A Whiter Shade of Paleface, or Remembering Boys and Guns

Abstract

Since the late 1960s, new labor history sought to overturn the familiar claims that consensus historians made about labor history, ethnic history, and political history. The consensus history, put simply, was that labor, ethnic, and political histories were stories that ran in parallel. Ethnic identities determined how people organized, how they voted, when they fought, and what they fought for. For Boorstin, Handlin, and Hartz, class-consciousness was a European drink that curdled at Ellis Island. Workers, if they had a reason to hate, did so from their ethnic clans and drinking clubs, and simply hated the folks on the next block. All workers sought some common American dream, and their ethnic identities gradually dissolved. Boorstin celebrated this as America's genius; Hartz lamented it as a historical curse. Two now-familiar models of labor history scholarship emerged to disrupt this paradigm. The community study, associated with Herbert Gutman, used newspapers, census records, and county histories to demonstrate how labor organizers and political leaders managed to find class identities that transcended ethnic tensions, and how they created lasting social movements. Even failed movements showed how working people faced common struggles against local privilege, the rigidity of the two-party system, and the power of distant corporations. Gutman's many students and colleagues wrestled with these kinds of sources to produce monographs and syntheses that have reached well beyond his conclusions. The centrality of the community for these historians demonstrated that the consensus history may have read back an individualistic American Dream into nineteenth-century lives that were always more complex and conflicted than historians of the consensus thought. Another model critical of the consensus school emphasized work itself. The workplace study, associated with David Montgomery, used business records, personal papers, and state hearings. Montgomery showed how workers used trade unions as instruments to shape emerging technologies, and how managers deployed these same technologies to undermine and