Historians of labor and working-class life face a powerful public amnesia; they seek to recover a past of struggle for economic security and dignity at work that is all too often obscured or even suppressed by consensual accounts of American history. Public historians necessarily work against similar lapses in popular memory. Historian Max Page has invoked the oppositional character of public history, which he asserts, “should by all rights be a radical undertaking. For, at its heart,” Page continues, “public history is about bringing history to a wider public, about challenging citizens out of complacency about their past and creating spaces for forgotten stories to be told.”Footnote 1
The Labor Trail: Chicago's History of Working-Class Life and Struggle, conceived and directed by historian Leon Fink for the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies (CCWCS), acts on a similar vision of labor history as provocative public history.Footnote 2 The project maps the contours of everyday life as well as the struggles of working people in Chicago, while opening this history up to a broader public discussion on an interactive website, www.labortrail.org. The Labor Trail's original paper map of 140 sites and eleven neighborhood tours, along with the substantially expanded content on the interactive website, offers a guide to the concrete world of workers' lives and a virtual space to debate the contested meanings of the city's working-class history.
Chicago is perhaps the preeminent immigrant working-class city. Working people in Chicago created a model of urban life with an unprecedented variety of large and small industries, a politically powerful and resilient craft economy, retail and wholesale businesses, and a range of white-collar work. By taking a broad view of Chicago's labor and working-class history, The Labor Trail connects the history of labor unions and labor struggles to the narratives of working-class communities, including the places where working people worshipped; the houses they built; and the taverns, theaters, and parks where they relaxed. This larger world of Chicago working-class history sheds further light on the experiences of European, Asian, and Latin American immigration and migration from the US South; the communities and workplaces immigrants and migrants built; and the often-unsung labor and civil rights struggles they mounted to improve life and working conditions in the city.
Chicago has managed to sustain a memory, however incomplete, of a working-class past. Carl Sandburg's image of the “city of big shoulders” remains iconic. Chicago's novelists, poets, journalists, reformers, and musicians have enshrined an image of a hard-working, gritty city.Footnote 3 The city's past even helps keep labor history alive in high school and undergraduate curricula as the site of the 1886 Haymarket Incident and the 1894 Pullman Boycott.Footnote 4 In addition, local historians and the members of the Illinois Labor History Society have valiantly worked to preserve the memories of the city's labor and working-class movements when virtually no one else was paying close attention.Footnote 5 Nonetheless, the casual visitor to the city and readers with only a general interest in Chicago could easily get to know the city as the phoenix of late-nineteenth-century modernity, rising from the flames of the Great Fire of 1871 to become the industrial giant on the lake. Gleaming skyscrapers, shopping on the Magnificent Mile, the Chicago Board of Trade, political corruption, perennially-underperforming baseball teams, and, now, the neighborhood of Hyde Park (former home of President Barack Obama) loom larger in the popular mind than the craft and industrial unions that fought for workers' interests, or the neighborhoods stretching out on the horizon where immigrants and migrants built working-class communities.
The Labor Trail recaptures the dramas of everyday people building their lives in a city defined by “creative destruction.” At the heart of these everyday dramas were efforts to build individual lives and collective institutions in the face of corporations, laws, police forces, and older settlers often antagonistic to newcomers and their desires for higher wages, better working conditions, control over their workplaces, and political power. The everyday struggles of working-class Chicagoans gave rise to some of the greatest leaders and confrontations in American history. In Chicago, Eugene V. Debs, Albert and Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, Ida B. Wells, Clarence Darrow, Bessie Abramowitz, Sidney Hillman, and A. Philip Randolph (to name just a few) fought alongside workers in monumental battles against the combined forces of the American industrial octopus. In a recent biography of Mother Jones, known at the time as “the most dangerous woman in America” for her ability to mobilize militant workers' movements, historian Elliott J. Gorn describes the political environment that made Chicago a place of profound individual and collective striving and confrontation:
There, a constant surge of ideas—foreign and domestic versions of trade and industrial unionism, anarchism, socialism, populism—was a part of daily working life. The radical ideas, the mix of peoples from so many lands, the city's mythology of rebuilding itself out of the ashes, all made it remarkable. But much more than that, Chicago was where people came to transform themselves. … What brought so many to Chicago was ambition, and the mutability of cityscape and self fed their desires.Footnote 6
The Labor Trail offers a unique opportunity for historians, teachers, union members, and the general public to visit the places where working-class Chicagoans pursued their individual and collective desires and to debate their achievements.
The activists who drove Chicago's labor rights, civil rights, women's rights, and immigrants' rights movements make up a substantial part of The Labor Trail. The Labor Trail helps mark the sites of some of the most dramatic and significant labor clashes in United States history. The otherwise unnoticed intersection at Sixteenth Street and Halsted, for example, marks the Battle of the Viaduct, Chicago workers' standoff with local police, state militia, and federal troops during the Great Upheaval of 1877. The Trail also marks important centers of African-American labor and civil rights history on Chicago's segregated South Side that are otherwise forgotten in the city's efforts to memorialize “Bronzeville” and the “Blues District.” Near Forty-third Street and Michigan Avenue, for instance, black men and women organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in an unassuming graystone three-flat building, while the International Labor Defense, the National Negro Congress, and the South Side Labor Council met nearby in The Forum Building, which now stands unmarked and largely unknown. By placing scores of labor and working-class movements and organizations on the map, The Labor Trail demonstrates that resistance and dissent have been a regular, not an exceptional, part of the city's history.
Dissenting perspectives often get lost or taken out of context in the retelling of American history, which adds to the importance of the videos on www.labortrail.org that preserve the voices of some of the most prominent of the city's labor leaders. Reverend Addie Wyatt, for example, explains how her introduction to the labor movement in Chicago's packinghouses during the Second World War allowed her to work, earn a previously unimaginable wage, raise a family with the security of maternity leave and seniority rights, and become involved in a fight for justice as both a union official and a community leader. Leon Despres, the rare independent Chicago alderman, describes his role as legal counsel to the Republic Steel strikers in the aftermath of the 1937 Republic Steel Massacre. And activist Katie Jordan recalls how a group of Mexican-American workers prevailed in a 2001 strike at Carousel Linens in suburban Chicago. The Carousel Linens workers won widespread support from labor, community, church, and student groups, taking the motto that “It's better to die on your feet than to live a lifetime on your knees.”
In addition to the radical leaders and movements on the map, The Labor Trail also highlights the many layers of history in Chicago's working-class neighborhoods. Many generations of immigrants and migrants have created and rejuvenated workplaces and community institutions. Since 1970, for example, Casa Aztlán has fostered social networks and acted as a community advocate for a Mexican immigrant population in a neighborhood facing gentrification, underemployment, and gang violence. Casa Aztlán operates out of the same building in the South West Side community of Pilsen where the Howell Neighborhood House served the Bohemian, Pole, and Czech population earlier in the century. The Labor Trail also reclaims downtown Chicago as a working-class place. On streets more often remembered as home to corporate wealth and power, visitors to The Labor Trail go where working-class residents marched to demand their fair share of the relief funds raised for the victims of the 1871 fire; where teachers rallied in support of their unions in the 1930s; where the city's carpenters built a nearly unrivaled center of craft union economic and political power; where the Coalition of Labor Union Women was founded; and where a largely immigrant workforce continues to march on the longest running picket line in the country at the Congress Hotel.Footnote 7
The Labor Trail crosses conventional boundaries between historical topics and places. Recently, for example, one-time candidate for the presidency of the United Steelworkers of America Ed Sadlowski, his fellow union leader Joe Gutierrez, and historian Joseph C. Bigott led a tour of the former steel factories and communities in the Calumet Region along the Illinois-Indiana border.Footnote 8 As Sadlowski and Gutierrez shared their memories of the working conditions and interracial industrial unionism, Bigott, a historian at Purdue University-Calumet whose father was a tool-and-die maker in the steel industry, added a complementary perspective on how working people built housing, communities, and local economies in the shadow of giant steel factories and oil refineries. Sadlowski, Gutierrez, and Bigott spoke to the ways in which steel workers of different races, ethnicities, and job classifications came together, often uneasily, to build powerful unions and community bases for upward mobility. Similarly, The Labor Trail team is now working with historians and activists affiliated with the Calumet Heritage Project to extend the Trail across the Illinois state border to reconnect the stories of life and work throughout the steel region, showing that class-based employment and environmental struggles of local residents are not “Indiana” or “Chicago” stories.Footnote 9 In this way, public history with a working-class vision shows that the problems working-class people face, and ultimately the strategies they are creating to improve life in the area, necessarily cross formal political boundaries.
The Labor Trail provides a virtual location where activists, historians, and the general public can preserve and share the continuing saga of labor and working-class history. The project's team members lead regular bus tours and present the map to students, high school teachers, union members, community groups, academics, and the general public. The Labor Trail has been used in teacher education programs, seeking to inspire high school teachers to bring both working-class history themes and a style of education that focuses on the practice of history into their classrooms. During the Fall 2008 semester, my students at Roosevelt University and historian Liesl Orenic's students at Dominican University wrote Labor Trail essays. One student presented an oral history with a member of the International Association of Machinists who recounted how the union protected him from the worst effects of mechanization and speed-ups in the newspaper printing industry. Another student drew upon interviews, parish records, and local newspapers to examine how Mexican immigrants worked their way on the railroads to the relatively little-known Mexican-American working-class suburb of Argo-Summit, Illinois, after the Second World War. And still another revealed the devastating effects of the use of permanent replacement workers during the 1989 beer truck delivery drivers' strike by Teamsters Local 744.Footnote 10 By combining the themes of work, unionization, immigration, and community these essays epitomized the potential insights provided when students engaged with labor and working-class history as public history. Similar collaborations will be central to The Labor Trail's growth in the future, while they also point to the challenge and reward of approaching labor history as public history.
