Working‐Class Life and Culture

Working‐Class Life and Culture. In his landmark study Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (1976), historian Herbert Gutman drew upon the work of anthropologist Sidney Mintz to define working‐class culture as a “kind of resource” for workers in their daily lives and struggles. Much recent scholarship has focused on interpreting working‐class culture, from its origins in Colonial‐Era artisanal life through the immigrant‐industrial era of the nineteenth century to the diverse and complex patterns of the twentieth century. There is, in fact, no single working‐class culture, but a shifting kaleidoscope of subcultures, in which race and ethnicity, gender, religion, region, and type of employment all play a part.

The Late Colonial and Antebellum Eras.

Distinct urban working classes first emerged in the cities of mid‐eighteenth century America. With craft work the predominant way of producing goods, artisans occupied an important, if subordinate, place in the cultural life of the late Colonial Era. The closely linked values of craft work and “manliness” influenced both revolutionary and class politics, as artisans, inspired by Thomas Paine, adopted the banner of republicanism. The artisanal culture spawned by the Revolutionary War and its aftermath found expression in the politics of the early republic.

As the economic and cultural gap separating the social classes widened in the Antebellum Era, the urban working class was characterized by fear of dependence, loss of political status, and racial and ethnic fissures. While immigrants fleeing Ireland's potato famine flooded into seaboard cities, white migrants arrived from rural America and the poverty‐stricken free black population also increased. Employed largely as day laborers in construction and transportation, these new workers drew upon agrarian traditions to create their own rough culture. U.S.‐born and immigrant white craftsmen, meanwhile, differed from both the emerging middle classes and the laboring poor. Reacting against the threat of their own transformation into wage laborers, craftsmen adopted artisanal republicanism and its labor theory of value to proclaim productive labor of the kind they themselves performed as the moral grounding of republican democracy, even as they distanced themselves from the unskilled masses and the dependent poor by celebrating their autonomy and respectability. Among printers, builders, shoemakers, tailors, and other artisans and mechanics, a sense of solidarity and pride in shared skills generated the first working‐class trade associations and, later, the first labor unions.

Economic dependency and political disfranchisement lowered the status of working‐class women. Politically and economically, men were the principal public actors in the working class. With a few exceptions, such as the early New England textile mills, women were denied employment in either skilled or unskilled occupations. Although most working‐class families required an economic contribution from wives and daughters, fathers and older sons were the principal wage‐earners and authority figures. For some workers, manliness expressed itself in dress, sporting competitions, braggadocio about drinking and sexual prowess, and the equation of masculinity with whiteness. Volunteer fire brigades and political clubs welded younger working men into ethnically defined solidarities. In New York and other cities, an urban subculture of native‐born and immigrant workingmen, typified by New York's “Bowery B'hoys,” glorified drinking, street fighting, and dandified clothes. If this expressed one facet of antebellum working‐class culture, another was revealed in the behavior of respectable artisans whose evangelical Protestantism extolled piety and sobriety.

The Urban‐Industrial Age.

Post‐Civil War working‐class culture assumed new forms in the growing cities of the North and Middle West. Racial divisions and differences among various ethnic immigrant groups, as well as membership in cross‐class organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic and fraternal organizations like the Masonic Order and Odd Fellows, often undercut working‐class solidarity. For a time in the late 1870s and 1880s, however, the Knights of Labor became the dominant institutional expression of working‐class political culture. Dedicated to improving social conditions and educating and organizing the producing classes, the Knights recruited skilled craftsmen, unskilled laborers, industrial workers, and—with less success—small businessmen. Under the banner of worker republicanism, the Knights espoused a radical working‐class political sensibility and adopted innovative forms of working‐class protest. The order also fostered a vibrant working‐class culture through political clubs, newspapers, songs, and literature, as well as land‐reform and home‐ownership associations and trade and industrial unions. The Knights supported women's rights and racial equality as well, rhetorically if not always in practice, as part of the effort to recruit all working people. But the Knights at their peak represented no more than 10 percent of all workers. Most politically active workers remained in the Republican or Democratic parties.

The Knights declined in the early 1890s as the bitter Homestead lockout and Pullman strike (1892 and 1894 respectively) thrust class conflict into national politics and as continued industrialization and immigration contributed to a shifting class terrain and intensified conflicts among workers of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. With racism and Jim Crow practices at a peak in America, the hostility of white workers toward the small but growing number of African‐American wage earners and, on the West Coast, Chinese immigrant workers, was particularly intense. With the new immigrants lacking labor‐market power and therefore proving difficult to organize, the railroad brotherhoods and the craft unions of the American Federation of Labor concentrated on advancing their own economic interests, and some actively supported immigration restriction.

Religious differences within the working class also intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Earlier waves of immigration had brought religious diversity to the U.S. working class. German immigrants had been both Catholic and Protestant, and the influx of Irish Catholic newcomers in a predominantly Protestant nation had stirred protests and riots. The religious divisions now deepened as Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants arrived in great numbers from southern and eastern Europe. Immigration peaked at about 1 million people a year between 1900 and World War I. While divergent religious loyalties reinforced ethnic and skill‐based differences among workers, they also encouraged new forms of working‐class organization. Immigrant fraternal organizations and mutual‐aid societies provided insurance benefits and enlivened community life with dances, fairs and holidays, and political activities. Ethnic parishes, publications, shops, taverns, athletic clubs, and cultural societies broadened and nourished working‐class culture. The preservation of Yiddish, Italian, Czech, Polish, and other immigrant languages in newspapers, religious services, and popular entertainments further cemented the solidarity of these immigrant working‐class enclaves.

Russian Jewish radicals, Italian anarchists, and eastern European socialists expanded working‐class political culture. While only a minority of immigrant workers were politically active, these enclaves did generate inclusive forms of worker protest and association. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905 to spread industrial unionism, organized immigrant and native‐born workers. Emphasizing class unity, the IWW promoted a vibrant working‐class culture through songs, poetry, and cartoons.

From World War I to the Late Twentieth Century.

Nevertheless, the culture of both immigrant and U.S.‐born workers was inexorably changing. Mass‐market fiction, dime novels, and the popular press increasingly appealed to a broad, cross‐class audience with stories tailored to the language skills and educational levels of working‐class readers. Music halls, vaudeville, amusement parks, professional sports, dance pavilions, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley all attracted working‐class consumers. Vaudevillians, sheet‐music publishers, and early filmmakers appropriated themes from immigrant and working‐class culture while tailoring their products to a mass audience. The immigrant working‐class cultural enclaves remained strong through the 1920s, but thereafter the new mass culture steadily undermined the ethnic associations and businesses that had dominanted the immigrants’ social and cultural life. One result of this process was to make social class more salient than ethnicity and to encourage the formation of a working‐class consciousness. The hard times of the 1930s and the patriotism of World War II contributed to this process as well, as did the decline of immigration caused by World War I and the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s. Working‐class life and culture was further transformed as increasing numbers of native‐born women and southern black and white migrants replaced European immigrants in the labor force. Southern whites introduced country music and the “hillbilly” culture of Appalachia to northern cities, even as African Americans brought gospel music and the blues.

As the economic crisis of the 1930s bankrupted ethnic fraternal unions, banks, and businesses, the specter of unemployment, and the continued influence of popular culture, united workers across ethnic and occupational lines. The shift found expression in the political culture of the New Deal. The labor movement of the 1930s, encouraged by the National Labor Relations Act and led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations and a revitalized American Federation of Labor, transformed working‐class culture. Labor newspapers, radical theater, union‐sponsored recreational events, and workers’‐education programs underscored how far many workers had moved toward broad‐based class solidarity. The new language of working‐class unity did not always match its practice, as racial and gender discrimination and conflict continued to roil working‐class life, but World War II furthered racial integration, drew millions of women at least temporarily into the labor force, and encouraged pluralistic values in culture and society.

In the prosperous 1950s, working‐class culture became almost indistinguishable from mass culture. Television, movies, mass magazines, paperback books, chain stores, fast‐food outlets, and the popular music promoted by the recording industry and radio disk jockeys all relied heavily on working‐class consumers. While mass culture producers sometimes employed class themes, they sought to build a consumer market that transcended class. For example, while African‐American music retained its distinctivenes, the blues evolved into rock‐and‐roll, which expressed a youth culture more than a class culture. Its wide acceptance among young people of differing ethnic, racial, and class origins blunted its political edge.

Working‐Class Culture? A Summing Up.

As the twentieth century ended, the question of whether one could even speak of an American working‐class culture remained unresolved. In any simple sense, the answer was probably no. In many respects that had always been true. Throughout the nation's history, the working class had been characterized by its fragmentation, even though class‐defined political movements in the workplace and the electoral arena had sometimes opened a common ground for broad working‐class constituencies. Ironically, the moments of exceptional class solidarity had often come at times of national cultural unity, as in the early national era, the New Deal period, and World War II. The rise of a mass culture and other pressures countering class consciousness did not, therefore, preempt and undermine working‐class culture so much as exist in dynamic relationship with it. Similarly, competing racial, ethnic, religious, and gender identities did not erode working‐class culture but rather vastly complicated it, posing major hurdles to efforts to discover and define it. As a new century dawned, the task of understanding both the contradictions and the strengths of America's working‐class culture seemed as challenging as ever.
See also Anarchism; Asian Americans; Consumer Culture; Depressions, Economic; Film; German Americans; Immigrant Labor; Immigration Law; Industrial Relations; Irish Americans; Judaism; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Lowell Mills; Mobility; Radicalism; Railroads; Roman Catholicism; Socialism; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Urbanization; Women in the Labor Force; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Kathy Peiss , Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York, 1986.
Christine Stansell , City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860, 1986.
Herbert Gutman , Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Ira Berlin, 1987.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,, James Leloudis,, Robert Korstad,, Mary Murphy,, Lu Ann Jones,, and and Christopher B. Daly , Like a Family: The Making of the Cotton Mill World 1987.
David Montgomery , The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925, 1987.
Lizabeth Cohen , Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, 1990.
Elizabeth Faue , Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945, 1991.
Leon Fink , In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture, 1994.
Robin D.G. Kelley , Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class, 1994.
Hadassa Kosak , Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881-1905, 2000.

Elizabeth Faue