in and study, Chile and Brazil, labor history was made public initially through
its close ties to anarchist organizations, Communist parties, and labor move-
ments in which anarchists and Communists played a major role. In the wake
of state repression during the 1960s and 1970s and neoliberal economic restruc-
turing, labor history moved away from an earlier generation's focus on insti-
tutions, leaders, political parties, and the state toward studying the new social
history and the history of ordinary people and everyday life. This coincided in
Chile with Salvador Allende's "Chilean road to socialism" (1970-1973) and
then the explosion of popular protest against the military dictatorship of
Augusto Pinochet' during the early 1980s and, in Brazil, with the emergence
of a "new labor movement" that opposed Brazil's military dictatorship in
massive strikes during the late 1970s led by metal worker and future Workers
Party Leader Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva (Lula), now Brazil's president.
Since the turn to working-class and social history in the United States and
England during the 1960s and in Chile and Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s,
economic restructuring according to the neoclassical economic models of the
Chicago School and the accompanying intensification of economic globalization
have hit both labor movements and the alliance of public and labor history hard.

International Labor and Working-Class History

No. 76, Fall 2009, pp. 2-5
© International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2009
doi:10.1017/S0147547909990020

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Labor History and Public History: Introduction 3

In certain parts of the world, like Latin America, neoliberal reforms were
implemented at gunpoint and were accompanied by the violent repression of
labor movements and intellectuals alike, as Marco Aurélio Santana and
Ricardo Medieros Pimenta describe in their article on Brazil. In the United
States and England, the 1980s brought Thatcher's crushing of the miners'
strike, discussed here in David Wray's article on Durham miners' galas, and the
decimation of old industrial working-class neighborhoods and cities, chronicled
by Robert Chidester and David Gadsby in their article on a public history arche-
ological project in Baltimore and by Jeffrey Helgeson's article on labor tours in
Chicago. A similar process is described by Lucy Taksa in her article on Australian
industries transformed into industrial heritage sites. In this context labor history as
public history has confronted new challenges. One of the significant roles played
by labor history as public history has been local history projects in working-class
neighborhoods experiencing violent political and economical displacement due to
deindustrialization and, in some cases, political repression, since the 1970s. The
development of labor tours in Chicago demonstrates the invaluable role of
labor history and labor historians as manufacturers of public history, as well
as key elements of community memory and organization. Chidester and Gadsby's
article similarly probes the ways in which local public-labor histories of working-
class communities can be essential to the ways in which those communities navi-
gate the disruptions produced by deindustrialization and, in the case of Baltimore,
urban gentrification.
Yet labor history as public history confronts new challenges in the context of
free market economic reforms and economic globalization. As Chidester and
Gadsby's article on public history in local communities shows, labor history as
public history confronts the problem of what Lucy Taksa calls the Janus face of
"nostalgia and nostophobia." In the Baltimore neighborhood where Chidester,
Gadsby, and their archeologist colleagues worked, the neighborhood's gentrifica-
tion was accompanied by a commodification of its working-class history that
silenced the current embattled working-class population and evacuated a com-
mercialized kitsch working-class culture of any critical history, including its
labor history. Elements of the neighborhood's working-class culture were appro-
priated and employed as attractions for its new middle-class residents and
businesses, as well as tourists. In Australia, Taksa argues, industrial heritage
sites often seek to conserve the railroads' past by focusing on technology and
evoking nostalgia for the past to boost heritage tourism, while eliding any
history of work, workers, or labor struggles. In an oddly similar vein, Jorge
Giovannetti documents a surge in tourism to former slave plantations throughout
the Caribbean and Latin America. As in the working-class urban neighborhoods
studied by Chidester and Gadsby, the new interest in touring plantations often
involves an almost total elision of the history of the slaves who worked cane
and coffee fields and whose labor helped build "the big houses" that are the
central attraction for nostalgic excursions back to the nineteenth century. These
articles raise the challenge to labor and public history of the increasing commodi-
fication and commercialization of the past by both governments and businesses,

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 4 ILWCH, 76, Fall 2009

be it working-class neighborhoods destroyed by deindustrialization and gentrifi-

cation, old railroad yards, or slave plantations, in the name of generating local
or regional economic growth and development.
The articles in this special section confront the issue of nostalgia in
public-labor history projects in other ways as well. Many public-labor histories
of working-class communities hammered by deindustrialization and state
repression work to resuscitate lost histories and recover forgotten urban sites
that mark significant, heroic or tragic, historical events - strikes, massacres,
protests - and thus mark the transforming urban landscape with what Pierre
Nora refers to as "memory places." As cities have been transformed from
sites of production to sites of consumption, radically changed from places
constituted by a plethora of working-class communities of different races and
ethnicities by deindustrialization and/or gentrification, labor-public history
projects like the tours discussed by Helgeson have become invaluable.
Yet, the challenge of these projects to imprint the memory and history of
cities' working-class communities on the urban landscape through· tours,
museums, exhibitions, concerts, and monuments, confronts the problem of how
to deal with labor historians' interest in building an analysis of class formation
that includes the histories of women workers and workers who constitute racial

or immigrant ethnic minorities, as well as the histories of patriarchy, xenophobia,

and racism. Chidester and Gadsby's article on Baltimore, for example, suggests
how labor history's work to excavate the complex history of class formation
can conflict with public history's project of conserving the memories and tra-
ditions of local communities. The neighborhood they study was overwhelmingly
white and notorious for its racist politics. In this case, the labor historians (or
archeologists) had to confront the issue of nostalgia in a different way and
build an analysis of the city's working-class formation and its labor movements
that took into account race and racism, while at the same time engaging working-
class residents in a process of ethnography and oral history, ostensibly in the
service of the defense of the community and its memories.
Politics constitutes another fault line that makes the labor-public history alli-
ance difficult. How labor historians, working as public historians, engage with past
political schisms and often violent internal conflicts in their projects to excavate
and communicate to the broader public the histories of labor and working-class
communities is not always easy. Here the Janus face of nostalgia and nostophobia,
referred to by Taksa, is particularly acute. This is particularly true because ideo-
logical and political disputes have a long reach into the present. Thus, Peter
Ludvigsen describes the political trials of the Workers' Museum in Denmark
where a statue of Lenin - in an exhibition devoted to the role of the

Communist Party in the labor movement - provoked scandal. Santana and

Pimenta trace the ways in which contemporary labor-public history projects in
Brazil confront two difficulties. The first is how to constitute working-class identity
and cohesions among a new generation of younger workers faced with managerial
strategies that effectively undermine older traditions of organization. The second
is how to approach the labor movement's own historiographical practice, which

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Labor History and Public History: Introduction 5

highlights a major rupture between the "new unionism" of the 1970s and 1980s
that is identified with Lula and the Workers Party and the "old unionism" ident-
ified with both the Communist Party and the corporatist labor relations system
and labor movement developed under Getulio Vargas - a "nostophobia" in
Taksa's words. In this context, labor-public historians face the challenge of adopt-
ing a critical approach to historiography and politics that work to separate these
two periods (1930-1964 and the 1970s-present) and elide continuities and tra-
ditions between the old and new labor movements, establishing a rupture with
both Vargas's populist and corporatist politics and the central role of the
Communist Party in the "old" labor movement.
The histories of both industrialization and deindustrialization have been
marked by violence. As a number of the articles in this issue demonstrate, one of
labor history's important tasks as public history is to do the "memory work"
required to build public awareness of the repression suffered by workers and
labor. In Brazil, for example, Santana and Pimenta show the difficulties of doing
labor history following decades of military rule and dictatorship and the impor-
tance of oral history in the place of more traditional sources that have been
made unavailable because of repression. Their article highlights the fact that in
many countries, like Brazil and Chile, the targets of state repression have been
workers and the labor movement. Similarly, James Green and Elizabeth
Jameson's article focuses on labor historians' work to restore the memorial to
the victims of the 1914 Ludlow massacre and have it declared a National
Historic Landmark. In this case, as they note, memorials and monuments are
often "elegiac and ceremonial," and thus ignored by labor historians who leave
them to local historians and preservationists who work in unions, museums, and
parks. But, like Santana and Pimenta, they argue for the importance of
"memory places" in organizing public memories that might otherwise be lost. In
a similar vein, Wray notes the importance of annual celebrations involving the
parades of Durham miners' banners to preserve memories of the coal communities
and their labor struggles that might have been swept away following the decimation
of the miners' unions under Thatcher. Like memorials, the banners serve to disrupt
normative narratives of the past that elide work, workers, and collective social
struggles and, in Taksa's words, "to create spaces for the telling of alternative
and fuller versions of forgotten stories." Memorials like the Durham banners not
only help maintain the memory of the past, but also serve as places and
moments of the reconstruction of working-class communities and labor traditions
in the present. A similar argument might be made about the folklore and folk song
projects of Archie Green, which Sean Burns argues in an article here, represented
both public history and innovative labor history linked to the work of historians
like Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery. Together, then, the articles in this
special issue demonstrate the urgency of making labor history public history
through a wide variety of forms - including tours, memorials, museums, oral history,
trade union historical projects, archives, festivals, film, and music - in the context of
the often violent destruction of working-class communities and labor movements
imposed by neoliberal restructuring, deindustrialization, and globalization.

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