In 1967 the Smithsonian Institute sponsored its first Festival of American Folklife on the public greens of the Washington Mall. The brainchild of folk music field collector and performer Ralph Rinzler, the Festival reflected the way a new generation of folklorists was reconceptualizing their academic discipline in relation to the public sector.Footnote ¹ Rinzler, who had previously worked for the Newport Folk Festival, “effectively lobbied S. Dillon Ripley, the secretary of the Smithsonian, to take the traditional artifacts out of their cases and reveal the people and the cultural dynamism that lay behind the static dioramas and exhibit.”Footnote ² Showcasing craft demonstration, decorative art, traditional music and dance, the new Festival succeeded, on the one hand, in presenting traditional cultural forms as living, contemporary practices.Footnote ³ On the other hand, its emphasis on pre-industrial forms of cultural expression reinforced a limited conception of folklife as mostly antiquarian and backward looking. This emphasis troubled Archie Green—one of Rinzler's close friends.

Like Rinzler, Green had a history of involvement in the folk music revival of the 1960s.Footnote ⁴ In this sense, the two shared instincts and skills for public presentation. But, unlike Rinzler, Green had come to an interest in folklife through his twenty-year career as a union shipwright and carpenter. In the late 1960s, as Rinzler developed the American Folklife Festival, Green was parlaying his unique life history as a craftsman and amateur folklorist into doctoral work which forged an unprecedented scholarly integration of labor history with culturally nuanced folklore studies.Footnote ⁵ It is in this context that Green began to discuss with Rinzler a vision for how the American Folklife Festival could highlight the skills and cultural expressions of contemporary craft and industrial workers.

By 1971 Green had persuaded Rinzler to add a new thematic section to the Festival. They called it “Working Americans,” and Green became a behind-the-scenes coordinator of the program. The Working Americans exhibit at the Smithsonian's 1971 American Folklife Festival constitutes an important milestone in the history of labor-oriented public history in the United States. This article begins by revisiting the implementation of this program with a particular focus on the challenging questions it raised for Archie Green and a subsequent coordinator of the Exhibit, occupational folklorist Robert McCarl. To draw out these challenges I turn to McCarl's insightful reflection on the Working Americans exhibit in his essay, “Occupational Folklife in the Public Sector.”Footnote ⁶ Following this, I explore how Green's life history uniquely prepared him to formatively advance the fields of public sector folklore, labor history, and public history. The child of participants in the 1905 Russian Revolution, raised in the multi-ethnic, working-class crucible of 1920s East Los Angeles and educated and apprenticed in what historian Michael Denning calls the “Age of the CIO,” Green cultivated a unique sensibility and appreciation for workers' culture.Footnote ⁷ Central to this commitment is a generative, if uneasy, combination of syndicalist ideals with pragmatic New Deal-inspired politics. My final section argues that we must understand the creation of the Working Americans exhibit and the passing of the 1976 Folklife Preservation Act in the context of an emergent, democratic, cultural sensibility developing within the disciplines of folklore, labor history, and American Studies during the late 1960s and 1970s. This cultural sensibility (different from and pre-dating the “linguistic” or “cultural turn” of the 1980s) expressed a historical conjuncture of influences. From one direction, we find public intellectuals like Archie Green, Herbert Gutman, and Studs Terkel advancing projects that reflected their earlier exposure to Popular Front and New Deal cultural politics. From another direction, 1960s left social struggles catalyzed a new, younger generation of historians and folklorists. They all generated critical questions about historiography, ethnography, academic accountability, and the role of intellectuals in a democracy. Many of these questions had a deep connection to, as well as profound implications for, the practice of public history. I argue that Archie Green figures significantly in these transformations of the disciplines of labor history, folklore, American cultural studies, and public history. Indeed, Green's academic and public sector work constitutes the major link among these fields.

“Hardhats” on the Mall

In the humid mid-Atlantic heat of July 1971, thousands of people interacted with glass blowers, meat cutters, sheep shearers, and metal workers as they demonstrated their crafts on the expansive Washington Mall. The visual centerpiece of the Working Americans exhibit space became a towering, two storey I-beam steel structure erected by ironworkers. The nine ironworkers came from locals all over the country (Local 1, Chicago; Local 84, Houston; Local 433, Los Angeles; to name a few). They had been selected and brought together by the International.Footnote ⁸ Two days into their exhibition, the Washington Post ran an article on how unexpected and captivating it was to see a dozen union “hardhats” displaying their daring skill against the backdrop of the Washington Monument.Footnote ⁹ While the Post focused on the entertainment value of the craftsmanship, the most significant implication of the exhibit for our purposes was how it implied and expressed a range of sociological, political, and ethical questions that productively enmeshed academic concerns with larger socio-political issues of the day.

Robert McCarl, a protégé of Archie Green and a folklorist who later took up coordination of the Working Americans exhibition, offers a productive overview of these questions in his essay, “Occupational Folklife in the Public Sector.”Footnote ¹⁰ McCarl emphasizes the challenges of constructing a work presentation loyal to the nuanced dynamics of work site practices while also trying to meet the needs of all the constituents invested in the exhibit. In the case of the 1971 Ironworkers Exhibit these constituents included the workers themselves, the ironworker's various locals, the Ironworkers International, the AFL-CIO, the exhibit curators, Smithsonian bureaucrats, and the diverse public attendees. The challenges begin, according to McCarl, when we recognize that “the mode of production” is a “fundamental force in the creation and maintenance of work culture,” and therefore an exhibition poses numerous challenges for translating complex production processes into public presentation.Footnote ¹¹ This is not only a problem of logistics (i.e., relocating and displaying all the right equipment and tools) but more significantly of remembering that

From his discussion of these complex work site dynamics, McCarl goes on to alert public historians and folklorists of labor to a tension in their work—a tension that relates to long-time challenges faced by labor scholar-activists. As scholars, he writes,

Drawing from his and Green's experiences with the Working Americans exhibit, McCarl offers two overarching directives for helping to navigate this tension. First, curators of worker exhibits “must make decisions concerning the public presentation of those activities that best reinforce the emerging cultural goals of the participants themselves.”Footnote ¹⁴ Second,

Both directives are fundamentally about planning processes. If a public program is to reflect “the emerging cultural goals of the participants themselves,” the participants must be thoroughly included in exhibition planning from conceptualization to implementation. This ethical imperative places a constellation of demands on an exhibit coordinator—not the least of which is a negotiation of worker-participant goals with the potentially different or contradictory goals of regional and national union executives. As McCarl poignantly describes,

This last sentence encapsulates the political commitment Green and McCarl brought to their coordination of Working Americans.

Such ethical, political, and logistical challenges are, of course, not unique to bringing workers' skill and culture into public presentation. Any relocation and representation of cultural practice will involve versions of these problems. That being said, McCarl effectively articulates challenges specific to occupational folklife presentation. Many of these are rooted in the general question: How are workers perceived in the public imagination and to what degree does a presentation perpetuate and/or disrupt stereotypes of workers? These questions can only be addressed through analysis of specific exhibitions in relation to the specific historical, geographical, political, and cultural conditions of their performance and public reception. McCarl exercises this kind of situated analysis when reflecting on challenges Archie Green faced in launching the Working Americans exhibit in 1971:

As McCarl references, the Working Americans exhibit began at a historical moment where the confluence of civil rights movements, 1960s cultural movements, and the Vietnam War were shifting the material realities, discursive representations, and popular notions of American workers. Amidst this matrix of contestation, Green, as much through instinct as principle, looked to shape an experience where the workers, to the greatest degree possible, could directly and autonomously convey their experience to the festival audience. This commitment, rooted in his syndicalist-democratic ideals, is the basis for the way Green met the ethical challenges facing him as an occupational folklorist in the public sector. As his experiences with the Ironworkers Exhibit in 1971 evidence, this commitment often alarmed other public sector cultural workers at the time. Green says,

These questions of who participates in and controls the form of an exhibit speak directly to highly politicized debates within circles of public sector cultural workers at the time. Green specifies that,

Green's history as a shipwright and union secretary combined with his scholarly work on “laborlore” assured him of the pedagogical impact of workers demonstrating and narrating their skills to the public. Green expresses this in the program notes for the 1973 festival book:

Green and McCarl both suggest that perhaps the most profound and lasting impact of the exhibition may have been on the participating workers themselves. This supports Green's long-maintained conviction that public laborlore projects foster worker pride in skills that are often taken for granted by or made invisible by the dominant social order.Footnote ²¹ These issues of skill and identity beg other questions fundamental in the humanities, social sciences, and, one would hope, a democratic society. For starters, who constitutes “folk,” and how does presenting craft workers in a folklife festival challenge definitions of “folk” commonly organized around region, ethnicity, style, race, and gender? This sociological question links to philosophical and political ones: When, why, and where are certain forms of knowledge deemed valuable by a society? How do public exhibitions contribute to and/or destabilize dominant relations of culture, knowledge, and power? Who has power to determine the form and format of a public labor exhibition? Who benefits most from public presentations of workers' skills and culture?

There are no easy answers to such questions, but I agree with McCarl that Archie Green's varied life experiences “uniquely qualified” him to wrestle with them through his path-breaking public sector work.Footnote ²² Green's launching of the Working Americans exhibit was the first of what would become a long list of accomplishments in public sector folklore and history from the community level to the federal level. He is perhaps best known for his successful lobbying for the 1976 Folklife Preservation Act, which established the American Folklife Center as part of the Library of Congress.Footnote ²³ The success of the annual American Folklife Festival on the Washington Mall helped pave the way for this legislative victory.Footnote ²⁴ In the next section, I discuss two of Green's life experiences that significantly motivated and informed his substantial commitment to, and skill for, public sector labor work. My intention is to show how these experiences fostered in Green a keen sensibility for cultural dynamics that later would well serve his ambition to link studies of worker culture with history and public presentation. My biographical sketches rely significantly on dozens of interviews I conducted with Archie Green between 2006 and 2008.

The Laboring of Archie Green

Reflecting on the relationship between his life experience and his public sector accomplishments, Green writes, “Coming to the academy after seasoning in a bicultural family and after learning a waterfront trade, I could help articulate a legislative agenda for folklife.”Footnote ²⁵ While his comments focus on the passing of the 1976 Folklife Preservation Act, they have equal bearing on his initiation of Working Americans, his many books on laborlore, his years of innovative university teaching, and, in the final decades of his life, his directing of the Fund for Labor Culture and History. Green's upbringing and his years of ship building on the San Francisco waterfront gave him firsthand experience of how multidimensional working-class identity can be and how prevailing stereotypes and popular images of workers diminish and undervalue the complexity of workplace culture.

Green's first lessons in the deeply intersectional character of workers' identity came through the stories of his father, Samuel Green. Samuel was born around 1896 in Chernegov, a rural Ukrainian province in the Russian Empire. Like all the males in his extended Jewish family, he developed a skilled trade—in his case harness making. Archie relayed that by sixteen Samuel was a “politically sophisticated young radical who like many other Eastern European Jews was captured by ideals of the French Revolution” and, in the context of growing anti-Czarist sentiment, knew all “the competing platforms of the main revolutionary parties.”Footnote ²⁶ Samuel was a socialist, and, with a small mimeograph that he hid under the floorboards of his home, he printed revolutionary literature. While Samuel knew people in the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) and the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (SDs), Archie stressed that his father maintained reservations about their revolutionary prescriptions. Referring to Samuel, a Jewish Ukrainian living in a Russian, Christian Orthodox Empire, Green said:

Archie's stories of his father portray Samuel as grappling with political decisions that foreshadowed perennial challenges of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century. In this vein, Archie said, “I realized later that at age 17, my father already faced some of the central problems of revolutionary or Marxist thought: that is, how to make a combination of your identity as a member of a minority with revolutionary activity?” Interestingly, in a different interview, Green pointed out that W.E.B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction helped him make fuller sense of his father's life and his own childhood. “When I read Du Bois on double identity, I realized that at five, six, or seven years old in Los Angeles, hearing my father's stories, I was dealing with quadruple identity.”Footnote ²⁸

In October of 1905, when Czar Nicolas II implemented martial law in the Chernegov province, Samuel escaped the terror of the Cossacks by hiding in a hay wagon and fleeing for Finland. Ultimately, Samuel, and later his wife-to-be, Rose, made it to Winnipeg, Canada where Archie and his two sisters were born. Then, in 1923, the family moved via train to Boyle Heights, a working-class immigrant community in East Los Angles. Samuel sought better work, and Rose dreamed of better weather. As George Sanchez's research shows, Boyle Heights in the decades between the two World Wars “developed as a uniquely working-class Jewish community, full of Jewish-owned businesses … [and] many Jewish workers brought with them a tradition of radical politics and enthusiastic trade unionism.”Footnote ²⁹ Green's stories of his adolescence note that his parents and other working-class Jews in the neighborhood also regularly socialized with the substantial populations of Mexican, Armenian, Serbian, Yugoslav, Bosnian, and Japanese immigrants who also lived in Boyle Heights in this era. Samuel and Rose welcomed neighbors of all ethnicities into their home, and the anecdotes Archie offered from this time period paint a picture of the Green's house as a vibrant meeting place for an ethnically diverse group of working-class intellectuals:

The long-term impact of this home and neighborhood atmosphere on Green's personality, political commitments, and future scholarship cannot be overemphasized. When Green attended the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1930s, he was already an adamant reader of Louis Adamic's labor writing. He took labor economics courses with Paul Taylor and Ira Cross—two professors who had studied under John Commons in Wisconsin. In his dorm room he proudly hung a poster of John L. Lewis. This was, to borrow Michael Denning's language, the “Age of the CIO,” and Green's visions of his future reflected what Denning calls the “laboring of American culture.”Footnote ³¹ Even though he engaged seriously with the humanities and social sciences, Green never doubted that he would enter a union trade upon graduation. With degree in hand, he moved to a Civilian Conservation Corps work-camp for a year-long stint learning the basics of surveying, road building, and fire fighting near the California-Oregon border. After this, in January of 1941, Green returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to look for work in the waterfront industries.

When Green began walking the San Francisco waterfront in search of work, the shipbuilding industries of the Bay were expanding, but this was not yet the explosive economy of wartime ship production. Living at a YMCA on the San Francisco Embarcadero, Green had no luck for a week until an old college connection got him in the door at Western Pipe and Steel—a small yard in South San Francisco that produced type C3 ships.Footnote ³² He immediately began work as a “shipwright's helper” and proudly received his first union card in Local 2116—Dry Dock, Marine Waysmen, Stage Riggers & Helpers. “Local 2116,” Green wrote in an autobiographical essay, “attracted an unusual mix of men—waterfront drifters, castaways, casualties of the labor wars of the 1930s. We had a large contingent of former seamen and longshoremen who found safe haven in the area's shipyards.”Footnote ³³

As an apprentice, Green was assigned to work with one of these veterans of the waterfront—shipwright Benny Carwardine. The ensuing relationship proved profoundly formative. Not only did Carwardine introduce Green to the world of stem and stern, Carwardine also offered a very specific orientation to trade unionism and the contentious labor politics of the San Francisco waterfront. Keep in mind, when Green arrived in 1941 to work on the San Francisco waterfront, he stepped into a space where some of the fiercest worker-employer-state struggles of the 1930s occurred. The insurgent general strike of 1934, catalyzed by maritime worker militancy, was expressive of an emergent “social warrant” demanded by workers nationwide.Footnote ³⁴ This era birthed new industrial unions, new union leaders, and bold new experiments in worker solidarity such as the Maritime Federation of the Pacific. The 1934 strike was followed by an even longer, ninety-nine day maritime strike in the winter of 1936–1937. As Bruce Nelson persuasively argues, these monumental waterfront struggles, a microcosm of larger battles to define the very nature and scope of American unionism, were fundamentally struggles to define Americanism and the place of the worker in the larger social order.Footnote ³⁵ Specifically, West Coast maritime, like the automobile industries of the Midwest, became a site where these larger contests between the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, craft unionism and industrial unionism, social democrats and communists, all played out.

Benny Carwardine, Green's mentor, had come to San Francisco after learning his craft on the Glasgow banks of the Clyde. Like other “Clydesiders,” Carwardine was as revered for his engineering skills, as he was infamous for his unique brand of militant industrial unionism and Scottish cultural pride. “They were blue collar, overall wearing, whiskey drinking, haggis eating, and camber throwing,” Green recalled of the Clydesiders. “They went to the Scottish games. They would go out to the St. Andrew's Society and recite Robert Burns. I can't express the amount of admiration I had for these men: salt of the earth, good mechanics, revolutionist, and nationalist—proud of one's heritage.”Footnote ³⁶ Clearly the waterfront mentoring was not limited to craftsmanship. Green absorbed shipwright style and manner. One veteran Clydesider told him, “If you want to be a shipwright, you've got to look like a shipwright.” That meant white cap, blue overalls, and always your union button.Footnote ³⁷

Green also absorbed from Carwardine a particular syndicalist political philosophy that drew on the revolutionary Marxism of Scottish trade union hero John Maclean. Carwardine likely met Maclean as a worker-student in one of the hugely popular courses on Marxism that Maclean offered to the Clyde Workers Committee and its members.Footnote ³⁸ In addition to his popular education work, Maclean helped found the Scottish Workers Republican Party in 1921—an organization that combined communism with a movement for Scottish independence. While Maclean expressed commitment to the vision of the Communist International, he felt it was critical that Scottish workers have a party independent of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In this sense, his anti-imperialism combined with skepticism for the control Moscow exercised over the Communist International. Carwardine retained Maclean's suspicion for the Communist Party and passed it on to Green. Carwardine was an early, vociferous critic of Communist-affiliated longshoremen Harry Bridges and his influential International Longshoremen's and Warehouse Union—a position that Green emulated. Similarly, Carwardine, following Maclean, instructed Green in a strain of syndicalism that embraced political party building alongside shop floor direct action and fervently celebrated cultural pride.

Archie Green's sequential exposure to his father's political history, the Boyle Heights’ working-class immigrant community, the Civillian Conservation Corps, and the culturally infused syndicalism of the Clydesiders constituted a rich education in how workers express their identity through occupationally inflected folklife. Without going into detail, it is also relevant to mention that Green, beginning early in his life, engaged with a variety of efforts to build political organizations including Upton Sinclair's 1934 End Poverty in California campaign, the American Students Union, and the Young Democrats. Later, as a union shipwright, he became an active member of his local, eventually winning the position of secretary before shipping off to the Second World War. The combination of his working-class, multi-ethnic, cultural epistemology with nuts-and-bolts organizational skills prepared Green to effectively imagine and advocate public sector laborlore later in his life. As he did with the 1971 Working Americans exhibit, Green engaged many needs at once: trade union education, audience engagement, instruction in craft and, most importantly, the imperative that workers speak for themselves.

I think it is valuable to construct a biographical approach to the foundations of Green's public sector work because, as is so often the case, his social imagination and skilled advocacy rested on knowledge, relationships, and associations rooted in personal experience. At the same time, this approach is meaningful only to the degree it captures how larger social phenomena, such as the New Deal and “Age of the CIO” metabolize at the level of the individual. From this perspective, I conclude with a brief analysis of how Green's work related to the transformations in labor history, folklore, American studies, and public history generated during the 1960s and 1970s.

Labor Studies, Folklore, and a Cultural Turn toward the Public Sector

In a 1989 volume of The Public Historian devoted to labor studies, James Green proposed that “The task of public historians is to create a more democratic cultural world.”Footnote ³⁹ Archie Green agreed completely. His efforts behind the Smithsonian's Working Americans exhibit commenced years of advocating for federal recognition of and funding for workers' culture and history. When he and Ralph Rinzler were collaborating in Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s, they discussed how the cultural orientation and funding priorities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts did not sufficiently recognize or support the nation's vast range of folklife. Combining forces with Jim Hightower, who at the time was an aide to Senator Ralph Yarborough from Texas, they inspired Yarborough to sponsor a bill that would fund an American Folklife Center. In 1976, after seven years of lobbying and multiple revisions, the American Folklife Preservation Act passed.Footnote ⁴⁰ On a policy level, the bill stands as one of the great cultural commitments in United States history, and, as Green importantly noted, “If it didn't pass then, it would never have had a chance in the era of Reaganite conservatism.”Footnote ⁴¹

The philosophical underpinning of Green's public sector advocacy can be summed up in one phrase: cultural pluralism. Green encountered the concept in Horace Kallen's Culture and Democracy in the United States.Footnote ⁴² Kallen, a German Jewish immigrant, studied under William James and George Santayana at Harvard in the first decade of the twentieth century. Along with his classmate Alaine Locke, Kallen was of a generation of pragmatist philosophers who deeply explored the relationship between cultural diversity and national cohesion. Kallen's pluralistic philosophy, according to Green, “assailed melting-pot assimilationists and Anglo-Saxon supremacists, equating pluralism with democracy.”Footnote ⁴³ Kallen's centering of cultural pluralism in “expressive behavior” assisted Green in translating his life experiences with work cultures and folk revivalism into programmatic efforts to enrich American cultural democracy.

Starting in the 1950s, while still a carpenter in San Francisco, Green began developing a reputation in his union local and beyond as a collector and proponent of “laborlore,” a term he coined to capture the culturally expressive traditions of workers.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the 1960s, after Green moved to Urbana-Champaign for a part-time librarian and teaching position, he focused much of his work on promoting traditional music—often with an emphasis on work songs. Green sponsored the hugely popular Campus Folksong Club, introducing thousands of undergraduates to American musicians who sustained deeply traditional, vernacular styles—artists such as Glenn Ohrlin, Hazel Dickens, Big Joe Williams and Doc Watson. Within the context of a growing national craze for folksong where citybilly interpreters of traditional material captured the media limelight, Green advocated an outlook toward traditional music organized around “particularity, preservation, and pluralism.”Footnote ⁴⁵ As folk music scholar Neil Rosenberg has suggested, these educational and organizational roles additionally prepared Green for the public sector advocacy ahead of him.Footnote ⁴⁶

At fifty-two years of age, Green completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and developed his research into the 1972 publication of Only A Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal Mining Songs.Footnote ⁴⁷ MacEdward Leach, Green's dissertation advisor, supported his vision to combine labor history with detailed ballad scholarship and a nascent form of media studies. The result was a book that provocatively stretched academic conventions in content and form. (The book's editor, Judith McCulloh, told me how insistent Green was about the specific placement of the more than one hundred images that stunningly complement the text.) While Only A Miner has been celebrated by music historians, occupational folklorists, and Appalachian scholars to this day, it should also be recognized as a crucial text in the birth of New Labor history and any American genealogy of interdisciplinary cultural studies.

It is not that Green has been ignored in labor history. (Unfortunately, this is the case in cultural studies.) Green has exercised important influence on labor scholars ranging from Paul Buhle and David Roediger to Robert Cherny and Michael Kazin. My point is that I have not yet seen him included in historiographical discussions about the important shift in labor history from a Wisconsin School-based trade union focus to a workers' culture emphasis. This conversation usually revolves around the excellent contributions of Herbert Gutman, David Montgomery, and David Brody (in the United States) and E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill (in Britain). Green was their intellectual contemporary, an association that can be obscured by the fact that Green wrote so many of his books during the last twenty years (while in his seventies and eighties!).Footnote ⁴⁸ Keep in mind, however, that when Gutman was doing his formative research in the 1960s on the labor uprisings of 1877, Green was busy formulating how coal mining song studies could serve as fecund entry into workers' lives and consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1965, when Green asked, “Does a [scholar] station himself at the furnace hearth, the personnel office, or the juke joint? Are our commitments strong enough to push us to steel not only where it is shaped physically, but also where the expressive life of its workers is shaped?” He was lighting the path for scholars—whether in labor history, American Studies, or folklore—to more thoroughly consider the “politics of the everyday.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The politics of the everyday, to use a popular and revealing phrase born out of the influence of 1960s movements on the academy, became an important historical concern as scholars like Green began to view identity in broader cultural and historical terms. Central to this shift for labor historians was an expanded conception of where one could find “the worker” and, by extension, an expanded conception of what kinds of social-historical materials could be looked at to illuminate worker identity, culture, consciousness, and struggle. Transcripts of union meetings might still be significant, but they were no longer sufficient. From this perspective, it is no surprise that New Labor history began to draw heavily from folklore studies. With their long history of ethnographic fieldwork, folklorists had been the people most meticulously documenting the speech, rituals, songs, jokes, fashions, and visual art of people living their everyday lives in their everyday contexts at work, at home, and in public. Green was at the forefront of this intersection.

My point is not just that we should add one more name to the list of founding (white) fathers of New Labor history. More fundamental than that I wish to bring attention to how the epistemological and methodological transformation of New Labor History—a transformation born of complex, far-reaching, and often revolutionary social forces—has over time been reduced and disciplined into a short list of a handful of writers within the academy—however amazing their research. Remembering other influential tributaries in the origin story of New Labor history can make a difference to how we understand labor history's current horizon of concerns and their political consequences. Bringing Green and others into historical view is less about altering the past and more about rejuvenating and decalcifying current historical work.Footnote ⁵¹ In the case of Green, when we sustain attention on his vision of laborlore, we are emboldened to resist the trend of New Labor history to conveniently fall back into asking questions and focusing on sources that defined the kind of history it originally set out to challenge.

This discussion of historiography also bears on the topic of public labor history. Consider one example: Doesn't it make sense to see Gutman's initiation of the American Social History Project (founded in 1981) as politically and ethically related to Green's earlier efforts at making labor history and culture more public through Working Americans and the Folklife Preservation Act? Interestingly, this kind of historiographic oversight does not occur in terms of how public sector folklorists construct their historical development over the past half-century. The three major anthologies concerned with public folklore all include Green's writings and highlight the huge contributions he made to the field.Footnote ⁵² The omission of Green from discussions about the rise of New Labor history, American cultural studies, and the related increase in public history work on labor reflects an inadequate recognition of how significantly folklorists working on occupational culture have contributed to and drawn from these encouraging, paradigmatic disciplinary changes.

The common ground linking all of these developments was and is this: When labor scholars—wherever they may be professionally housed—begin to seriously take up questions of culture, they are challenged to think in new ways about the role and place of workers' voices in their projects. The concern for worker culture, as we saw in 1960s and 1970s labor scholarship, necessitates fresh research methods and encourages a democratization of the processes of history making. These disciplinary transformations were not only about new subjects and hidden histories but also about letting workers speak for themselves. As a result, labor history, folklore, American studies, anthropology, oral history, and cultural studies began mingling in unprecedented ways. It is in this generative intersection, where Archie Green labored all his life, that public labor history has substantially grown.Footnote ⁵³