Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 by Gary Gerstle

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 431 Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914— 1960. By Gary Gerstle. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 356; illustrations, notes, appendixes, index. $39.50. This fascinating study undertakes to “demonstrate the centrality of the language of Americanism to the political consciousness of Amer­ ican workers in the post-World War I period” (p. 331). In so doing, Gary Gerstle employs an extended case study of textile manufactur­ ing at Woonsocket, Rhode Island, from about 1875 to 1960, probing the cultural bases of labor activism and the multiple, changing rhetorics of democratic rights and practices through which it was voiced. Moreover, this work bridges two dominant areas of interest in labor history, in-depth community studies and analysis of union institutions, and marries this linkage to issues in politics and religion, both local and national. Woonsocket’s woolen and worsted yarns and fabrics were made in mills staffed largely by immigrant, devoutly Catholic French Canadians, men and women linked through lan­ guage and faith to their Quebec origins. In Rhode Island, they created self-sustaining French-speaking communities, built churches and schools, supported newspapers, and toiled diligently for mill companies, many of which were owned by continental French and Belgian interests that had invested in Woonsocket to avoid tariff barriers and escape labor militancy at home. Yet during the Great Depression, the Quebecers helped create an aggressive and successful Independent Textile Union (ITU) that by World War II gained contracts for over 80 percent of the district’s 13,000 textile workers. Gerstle seeks to understand how such traditionalists could be trans­ formed into assertive unionists. An initial key was the immigration of hundreds of French and Belgian textile factory veterans, skilled workers needed for quality mule spinning of fine yarns. These men brought with them a radical tradition of shop floor militance and inclusive industrial unionism, fluency in French, and a secular, “modernist” outlook toward manu­ facturing that mirrored, yet opposed, the worldviews of owners and managers. The Franco-Belgians led early craft-based locals in the 1920s and spawned the leader of the ITU at its 1931 formation. Here was the energizing cadre, but only when they recast their ideals within the language of the American political tradition did the Canadian French begin to respond. That by the 1930s there was a capacity for such responses in turn depended on the transformation of the inward-looking Quebec community toward an “integrationist posi­ tion” as ethnic Franco-Americans (p. 231). Gerstle provides an intri­ cate and compelling account of this process, which involved a divisive search by French Canadians for means by which to “negotiate the terms of their entry into American society” (p. 60). The union proved to be one such means, but its radical leaders were unprepared for a corresponding shift in the attitudes and practices of 432 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Catholic clergy and ethnic leaders in order to preserve their authority while accommodating the rise of unions. Labor activism did not separate Quebec-heritage workers from commitments to religious and cultural values, for the clergy’s adaptive use of American political language fostered creation of a rival “American identity” for workers, “anticapitalist but anticommunist, patriotic but parochial, militant but devout” (p. 195). Articulated as what Gerstle terms an “ethnic corpo­ ratism,” this ideology integrated well with the postwar political climate and served as the basis for displacing radical leadership. Yet its very parochialism doomed the union, for the new leadership rejected organizing ventures beyond textiles or Woonsocket as well as merger with national unions. When the city’s core industry collapsed in the 1950s, so too did the ITU. As interest in workplace dynamics and their cultural dimensions has grown among historians of technology in recent years, it is valuable to have Gerstle’s work as a complement to studies by Tamara Hareven, David Montgomery, and Ronald Schatz. We may also be grateful for the author’s fluid style and the ease with which he moves from close description to historiographical context and controversy. Yet, as with other studies in this vein, it is regrettable that issues of technological change fall generally...