Labor History at the American Historical Association

Abstract

In the midst of its bicentennial celebration, the city of Cincinnati played host to the American Historical Association convention, 27-30 December 1988. The number of potentially interesting sessions was more than any single person could attend; I managed to participate in four sessions on working-class life in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe and North America. While these sessions reflected the centrality of class as the key analytic category in understanding the lives of workers, the presenters, commentators, and audiences seemed to agree that class affects people's lives in complex ways. In particular, a number of factors ? including race, gender, ethnicity, and skill, as well as political and legal influ ences?mediate the impact of material conditions. Only by considering these other factors and the ways in which they interact with economic conditions can we understand workers' experiences, political activity, patterns of protest, or con sciousness. Adequate understanding of working-class life requires a sensitivity to these mediating factors, and a willingness to borrow from fields such as women's history, Afro-American history, cultural history, and political history. A beginning session chaired by Leonard Rosenband (Utah State University) considered Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns. Gary Freeze (Univer sity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) presented his research on the Odell Cotton Mills of North Carolina, 1877-1907, and the role of Methodism in the company town of Forest Hill. The Odells were able to impose their own assumed reality in the town by linking active Methodist proselytizing with paternalist policies. The employers relied on the preindustrial values offered in their Methodist church to ease the dislocation of new migrants to the mills. This system helped young male workers adapt to the loss of the patriarchal authority of the countryside, and religious piety offered them an opportunity for advancement in the church and mill. William E. French (Utah State University) then discussed miners in the Hidalgo District, Chihuahua, Mexico. In this case, middle-class reformers at tempted to mold a group of transient, uncooperative workers into a reliable, disciplined labor force. The state cooperated by passing laws to control prostitu tion and gambling. Alongside this state activity, reformers launched a cultural offensive, encouraging middle-class family values as an alternative to the working