Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 231

May 10, 2018: Hap & Leonard Studying: The Devil Went Down to Texas

[One of the best parts of my 2018 so far has been discovering SundanceTV’s Hap & Leonard. Based on the series of novels by Joe Lansdale, and starring James Purefoy and Michael K. Williams, the series has completed two wonderful 6-episode seasons and as I write this is in the midst of Season 3. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Hap & Leonard contexts, leading to a special weekend post on the unique career to date of Michael K. Williams!]On a mythic and a very real context for the show’s Season 3 opening.As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, at the time of writing this week’s series I’ve only seen the first two episodes of Season 3 (they will all have aired, and perhaps even will be on Netflix, by the time this post appears). But even without the full context of the season, I was immediately struck by the bravura Season 3 opening sequence, an East Texas retelling of the legend of blues great Robert Johnson and the Devil. In Hap & Leonard’s version (narrated by a mysterious African American girl), it’s young African American blues musician L.C. Soothe who meets the Devil at an eerie crossroads (indeed, who performed a ceremony to summon the Devil) and sells his soul to become the world’s greatest blues guitarist. Soothe achieves his goal and for a time all is ideal, but the Devil is simply waiting for his moment, and in the sequence’s closing moments he arrives, bringing the Ku Klux Klan with him, to end Soothe’s story tragically and brutally.As I understand it, the Hap & Leonard books (which I haven’t had the chance to check out yet) consistently feature supernatural and even horror threads. But I wouldn’t say such elements or genres have been much a part of the show’s Seasons 1 and 2, and so this Season 3 opening sequence signals a distinct addition to the series. Yet at the same time, I would argue that the Devil and Robert Johnson story is less supernatural or horror and more folklore, a mythic storytelling embodiment of various regional, cultural, and historical traditions and themes. As such, the L.C. Soothe and the Devil sequence sets up Season 3 to feature such a folkloric side, a storytelling style and tone that asks us to view what we’re seeing as at least partly symbolic and legendary. That we will apparently spend much of the season not in Hap and Leonard’s by now familiar hometown of LaBorde but in Grovetown, a very distinct community with a mythic and sinister quality all its own, only heightens that sense that this season we are entering a folkloric story and world.Yet I would also argue that it’s crucial that the L.C. Soothe story ends with the Devil allied with the Ku Klux Klan, and that we’re told repeatedly that Grovetown is one place in the region where the Klan are still present and active (paying off the final image of Season 2, that of Klan robes and hoods drying on a laundry line). Whatever else Hap & Leonard is (and it’s many things, as I hope this week’s series illustrates), it has from the first season on been a work of historical fiction, an examination of both its 1980s setting and of the many histories out of which such a moment emerges. Grovetown is quickly revealed (particularly through a harrowing sequence involving Florida Grange, whose disappearance in the town is what brings Hap and Leonard there in the first place) to be a Sundown Town, a dark and under-remembered American history that both aligns with the Klan and yet also reflects the far wider and broader scope of white supremacist violence. Which is to say, the Devil has always been in places like East Texas, and most everywhere else in the U.S., and he’s worn the clothes and the face of white supremacy and domestic terrorism.Last context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on H&L, or other shows you’d highlight?

May 9, 2018: Hap & Leonard Studying: Crime and Punishment

[One of the best parts of my 2018 so far has been discovering SundanceTV’s Hap & Leonard. Based on the series of novels by Joe Lansdale, and starring James Purefoy and Michael K. Williams, the series has completed two wonderful 6-episode seasons and as I write this is in the midst of Season 3. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Hap & Leonardcontexts, leading to a special weekend post on the unique career to date of Michael K. Williams!]On some of the show’s many complex and great supporting characters, all part of the justice system (and in addition to Tiffany Mack’s Florida Grange, about whom I wrote a bit yesterday).1)      Marvin Hanson and Charlie Blank: Season 2’s investigations feature a pair of police detectives, Hanson (Cranston Johnson) and Blank (Douglas Griffin), who are each far more than they appear. Hanson’s African American detective is alternately Leonard’s most aggressive adversary and an ally to the African American community, and his burgeoning but troubled romantic relationship with Florida (which continues into Season 3) adds one more layer still. But it’s Blank whose arc truly reflects the show’s depth, as he initially appears to be a blatantly racist white cop and by the end of Season 2 (and certainly the start of Season 3) is a far more sympathetic and even likable figure (despite having done some unquestionably bad things). 2)      Valentine and Beau Otis: A father and son duo who together rule the county, Sheriff Valentine (Brian Dennehy) and Judge Beau (John McConnell) Otis more clearly occupy villain roles in Season 2. That becomes even more apparent through a multi-episode series of flashbacks that gradually reveal Beau to be the teenage drunk driver who killed Hap and Leonard’s fathers decades ago, and Valentine to be the father who paid off the authorities to let his son walk free. Yet without spoiling more than I already have, I’ll simply note that the season’s final revelations significantly shift our perspectives on both Valentine and Beau, and make clear that the season’s overarching themes of family histories, race and community, and identity affect even powerful white men such as these two.3)      Sneed: Evan Gamble’s Sneed is the weasely white cop who brutally beats Leonard while he’s in police custody (although Leonard gets his revenge in that humorous hyperlinked scene), and thus a visceral representation of some of Season 2’s central images of white supremacist prejudice and violence. Yet in the first two episodes of Season 3 (which is all I’ve seen as of the moment in which I’m writing this post), we meet Sneed in a very different place, literally and figuratively, and begin to see the possibility of change even more a man who has done and been the things he has. The fact that we can believe in that possibility, while still remembering what Sneed did and was in Season 2, reflects the nuanced humanity that Hap & Leonard and its actors bring to each and every character.Next context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on H&L, or other shows you’d highlight?

May 8, 2018: Hap & Leonard Studying: Redefining Lynching

[One of the best parts of my 2018 so far has been discovering SundanceTV’s Hap & Leonard. Based on the series of novels by Joe Lansdale, and starring James Purefoy and Michael K. Williams, the series has completed two wonderful 6-episode seasons and as I write this is in the midst of Season 3. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Hap & Leonardcontexts, leading to a special weekend post on the unique career to date of Michael K. Williams!]On two important historical themes in the show’s amazing second season.To this viewer at least, Hap & Leonard’s Season 2 (based on Lansdale’s second H&L novel, Mucho Mojo [1994]) was vastly superior to the (already quite good) Season 1. There were various reasons why, including both lead actors settling even more fully into their wonderful characters (and some inspired guest casting, including the always great Brian Dennehy), but by far the most important factor was the season’s central plot, which focused on both historical and contemporary (as of the late 1980s, although they all felt strikingly relevant to 2018 as well) issues facing African Americans in its East Texas setting. In the season’s opening scene Hap and Leonard find the decaying corpse of a young boy in the crawl space of Leonard’s deceased Uncle Chester’s house, and this mysterious and disturbing discovery leads them to a community of African American women and families that have lost their sons. As ever, this plot connects to Hap and Leonard’s present and past lives and identities in various complex and compelling ways, but I would argue that the season nonetheless remains consistently focused on the African American boys, mothers, families, and histories in overarching and vital ways.In so doing, the season impressively and importantly broadens our understanding of the horrific, still far too under-remembered histories of lynching in America. The season’s flashbacks do include a harrowing sequence in which the Ku Klux Klan arrive at an African American church, hang its pastor, and burn it to the ground, killing the pastor’s wife and a large number of children (both theirs and others’, I believe) in the process. But throughout the season that more overt version of a white supremacist-led lynching (of both an individual African American man and an entire community) is directly paralleled to the stories of the missing African American boys, making a clear case that the violence, neglect, official indifference, and other factors that contribute to such histories represent just as destructive a presence within the African American community as the Klan and its domestic terrorism. While many commentators (including this AmericanStudier) have referred to the constant police shootings of African Americans as a epidemic, Hap & Leonardreminds us that much violence takes place in quieter and more subtle, but no less destructive, ways.And then there’s Leonard. Thanks to his association with his Uncle Chester, but also undoubtedly to the color of his skin, Leonard becomes a prime suspect in the kidnapping and murder of the boy found under Chester’s house, and spends a good bit of Season 2 in or around prison and the justice system. While there he’s consistently mistreated and abused, not only physically (although a racist cop does beat him brutally while he’s in custody) but in various other legal and illegal ways as well. These racist mistreatments are generally accepted (even by Leonard) as par for the course, although both Hap and Leonard’s lawyer Florida Grange (the wonderful Tiffany Mack) fight hard and well to challenge that narrative. Without ever quite saying as much, the show thoughtfully weaves this racism in the justice system into the context of the historical and contemporary lynchings and violence, reminding us that older black men can disappear nearly as easily as young black boys. If it seems hard to believe that a crime show can present such multi-layered historical and cultural themes within a six-episode season, well, that’s the magic of Hap & Leonard!Next context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on H&L, or other shows you’d highlight?

May 7, 2018: Hap & Leonard Studying: ‘60s Legacies

[One of the best parts of my 2018 so far has been discovering SundanceTV’s Hap & Leonard. Based on the series of novels by Joe Lansdale, and starring James Purefoy and Michael K. Williams, the series has completed two wonderful 6-episode seasons and as I write this is in the midst of Season 3. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Hap & Leonardcontexts, leading to a special weekend post on the unique career to date of Michael K. Williams!]On three layers to the show’s portrayal of ‘60s legacies in its ‘80s setting.The plot of Hap & Leonard’s Season 1 , based on Lansdale’s first novel about the characters Savage Season (1990), focuses closely on the question of whether and how the 1960s can be extended into the 1980s. Hap (Purefoy) and Leonard (Williams) are connected by Hap’s ex-wife Trudy (played wonderfully by Christina Hendricks) to a group of former ‘60s radicals (one a member of a Weathermen-likedomestic terrorist organization) who are searching for a lost cache of stolen money in order to fund radical initiatives once more. As anyone with a passing knowledge of film noir or crime fiction would expect, things don’t go as planned, and most of the ex-hippies abandon their ideals and morals in favor of greed and self-interest. But the historical cynicism of those shifts is balanced by the character of Trudy, herself a former ‘60s radical who remains consistently true to those ideals and the ‘80s plans that seek to extend them. Although she seems at times to fill the femme fatale role, I would argue that Trudy is instead Season 1’s most honorable and inspiring character.Yet that present role and image are complicated by what we learn about Trudy and Hap’s past, and specifically about Hap’s own ‘60s legacy. We know from the beginning of the show that Hap is an ex-con, but it’s only gradually that we learn why he was in prison: for resisting the Vietnam War draft, at Trudy’s urging. Yet while Hap was serving his two-year sentence, Trudy left him, unable to wait through this necessary consequence of her husband’s (and her) radicalism. We get the sense that Hap has never quite recovered from either the time in prison or the marital betrayal, and that both his former radicalism and his enduring love for Trudy are at least as strong forces in his 1980s life as any actually present factors. This is a very different image of a lingering ‘60s perspective than those we see in Trudy and the other conspirators—while they are actively pursuing ‘60s objectives in the present, Hap is held back, or at least constrained, by ‘60s legacies that he can neither escape nor quite ever achieve. Such a personal situation is not limited to any particular decade or time period, of course, but the extremes of the ‘60s do give it a particular urgency and potency. And then there’s Leonard. Everything about Leonard, a gay conservative African American country music fan and wannabe cowboy living in rural East Texas, is unique, compelling, and deeply human (like all of Williams’s characters, on whom more this weekend). But it’s Leonard’s service in the Marines during the Vietnam War, and thus his status as a Vietnam Vet, that links him to these first season questions of ‘60s legacies and effects. Leonard is not obviously suffering from PTSD or the like, but he clearly carries his Vietnam service with him constantly, most especially in an understandable feeling that he has served his country and deserves to be treated with respect as a result. That perspective necessarily clashes with racist treatment he receives at various points throughout the show, but in Season 1 it also leads to consistent conflict with the ex-radicals, whom Leonard believes to be both naïve about the world and utterly unable to comprehend his far different and (to his mind) far more real experience of the ‘60s and their aftermath. Those conflicts aren’t resolved any more neatly or definitively than any in Hap & Leonard, and instead serve as one more layer to the show’s nuanced, messy, and utterly compelling portrayal of the ongoing legacies of the 1960s.Next context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on H&L, or other shows you’d highlight?

May 5-6, 2018: Scholarly Tribute: Erik Loomis

[On May 4th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to this special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]On three ways to read the vital voice of labor historian and professor Erik Loomis.1)      Lawyers, Guns, & Money: I first encountered Erik’s work through the LGM blog, for which he’s written countless important posts (including the ongoing “This Day in Labor History” series) for many years now. LGM has been a model of a community of academics engaging with public issues and conversations since its May 2004 founding, and remains one of the best (and ever-more necessary) such spaces in 2018. 2)      His Books: Erik has published two ground-breaking books and has at least two more in progress, and among other things they model a back-and-forth between more academic and more public styles and audiences. His first book, Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe (2015), was more publicly oriented; his second, Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (2016), more academic. He’s now at work on a similar pair: the publicly focused No Retreat, No Surrender: American History in Ten Strikes ; and the academically oriented Soil and Steel: The New Deal Roots of Labor-Environmental Coalitions. I can’t recommend his first two highly enough, and greatly look forward to this next pair!3)      His Public Scholarly Presence: I know about those works in progress primarily because of Erik’s public scholarly online and social media presences: on Twitterand and on Facebook, for example, where Erik both traces his own evolving work and career and responds thoughtfully yet sarcastically (both entirely warranted responses, of course) to the world around us. He also recently co-authored an excellent op ed for the Washington Post, one more step in his path to digital domination. Online and otherwise, when it comes to the kinds of labor histories about which I wrote this week (among many other subjects), there’s no one we should all be reading and learning from more than Erik.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other scholarly voices or works you’d highlight?

May 4, 2018: Haymarket Histories: Remembering Haymarket

[On May 4th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]On two existing ways to better remember Haymarket, and one I’d love to see.One way to remember the Haymarket Square protest and rally, bombing and violence, and trial more fully and accurately would be, quite simply but crucially, to engage with all the primary texts and contexts to which I’ve hyperlinked throughout the week’s series. While there are and will remain the unanswered questions and ambiguities about which I wrote on Wednesday, the fact of the matter is that there are many many texts and resources through which we can learn a great deal about the lead-up to May 4th, the events of that day, and all its aftermaths and legacies. One of the blessings and curses of my principal public scholarly goal—adding to our collective memories—is that there is a literally endless supply of histories and stories, figures and texts, that can and should be better remembered, and I know it can be difficult for any one American (much less all of us) to engage with them at length or in depth. But we don’t have to do it all day every day to make it part of our collective communal experience, and even an occasional dip into the primary sources and resources would help us think about Haymarket and its contexts and meanings.Public memorials offer another set of resources for collective memory, although with Haymarket, as is so often the case, there are competing memorials that demand nuanced response and engagement. Sculptor Johannes Gelert created a memorial to the fallen policemen in 1889, and it stood in Haymarket Square for nearly a century before being moved to Chicago Police Headquarters in 1972. Sculptor Albert Weinert created the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument in 1893 to honor the anarchists convicted and executed for the bombing; it stands in Forest Home Cemetery (originally the German Waldheim Cemetery) where the men are buried. To some degree bridging the gap between these two competing memorials is the most recent work, artist Mary Brogger’s 2004 sculpture of a fifteen-foot wagon meant to commemorate the impromptu stage from which the Haymarket rally speakers delivered their remarks. The September 2004 ceremony that unveiled Brogger’s monument featured both labor activists and the president of Chicago’s police union, suggesting the possibility at least of a shared communal history that does not pit the subjects of Gelert’s and Weinert’s memorials against each other quite so overtly or necessarily.Popular culture has its own role to play in our collective memories, and on that level I have to admit being disappointed with (from what I’ve seen) the lack of Haymarket stories in our cultural works. For example, the life of convicted anarchist August Spies, whose concluding statement to the judge and jury I quoted in yesterday’s post, would make for a wonderful TV miniseries. Born in 1855 in a ruined mountain castle in Germany to a forestry official and his wife, Spies immigrated to the US in 1872 as a teenager (after his father’s death), worked as an upholdsterer while gradually becoming more and more deeply involved with radical labor and socialist activism and journalism, and spoke at the May 4thHaymarket Square rally. While in prison awaiting execution Spies met and married the young journalist and labor activist Nina van Zandt. Moments before his November 11th, 1887 hanging, he cried out, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today,” some of the most compelling last words in American history. His is only one of many Haymarket stories, of course, but telling it would open up those other stories and histories as well. Just another potential screenplay I’ll add to the imaginary pile, I suppose!Special tribute post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?

May 3, 2018: Haymarket Histories: The Trial

[On May 4th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]On two frustrating failures of and one inspiring moment from a farcical show trial.From the outset, the arrest and trial of the Haymarket “bombers” was an overt case of presumed guilt, and not just (not really at all) for the Haymarket Square bombing. The media used the bombing to whip up xenophobic fears and violent exclusionary fantasies, as illustrated by a Chicago Times editorial that argued, “Let us whip these slavic wolves back to the European dens from which they issue, or in some way exterminate them.” The police followed suit, raiding the offices of the pro-labor newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitungwithout a warrant and arresting its editors, and then doing the same with the residences of numerous known socialist and anarchist activists. While the eight men eventually charged with the bombing were indeed swept up during these widespread raids (including those two newspaper editors, August Spiesand Michael Schwab), there is ample evidence to suggest that the raids were designed and executed to intimidate and destroy entire communities, and that picking scapegoats for the bombing from among those targets was simply a convenient side effect.The trial itself was no more fair or legally sound. The eight defendants were charged not with the bombing itself, but with the broader and vaguer charge of conspiracy, which came to mean simply producing anarchist journalism and propaganda that might have inspired a bomb-thrower: as state’s attorney Julius Grinnell instructed the jury, “The question for you to determine is, having ascertained that a murder was committed, not only who did it, but who is responsible for it, who abetted it, assisted it, or encouraged it?” That jury was hand-picked from the jury pool by the court’s bailiff, a break from the normal random selection procedure; it included no immigrants or laborers. After presenting the jury with a long series of circumstancial and tangential details and accusations that only vaguely connected any of the defendants to the Haymarket violence, in his closing argument Grinnell made plain the trial’s true stakes: acquitting the defendants would mean more radicals on the city’s streets, “"like a lot of rats and vermin”; and only the jurors “stand between the living and the dead. You stand between law and violated law.”Unsurprisingly, the jury convicted the defendants, with seven sentenced to death and one (labor organizer Oscar Neebe) to fifteen years in prison. Four were executed in November 1887, while three others had their sentences commuted to life in prison or otherwise were still in limbo when Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned them in 1893, his first year in office (due to his outrage at the farcical arrests and trial). That pardon (which cost Altgeld his political career) was one inspiring moment to emerge from this historic injustice, but to my mind even more inspiring was August Spies’s concluding statement to the judge and jury. “The contemplated murder of eight men,” Spies argued, “whose only crime is that they have dared to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these suffering millions; may wake them up.” Detailing the prosecutor and judge’s numerous inappropriate and likely illegal staetments, he added, “I will say that if I had not been an Anarchist at the beginning of this trial I would be one now.” And in his concluding paragraphs, he brilliantly reversed the concepts of patriotism and treason that had been used to condemn the defendants: “I can well understand why that man Grinnell did not urge upon the grand jury to charge us with treason. I can well understand it. You cannot try and convict a man for treason who has upheld the Constitution against those who trample it under their feet.” A moment of American ideals amidst a history that did indeed trample upon them.Last Haymarket history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?

May 2, 2018: Haymarket Histories: Historical Ambiguities

[On May 4th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]On what we’ll never know about Haymarket, why that matters, and what we can say anyway.The May 4thrally and protest devolved into violence and chaos for several reasons, but one moment towers above the rest: the throwing of a dynamite bomb at police officers. It was after that bombing that police began firing at protesters, that protesters began rioting and fighting back, and that the widespread conflict which resulted in at least eleven deaths (seven police officers and four protesters) and countless injuries truly commenced. Yet if the bombing’s influence and effects are crystal clear, its origins are entirely murky: as I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post, eight anarchist activists were tried and convicted for the bombing, but that trial was a demonstrable farce (so much so that the governor of Illinois pardoned the anarchists who had not yet been executed only seven years later) and certainly does not offer historical proof of who threw the Haymarket bomb. Indeed, as far as I can tell historians have no idea of who threw that bomb, and it’s difficult to imagine the emergence at this late date of any new details or evidence that will provide any further clarity into that crucial historical ambiguity.Such a central historical ambiguity is quite frustrating, but it’s even more illuminating. That is, our eternal uncertainty about the Haymarket bombing offers a number of valuable lessons for the study of history and its meanings in the present. For one thing, Haymarket makes quite plain the way that subsequent narratives (such as those created at a trial) shape our understanding of a historical event, and forces us to consider whether and how all such narratives distort (or at best partially portray) more than they reflect the histories themselves. For another, such ambiguous histories render it nearly impossible to write about the past without bringing our own perspectives and preferences to bear—I’m sure I’ve done that here in writing about Haymarket—and in truth that limitation is (as the recently deceased historian and theorist Hayden White laid out so convincingly) an element of any and all history writing and historical thinking. And for a third, particularly clear historical ambiguities like Haymarket can help us engage with the presence of such ambiguities in every significant historical event and moment: what caused the Salem Witch Trials; why Jefferson’s draft paragraph on slavery was cut from the Declaration of Independence; what Abraham Lincoln’s vision of Reconstruction entailed; and many more.If there are many things we can’t know or say with certainty about the Haymarket Affair, however, there are still some that we can. To my mind, perhaps the most important thing we can say about the Haymarket protest is that it was intended to be a peaceful rally in support of the nationwide strike; that the bombing, whoever performed it and for whatever purpose, was a horrific aberration and break from the event’s goals. A violent, destructive moment like the bombing often overtakes any other histories in providing one of those subsequent narratives and frames for an event, and perhaps that’s inevitable and not worth contesting. But it seems to me still crucial to differentiate events where the violence is planned and central (such as the 1898 Wilmington coup and massacre) from those where violence shatters and shifts the event from its plans and purposes. It’s my understanding that that’s what happened in Haymarket Square on May 4th, and that’s a historical narrative worth working to add to our collective memories.Next Haymarket history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?

May 1, 2018: Haymarket Histories: The May Day Strike

[On May 4th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]On a motivation, a debate, and an effect of one of the earliest nationwide strikes.One of the scholarly works I read as an undergraduate that left a lasting impression on me was historian Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (1983). It wasn’t just the depth and detail with which Rosenzweig narrated and analyzed new leisure possibilities and spaces in the late 19thcentury, although that certainly impressed me. Instead, it was the overall paradigm shift that Rosenzweig’s book effected in my perspective, as I really considered what the absence of work-hour regulations (and thus the push for an eight-hour workday) meant for 19th century American workers. The issue isn’t as blatant or horrifying as child labor practices or the absence of safety regulations or the like, but it was a vital cause through which workers and the labor movement could take a bit more control over their own lives. So vital, in fact, that the May 1st, 1886 nationwide strike of more than 350,000 industrial workers was undertaken specifically to agitate for the creation of an eight-hour workday.Not every labor leader and organization supported the use of a nationwide strike for that purpose, however. Terence Powderly, leader of the influential national union The Knights of Labor (which had a membership of more than 700,000 in 1886), opposed the strike and forbid Knights of Labor members from taking part in it. Powderly preferred other tactics, from negotiation with management to boycotts, to strikes, a sharp divide from the perspective of the nation’s other most prominent labor union, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (an immediate predecessor to the American Federation of Labor, which was founded later in the year). The debate reflects the widely divergent views and tactics that characterized the labor movement at this still early stage, and reminds us that the May Day strike, significant (indeed, unprecedented) in scale and scope as it was, nonetheless represented only a subset of American workers (again, the Knights of Labor had a membership more than twice the size of the number of workers who struck on May 1st). Despite those divergences the May 1st strike was an important labor milestone, and (despite the Haymarket catastrophe and the negative press and narratives it engendered) had a number of both immediate and long-term positive effects. Some employers did institute an eight-hour workday, while others offered higher wages or other benefits. Yet it was a pair of commemorations that proved the most enduring, if partly ironic, legacies of the strike: in 1889 the Paris Second International designated May 1st as International Workers’ Dayin remembrance of the strike; and when President Grover Cleveland designated the first official federal Labor Day in September 1887, he did so in large part to commemorate organized labor separately from lingering May associations with the Haymarket Affair. Those might seem to be distinct and even opposed effects and commemorations, but both represent the power of organized labor and of events like the May 1st, 1886 strike to affect and change national narratives and collective memories. Next Haymarket history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?

April 30, 2018: Haymarket Histories: An American Revolution?

[On May 4th, 1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square in support of a nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for the Haymarket Affair, leading up to a special weekend post on one of our most important current scholarly voices on labor.]On revolutions, large and small, and a controversial moment in labor history.
One of the more eye-opening classes I took in college focused on 19th century European history, and specifically on the spate of revolutions and radical shifts in government and authority that dominated much of the century (particularly if it’s defined to include the end of the 18th century and so the French Revolution) for many European nations. Prominent European historian Eric Hobsbawn designated the first half of the century The Age of Revolution, as per the title of the relevant volume in his seminal multi-volume historical series, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962). But even though 1848 did represent a culmination, with numerous nations undergoing revolutions of one kind or another, the decades afterward likewise included at least one more major upheaval (the Paris Commune of 1871) and a number of smaller but still significant revolts and shifts as well. There were lots of reasons why both the details of these historical events and the class that highlighted them were eye-opening for me, but I suppose the most salient is the contrast with the United States, which, despite the newness and definite fragility of its government and identity, underwent no comparable revolutions or changes in its government over the same period (the Civil War would seem to be an obvious exception, but I think it’s different in kind from any of the European revolutions in question, not least because the Confederacy didn’t want to turn Washington into a new form of government but rather just to break entirely from the existing one).
This isn’t going to be one of those posts where I try to entirely flip that vision of our history; I don’t think there are any unknown 19th century American revolutions waiting to be remembered and narrated (there is the 1898 Wilmington coup d’etat, but I’m talking national revolutions). But I do think that using the lens of the European revolutions, particularly in their near-ubiquitous emphasis on issues of class and caste as a chief factor in both their causes and results, can provide a helpful way to analyze one of the most complex and, yes, revolutionary elements of American life in the second half of the 19th century: the labor movement, and specifically the profound challenges it offered to American identity and changes it eventually effected. For one thing, the labor movement—and the singular term is a misnomer, there were many different labor movements in the period, with each particular union and organization representing a distinct community and vision and set of goals; but in the interests of space, I’ll refer to it with the collective term—was perhaps the only 19th century American social movement that comprised in large part an extension of existing, outside (and mainly European) movements. That doesn’t mean that labor in America didn’t take on shapes and tones specific and unique to our national history and culture and identity, but it did mean that some of the particularly prominent labor-related events that took place here were instigated in part by—and so, potentially, blamed on—international forces and organizations.
Exemplifying both the international instigations and the potential blame was the Haymarket Affair of May 1886, a labor protest (in support of the eight hour workday, the institution of which many different labor organizations had worked to make standard beginning on May 1st of that year) that turned into one of the more violent and chaotic events in the post-Civil War era. The principal organizer of the May Day marches and subsequent strikes in Chicago was Albert Parsons, an anarchist and founder of the International Working People’s Association; when the May 4th rally in support of the striking workers was torn apart by violence, both in the form of a bomb thrown at police and in a subsequent exchange of gunfire, it was eight anarchist leaders (five of them German-born) who were arrested and charged with inciting the bombing. The trial itself was largely a sham, since the prosecution admitted that it could not link any of the eight directly to the bombing, but an effective one, with all eight defendants found guilty and seven given the death penalty (four were eventually executed and a fifth killed himself while awaiting execution). But more telling still were the many journalistic responses to the anarchists, the authors of which consistently sought not only to criticize the anarchists’ political perspectives and castigate the labor movement for its association with them, but also and just as overtly to define them as foreign, as an unwanted alien presence in America (and thus to define the trial as a necessary, if not necessarily legally sound, repelling of this invasion of violent foreign ideas).The aftermath of Haymarket highlights, on the one hand, the absence of overt revolutions in America—this was perhaps the moment of most heightened visibility for political radicals in the period, and yet the anarchists did not overthrow and remake Chicago’s government (as did the Paris Communists for that brief period in 1870) or in any other explicit way shift the nation’s political identity. But on the other hand, the eight hour workday was indeed instituted, just as the era’s labor movements eventually succeeded in achieving virtually every other significant goal (from an end to child labor to the creation of the work week, from safety regulations to more fixed wages and contracts, among many other advances). So it’s perhaps more accurate to say that America’s 19thcentury revolutions were social and gradual rather than political and radical—that the true bombs, that is, didn’t blow up our nation so much as slowly but profoundly reshape it. Next Haymarket history tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Haymarket histories or contexts you’d highlight?