Internationalizing Working-Class History since the 1970s: Challenges from Historiography, Archives, and the Web

In this essay the communication practices of labor migrants and their evolution from nineteenth-century print media to late twentiethcentury electronic media provide the frame for a discussion of the limitations of national approaches to collection and interpretation. Multiple languages and knowledge of cultures of origin are required, cooperative library and research projects are necessary. On the basis of the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project it is argued that analysis of the bibliographic data by themselves, without going into the contents of the newspapers, revises current assumptions about processes of migration, acculturation, and internationalist class positions. The classic North American immigrant labor press came to an end in the 1970s. New patterns, feminization of migration and mobility to domestic and caregiving work, and new patterns of communication led to an ascendancy of electronic publications. Electronic publications and global rather than hemispheric migration will require different collecting strategies. These, like their printed predecessors, provide a perspective on migrants that differs from ethnicity and state-side approaches. Human rights rather than class struggles and migrant remittances rather the denationalization are the themes, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) rather than labor organizations are the publishers. In the internationalizing research scene, the Wisconsin Historical Society, through its collections dating from the time of the labor relations studies of Richard T. Ely, Selig Perlman, John R. Commons, and others became an important resource. At the time of these scholars’ groundbreaking work, Internationalizing Working-Class History since the 1970s: Challenges from Historiography, Archives, and the Web Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 56, No. 3, Winter 2008 (“Alternative Print Culture: Social History and Libraries,” edited by Wayne A. Wiegand and Christine Pawley), pp. 635–649 © 2008 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 636 library trends/winter 2008 disciplines were far more integrated than in the compartmentalized and fragmented academia of the present. Most of the reformers of the period were as much part of an Atlantic space of social reform and intellectual exchange as workers were of the labor markets of the Atlantic economies (see Rodgers, 1998). But under twentieth-century nation-state paradigms and powers of definition such transeuropean and transatlantic traditions had been relegated to the margins or, even, oblivion. Rescuing working-class publications from this assigned place was a task assumed by James P. Danky, the newspaper and periodical librarian of the Wisconsin Historical Society. He inherited the responsibility for the largest collection of labor newspapers and periodicals in the United States. From the German press of Milwaukee’s socialists to the Italian American anarchists of Vermont, the society’s collections were a well-known source for scholars. In the political climate he needed energetic perseverance not only to prevent neglect of the collections in this field but, even more, to develop and expand them.1 He included new titles that reflected the changing demographics of the state and nation like, to give only one example, “UNITE!” published by the Blouse, Skirt, Sportswear, Children’s Wear and Allied Workers Union, Local 23–25. Even the union’s name suggests that the times of male-dominated work was past—but the women’s strike of 1909 had already set an early sign that neither AFL-leadership, nor pre-1960s scholars had fully understood. The pathbreaking work of the Wisconsin scholars, and thus the holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society, had been organized around concepts of labor relations and economics. Negotiating wages and organizing economic units were studied in the English language, and few scholars could read the many languages the laborers spoke and in which they published. To overcome limitations of language, culture, and state-centered archival collection as well as the nation-state focus of historical research, the authors of this essay developed the internationally cooperative Labor Migration Project (LMP). A first step of the LMP was to establish in 1978 the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project (LNPP) for the non-English language labor press in North America from the 1840s to the 1970s. With Jim Danky, the authors discussed the use of North American databases; Danky became a cooperating scholar. The bibliographic information by itself, placed in chronological sequence and studied quantitatively, changed the interpretations of the impact and development of ethnocultural working-class groups in North America. Building on the newspaper preservation project’s broadly cooperative structure, Danky worked to provide a similar source basis for Afro-Americans. The African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Maureen E. Hady, associate editor; Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998) was the result. Danky is internationalizing 637 harzig & hoerder/working-class history the perspective in his current project “Newspapers and Periodicals of the African Diaspora.” He thus helped to overcome a seemingly useful division of tasks among historians that involved a segmentation of working people’s experiences. In the U.S. context they were placed in compartments of the discipline separate from “labor history”: history of slavery and of African Americans, history of coolie labor and Asian Americans, and history of Chicanos or Mexican Americans. Following seemingly natural discourses that had racist origins but made sense in terms of source materials and approaches, most historians of the time divided the working classes according to the raceconscious categories or country of origin. As a result, their approaches were implicitly or even explicitly bounded by national language, institutions, and territorial borders. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century migrating men and women were thus entrenched in nation-state frames; they were seen as leaving the nation-state or entering another. With today’s globally mobile work force, however, we can see different frames of reference. Though the nation-state is still responsible for many of the migration policies that so prominently implicate the migrants’ lives—making them legal or turning them into “illegal criminals”—do we best capture their life experiences by a national perspective? Or do we see, through their Web-based forms of communication, a globally connected diaspora emerging which retains aspects of national identity but functions in a regional, transcultural, and worldwide frame? In this essay the authors consider the approach taken by the Labor Migration Project, in particular the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project (LNPP) to achieve bibliographic control over the non-English-language labor press in Englishand French-language North America. The authors also look at more recent Web-based labor publications to consider changes due to electronically mediated communication and new patterns of migration. The authors believe the archival and research work that Danky has developed for periodical publications will need to assume new dimensions—as yet difficult to assess—to cover electronic periodicals.2 The authors’ interest in labor can be traced to E. P. Thompson (1963), who had countered the organizational history of labor movements by his cultural and social history of class formation as women historians pointed to their male colleagues that the working class consisted of men and women (Tilly & Scott, 1978). In the United States, the three great figures of labor historiography, Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, David Brody, and the generation of their students had begun to reconceptualize the history of labor movements—for most of which sources were easily accessible in union or party archives—to working-class history for which research was much more time-consuming and required new questions, new frames of reference, and new sources.3 638 library trends/winter 2008 The Non-English Language Labor Press in North America Thus the stage was set for the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project. Scholars from all European migrant sending cultures and from the two North American receiving cultures agreed to cooperate in a bibliographic project on the labor and socialist press. In a way, the labor press as a whole was an alternative press that fought the exclusionary powers of the middleclass dominated state. In Europe and North America, some of the press advocated a revolutionary change of existing structures, but the majority demanded inclusion of the working classes. This press was thus statist and even nationalist by demanding jobs in the nation’s economy, and by relegating in-migrating workers to inferior, even racially inferior status. At the same time it was internationalist in reporting and by intention and often was connected at least by sympathy to the First, Second, and Third Internationals. Numerous editors of North American newspapers and journals had previous editing experience in their European culture of origin. Working-class formation, at this time, was a northern-hemisphere-wide experience with bound labor migrants, slaves, and contract workers coming also from African societies, Chinese regions, and India’s many cultural groups. The tension between statewide (or national) self-interest and international solidarity may be illustrated by an example from the press of the German trade union federation. In the 1880s, it counseled workers: “Your America is here”—workers should struggle for better conditions at home rather than depart for presumably better working conditions in other societies. The same newspaper, on its last page, published the farewell notices of workers leaving for the United States or, in relatively small numbers, Canada. The press also warned workers not to migrate to sites of strikes in neighboring countries and take jobs as strikebreakers. Self-interestedly it added, at least on one occasion, that—if the respective strike continued to be sustained—the capitalists might shut down the facilities and move production to a region in Germany where the respective skilled labor was available. It might be argued that the labor press in Europe and in North America was oppositional, alternative, and nation-state supporting at the same time (Hoerder, 1981, 1988). Those with the power of definition and of determining wage levels placed working men and women in general in marginal positions in society. Thus we see struggles that were aimed at inclusion and which were geared to changes of the social and economic system, side by side. By bringing together scholars from many cultures and by fusing ethnicity-centered with class-centered historiographies, the Labor Migration Project sought to reconceptualize nation–to–ethnic-enclave migrations into complex interdependent migrations in the North Atlantic economies (Hoerder, 1985). A northern transatlantic space emerged that connected first western, then northern, and finally eastern and southern 639 harzig & hoerder/working-class history European rural and urban neighborhoods to particular industrial locations in North America. Within this multilingual North Atlantic context the authors looked at interaction between migrant working men (and women) and resident working class organizations in Europe and did find labor newspapers written for and by immigrants.4 Within Europe the labor-importing core, consisting of Germany, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, and Great Britain, attracted workers from the northern, eastern, southern, and western (i.e., Irish) periphery. From this analysis of the continent-wide regions of origin of the North America–bound migrants, the authors turned to the United States and Canada with the intention to provide “comprehensive annotated bibliographies of the non-English-language labor and radical periodical publications” in both societies (Hoerder, 1987, p. 3). This source compendium became the basis for scholars’ attempts to achieve “a comparative cultural history of the North American working classes whatever their social origin in their respective cultures of departure” (p. 3). In view of the manycultured and multiethnic European states as well as in recognition of the local/regional cultural origins of migrants, the emphasis was on cultures rather than states of departure. Migrants established transcultural connections and crossed borders easily, states developed the dividing and controlling passport and border-control systems only from the late nineteenth century on. The majority of connections relating cultures of origin and receiving cultures were not between countries, thus were not transnational, but rather between particular communities—defined locally, ethnoculturally, and by class and gender. Thus migration may be better understood as translocal, transregional, or transcultural (Hoerder, 2005). This shifting of the frame from states to macroregions changed views of migrant men and women in terms of culture, class, and gender positionings. Similarly, the mere analysis of the bibliographic data of the labor and radical press in North America (and in Europe)—before even taking into account the contents and orientation of the periodicals—provided new perspectives. Quantitatively, the total number of non-English-language labor union and radical periodicals published in North America amounted to about 1,265 from the 1840s to the 1970s: 265 of West European immigrants of which 240 of were German-language, 160 North European ones, 620 Southeast and East European ones, and 220 South European ones— in chronological sequence of first appearance. A large number were ephemeral, not surviving their first year of publication, though a “core” press, composed mainly of the organs of well-established labor unions, was published for decades. Often the development of the press was related to long-term developments in Europe as well as to sudden changes in the cultures of origin. The volume of the German-language press is, to some degree, explained by the early arrival of German-language socialists and utopian thinkers, 640 library trends/winter 2008 the cooperation of German and Austrian workers, and the fact that among artisans and, subsequently, skilled workers in Central and East Central Europe, German had been and was the international language. As regards Yiddish-language publications, the failed revolution of 1905 in the Czarist Empire forced Ashkenazi Jewish radicals as well as those from the three Baltic territories to flee and, consequently gave impetus to their radical press in exile. The imposition of Hungarian (Magyar) culture on the Slovak people after 1867 resulted in publication of more Slovak-language periodicals in North America than in Slovakia.5 The decline of all of the German-language ethnic and ethnoradical press has often been assumed to date from the antagonism against German and Austrian Americans after the declaration of war in 1914 and, in particular, after the entry of the United States into the war. However, the publication data tell a more complex story. The volume of German transatlantic migration declined rapidly around 1893, when a deep economic crisis in the United States caused layoffs and when the new level of industrialization in Germany was sufficient to provide jobs. About a decade after the decline of German migration, the vibrancy of the U.S.-published German-language press declined. From the mid-1890s on, the annual number of newly founded papers took a downward slide, reaching a plateau from about 1910 to 1917. Only then did the wartime induced decline occur. The core press, too, had begun to lose impact a decade before the U.S. entry into World War One. This indicated that part of the viability of the ethnic and ethnic radical press depended on contacts to the society of origin mediated by continuous arrival of new migrants.6 Ever since the analyses of the Chicago School of Sociology, scholars have discussed migrants in terms of bordered ethnic groups. However, the press of the different Scandinavian-language groups indicated a pattern overlooked under the nation–to–ethnic-enclave paradigm that acted like a blindfold to screen out scholars’ awareness of interethnic connections and transcultural cooperations. Since relations between Scandinavian societies had been close, and since the number of migrants from each Scandinavian-language group was, at least at the beginning of the migrations, too small to support a press of its own, a pan-Scandinavian press emerged among migrants. Such cooperation has also been found in migration patterns of other cultural groups of people leaving Europe. From the mixed German-Polish territories Germans left first, Poles used the information about migration options sent back, and in the receiving localities, Milwaukee for example, interethnic German-Polish cooperation emerged. Similarly Slovaks followed Czechs, using the information sent by the earlier migrants, and both groups cooperated upon arrival in Chicago. Thus, before even looking at the content of the press, patterns of activities and interactions emerge from a quantitative analysis of the bibliographic data (Park, 1922).7 641 harzig & hoerder/working-class history The ethnic press fulfilled a mediating, triple role in conveying information: It provided news from the society of origin deemed of importance to the migrants; it reported on the receiving society, that is, the temporary or new, permanent home; and it provided space for discussing affairs of the respective community. It constantly mediated and negotiated between the two cultures in the interest of migrants engaged in a trajectory between the two (see Hoerder & Harzig, 1987, 1:31–37). This leads to a question: may the decline of the labor and radical press be at least partly explained by its inability—the core press perhaps excepted—to fulfill all three functions? Its resources were often scant, its class-based readership smaller than that of the general ethnic press. And its emphasis on the unity of the working class prevented attention to regional cultural affiliations. The advertisement and announcement sections of the mainstream Germanlanguage American press carried large numbers of items from migrant organizations of a particular locality, like a district town, or a particular region, like Mecklenburg, or an earlier migrant settlement, like Germans in Hungary. These cultural affiliations were important for everyday life, and once again point to the transcultural rather than transnational experiences of migrant men and women. The emphasis on class and its common goal to improve wages and working conditions was certainly in the interest of working families but did not speak to their local and regional networks and belongings. Questions need also to be asked about the internationalism of the working classes, the migrants among them, and the new working classes they established after migration or of which they became part. While some editors of labor periodicals, in particular European societies, migrated to North America and continued their editorial and printing activities there, labor migrants seem to have been internationally mobile rather than internationally conscious of capitalist and class alignments and struggles. Research on migration of unskilled workers indicates that the majority of them came from rural contexts and strata and thus brought peasant mentalities with them. As a result of their experiences as tenants, theirs could be a culture of resistance, but one that followed different experiences than those of urban workers. Contrary to Gutman’s (1976) assumption that these workers brought neither class consciousness nor factory-regularity in work habits, they did have notions of struggle and equity and they came with regular work habits, which they were forced to lose when industries stopped during economic downswings or factories laid them off for a few hours, a day, or longer because of a breakdown of machinery. Again, we may ask: did the labor press talk to workers whose class and ethnocultural background varied? Editors often had a national, urban, industrial focus and did pay little attention to cultural (regional/rural/urban) differences. This observation is not meant to diminish the importance of interethnic or interclass cooperations, or of cooperation between workers on 642 library trends/winter 2008 the shop floor and working-class families in the streets and in ethnic neighborhoods. It merely indicates that the interface between complex class compositions and ethnicity was not a primary arena of the labor press’s editors. This interface was also highly male-centered. Attention to women and families beyond calls for a “family wage” for men was almost nonexistent. Although the transatlantic ethnic labor and radical press was more vibrant and quantitatively far larger than had been taken for granted to the 1970s, by then, however, this press was coming to its end. At the same time, new publications, in particular in Spanish language, emerged. The transatlantic migration system was being replaced in both the Americas and Europe by south-north migration systems. In Europe, the “guestworkers” from the Mediterranean periphery were, in fact, labor migrants who more often than not settled and brought in family. In the Americas, the southern economies, which did not provide jobs in a number sufficient to permit sustainable lives of the working-age population; the refugeegenerating regimes often supported by particular U.S. administrations; and—at the other end—the dynamism of the United States and Canadian economies, also resulted in large northbound migrations. Since the 1980s, these migrants increasingly use electronic means of communication and thus pose a challenge to historians and archivists. Thus communication and print culture underwent major changes. The question that remains, however, is whether there is a legacy of working class print culture in today’s electronic world and if yes, what shape does it take? Can we recognize continuities to previous labor or working class migrants who created and controlled their own means of communication and by doing so participated in the prospects of a transcultural/ acculturated identity, that is, sinking roots—on their own terms—in the new society? How do today’s migrant workers communicate beyond the microlevel of personal letters, phone calls and e-mails. Do we see a new, albeit different medium emerging that provides a forum to discuss issues of wider importance like working conditions, legal developments, prospects of organizing resistance against extreme forms of exploitation, and perhaps formulation of demands, that is, building of group identities? Today’s labor migrants are faced with a number of different challenges when trying to build an identity based on media: on the one hand technology may help in composing and distributing various forms of media, printed or electronically; on the other hand the radius of communication has spread beyond the local, the regional, the national. Today’s “labor-paper editors” have to think globally, their readers are seldom concentrated in one city, one region, not even in one receiving state. So far, we know very little about the means of communication of modern global migrant