Working-Class Americanism : The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960

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Summary: The Great Depression You Only Thought You Knew
Review: Professor Gary Gerstle's book doesn't remotely resemble the pop history books that sell so well today. The happy history that provides all that one needs to know about the great events of American history is missing here. In place of the pap, the professor has substituted facts, data, and the truth.

In Working-Class Americanism, we find the Great depresion, at least at the micro level, as well as its antecedents and aftermath, to be quite different than we were quite sure we knew. Dr. Gerstle fights through the popular notions of how the times impacted working men and women to determine how the great events of the first half of the last century really touched ethnic workers in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

Those of us who know Woonsocket - at least a little - wonder why students of American history don't know a great deal more about the place that is still the most French City in the United States. Here resides a large population of the descendants of an important yet largely overlooked ethnic minority that contributed greatly to the advancement of the industrial revolution in America. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Franco-Americans spread over the northern regions of the U.S. and especially to New England and to nowhere more than Woonsocket. These hard working and modest people wanted nothing more than a place to preserve their cultural identity and to find work to support themselves, their offspring and their institutions, especially the Church.

The horrendous difficulties these French Canadians faced as they moved from being an admired but suspect seperatist oriented minority to become part of the American labor movement that reached beyond the safety and security of their in group has been tackled in a very straight forward manner by Dr. Gerstle. He has stripped away the myths of the monolithic impact of the powerful economic forces of the first half of the twentieth century and demonstrates clearly that we cannot rely on the widely perpetuauted myths of the economic history of the times.

That the impacts of the Great Depression varied significantly by industry, even within a single city should open the eyes of readers. That even in related industries such as the woolen and cotton textiles the impact on labor was widely different in places like Woonsocket. That the times and the overpowering nature of American culture threatened the insularity of even the most committed ethnic groups is laid out in stark detail. That the French Canadians looked outside their society to seek common cause with workers from other backgrounds - even some, such as the Irish, that had worked to keep them in check - is a wonderful tale that Dr. Gerstle has treated beautifully and with great sensitivity.

The book is an academic treatise that has the clear writing style of a work of popular fiction. To gain an appreciation of the complexity of the times and an original view of the American labor movement, buy this book. You'll be enriched and you'll enjoy the read.

Rating:
Summary: Americanism as a fluid language
Review: Working-Class Americanism, written by Gary Gerstle, is a truly fascinating and inspiring book. He focuses on the early-twentieth-century Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a city of textile industry and habitated mainly by French-Canadian immigrants from Quebec, Canada. Most of residents in the city were French Canadian, but there were other residents, especially Franco-Belgians. The culture of French Canadian workers was community-centered, devoted to Catholicism, and French language. On the other hands, workers from France or Belgium were radical, or socialistic, social democrats. Gerstle analyzes the process hoe these two working-class groups of diffenent culture and ideology made (and broke later) tenuous alliance under the Independent Textile Union (ITU), an CIO-affiliated labor union.
The author's innovative approach to the labor history of Woonsocket is his usage of the concept of Americanism. He treats Americanism as not as a consistent and monolithic ideology but as a fluid language which is open to appropriation by various social groups and individuals. In his view the language of Americanism consists of several dimensions---nationalistic, democratic, progressive, and traditional. He argues that in the severe economic condition of the Great Depression two different working-class groups succeeded in establishing the strong labor movement of the ITU by using the nationalistic, democratic, and progressive dimensions of Americanism in order to articulate their rights as workers.
Gerstle's treatment of the labor Americanism is very subtle and sensitive. He does not insist that the discourse of Americanism could have assimilated French Canadians and Franco-Belgians into one monolithic Americanized group of citizen-workers. He points out that whereas Franco-Belgian radical labor leaders embraced a dream of remolding America thoroughly in terms of social democracy, French Canadian workers accepted Franco-Belgian leadership in the ITU as an instrument to reinvigorate their ethnic community and family (Gerstle points out the patriarchal nature of French Canadian working-class culture). French Canadians and Franco-Belgians allied without a common vision of American society. As a result, he suggests, they abandoned the alliance based on the ITU when local Republicans, after defeated by Democrats in the late 1930s, solicited French Canadian workers by giving favor to their ethnic culture. The author's unique approach to Americanism makes Working-Class Americanism interesting both as social history of labor and political history at the same time.
Gerstle has succeeded in discovering multi-faceted and complicated experiences of Woonsocket textile workers and their politics of language by wide and intensive research including interviews. The interviews make his book highly vivid. For example, he proves the ITU's commitment to democratic delibaration by description of an interview with a old-aged ex-labor activist, who showed the author his "highly polished gavel" and "dog-eared paperback copy of Robert's Rules of Order" which had been used for debates among union members. The reviewer felt spellbound to an imagination inspired by this episode.
I should remark, in the recent advance of studies on ethnicity and race, especially so-called "whiteness studies," that Woonsocket was the city of white people, native or immigrants, therefore the author makes almost no mention to problems of race or color-line (relations of French Canadian or Franco-Belgian workers with non-white people). It mean that his analysis might not be applicable to other regions where we could find deep-rooted racial confrontations. It, however, does not undermine the value of Gerstle's excellent analysis made in this book.