When Corporate PR Meets Social History

File this under “while you were on summer vacation.”  The Newberry Library released a fascinating photo collection under the deceptively plain title “Daily Life Along the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.” It is a selection of some 3,000 black and white photographs taken by Russell Lee and Esther Bubley in 1948. Both Lee and Bubley are more well known for their role in the New Deal Farm Security Administration photo collections, much of which is available online.  In this case they were promoting a folksy identity for fairly large corporation with deep roots in the Midwest, rather than reform of the American political economy.

A handful of these pictures were published in the volume Granger Country, written and compiled by then Newberry Library president Stanley Pargelis and Chicago newspaperman Lloyd Lewis.  The rest languished in the stacks of the Newberry until a few years ago when Newberry archivist Martha Briggs, librarian Hjordis Halvorson, and others secured funding to scan a selection.

The CB&Q collections makes for an interesting companion to the much larger Charles Cushman collection at Indian University (14,000 color slides by an amateur photographer). It is much more focused, as you would expect from two professional photographers who were escorted around the railway system by Pargelis and CB&Q PR employees.  There are series of “daily life” shots that focus on particular towns, workshops, and farms.  One series documents life on a family farm in north central Illinois, including a trip to Chicago by the farm wife (on the CB&Q, of course) to shop at Marshall Field’s.

A good number of the shots have a formulaic feel of corporate publicity, but there are some real gems, too.

I’m struck by the image above, of two women rail shop workers in Havelock, Nebraska.  What a story these two must have.  Their body language suggests the bonds of women working in an intensely male environment–likely as not the only women on the shop floor.  Were these two “Rosie the Riveters” who held on to their wartime jobs?  The woman who looks into the camera is wearing a wedding ring.  Is her husband working there too?  Unemployed?  Gone?

The collection is also rich in describing the work processes of a large railroad at a moment when rail travel was still quite common.  There are quite a few shots documenting work in roundhouses, loading and unloading freight and passengers, and cleaning passenger trains.  There are also a few shots of the pre-computer information technologies used by railways to set freight rates (agent with rate books and a phone), and keep track of individual train cars across their sprawling continental networks.

Like the Cushman collection, the CB&Q collection documents a peculiar moment in U.S. history.   Historian Eric Sandweiss writes that Cushman’s images captured a landscape and built environment frozen in time by the Great Depression.  Among other things, the Depression ground to a halt the massive construction boom of the 1920s.  True, the New Deal would sponsor a wide array of public works including housing and roads.  But compared to the phenomenal growth of the post-World War II period, the 1930s saw relatively little in the way of urban transformation, and much of the building during the war was temporary housing.  So the immediate postwar years are interesting in that they retained much of the feeling of scarcity held over from depression and war.  The take-off was still just over the horizon.

Unfortunately, the collection is housed within CONTENTdm in such a way that makes it impossible to easily integrate into blog posts.  No doubt this is to protect the Library’s intellectual property.  But if any of my old colleagues at the Newberry are reading, you can see that it’s easy enough to grab a low-res image from the site.  So why not facilitate blog integration?  Put the images up on Flickr?  Similarly, to save image links in Delicious or Zotero, you have to go and grab a separate “reference link” by clicking on a nearly-hidden link at the bottom left of the images catalog page.  On the plus side, CONTENTdm provides a way to save your “favorites.”  But for me, I’m more interested in saving my favorites centrally, along with my other citations.

Despite these gripes, I’m thrilled that this collection is out, and I salute the Newberry librarians and archivists who worked hard to preserve it, catalog it, and made it accessible.

Joe Worker Arrives Online

In the last days of my tenure at the University of Illinois, I spent several hours digging through vertical files in the library of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.  Because of changes in professors’ interests–generally away from collective bargaining–and space considerations, the bulky and little used file cabinets were slated for removal.  Not sure if the files would be destroyed or stored out of reach, I wanted to at least assess what might be lost.

And that’s where I found the wonderful, full-color comic book “Joe Worker and the Story of Labor” produced by the CIO Research and Education Department in 1948.  Through the good graces of Betsy Kruger at the UIUC Library, the entire booklet is now available for free download at the Internet Archive.  You can read about it here, and download it here.  UIUC has uploaded a few other similar pamphlets from the CIO, like How Big is Big Business, and I’m still looking forward to the scanning of the CIO’s comic book on the “Bible and the Working Man.”

From the first page, above panels depicting Elamites and Chaldians trading racial slurs:  “The trick of setting worker against worker started way back.  The idea was to keep common men of different tribes and tongues divided and enslaved.  King Nimrod of Anciet Babylonia tried this, but it didn’t work–he even lost his own kingdom.  The centuries have taught Labor the great lesson–only in union is there strength.  So today all American workers, native born and foreign, Christian and Jew, White and Negro, together march forward.”

May Day: Stakeholders vs. Shareholders

In 1885 the group of labor unions that would later become the American Federation of Labor boldly declared that as of May 1st 1886, eight hours would constitute a day’s labor. This was at a time when 12 and 14 hour days were the norm for wage earners. And to the surprise of many, working people across the U.S. organized themselves and walked out of their factories to make that declaration a reality. Some succeeded. Most did not. It would be another 52 years before the Fair Labor Standards Act mandated the 8 hour day, overtime, and the minimum wage for most wage workers (with significant exceptions).

We’re on the far side of that history now.  The 8 hour day, the 40 hour week and the steady job are not even part of most workers’ living memory.  Most young workers (say under 30) are intimately familiar with what used to be called “nonstandard” work arrangements, self-funded health insurance and pensions, and a do-it-yourself approach to the labor market.  The current economic crisis, now more than a year old, has simply brought the ugly reality of contemporary work into the narrow focus, and short attention span, of the mainstream media.  The rise and fall of the 8 hour day was a long arc.  It took half a century to win the 8 hour day, and another 70 years to bring us to our own dismal days.

It is our distance from that long crisis of capitalism (or series of crises) that makes possible the return of May Day.  As some have noted, the when Republicans call Obama a “socialist,” the result is an increase in the number of people identifying as “socialists.”  They don’t even bother with “communist,” and their recent forays into “fascist” likely won’t fly either.  We’re in a new era.  Not a particularly nice era.  But a generational shift in personnel and in language.  If our political economy moves along through a series of crises, then we’re in a new form of crisis. And we’ve yet to see what forms of organizing, and what rhetorical appeals, really have traction.

One word to look for is “stakeholder.”  Without any legal definition, stakeholder implies a claim to participation in decision making and in a share of the benefits of society.  It conjures a world of competing legitimate interests, and implies negotiation and compromise.  If you look at the language of the union haters decrying the Chrysler and GM deals you can see their underlying argument is usually that workers don’t deserve high wages because they are lazy.  Shareholders, on the other hand are exempt from the charge of laziness frankly because they have money.  The argument of May Day, and the language of stakeholding, is that everyone deserves to make a decent living by virtue of living in a society.  Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will.  There are only 24 hours in a day, and so many years in a life.  The eight hour movement sought to claw back some portion of that for people to decide on their own.

The language of stakeholding isn’t perfect.  It can be used as a cover for enforced cooperation (“we’re all in this together”) and one-sided “partnerships” between labor and management.  But it has several advantages. Because it is not a legal term, its content has to be defined, and redefined, in actual processes of organizing and negotiation.  It can transcend citizenship and legal status, as in: people working and living in a particular situation, whether they’re legally permitted to or not, are all stakeholders and should be consulted.  It’s not too far from how collective bargaining actually works, when it works.  And, strategically, it has favor with and leverage on our popular President.  So let’s watch for talk of stakeholding as we go forward and try to make opportunities out of our latest crisis.

History in the Mix

We’ve all been watching and reading the denunciations, from the right and the left, of Wall Street and Obama’s alleged complicity in enriching the rich.  History has become something of a motif in these “debates.”  For instance, conservatives claim that the New Deal had no impact, or made the Depression worse.  (Don’t let facts get in your way, folks.)  And more recently, we have a series of allegedly grassroots anti-tax “Tea Parties” that aim to harken back to the American Revolution.  (Contrary to MSM belief, evidence points to these “tea parties” being a premeditated astro turf project).

On the left there is the implication that Obama is failing to take the kind of bold actions that FDR took in the 1930s.  Here it’s worth recalling that many of Roosevelt’s early actions were largely symbolic, or repackaged extensions of Hoover policies.  The boldest moves toward regulation, especially the National Recovery Act had complex impacts, often empowering employers more than workers.  Many left wingers considered Roosevelt a tool of big business, or worse, an American fascist.  It was the “Second New Deal,” beginning in 1935, that brought us an effective labor law, and the famous public works of the WPA. (And it was the war that ended the Depression).

For your enjoyment, I offer this little ditty from the July 1933 issue of the New Pioneer, the Communist Party’s youth magazine.

The Spirit of ‘33

We celebrate July the Fouth
With patriotic glory–
But have we got enough to eat?
Oh, that’s another story!

Yankee Doodle, fight to win
Yankee Doodle dandy
Until a workers’ land we’re in
Yankee Doodle dandy

Our President, old Franklin D.
So busy with his new deal,
Forgetting the forgotten man,
Is helping bankers to steal.

Yankee Doodle, march right on,
Yankee Doodle dandy
Until the long hard fight is won,
Yankee Doodle dandy

Morgan won’t pay income tax,
He hasn’t any money–
Will they put him into jail?
Come on, don’t be funny!

Yankee Doodle, shout on high,
Yankee Doodle dandy
We’re in this fight until we die
Yankee Doodle dandy

The bosses are in quite a mess,
They can’t find a solution–
Workers know the answer, though–
The answer’s Revolution!

Yankee Doodle, let ‘er go,
Yankee Doodle dandy
Here’s your friend and there’s your foe
Yankee Doodle dandy

by Sim Slim.

Here’s hoping Rush Limbaugh will pick this one up!  You can see an image of the page on my Flickr photostream.

End of an Era

About a month ago, the Fox News website (of all places) interviewed me for an article on historians’ assessments of Bush II’s legacy.  The reporter began with the well-worn idea that it takes a few decades to fully assess a presidency, an idea about which I’ve always been ambivalent.  Sure, some things take time to figure out.  But as I told the reporter: “It doesn’t take a historian to know that this is going to be a presidency that will not be seen favorably in retrospect.”

I also made the following claim:  “Higbie said the Bush term will be seen as the last presidency that the Reagan period opened, including dynamics such as a bolstering of the private sector and business amidst a weakening labor movement.”

I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the high priests of global business agrees with that idea.  From an article on Bloomberg last week:

Billionaire investor George Soros said the current economic crisis has its roots in the financial deregulation of the 1980s and marks the end of a free-market model that has since dominated capitalist countries.

Liberalization of the financial industry begun by the Reagan administration has led to a series of breakdowns forcing government intervention, Soros told economists and bankers last night at a private dinner at Columbia University in New York.

It’s always nice to feel that you’re ahead of the curve, however, the notion has certainly been in the air since the 2006 elections so I don’t claim too much originality.

But what is very interesting in light of Soros’s comments is the speed with which the ideological hegemony of business, of neoliberal globalization, is crumbling.  A month ago, there were only a few voices in the media wilderness calling for the nationalization of banks.  In the midst of the fight for the stimulus bill, during which the Republicans called Obama a “Socialist,” Obama declared that nationalization unworkable and contrary to our “culture” (which in retrospect looks more like a hedge than a statement of principle).  The entire Republican game plan during the stimulus fight was based on the notion that we are in a “normal” recession that will “naturally” turn around if we can just “free the energies” of America’s “entrepreneurial spirit.” And much of the media seemed to agree that Obama had over-reached.  That his presidency was finished, a failure almost before it had begun.

Of course, the stimulus passed.  Then last week came word of Alan Greespan declaring bank nationalization a likely necessity, followed by a few members of Congress, and then Soros.  Now the lonely voices in the media wilderness (e.g., Nuriel Rubini) look like Casandras, and folks take a second look when they declare that the “Laizziez-Faire Anglo-American Model of Capitalism” is mortally wounded.  The reason, of course, is that the underlying economic realities are moving well beyond the ideological blinders.  Bank nationalization, however, distastful to our “culture,” is becoming a reality even if we don’t use the word.

The ground is shifting rapidly, and it’s hard to see how it can shift back any time in the next 12-18 months.  Onto that ground comes President Obama more productive after one month in office than many presidents after 4 years.   And still wildly popular.  Ahead of the curve.

Visualizing the Recovery (texts)

Lately, I’ve been enjoying the visualization tool Wordle, which was created
by folks at IBM Research Visual Communication Lab. Wordle creates word clouds of any text you supply. It can also draw text from a blog or rss feed. The tool has been around for a while, but this newer, simplified interface is great. So here are a few examples.

Text of the 1,000 page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e., the Stimulus), minus the word “section.”

To remix this cloud go to the Wordle Gallery.

Or consider the transcript of Obama’s recent town hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana:

To remix this cloud go to the Wordle Gallery.

The appeal of these text clouds is that they provide an easy (maybe too easy) index of the contents of a body of text.  For the ARRA:  Act.  provided. funds.  For the town hall meeting:  Applause. people. get. going. Make. jobs.

It’s non-linear reading.  Not that one would give up actually reading texts, obviously (although I don’t plan on reading the whole ARRA), but it gives you a quick sense of the weight of particular words.  And it is not necessarily static.  Part of the instructive element of this technology, I think, is the ability to remix text clouds by adjusting the layout, font, color, and number of words.

Now I just need to figure out how to export the text of my book.

Hat tip to historying.

A taste of things to come?

While Congress debates what to do about our economic crisis, a group of Chicago workers have taken matters into their own hands.

Last week managers at Chicago’s Republic Windows announced that the company would shut down in three days, and they promptly cut off workers’ health insurance. The reason? The slump in the housing industry and the withdrawal of a credit line by Bank of America. The short notice violates state and federal laws about advance notice for mass layoffs, and workers are due payment for their accrued vacation pay. Funny thing, apparently the company removed some heavy machinery from the plant over the Thanksgiving holiday leading to speculation that they plan to set up production in a more “business friendly” environment.

Rather than accept their fate, the workers (members of United Electrical Workers local 1110) occupied the factory and sent out a general call for support. And who should respond?  Not only Jessie Jackson.  Not only two powerful U.S. Reps.  But our President-elect himself.  According to the New York Times, Obama said of the occupation:

“The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned,” Mr. Obama said, ” I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.”

Ah, what a difference an election makes.  Granted, it’s not an outright statement of support for sit-down strikes.  But can you imagine Bush saying this?  Bill Clinton?  I can’t.  We’re talking about a group of people trespassing on private property and refusing to leave.  We’re talking about people taking direct action to confront the economic crisis on the ground.  True, all these workers want is back pay, vaction pay, and reasonable notice.  In a few days, this will be resolved and the occupation will end.  The real question is whether this event is a taste of things to come?

During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt famously quipped that if he worked in a factory he would join a union.  That message was immediately trumpeted by the labor movement to significant effect.  It wasn’t the only reason people joined unions in unprecedented numbers during the 1930s.  There was, of course, a major change in the legal structure of labor relations, and a hugely creative and determined drive by organizers and rank-and-file unionists.  But no one should underestimate the symbolic significance of even vague support from a very popular President.  The terrain of struggle is already shifting.

To follow the story beyond the MSM:

Pilsen Prole blog

Chicago Indymedia newswire

There is an interview with union leaders here on the Internet Archive.

Update: The UE announces victory.

Images and Links for my UCSB Presentation

If you’re finding this blog via my working paper “Self-Education, Radicalism, and the Authentic Organic Intellectual,” you may have a copy without links to the images mentioned in the Appendix.  So here are the images, and links to the complete text of the “How I Became a Rebel” autobiographies. Everybody else can ignore this post.

How I Became a Rebel, Part 1 and Part II.

Image 1 (click through for larger image and citation).

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

An awakening as sudden as it was violent

From James Maurer, It Can Be Done (New York:  The Rand School, 1938).

Learning to Read

Working beside me in the machine shop was a journeyman named Thomas King.  I learned later that he was one of the original organizers of the Knights of Labor.  He talked to me about justice and labor’s rights, of the need for workers to organize, of their solidarity at the ballot box, and other ideas new to me.  They were subjects that I knew nothing about and cared less; he might as well have talked about trigonometry or the nebular hypothesis for all the impression he made on me at first.  However, I pretended to be interested so as not to hurt his feelings, for outside what I thought were his foolish notions, he was a good fellow always ready to help me in my work.

One day he asked me if I would care to hear him make a speech.  I really wasn’t interested in a speech by him or anybody else, but I agreed to go in order not to offend him.  The meeting was held in the Junction House Park and several hundred attended.  The next morning King asked me what I thought of his speech.  Ashamed to admit that I hadn’t understood it I cheerfully lied, “Great!”  He then gave me a small pamphlet with the remark, “Read that and tell me what you think of it.”

It was the first time anyone had asked me for an opinion on something in print, and that night after supper I tackled the pamphlet, but try as I might I found the job too much for me.  I could spell out the words but could pronounce only a few;  and some were so big I suspected they belonged to another language.  For over an hour I wrestled with the little pamphlet, determined to find out what it had to say, but finally had to acknowledge defeat.  Mother’s prayer book lay on the table;  I hurriedly opened it and tried to read it, but could not.

I was nearly sixteen, yet had no idea why anyone should learn to read.  My vocabulary consisted of a few hundred simple words, fully half of which I pronounced wrong or with a Pennsylvania Dutch accent.  That evening I had an awakening as sudden as it was violent.  For the first time in my life it dawned on me why children were sent to school;  schools weren’t penal institutions after all.  I rushed to the front room to Mother, fairly screaming;  “Why can’t I read!”

“Why, Jimmie!” she exclaimed.  “What are you talking about?”  I explained myself.  “Well,” said Mother, “it’s like this, Jimmie.  We always were poor and instead of going to school you had to go to work.  And, besides, you never seemed to get anything out of school when you did go.”

Up to then no one had taken the trouble to explain the purpose of learning the alphabet or the multiplication table.  I could recite the multiplication table by heart, but I hadn’t the slightest idea what use I was to make of it;  it sounded like a poem without any sense.  And I couldn’t understand why I should learn to spell “apple” or “horse” or “cat,” when I could say the words so much more quickly.  That is the way I had reasoned out the scheme of education, and not even the educators had thought of setting me on the right track.  It was a little labor pamphlet that switched me off the narrow path of illiteracy to the broad highway of knowledge and light.

The next morning when King asked me what I thought of the pamphlet I frankly admitted that I couldn’t read it.  He looked at me in amazement.  “Sixteen and you can’t read!” he exclaimed.  “Boy, what have you been doing with yourself all these years?”  I made no effort to excuse myself.  Instead, I said: “I’d give a thousand dollars, if I had them, to be able to read.”  For a quarter of an hour or so neither of us spoke another word.  King was evidently doing some serious thinking.  Finally he came over to my machine and laying a hand on my shoulder, said;  “Jimmie, I’ll give you your chance and it won’t cost you a cent.”

And with that Tom King, the labor leader, opened a school with me as his only pupil.  Our schoolroom during the day was the machine shop, with our machines for desks.  Two or three nights a week he labored with me at home, and thus he started me on a journey I should have begun ten years before.  For over a year King worked with me;  I read everything I could lay my hands on, and I developed my knowledge of mathematics by measuring everything in and around the machine shop and figuring out the square and cube of each.

###

Google Books: surprisingly cool

Hey, I’m married to a librarian.  So the whole “we’re scanning everything” crusade that Google Books and the University of Michigan have been on for the past few years has not always been received with open arms around our household.  I’m even on record (somewhere) calling this project “digital Fordism.”  And it was meant perjoratively.  (At the time, I thought that was an original idea, but I just googled it.  Oh well.)

Lately I’ve been preparing a class on early 20th century social history and I’ve been (sort of) loving GoogleBooks.  Lots and lots of good, full-text material from the pre-1923 era (i.e., the cut off for public domain).  For instance, I wanted to start the class by presenting students with several visions of social division circa 1900, and it was very easy to search and find things like Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth”, Jane Addams’s “Modern Lear”, Henry D. Llyod’s “Wealth Against Commonwealth“, DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, and even a good variety of Eugene Debs’s work.  All of it full text, free, and downloadable as a PDF.

What else?  Jack London novels; lots of classic progressive era investigations (tho sadly not too much from the Chicago School of Sociology);  various volumes of federal investigations:  Industrial Commission, USCIR, Immigration Commission.  All very cool.  But oddly, federal records from the post 1922 era don’t seem to be freely available.  So for instance the LaFollette Committee hearings (search for Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor) are listed, but not available in full text mode.  This is frustrating since all federal publications are public domain.  Who didn’t get the memo?

But through it all I’m still left with the thought that this massive digital library is missing one very important element:  LIBRARIANS.  Gobs of information.  No organization.  A dozen volumes (maybe two dozen) of the Industrial Commission, but no way to link, order, or index them.  No way to indicate that these separate volumes are in fact part of a whole work. No way to browse them together as you would in a LIBRARY.

Historically this has been the task of catalogers.  Might Google Books create a way for it’s users to serve that role, albiet in a less skilled manner?  Or better yet, as I suggested in a long-ago review of a digital archive:  as we digitize real libraries, might we retain some of the value-added by generations of librarians?  Subject headings are probably pie in the sky.  I’ll settle for some linkage of volumes that are obviously part of the same publication, but were divided because the mechanics of the book-form dictated it.

Enough complaining.  For your amusement I’ve added an RSS feed of my GoogleBooks “library” down in the sidebar.  Now you can see exactly what I’m “reading.”  Soon we’ll see how much my students “read.”

By the way, you can request a reprint of these full-text volumes via this site:  http://www.publicdomainreprints.org/ which also allows you to search the Internet Archive.  You can review my experience with this process here.