Herbert Gutman's Power and Culture

...In his last few years Gutman did more and more, through summer schools with trade unionists, through the American Social History Project (a project that continues), and through efforts at some popular synthesis of the "new" history, to open the clogged channels of communication...

...It is an important and necessary book, but not one to read at a single sitting...

...My wife, Dorothy, and I visited several history departments in Chinese universities in 1985, a year or so after a group of American scholars, which included Herb, had been through...

...His letter to us continued: "I have a group of really fine graduate students [at Rochester...

...But he showed that no elaboration of statistical techniques could displace the need for historical logic—the asking of intelligent and appropriate questions—nor could the computer somehow sanitize the evidence and provide a positivist guarantee against the infiltration of ideological assumptions...

...He had conveyed, not so much a method—perhaps they have enough methods and too many answers?—but an antimethod: stop looking for answers and start looking for the right questions...

...He started publishing late...

...The interventions were always in sensitive and significant areas...

...The American past is the unredeeming saga of a mixture of corporate exploitation, all-pervasive racism, and a compliant and corrupted working-class and radical movement...

...What is difficult to remember now is the ecstatic terms in which Time on the Cross had been received on almost all sides, at a time when "cliometrics" was carrying all before it...

...We are letting in through the back door a notion of fixed and predetermined historical development...

...On the contrary, from my first arrival at the airport I was immersed in debate, and was subjected to an intense course of instruction in American labor historiography...

...is to quarrel with 3/4ths of a century of terrible scholarship mired in class and race bias...

...His open, strenuously argumentative, self-critical style, his way of proposing new questions and agendas, made for stimulating seminars and for memorable interventions at conferences...

...He was fortunate to find in Pantheon a publisher both strongly supportive and intellectually adventurous...

...It concerned him that such defeatism (and fear of all "populism") blocked the channels of communication between the campus and the general public...

...Their alienation from the FALL • 1988 • 495 Books present drives them to reject the past in its entirety...

...But what leaves some readers dissatisfied is that Gutman offers every finding as provisional, every definition as imperfect and awaiting refinement, every conclusion as openended and under the profession's review...

...We need to put aside notions that workers' movements have developed properly elsewhere and in the United States they developed improperly...

...What does it mean to talk about historical tasks that workers faced...

...Americans' loss of historical memory is the theme of the final chapter...

...His favored mode was dialogue...

...The interview form can be a lazy one...

...Writing was never easy for him and sometimes his early drafts buried the reader in a reiteration of examples...

...Add to this a craftsman's appetite for the archives and a trained skill in interrogating the text, and one is some way towards itemizing his qualities...

...indeed, when theory is presented as critique, it acquires definition and clarity...

...That is the Whig fallacy of history once again...

...What is left of Marxism, in your view, when you have stripped away this aspect...

...Q: It is not just the Whig fallacy...

...he places it in its context, evaluates it, provides necessary intellectual biography, assesses, commends, praises, and on occasion criticizes...

...The impression he had made was profound, and at every place they were scheming to get him back...

...He was concerned, as the poet Thomas McGrath has been concerned (although expressed in different terms), that, in the eastern United States, "history no longer functions, has been forgotten, has been 'paved over.' In the East man begins every day for himself...

...It comes from an essentialist view of workers or the working class, one that emphasizes a predetermined pattern of historical development...

...To this one might add a respect for the "anonymous" individual and her/his experience...

...I mean, rather, resistance to conceptual closures and to the reification of findings into systems...

...These are premises imported by the historical observer—and legitimately imported if the contraband is not concealed...

...GUTMAN: What is left when you clear away the determinist and teleological elements is good questions that direct your attention to critical ways of looking at ongoing historical processes . . . . This does not seem to me to be evasive...

...If Gutman was a major historian—as so many of his contemporaries insist—where are the conceptual breakthroughs...

...GUTMAN: I don't think that way as a historian...

...But he did not overlook the fact that some of the loss of historical memory was self-willed and owed as much to the self-suppression of an alienated and privileged "left" as to the ideologically motivated amnesia of the "right...

...Some would call it the Marxist fallacy...

...But neither the "goals" of history nor history's "meaning" are inscribed within "history" itself...

...There was nothing smooth or self-defensive about this style...

...The critique of Time on the Cross r Is a decisive check to the excessive claims of the quantifiers and to their uncritical reception...

...He expected to find that any individual would turn out to be extraordinary...

...The argument is that historical understanding liberates the mind from the fatalism that both ignorance and an inert capitulation to determinism bring: "Once you surrender the fixed older forms of historical explanation and process, the future becomes open...

...Perhaps provisionality and open-endedness was itself his method...

...When I speak of "antimethod" I do not mean lack of theoretical concern or of consistency...

...The essays should be savored one at a time...

...I do not know in what part of the cranium phrenologists place the "historical imagination" or with which faculties it is associated, but one could not be in Herb's company for half an hour FALL • 1988 • 493 Books without being astounded at his restless and inquisitive historical consciousness, his superb capacity for empathy with the "anonymous"workers of the past to whom he gave back voices and identities...

...This is far more than a conventional tribute paid to a friend and fellow scholar...

...GUTMAN: And it contains within it dangerous notions of vanguard leadership and vanguard parties . . . Q: But vanguard parties are not central to the vision of classical Marxism, the Marxism of Marx...

...Nor is there any warrant for identifying this as "Thompsonian culturalism" — "culturalism" is a term that Herb and I always refused, a spurious term invented by systematizers whose business it is to rigidify differences and to set up specious boundaries between approaches that are perfectly compatible...

...What made Herb growl was the limitless capacity of the intelligentsia to write off working-class initiatives within elaborately theorized systems— structures or determinisms —from whose compulsions only they, the intelligentsia, are supposed to be exempt...

...His prose flowed most readily when he was engaged in polemic, and several of the studies in this collection had their origin in this kind of engagement: his polemic against stereotyped views of general working-class assent to the values of the Gilded Age, his polemic against models of the "breakdown" of immigrant cultures and traditions...

...GUTMAN: I don't think that is a well-put historical question...

...If these are "essays on the American Working Class," where is the essay that defines the nature of "class...

...Gutman himself was in no way hostile to sophisticated techniques of counting, as several studies in the book demonstrate...

...In doing this with such clarity and honesty, Berlin has not only given unity and focus to this collection, he has also written a major study in recent intellectual history...

...Rather too often throughout it there is reference to the "Thompsonian" influence upon Gutman...

...At the end of that decade Herb wrote to Dorothy and me about a talk he gave to the Socialist Scholars Conference: It was a disaster—to put it mildly...

...It then becomes even more important to analyze and examine the history of those structures and ideologies that shape our lives...

...The young radicals would have none of this kind of "history...

...If I have not entered into a close discussion of several of the themes in this book, that is because it would have taken me beyond my competence...

...If his work was about "power" and "culture," where are these two concepts ratified and defined...

...If musicians or artists are "born" before they are trained, then it may not be unreasonable to suppose that there is such a thing as a historical sense, a sense with which Herb Gutman was endowed in superabundance...

...Here is a rich book—a dozen essays, of uneven quality, some hitherto unpublished, some published in inaccessible places, which, taken together, offer a conspectus of Herbert Gutman's energetic genius...

...So far from knowing always where he was going—what his conclusions would or ought to be— he suffered from prolonged writing blocks and depressions...

...There is a very real need for such persons to believe that this has always been a culture dominated by the industrial-military complex...

...The historian's object is, in part, to "understand" history—that is, to answer relevant questions that are appropriate to the evidence...

...Its vigorous interrogatives had a way of leaping over barriers of language and of culture...

...Berlin has read with care all of Gutman's published and much of his unpublished work...

...If this is not theoretically informed history, then I do not know what that can be...

...What is central is some notion of historical progress and some direction to history...

...Gutman muddled into arguments, which grew into articles too long to be published, went into bottom drawers, were dug out and rewritten, grew even longer, and in some cases had to be rescued and shaped by editors or publisher...

...What made him growl even louder was when intellectuals theorized such compulsions in radical or Marxist rhetoric, offering conservative or defeatist ideology in fancy leftist dress...

...In Gutman's words there was a "vast distance" separating "working historians and other American intellectuals—and, indeed, ordinary Americans of all kinds...

...In this book one can certainly find definitions of culture, class and class formation, and the rest...

...It enables us to see the structures in which we live and the inequality people experience as only one among many other possible experiences...

...Our dialogue soon took in many others, on both sides of the Atlantic, so that it would be possible to chart, not a Thompsonian influence, but an Anglo-American impulse in social history...

...The young American "new left" is not the monolith that popularizers have made of it...

...It also led him to his own countertheses...

...To argue, as I am doing," he wrote to me, "that blacks—even as slaves—'made their own history...

...He tried out his ideas (and read aloud his latest finds) in a ceaseless dialogue with friends, colleagues, graduates, and with his wife and fellow historian, Judy...

...He did not plan his oeuvre as a real historian—let us say Foucault— would do: one mighty general study after another, the results already known (and arriving from some ulterior theoretical area) in advance of the research, and the research performed by obedient assistants in order to illustrate the theses...

...I notice that some commentators assume that Gutman's style of history, and its reception, belong in some way to the radical 1960s as one of the fashions of that time...

...He was acutely aware of the way in which the ideological premises of the present put down roots in the form of falsified histories, in a self-fulfilling procedure by which one feeds the other...

...I should add that Power & Culture includes an excellent checklist of Herbert Gutman's published writings, prepared by Andrew Gyory...

...Even here, in Power & Culture, there are several places where he reviews and revises his own earlier work, or accepts, with frankness and generosity—perhaps, in his interview with Mike Merrill, accepts too easily?—the criticisms of others...

...Nothing drove him more swiftly to polemic than the contemptuous dismissal of the experiences of "ordinary" working people, whether it came from modernizers or Marxists or quantifiers or intellectual elitists...

...There is the tumultuous (and sometimes hilarious) polemic against Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross, published as Slavery and the Numbers Game (and some part republished here), and first appearing in the Journal of Negro History in 1975...

...But there is one matter within my competence where I must dissent from Ira Berlin's excellent introduction...

...This gave to Gutman a thesis against which his research proposed antitheses...

...Gutman's refusal to be tied in with any "notion of fixed and predetermined historical development" is a defense of the discipline of history...

...This seventy-page essay is outstanding, a model of what such a study ought to be but almost never is...

...This may be considered by the sophisticated upthrusting generation to be disgraceful, and to be yet one more illustration of the theoretical immaturity of the historical profession of yesteryear...

...Q: But some would argue that such a notion is central to classical Marxism...

...But these appear seriatim, in the course of argument and critique, rather than as System...

...In the book (he explained) "slavery is described as an adaptive experience, and . . . the blacks are viewed as a special instance of a working-class population...

...The responses were wild, not mild, and some were very angry because I had obfuscated the criminal character of our entire history by talking about work habits, culture, etc...

...This makes it clear that Gutman was not some ephemeral radical culture hero...

...Among these dedicated young people are a number deeply committed to serious social history and torn between that commitment and an equally strong desire to alter this society...

...To this Gutman adds less manifest functions: The central value of historical understanding is that it transforms historical givens into historical contingencies...

...Confronted by the rigorous inquisition of today's aspirant theorists, Gutman does not come out of it too well...

...But Merrill is a gifted interviewer, an able historian, and he prepares his interviews with comprehensive reading and with a careful selection of points of pressure...

...It is almost as if Mayor Daley and the Chicago police landed at Plymouth Rock and as if agents for General Motors dumped the tea in Boston Harbor...

...There is something in it, but only if we see the 1960s as more contradictory than the stereotypes propose...

...When I was first invited by Herb for several weeks to Buffalo in 1966 I did not go there as an instructor...

...This is in fact one leading form that reaction takes today on many campuses—sometimes in the fancy dress of Marxism or of "critical theory" —whose strategy is to show that all, except a small number of initiated theorists, are unfree...

...They are not, in my view, the worse for that...

...His blocks and depressions, his rewritings and polemics, were, exactly, testimony to this critical engagement with the past—reformulating old historical problems and proposing new ones, questioning received texts and their stereotypes, experimenting with novel methodologies, reading widely in adjacent disciplines (ethnography, demography, sociology) in search of new ways of decoding slave cultural inheritances or artisan work customs...

...For one thing, some of the "New Left" intelligentsia did not want to know about working-class history at all...

...Yet the volume would seem shapeless and sprawling— now labor struggles in the Gilded Age, now coal miners on the prairie, now the postemancipation efforts of black communities to found and support their own schools—if it were not for the introductory study by the book's editor, Ira Berlin...

...At the same time, he was a staunch and active supporter of the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Viet Nam war, and he admired many of the initiatives of SDS...

...Gutman never proposed that there was only One True Method of history — iinnddeeeedd,, one of my strongest recollections is of the generosity and enthusiasm with which he would commend the work of scholars whose approach might differ from his own...

...He has, furthermore, given a more analytical account of Gutman's historiographical "project" — of the direction and parameters of his work—than anything given to us by Gutman himself...

...We are measuring the American worker (or the French worker or the Polish worker) against an ideal type...

...And pondered...

...He situated himself between the evidence and the received historiography and made them interrogate each other...

...The passage where Merrill is trying to clarify Gutman's allegiances and his relation to Marxist historiography deserves to be quoted at length: Q: How does the new labor history answer the question, "Why has there been no mass socialist movement in the United States...

...This suggests an activity more ephemeral and less solidly constructed than is revealed in this volume...

...If he wished to demonstrate a contested point conclusively, he would do this, not by elegant formulations but by emptying a whole sack of confirmatory evidence upon the reader's head...

...GUTMAN: Yes, there is a Marxist variant of the Whig fallacy...

...Gutman could not meet with my notional critic's approval...

...I think of his working life as being spent in a kind of wrestling, and this collection exemplifies this stance...

...This was a quality in him that was admired by his fellow historians...

...q 496 • DISSENT...

...494 • DISSENT Books Nowhere is this more clearly presented than in the interview (for the Radical Historians Organization, MARHO) undertaken by Mike Merrill and included in this volume...

...One would not suppose, from this account, that the influence was very much two-way, and should more properly be called a dialogue...

...Yet even when Gutman arrived at theses, these were not carefully crafted and given dogmatic finality...

...The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom found its source in precisely such a polemic, in this case against Daniel P. Moynihan's report on the racial crisis in American cities, in which much is set down as caused by the "deterioration of the Negro family," which in its turn is given a historical explanation in the "deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American," created by slavery and segregation...

...By doing that, you free people for creative and critical (or radical) thought...

...We need to put aside the English model, the French model, and the Cuban model, and then ask a set of very, very tough questions about what American workers actually thought and did—and why . . . . Q: Based on your work for before 1900 and on [David] Montgomery's for the period after 1900, can you make judgments about whether or not workers' movements in these periods were adequate to the historical tasks they faced if they were to achieve their political goals...

...Yet, viewed from another aspect, Gutman was one of the most critically alert historians of our time...

...The premises of Gutman are those of democratic socialism, revealed on page after page in his interest in working-class selfactivity and in mutuality...