Michael Yates
Book Review
A Short History of the U.S. Working Class: From Colonial Times to the Twentieth-first Century. By Paul Le Blanc. Humanity Books, 1999. 205 pp. $17.95 paper. To order call 800/421-0351.
Reviewed by Michael Yates
Teacher and long-time labor activist, Paul Le Blanc, has done something quite remarkable in this exceptional book. Not only has he digested and understood more than 300 years of U.S. labor history and more than 100 years of labor history scholarship, he has also managed to write about this in a manner and style that will engage the workers who actually make the history. That is, this is a book not just for scholars or even for students but for the working class. Such books are rare, and therefore it is important to publicize them and encourage their use as much as we can.
In a mere 133 pages of narrative, Paul Le Blanc takes us from the European conquest of the New World and the theft of the lands of the native peoples to the introduction of slavery, the first revolution against British colonialism, the beginnings of the working class, the Civil War (or second American revolution as he calls it), the industrial revolution, labor revolts, the rise of the AFL, the formation of radical labor organizations and political parties (the IWW, the Socialist Party, various communist parties), the Great Depression and the CIO, World War Two and its conservative effects upon the labor movement, the Cold War, the postwar prosperity, economic stagnation and the collapse of the AFL-CIO, the civil rights and women's movements, and the recent attempts to reorganize and rebuild the labor movement.
Throughout his book, Le Blanc weaves several cogent themes. He believes and he demonstrates that it is the working class majority that actually makes our history. Workers build our roads, mine our coal, teach our children, heal our sick, and in doing so create our society. Modern history, then, must begin with the workers. When we start with workers, we see right away that it is their struggle for a better world that generates social change. In the United States, for example, the arduous and often dangerous efforts of ordinary working men and women have given meaning and sometimes reality to our hallowed notions of freedom and democracy. Without the fight of slaves and then of black workers, we would have had no second American revolution and no civil rights movements; without the heroism of workers, we would have no unions and all of the good things they bring to us. Workers have, of course, often been divided in many ways, by religion, by race, by gender, and by sexual orientation, but when they have managed to overcome these, our society has come closest to realizing the ideals our leaders are always talking about but seldom defending.
The radical optimism Le Blanc displays throughout his book is rooted in an understanding that the U.S. labor movement has had far more failures than successes. Therefore, it is necessary to examine these failures for clues as to why certain paths were chosen by workers over alternatives. He finds that successes often could not be sustained because of the unwillingness of white workers to support people of color and men to show common cause with women, as well as the willingness of labor's leaders to wage war on working class radicals, typically the very people who were trying to build a radically democratic and "rainbow" labor movement. He implies that only such a broad movement can challenge the seemingly unassailable power of capital.
Today's labor movement is a far cry from the one Paul Le Blanc hopes for; it is clotted with an entrenched, undemocratic, and occasionally corrupt bureaucracy. The author is hopeful that the new leaders in the AFL-CIO, pushed and prodded by the ranks below, will at least open up enough space for the rest of us to forge a "Third American Revolution," an upheaval aimed at "ending the power of wealthy corporations and consolidating a radically democratic social order."
In addition to his compact text, the author has included five valuable resources for his readers: a fine bibliographic essay, including works of fiction, art, and photography; an extensive annotated listing of films and videos (some of which are referred to in the test); an exceptionally useful and detailed glossary of terms; a time line of U.S. history; and a chronology of U.S. labor history.
One of the things I liked best about this book is the beautiful excerpt from Carl Sandburg's poem, The People Yes. Sandburg says, "Time is a great teacher, Who can live without hope?" Paul Le Blanc's book is also a great teacher, and it, too, gives us hope.