Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.
There are countless versions of similar, if varying, trajectories of the public-labor history alliance throughout the world. In the countries we work in and study, Chile and Brazil, labor history was made public initially through its close ties to anarchist organizations, Communist parties, and labor movements in which anarchists and Communists played a major role. In the wake of state repression during the 1960s and 1970s and neoliberal economic restructuring, labor history moved away from an earlier generation's focus on institutions, leaders, political parties, and the state toward studying the new social history and the history of ordinary people and everyday life. This coincided in Chile with Salvador Allende's “Chilean road to socialism” (1970–1973) and then the explosion of popular protest against the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet during the early 1980s and, in Brazil, with the emergence of a “new labor movement” that opposed Brazil's military dictatorship in massive strikes during the late 1970s led by metal worker and future Workers Party Leader Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva (Lula), now Brazil's president.
Since the turn to working-class and social history in the United States and England during the 1960s and in Chile and Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s, economic restructuring according to the neoclassical economic models of the Chicago School and the accompanying intensification of economic globalization have hit both labor movements and the alliance of public and labor history hard. In certain parts of the world, like Latin America, neoliberal reforms were implemented at gunpoint and were accompanied by the violent repression of labor movements and intellectuals alike, as Marco Aurélio Santana and Ricardo Medieros Pimenta describe in their article on Brazil. In the United States and England, the 1980s brought Thatcher's crushing of the miners' strike, discussed here in David Wray's article on Durham miners' galas, and the decimation of old industrial working-class neighborhoods and cities, chronicled by Robert Chidester and David Gadsby in their article on a public history archeological project in Baltimore and by Jeffrey Helgeson's article on labor tours in Chicago. A similar process is described by Lucy Taksa in her article on Australian industries transformed into industrial heritage sites. In this context labor history as public history has confronted new challenges. One of the significant roles played by labor history as public history has been local history projects in working-class neighborhoods experiencing violent political and economical displacement due to deindustrialization and, in some cases, political repression, since the 1970s. The development of labor tours in Chicago demonstrates the invaluable role of labor history and labor historians as manufacturers of public history, as well as key elements of community memory and organization. Chidester and Gadsby's article similarly probes the ways in which local public-labor histories of working-class communities can be essential to the ways in which those communities navigate the disruptions produced by deindustrialization and, in the case of Baltimore, urban gentrification.
Yet labor history as public history confronts new challenges in the context of free market economic reforms and economic globalization. As Chidester and Gadsby's article on public history in local communities shows, labor history as public history confronts the problem of what Lucy Taksa calls the Janus face of “nostalgia and nostophobia.” In the Baltimore neighborhood where Chidester, Gadsby, and their archeologist colleagues worked, the neighborhood's gentrification was accompanied by a commodification of its working-class history that silenced the current embattled working-class population and evacuated a commercialized kitsch working-class culture of any critical history, including its labor history. Elements of the neighborhood's working-class culture were appropriated and employed as attractions for its new middle-class residents and businesses, as well as tourists. In Australia, Taksa argues, industrial heritage sites often seek to conserve the railroads' past by focusing on technology and evoking nostalgia for the past to boost heritage tourism, while eliding any history of work, workers, or labor struggles. In an oddly similar vein, Jorge Giovannetti documents a surge in tourism to former slave plantations throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. As in the working-class urban neighborhoods studied by Chidester and Gadsby, the new interest in touring plantations often involves an almost total elision of the history of the slaves who worked cane and coffee fields and whose labor helped build “the big houses” that are the central attraction for nostalgic excursions back to the nineteenth century. These articles raise the challenge to labor and public history of the increasing commodification and commercialization of the past by both governments and businesses, be it working-class neighborhoods destroyed by deindustrialization and gentrification, old railroad yards, or slave plantations, in the name of generating local or regional economic growth and development.
The articles in this special section confront the issue of nostalgia in public-labor history projects in other ways as well. Many public-labor histories of working-class communities hammered by deindustrialization and state repression work to resuscitate lost histories and recover forgotten urban sites that mark significant, heroic or tragic, historical events—strikes, massacres, protests—and thus mark the transforming urban landscape with what Pierre Nora refers to as “memory places.” As cities have been transformed from sites of production to sites of consumption, radically changed from places constituted by a plethora of working-class communities of different races and ethnicities by deindustrialization and/or gentrification, labor-public history projects like the tours discussed by Helgeson have become invaluable.
Yet, the challenge of these projects to imprint the memory and history of cities' working-class communities on the urban landscape through tours, museums, exhibitions, concerts, and monuments, confronts the problem of how to deal with labor historians' interest in building an analysis of class formation that includes the histories of women workers and workers who constitute racial or immigrant ethnic minorities, as well as the histories of patriarchy, xenophobia, and racism. Chidester and Gadsby's article on Baltimore, for example, suggests how labor history's work to excavate the complex history of class formation can conflict with public history's project of conserving the memories and traditions of local communities. The neighborhood they study was overwhelmingly white and notorious for its racist politics. In this case, the labor historians (or archeologists) had to confront the issue of nostalgia in a different way and build an analysis of the city's working-class formation and its labor movements that took into account race and racism, while at the same time engaging working-class residents in a process of ethnography and oral history, ostensibly in the service of the defense of the community and its memories.
Politics constitutes another fault line that makes the labor-public history alliance difficult. How labor historians, working as public historians, engage with past political schisms and often violent internal conflicts in their projects to excavate and communicate to the broader public the histories of labor and working-class communities is not always easy. Here the Janus face of nostalgia and nostophobia, referred to by Taksa, is particularly acute. This is particularly true because ideological and political disputes have a long reach into the present. Thus, Peter Ludvigsen describes the political trials of the Workers' Museum in Denmark where a statue of Lenin—in an exhibition devoted to the role of the Communist Party in the labor movement—provoked scandal. Santana and Pimenta trace the ways in which contemporary labor-public history projects in Brazil confront two difficulties. The first is how to constitute working-class identity and cohesions among a new generation of younger workers faced with managerial strategies that effectively undermine older traditions of organization. The second is how to approach the labor movement's own historiographical practice, which highlights a major rupture between the “new unionism” of the 1970s and 1980s that is identified with Lula and the Workers Party and the “old unionism” identified with both the Communist Party and the corporatist labor relations system and labor movement developed under Getulio Vargas—a “nostophobia” in Taksa's words. In this context, labor-public historians face the challenge of adopting a critical approach to historiography and politics that work to separate these two periods (1930–1964 and the 1970s-present) and elide continuities and traditions between the old and new labor movements, establishing a rupture with both Vargas's populist and corporatist politics and the central role of the Communist Party in the “old” labor movement.
The histories of both industrialization and deindustrialization have been marked by violence. As a number of the articles in this issue demonstrate, one of labor history's important tasks as public history is to do the “memory work” required to build public awareness of the repression suffered by workers and labor. In Brazil, for example, Santana and Pimenta show the difficulties of doing labor history following decades of military rule and dictatorship and the importance of oral history in the place of more traditional sources that have been made unavailable because of repression. Their article highlights the fact that in many countries, like Brazil and Chile, the targets of state repression have been workers and the labor movement. Similarly, James Green and Elizabeth Jameson's article focuses on labor historians' work to restore the memorial to the victims of the 1914 Ludlow massacre and have it declared a National Historic Landmark. In this case, as they note, memorials and monuments are often “elegiac and ceremonial,” and thus ignored by labor historians who leave them to local historians and preservationists who work in unions, museums, and parks. But, like Santana and Pimenta, they argue for the importance of “memory places” in organizing public memories that might otherwise be lost. In a similar vein, Wray notes the importance of annual celebrations involving the parades of Durham miners' banners to preserve memories of the coal communities and their labor struggles that might have been swept away following the decimation of the miners' unions under Thatcher. Like memorials, the banners serve to disrupt normative narratives of the past that elide work, workers, and collective social struggles and, in Taksa's words, “to create spaces for the telling of alternative and fuller versions of forgotten stories.” Memorials like the Durham banners not only help maintain the memory of the past, but also serve as places and moments of the reconstruction of working-class communities and labor traditions in the present. A similar argument might be made about the folklore and folk song projects of Archie Green, which Sean Burns argues in an article here, represented both public history and innovative labor history linked to the work of historians like Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery. Together, then, the articles in this special issue demonstrate the urgency of making labor history public history through a wide variety of forms—including tours, memorials, museums, oral history, trade union historical projects, archives, festivals, film, and music—in the context of the often violent destruction of working-class communities and labor movements imposed by neoliberal restructuring, deindustrialization, and globalization.
