The Newberry Seminar in

Labor History

Co-sponsored by the History Departments of Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Labor and Working Class History Association

Seminars are held on Fridays from 3:00–5:00 PM
at the Newberry Library,
60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.
Papers are pre-circulated. For a copy e-mail scholl[at]newberry.org.

2009-2010

Special thanks to Professors James R. Barrett and Antoinette Burton for supporting this year's seminar.

2010-2011 Call for Papers

September 25, 2009— "Perplexities Enough": The Bodies and Minds of Working Class Women
Caroline Merithew, University of Dayton
Commentators:  Susan Levine, University of Illinois at Chicago and Christine Stansell, University of Chicago

In “Perplexities Enough:" The Bodies and Minds of Working Class Women, I look at how working class women described, experienced, used, and rhetorically constructed their bodies and minds for power in the first half of the twentieth century. I compare these sensibilities as workers with their middle class contemporaries’ constructions of them. My analysis draws on recent discussions in labor history which view the body as a possible avenue for integrating materialism and linguistic analysis to bring into focus female subjects. Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, for example, have called for studies which center the body in the practice of labor history to, among other things, dislodge the male physical form as paradigmatic. The paper brings together two strands of research which connect my scholarship in coal mining women and, in turn, more recent interest in labor education.

October 9, 2009— Chicago Traders and Transnational Labor During the Long War for the West
Ann Keating, North Central College
Commentators:  Fred Hoxie, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Joe Bigott, Purdue University Calumet
*Please note: the October 9th seminar meeting will be held in Altgeld Hall, Room 203, on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. For directions to NIU's campus, click here.

November 14, 2009— Saturday Symposium: Consumers—The Unknown Social Movement
Debating Lawrence Glickman's, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Featuring author Lawrence Glickman, University of South Carolina
Commentators:  Nan Enstad, University of Wisconsin Madison; Adam Green, University of Chicago; Susan Levine, University of Illinois at Chicago;  Nancy MacLean, Northwestern University; and Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland
Lawrence Glickman's talk is available to download or stream online at the Chicago Amplifed Site.
 Please Note: The Saturday Symposium will be held from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM

December 11, 2009— "For All Those Bending Years": IRCA, the Dog War, and the Campaign to Turn International Temps into Immigrants
Cindy Hahamovitch, College of William and Mary
Commentators:  Nancy MacLean, Northwestern University, and Will Jones, University of Wisconsin—Madison

In the 1970s farmworker lawyers fought to transform every aspect of farmworkers’ lives. They successfully sued to gain access to labor camps, to get workers transported in buses rather than flatbed trucks, to get farmworkers paid what they were owed. They sued to expose the conditions under which Caribbean cane cutters worked and sued to win those same miserable jobs for domestic workers. “We don’t lose,” Legal Services attorney Greg Schell said matter-of-factly. Yet farmworker lawyers didn’t exactly win either. While they battled over who would get the worst jobs in the world, the nation’s fields were filling up with Mexican men who lacked the legal right to work in the U.S. Who did one sue about that?

 January 15, 2010— Not Right: Progressive Era Liberals and Open Shoppery
Chad Pearson, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Commentators: Shelton Stromquist, University of Iowa, and Rosemary Feuer, Northern Illinois University

This paper explores the different ways in which several prominent Progressive Era liberals, including, but not limited to, Ray Stannard Baker, Louis D. Brandeis, John Dewey, Washington Gladden, Tom L. Johnson, and Theodore Roosevelt, embraced open-shoppery, the central managerial theory that justified strikebreaking, union-busting, and blacklisting.  I call these figures soft-core open-shoppers, and describe the ways in which they attempted to make the open-shop principle acceptable to a reform-minded public.  Most stood to the left of those active in union-busting associations, and many claimed to admire labor unions.  But they also championed the rights of employers and strikebreakers, which open-shoppers called “free” workers.  By exploring the triangulating roles played by several liberal individuals at a time of much labor unrest, this paper illustrates the elasticity of the open-shop theory and deepens our understanding of the history of anti-union ideas and actions.

February 5, 2010— Why They Were Members of a Teachers Union: College Faculty and the AFT
Timothy Cain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Commentators:  Lisa Philips, Indiana State University and Joe Berry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This paper examines college teachers' unions between 1928 and 1941, a period during which the American Federation of Teachers chartered more than four dozen locals on college campuses. Focusing on the arguments for faculty unionization and considering the locals' corresponding activities, the paper demonstrates that faculty joined the AFT for political reasons, to influence K-12 education, and to improve their own working conditions. Many others, though, rejected these efforts, and with the expulsion of the New York College Teachers Union and the ensuing membership struggles related to World War II, this era of faculty unionization came to an end.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was one of many progressive industrial unions with strong civil rights platforms in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1940s. Despite attacks for its ties with the left and its expulsion from the CIO in 1950, it provided institutional resources to civil rights activists and maintained a civil rights agenda inside and outside of its union halls during the 1950s and through the McCarthy-era repression. The ILWU's commitment to civil rights helped sustain the Bay Area's civil rights movement, linking activists from the 1940s and 1950s to the re-emerging movement of the early 1960s.

Since its inception the New Labor history has relied on the so-called “market revolution” to account for America’s industrialization post-1815. This reified “revolution” centers on the factory floor, deferring discussion of international trade to the late twentieth century. This will not do. This paper explores cheap British woolens "dumped" on American shores after the Napoleonic wars, an 1816-19 Anglo-American trade war, and how both contributed to the Panic of 1819. This paper examines global commodity chains, American banking practices, Schumpeterian crash theory, and 19th century haberdashery. Part of the author’s forthcoming book, Crash: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters.