Reflections on Americanism

Extract

Charles Williams's essay on the nature of progressive Americanism takes me back to where my quest to understand this phenomenon began: the labor movement of the 1930s. The broad nature and intensity of working-class rebellion and mobilization during the Depression decade once led the historian Irving Bernstein to label this period, the “Turbulent Years.” I was part of a group of self-described “new labor historians” that set out to penetrate the mysteries of this movement and especially the consciousness of the workers who participated in it. Most of us undertook community or single industry studies, out of the conviction that the kind of in-depth investigations that such focused work allowed would yield fully realized portraits of working-class insurgencies and of the workplaces and communities out of which they emerged. I chose to explore a New England textile city while others opted to work on transit workers in New York City, dockworkers in West Coast port cities, electrical workers in Pittsburgh and Schenectady, teamsters in Minneapolis, and a broad range of industrial workers in Chicago. All of us, however, had one eye on the automobile industry in Detroit and its environs, for this industry had produced what became, arguably, the most successful, innovative, and progressive CIO union, the United Automobile Workers (UAW).