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Labor's Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life
Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations, cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape, this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and digitally enabled self-study.
- GenresHistoryLaborNonfiction
234 pages, Paperback
Published December 30, 2018
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January 30, 2022
Higbie’s recent book is Much better than the cover design had suggested to me. His study of worker education in the US in the Twenties and Thirties is an exciting read that is full of insights that defy the usual hegemonic gloss. He pays careful attention to female workers, which is refreshing. There were many points of confluence with my own efforts at thinking in this area in the last 50 years and I felt a good deal of empathy with those working class intellectuals 100 years ago. Somethings haven’t changed! Yet!
“Mainstream progressives in the United States… Understood working-class and immigrant life ways to be bordering on pathological. ... Theirs was a modified Taylorism in which workers became raw material passing through a process planned and directed by elites.” p.8
The parallels with my own study of middle class cultural mediators were obvious but, as usual, I’m not in the bibliography. (Mind you neither is Ranciere!)
In the early decades of the C20th in the newly urbanised centres of the USA: “Pamphlets, newspapers, study groups, and street speakers amplified and circulated a vast and contentious dialogue about inequality to audiences that were fragmented by race, sex, skill, nationality, and location.” p.10
“The way we talk about intellectuals and ordinary people, however, is much the same as it was in the early 20th century. … The idea that workers and thinkers are distinct kinds of people with opposing interests remains potent in popular culture and politics.” p.11
“University administrators, faculty, and many students assumed that working people would rise out of their class rather than with it. Even if workers were reading, writing, giving speeches, teaching classes, and carrying out research – quintessential scholarly practices – few university-based scholars understood these activities to be legitimately intellectual when done outside of universities.” p.16
The persistence of such attitudes is gob-smacking!
Higbie talks about there being a working-class public sphere in the USA at that time. “In Chicago in 1930 there were 25 foreign-language daily newspapers publishing in 12 languages, according to historian John Bekken.” p.25 In 1925 there were an estimated 600 labour movement periodicals although less than one hundred were radical left. They contributed to an ethnic pluralism that was to gel as a national ideology.
The wider context, assumed by Higbie but not explored, was that the USA industrialisation was a 100 years later than Britain’s but much accelerated by imported technological know how, urbanisation and unionisation by a largely newly immigrant workforce. (SS)
“For many young workers, reading represented not only a desire for respectability but also a way of achieving it. Many found in self-education a path to less physically taxing work, cleaner living conditions, and higher pay, as well as personal intellectual development.” p.31 (cf Richard Hoggart’s sympathy with such ambition - I'm intending a review soon)
“Many self-educated working people felt a deep loss from their lack of formal schooling.” p.37
“Substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences.” p.37 Quoting from Tillie Olsen's classic, Silences, 1978
He comments on the evident loneliness of autodidacts and their use of a mix of text and spoken word.
Public talk in the early C20th was raucous and loud. (But there is not much about singing) In Chapter 2 he discusses the working class public sphere and its ‘open forums’ (which reminded me of my experiences of ‘open collectives’ and especially my doctorate on Exploding Cinema).
“Political speech created sites of sonic and social focus within the urban cacophony that disorientated and excited newcomers and long-term residents alike.” p.42
A raw working class public sphere “shaped by the concerns and accents of working people” p.40 That public sphere was potent in urban centres from the 1900s to WW2.
Those spaces used as open forums became subject to later urban development which obliterated them. (he doesn’t suggest any concerted motives to destroy these spaces, but its implied…)
After WW2 “radical activists who had powered the circulation of ideas also found the city and the nation to be increasingly hostile to their speech and very existence.” p.40 This substantially becomes the same timescale as in Britain, as I report in my recent picture book = SiLENCE!
There are dimensions of the urban culture that are barely mentioned, like song. Others like outsider art and inclusive modernist art forms like mail art, are not mentioned. There have got to be limits to an individuals efforts. With all this diversity of activity we did not seem to breakthrough into a realm of solidarity and power. In fact we seemed to let liberation slip through our fingers and to slide into future states of compliance in which it seems ‘impossible’ to make a working class public sphere again or even to whistle in the street!
“The disruption of left-wing organisational life had a real and lasting impact on the tenor of the working-class public sphere and the possibilities for social change.” p.54
Open Forums are a key concept in his account of the working class public sphere. “The spectacle and community that developed around open forums indelibly marked the modern city and how it is remembered.” p.55
Ex bouncer Slim Brundage ran a provocative open lecture forum called the ‘College of Complexes’ that ran for around 20 years in Chicago into the Sixties. Sounds very countercultural to me and we can see the beatnik roots of the Sixties counter culture that I experienced here and the links to working class ‘education’. p.56
There were also many church based movements fighting social injustice (quite different from UK)
Reflecting on the current era he claims that “in their approach to space, power, and conflict, the new movements echo the everyday speechifying of the working-class public sphere as well as the more dramatic moments of the Wobblies free speech fights.” p.60
But by the 1960s the ‘wild cadences’ of free speech venues ‘had disappeared from American cities’. The causes of the decline are attributed variously to McCarthyism, suburbanisation, television and mass higher education.
The upsurge of Unionism in the Thirties was seen by some to have the potential as a moral force put into action by its members.
“Recognising that solidarity is less of a social condition than a social process, historians have identified education as a key site of social movement formation.” p.62 I wanted references at that point.
In terms of oppression a deeper understanding of social conditions led working people to the self-awareness that “what happens to me is important” countering class oppression which carries the damaging message that working people are unimportant, insignificant and of little worth. The resulting “toxic mix of disempowerment and hopelessness sapped the labour movement capacity to act.” p.63 (see also page 74)
Any self-reflexive workers education, with the aim of class liberation, was diluted and made ineffective as it was gradually absorbed by the educational establishment and in particular universities. “Assailed from the right and the left, labour colleges struggled to survive their precarious economic and institutional condition throughout the interwar years.” p.67
“Labour education was sequestered on its own narrow path." … That was “averse to radical expression.” p.75
'Industrial Relations' was the new and toxic category that absorbed radical energies.
“Understanding and managing working-class rebellion became the full-time job of a growing class of researchers, journalists, and organisers.” p.8
There were some progressive pedagogic ideas in circulation in worker education:
Deliberative meetings should be seen as “a sort of field of magnetic forces wherein his mind can conspire with other minds to organise socially advantageous currents. His speaking is ideally influential when it precipitates a general mood to create an understanding.” quoting Alfred Sheffield, ‘Joining Public Discussion’ (c1922)
It was interesting to hear that in labour schools “Lectures are Taboo.” To be preferred were:“Classroom discussions proceeded by the exchange of ideas and experiences with the teacher acting as leader and counsellor.” p.69 quoting Edward Falkowski 1925
Interesting to me, as that is exactly how I felt about my teaching experience in London higher education from the Nineties.
“Many working-class, immigrant, and African-American children experienced public schooling as ruling class and ruling race indoctrination.” p.69
No it really IS. Not just ‘experienced as’. Education as ‘rigged to stifle’ a sense of outrage at social injustice, dissent and rebellion. This reminds me of Ranciere’s concept of stultification (not in the Bibliography here) My long review of the Ignorant Schoolmaster is by far my most viewed blog review.
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
Fostering listening and respect between gender, race, ethnic and occupational differences was a part of the pedagogy of the labour colleges aimed at achieving workplace solidarity.
“Where traditional education aims to give students cultural capital that will help individuals in a competitive labour market, workers education aimed to build a collective capacity for action based on the knowledge and experience gained by individual worker students.” p.83
PART 2 IMAGINING Critical Consciousness
“Poverty, family, and the daily grind enforced silence on many would-be artists and authors.” p.86
“How, then, to depict male coal-miners and lumberjacks with extensive personal libraries, or female garment workers with literary ambitions and a mastery of Parliamentary procedure?” 87
“Could images of working class knowledge visually overpower the association of mental acuity with the middle and upper classes and manual labour with lack of intelligence?” p.89
He looks then at worker autobiographies and the question of how a radical worker comes into being. Was it through book study or through ‘the school of hard knocks’? I didn’t find this question productive for me at least. Another question that did resonate was:
“Were writers and editors, even those born into the working class, still workers?” p.104
This echoes into my essay in ‘Class Myths and Culture’ (1990) which answers this question for myself.
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
Chapter 5. The Visual Culture of Critical Consciousness. This follows the discourse following Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. Rossums Universal Robots. Then it goes on to look at workers self-imaging in labour papers and journals. This is a welcome break with some great graphics but it doesn’t for me add much to the story.
The problem of representing the male worker as studious without him ‘looking’ middle class!!
Conclusion
“As the unions became more institutionalised, the social movement organisations that did not engage in collective bargaining fell away from the public conception of the labour movement, and unions themselves pushed many people out the door in a bid for political respectability.” p.146
“Perceptions of societies class structure changed as greater numbers of working-class youth attended college, and achievement that was supposed to mark their graduation to the middle class." p.146
"There would be no worker students in higher education.” p.147
Combining scholarship with community engagement was rebuffed by funders like the Ford Foundation.
But what of the recent widespread mass actions that are not formally organised from a workerist base? For me these actions are necessary and laudable but are held back by a lack of class awareness.
Tobias concludes that the separation of academics and ‘everyone else’ has been ‘a project’ that has been ‘carefully tended’ (by the undemocratic upper classes in the service of maintaining oppression).
To me my main take away from this marvellous book was that we will need a universal theory of how this all works to undermine our piecemeal efforts at class liberation. If such a theory could show as plain as day the mechanisms by which our efforts at liberation are undermined, and we had prior knowledge of what was likely to happen after a new grassroots initiative was successful, then the sly reaction might be clearly opposed and sustained across generations. Isn't that the idea of history anyway!
“Mainstream progressives in the United States… Understood working-class and immigrant life ways to be bordering on pathological. ... Theirs was a modified Taylorism in which workers became raw material passing through a process planned and directed by elites.” p.8
The parallels with my own study of middle class cultural mediators were obvious but, as usual, I’m not in the bibliography. (Mind you neither is Ranciere!)
In the early decades of the C20th in the newly urbanised centres of the USA: “Pamphlets, newspapers, study groups, and street speakers amplified and circulated a vast and contentious dialogue about inequality to audiences that were fragmented by race, sex, skill, nationality, and location.” p.10
“The way we talk about intellectuals and ordinary people, however, is much the same as it was in the early 20th century. … The idea that workers and thinkers are distinct kinds of people with opposing interests remains potent in popular culture and politics.” p.11
“University administrators, faculty, and many students assumed that working people would rise out of their class rather than with it. Even if workers were reading, writing, giving speeches, teaching classes, and carrying out research – quintessential scholarly practices – few university-based scholars understood these activities to be legitimately intellectual when done outside of universities.” p.16
The persistence of such attitudes is gob-smacking!
Higbie talks about there being a working-class public sphere in the USA at that time. “In Chicago in 1930 there were 25 foreign-language daily newspapers publishing in 12 languages, according to historian John Bekken.” p.25 In 1925 there were an estimated 600 labour movement periodicals although less than one hundred were radical left. They contributed to an ethnic pluralism that was to gel as a national ideology.
The wider context, assumed by Higbie but not explored, was that the USA industrialisation was a 100 years later than Britain’s but much accelerated by imported technological know how, urbanisation and unionisation by a largely newly immigrant workforce. (SS)
“For many young workers, reading represented not only a desire for respectability but also a way of achieving it. Many found in self-education a path to less physically taxing work, cleaner living conditions, and higher pay, as well as personal intellectual development.” p.31 (cf Richard Hoggart’s sympathy with such ambition - I'm intending a review soon)
“Many self-educated working people felt a deep loss from their lack of formal schooling.” p.37
“Substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it. Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences.” p.37 Quoting from Tillie Olsen's classic, Silences, 1978
He comments on the evident loneliness of autodidacts and their use of a mix of text and spoken word.
Public talk in the early C20th was raucous and loud. (But there is not much about singing) In Chapter 2 he discusses the working class public sphere and its ‘open forums’ (which reminded me of my experiences of ‘open collectives’ and especially my doctorate on Exploding Cinema).
“Political speech created sites of sonic and social focus within the urban cacophony that disorientated and excited newcomers and long-term residents alike.” p.42
A raw working class public sphere “shaped by the concerns and accents of working people” p.40 That public sphere was potent in urban centres from the 1900s to WW2.
Those spaces used as open forums became subject to later urban development which obliterated them. (he doesn’t suggest any concerted motives to destroy these spaces, but its implied…)
After WW2 “radical activists who had powered the circulation of ideas also found the city and the nation to be increasingly hostile to their speech and very existence.” p.40 This substantially becomes the same timescale as in Britain, as I report in my recent picture book = SiLENCE!
There are dimensions of the urban culture that are barely mentioned, like song. Others like outsider art and inclusive modernist art forms like mail art, are not mentioned. There have got to be limits to an individuals efforts. With all this diversity of activity we did not seem to breakthrough into a realm of solidarity and power. In fact we seemed to let liberation slip through our fingers and to slide into future states of compliance in which it seems ‘impossible’ to make a working class public sphere again or even to whistle in the street!
“The disruption of left-wing organisational life had a real and lasting impact on the tenor of the working-class public sphere and the possibilities for social change.” p.54
Open Forums are a key concept in his account of the working class public sphere. “The spectacle and community that developed around open forums indelibly marked the modern city and how it is remembered.” p.55
Ex bouncer Slim Brundage ran a provocative open lecture forum called the ‘College of Complexes’ that ran for around 20 years in Chicago into the Sixties. Sounds very countercultural to me and we can see the beatnik roots of the Sixties counter culture that I experienced here and the links to working class ‘education’. p.56
There were also many church based movements fighting social injustice (quite different from UK)
Reflecting on the current era he claims that “in their approach to space, power, and conflict, the new movements echo the everyday speechifying of the working-class public sphere as well as the more dramatic moments of the Wobblies free speech fights.” p.60
But by the 1960s the ‘wild cadences’ of free speech venues ‘had disappeared from American cities’. The causes of the decline are attributed variously to McCarthyism, suburbanisation, television and mass higher education.
The upsurge of Unionism in the Thirties was seen by some to have the potential as a moral force put into action by its members.
“Recognising that solidarity is less of a social condition than a social process, historians have identified education as a key site of social movement formation.” p.62 I wanted references at that point.
In terms of oppression a deeper understanding of social conditions led working people to the self-awareness that “what happens to me is important” countering class oppression which carries the damaging message that working people are unimportant, insignificant and of little worth. The resulting “toxic mix of disempowerment and hopelessness sapped the labour movement capacity to act.” p.63 (see also page 74)
Any self-reflexive workers education, with the aim of class liberation, was diluted and made ineffective as it was gradually absorbed by the educational establishment and in particular universities. “Assailed from the right and the left, labour colleges struggled to survive their precarious economic and institutional condition throughout the interwar years.” p.67
“Labour education was sequestered on its own narrow path." … That was “averse to radical expression.” p.75
'Industrial Relations' was the new and toxic category that absorbed radical energies.
“Understanding and managing working-class rebellion became the full-time job of a growing class of researchers, journalists, and organisers.” p.8
There were some progressive pedagogic ideas in circulation in worker education:
Deliberative meetings should be seen as “a sort of field of magnetic forces wherein his mind can conspire with other minds to organise socially advantageous currents. His speaking is ideally influential when it precipitates a general mood to create an understanding.” quoting Alfred Sheffield, ‘Joining Public Discussion’ (c1922)
It was interesting to hear that in labour schools “Lectures are Taboo.” To be preferred were:“Classroom discussions proceeded by the exchange of ideas and experiences with the teacher acting as leader and counsellor.” p.69 quoting Edward Falkowski 1925
Interesting to me, as that is exactly how I felt about my teaching experience in London higher education from the Nineties.
“Many working-class, immigrant, and African-American children experienced public schooling as ruling class and ruling race indoctrination.” p.69
No it really IS. Not just ‘experienced as’. Education as ‘rigged to stifle’ a sense of outrage at social injustice, dissent and rebellion. This reminds me of Ranciere’s concept of stultification (not in the Bibliography here) My long review of the Ignorant Schoolmaster is by far my most viewed blog review.
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
Fostering listening and respect between gender, race, ethnic and occupational differences was a part of the pedagogy of the labour colleges aimed at achieving workplace solidarity.
“Where traditional education aims to give students cultural capital that will help individuals in a competitive labour market, workers education aimed to build a collective capacity for action based on the knowledge and experience gained by individual worker students.” p.83
PART 2 IMAGINING Critical Consciousness
“Poverty, family, and the daily grind enforced silence on many would-be artists and authors.” p.86
“How, then, to depict male coal-miners and lumberjacks with extensive personal libraries, or female garment workers with literary ambitions and a mastery of Parliamentary procedure?” 87
“Could images of working class knowledge visually overpower the association of mental acuity with the middle and upper classes and manual labour with lack of intelligence?” p.89
He looks then at worker autobiographies and the question of how a radical worker comes into being. Was it through book study or through ‘the school of hard knocks’? I didn’t find this question productive for me at least. Another question that did resonate was:
“Were writers and editors, even those born into the working class, still workers?” p.104
This echoes into my essay in ‘Class Myths and Culture’ (1990) which answers this question for myself.
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
Chapter 5. The Visual Culture of Critical Consciousness. This follows the discourse following Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. Rossums Universal Robots. Then it goes on to look at workers self-imaging in labour papers and journals. This is a welcome break with some great graphics but it doesn’t for me add much to the story.
The problem of representing the male worker as studious without him ‘looking’ middle class!!
Conclusion
“As the unions became more institutionalised, the social movement organisations that did not engage in collective bargaining fell away from the public conception of the labour movement, and unions themselves pushed many people out the door in a bid for political respectability.” p.146
“Perceptions of societies class structure changed as greater numbers of working-class youth attended college, and achievement that was supposed to mark their graduation to the middle class." p.146
"There would be no worker students in higher education.” p.147
Combining scholarship with community engagement was rebuffed by funders like the Ford Foundation.
But what of the recent widespread mass actions that are not formally organised from a workerist base? For me these actions are necessary and laudable but are held back by a lack of class awareness.
Tobias concludes that the separation of academics and ‘everyone else’ has been ‘a project’ that has been ‘carefully tended’ (by the undemocratic upper classes in the service of maintaining oppression).
To me my main take away from this marvellous book was that we will need a universal theory of how this all works to undermine our piecemeal efforts at class liberation. If such a theory could show as plain as day the mechanisms by which our efforts at liberation are undermined, and we had prior knowledge of what was likely to happen after a new grassroots initiative was successful, then the sly reaction might be clearly opposed and sustained across generations. Isn't that the idea of history anyway!
June 14, 2019
This is an excellent, relatively brief scholarly study of the broad range of efforts taken by workers, from roughly 1920 to 1950, to educate themselves and engage the life of the mind. Higbie includes efforts at formal and self-education through books, labor colleges, adult education classes, public speaking, and lectures. Chicago holds a prominent place in the book, but Higbie still ranges across various urban areas. One of the final chapters covers artistic representations of laborers reading, studying, and being encouraged to participate in the life of the mind. While this book qualifies as a social history, people are not absent. Higbie explores the records of individuals, and this brings to life the study. In sum, this is a high quality addition to the histories of education--adult, higher, and informal. I recommend this to all libraries. - TL
January 30, 2020
Smart. Perfect for educators
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews