REVIEWS

...What Gutman outlines here as a major task for labor and social historians of the future is precisely the opposite: the recapture of lost memory...

...But he has provided a welcome incentive to begin filling in these spaces so that they will no longer be marked by the equivalent of the "here dwelleth lions" that one can see on African maps of the past...

...Recent immigrants, moreover, and not older elites, held most of the power in the community...

...He quotes a Chicago Times editor who wrote in the centennial year (1876) that Americans did not inquire "when looking at a piece of lace whether the woman who wove it is a saint or a courtesan...

...Informed by an impressive amount of detailed source material, he maps out the task to be done...

...Such organizations, as I have argued elsewhere, are "greedy," i.e., they want the service of the whole person, leaving only minimal room for affect directed elsewhere and the play of sensuality...

...Mazlish's thesis is highly suggestive...

...This seems to me a worthwhile and important endeavor...

...But he has largely failed to show the concrete interplay between the activities, say, of members of Cromwell's New Model Army, of capitalist entrepreneurs, or of such revolutionaries as Robespierre and Lenin and the dynamics of their personalities...

...Many years ago the sociologist W. I. Thomas suggested that the aim of "Americanization" of American immigrant workers was the "destruction of memories...

...Recoiling from the lack of analytical focus in traditional narrative history, many historians have attempted in the last few decades to develop new angles of vision on previously neglected aspects of the past...

...Among these new approaches, psychohistory and the new social history assume pride of place...

...There are still blank spaces over large areas of American labor and social history...

...Largely inspired by the new British labor and social historians such as Asa Briggs, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rud, and above all E. P. Thompson in his seminal The Making of the English Working Class, Gutman begins to right the balance...

...Gutman directs us precisely to find out who she and her many millions of brothers and sisters really were...

...The remaining essays collected in this volume make a stab at further illustrating through concrete research the programmatic outlines of the first...

...This aims at bringing into awareness crucial elements that have been buried in our collective unconscious for too long...

...He reports a revealing interchange between Robespierre and Danton in the corridors of the National Assembly shortly after Danton's second marriage...

...Most of Paterson's ironmasters and the owners of its mechanical workshops were, it turns out, skilled recent British immigrants and not members of old families...

...Most damaging of all, historians "spun a cocoon around American workers, isolating them from their own particular subcultures and from the larger national culture...

...This marvelous story hints at the contradictory demands of sexual indulgences and revolutionary activities, at the fact that revolutionary politics is likely to demand an allencompassing commitment on the part of the militant who is forced to abandon the quest for erotic satisfaction and other pleasures...

...Don't be an imbecile," Danton replied, "you can't conspire and fuck at the same time...

...Mazlish sets out to trace the development of asceticism, first in the service of puritan religion, then of capitalist economics, and finally of revolution...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...12.50...

...Gutman can, of course, only begin to explore the new territory of research that he has mapped...

...This seems to be the thesis Mazlish wishes to develop, yet he is largely detracted from it by a rigid Freudian framework, forcing him to pay much more attention to the genesis of revolutionary complicated patterns of the culture of work...

...There are probing papers here on the life and career of an early black organizer of the United Mine Workers, on the influence the Social Gospel and related Protestant movements had on American Labor during the Gilded Age, on early strike movements on the railroads that were a prelude to the general railroad strike of 1877...

...The few pages in which he shows that a large part of the early industrial work force of America was very far from living up to the injunctions of the Protestant Ethic are worth the price of admission...

...and Mazlish's and Gutman's works, respectively, are apt illustrations...

...Yet only Gutman seems to me to have succeeded in convincing the reader...

...343 pp...

...There was, it turns out, some reality to the "Rags-to-Riches" myth, after all...

...There are also two revealing case studies of 19th-century Paterson, New Jersey, which show, among other things, that concentration on the overall patterns of industrial growth and neglect of local developments have led historians to misinterpret patterns of social mobility in 19th-century America...

...Revolutionary organizations are hard taskmasters, forcing leaders and militants to deny themselves pleasures of the body, continually exhorting them to ever increased effort in the service of the revolutionary goal...

...You are conspiring, Danton," Robespierre said accusingly...

...He focuses instead on the development of character traits prior to their active life careers...

...WORK, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY IN INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA, by Herbert G. Gutman...

...His lead essay, "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919," which created somewhat of a sensation when it appeared a few years ago in The American Historical Review, spells out his general orientation...

...Through Freudian concepts, and with major assists from the work of Max Weber, he attempts to show that most modern revolutionaries, though not necessarily all of them, had an ascetic character structure, that they were austere "puritans," denying themselves personal pleasures, and developing only minimal emotional ties, sexual and otherwise...