In Retrospect: Richard B. Morris and Government and Labor in Early America (1946)

Abstract

Richard B. Morris and Government and Labor in Early America (1946) Graham Russell Hodges (bio) On December 20, 1944, Dorothy M. Swart of Columbia University Press informed Richard B. Morris, then Associate Professor of History at the City College of New York, that he needed to cut approximately 40 percent of his original 1,000-page manuscript of Government and Labor in Early America or face a subvention fee of $250. Accordingly, Morris cut over four hundred pages, including nearly all tables and a hefty chunk of a chapter on concerted action by laborers. A few months later, Morris anxiously wrote to Charles G. Proffitt, his editor at Columbia University Press, urging him to publish the book quickly. With the end of World War II in sight, Morris explained, his book has a “great many implications [about] the current problem of wartime controls on wages and prices.” Morris worried that the end of the war and the gradual relaxation of such controls would make publication of the book less timely. As months wore on, Morris continued to urge rapid release of his book, only to learn from Proffitt that its appearance was delayed by wartime paper shortages. Both editorial decisions would affect the long-term responses to the book. 1 Publication finally occurred in 1946 and the book received highly favorable notices from commercial and academic reviews. Typical of these was Joseph Rosenfarb’s appraisal that Government and Labor would become the “point of departure” for any study of colonial labor and legal history. 2 The book collected additional appreciation over the next few decades. In 1952, it received some votes for “Preferred Books in American History, 1936–1950,” in a survey conducted by the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. As Morris rose to prominence in the historical profession, the book was reissued in several editions. Government and Labor is now out of print, but it continues to inspire scholars. This essay surveys the significance of the book in the half-century since its first publication, discusses how scholars have accepted or rejected Morris’s conclusions, and suggests how Morris’s findings might serve as markers for newer studies. 3 [End Page 360] Principally, Morris hoped that the book would convince legal scholars to employ social interpretations of court records. Prodded by negative criticism of the sweeping nature of his previous work, Studies in the History of American Law in 1929, Morris gathered voluminous amounts of evidence from court records in all thirteen original colonies to support his contentions. As in his earlier work, Morris tried to pry colonial legal historiography away from dismissive attitudes of Roscoe Pound, and push it toward a social understanding of the effect of law. In the estimation of Stephen Botein, legal historians’ appreciation of Morris’s achievements had to wait until the 1980s. Today, legal scholars such as Christopher Tomlins, Robert J. Steinfeld, and Karen Orren owe much to Morris for their social interpretations of labor law governing master/servant relations, rules of conspiracy, and the power of the remnants of feudalism in America. 4 Government and Labor’s greatest influence has been on social historians. This was not clear for many years. Although duly noted, Morris’s book languished as a “neglected classic” until it was rediscovered by the “new” social historians of the 1960s and 1970s. As Gary G. Nash points out, the book introduced scholars to the use of court records to rescue from oblivion the roles of ordinary Americans in the construction of a new society. Morris was also active in this revival. In the preface to a 1981 edition of Government and Labor, Morris suggested several ways his book had influenced contemporary scholarship. He claimed that its broadly brushed concerns about economic and social mobility inspired works by James Henretta, Charles G. Grant, James Lemon, Allan Kulikoff, and Nash. Similarly, he contended that the works of Jesse Lemisch and Marcus Rediker on sailors were indebted to Government and Labor. Laying claim to the ancestry of a major historiographic debate, he argued (1981 ed., pp. ix–xii) that evidence of labor grievances against employers in colonial cities he unearthed undergirded studies on “crowd” or “mob” actions by town artisans and mechanics...