Abstract
Professor Leon Fink has written a provocative paper. As far as I am aware, it is the most thoughtful defense of the labor historiography produced by his generation of historians, who came of age in the sixties and maintain the perspective they learned from that era's movements. But his paper would have been more telling had it confronted directly my critiques of the new labor history. Thus of my skepticism about the work of Sean Wilentz and the late Herbert Gutman, Fink writes: For explanations of real group motives and attitudes, it is not exactly clear what kinds of sources unless one awaits some sort of 'spectral' illumination are to be admitted as evidence. In that earlier essay I tried to make it clear that I regard as trustworthy evidence, not the objects of working-class leaders' protests and complaints, but what they demand and what they do to realize their demands.
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