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When I began college in the fall of 1969, I was seeking answers to two questions. Was the Vietnam War a mistake, or was it the logical outcome of decades of US aggression throughout the world? Was our society making progress addressing racial inequality, or was racism so foundational that a thorough transformation was necessary? By the end of my freshman year, I had answered these questions and was turning to a new one. Given the deep roots of these problems, who was going to lead a movement to change American society? This led me to the study and teaching of labor history, an endeavor which has shaped my life for the past fifty years.
In the mid-1970s, labor history was a dynamic field of knowledge production in the throes of a paradigm shift. For the first three-quarters of the 20th century, labor historians were scholars who had been trained in economics, and they had focused on the formation and functioning of unions. But in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of scholar—inspired by our experiences in the civil rights and women’s movements and impressed by a rank-and-file labor insurgency from the fields of California to the streets of Memphis and from the coal fields of West Virginia to the auto plants of Detroit—reconceptualized labor history as the study of working people. We were interested in all kinds of people: workers of color as well as whites, immigrants as well as the native born, women as well as men, white collar as well as blue collar, unpaid (housewives who performed domestic labor and enslaved men and women) as well as paid, non-union as well as union. We were interested in the many activities undertaken by these workers: organizing unions and going on strike, to be sure, but also forming mutual benefit societies, creating art and culture, engaging in politics, and more. We saw these as ways that working people made sense of their lives, processed the narratives circulated by the dominant culture, and found the agency to shape and reshape their lives—and our society.
Our research led us to construct new stories of working people and to seek new ways to tell these stories. Documentary film provided a means to bring the stories of past workers to the attention of contemporary workers. Julia Reichert’s Union Maids (1976) inspired “new” labor historians to keep digging, to find new sources and new stories, and to share them with audiences outside as well as inside the academy. Reichert’s work inspired other great documentaries, including Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County (1978), Lorraine Gray’s With Babies and Banners (1978), Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer’s The Wobblies (1979), Connie Field’s The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), and John DeGraaf’s Labor’s Turning Point (1981, about the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes of 1934). Other filmmakers told workers’ stories in dramatic films, such as Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978), Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979), The Killing Floor (Bill Duke, 1984), Matewan (John Sayles, 1987), and North Country (Nikki Caro, 2005, about the struggles of women in Minnesota’s iron mines).
Julia Reichert and her colleagues opened the doors to new ways of telling the stories of working people and, consequently, new ways of conceptualizing the history of the United States. Their films reflected labor historians’ research and inspired hundreds of books, from the scholarly to the popular, including graphic texts and novels. Our generation undertook this journey with an eye on the past not for its own sake, but for the insights such engagement can offer us in shaping the future.
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