Tradition, Modernity, and the American Industrial Worker: Reflections and Critique

Abstract

Reflections and Critique Much of the current writing on labor history begins in complaint. The field, it is said, suffers from fossilization; its techniques are old-fashioned, its guiding questions archaic, and its institutional preoccupations downright myopic. There is a measure of truth to these charges, but it is a rapidly diminishing measure. Evident signs of change abound: a wholesale embrace of statistical techniques with often iconoclastic results; an egalitarian effort to recover working-class history from the bottom up and, in consequence, a flight from the study of trade unions or, at least, of conservative ones; and a new interest in the complex web of social and cultural relations too often overlooked by earlier generations of economics-trained scholars. Labor history has been driven before the winds of the present in less obvious ways as well. One change, unheralded but farreaching, has been the impact of the internationalization of the industrial revolution. It is a commonplace, though a momentous one, that the non-Western world has experienced a massive upheaval in economic habits in the twentieth century. As the factory and the supermarket, the ethics of Samuel Smiles, and the precepts of Henry Ford burst the boundaries of the West, the study of industrialization shifted as well, from past to present and from history to sociology. The result has been the emergence of new models and new vocabularies which, in turn, have begun to recast the axioms of Western labor history. The mediators between the non-Western present and the Western past were a corps of industrial sociologists and social theorists who turned to the study of international industrialization after 1945, and their contributions ran in separate but complementary directions. The first was to heighten interest in the strains experienced by the first generation of workers to encounter industrialization head on. As Luddites, as Chartists, or as Wobblies, these uprooted workers have always occupied a conspicuous place