The Uses of History

...by John R. Commons and Associates detailed the formation of a class, its actions, aspirations, politics, struggles, publications, ideologies...

...An immigrant, he grew up in the streets of Brooklyn, politically minded, feisty, sentimental, earthy, talky, and possessing a strong working-class consciousness...

...The presently hot subject of labor's position on protectionism is explored by George Benjamin Mangold's The Labor Argument in the American Protective Tariff Discussion...

...If such an enterprise had been undertaken in the '50s, there would not have been sufficient public response to justify its continuation...

...The classic example, of course, is the long litany of "begats" in Numbers...

...Consider just a few instances: In addition to Virginia Penny, the role of women in industry is taken up by Edith Abbott, Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Alice Henry, and Carroll Wright in full separate volumes covering many periods...

...In these volumes, persons and movements in need of a prologue for the present can find an abundance of activists, agitators, martyrs, heroines, preachers, teachers, prophets, theoreticians, dreamers, critics...

...and John Ryan's A Living Wage: lis Ethical and Economic Aspect...

...There is John Pickering, with his proposal in 1847 (the year Marx wrote his Manifesto) to restore the real value of things—that is, their labor value—by abolishing massive ownership of income-producing property, especially land...

...the voices and experiences of the past can do much to help us cope with the present...

...To these reclaimed classics are added other, less famous, works that illuminate labor's many sides...

...From there he went on to become a cutter in a New York garment factory...

...If it was "new," it had to be good, because what was old was bad...

...During the first two acts, discontinuity—along with all the other "dis"s—was proof of legitimacy...

...The sets run from as few as 3 volumes (American Music) to as many as 161 (Education...

...To date, the editor with the most expeditions to his credit is Leon Stein, who has been associated with two sets on labor, two on women, one on politics, and one on business, and has played a secondary role in organizing the volumes on immigration...

...In these movements Act One was Action: the deed...

...Many of the books in the labor collection could easily be placed in the other sets that Stein has been turning out...

...they recall lost voices, some of whom once enjoyed a good audience and then were forgotten, others of whom never received the attention they deserved...

...The set, edited jointly with labor historian Philip Taft, puts back on the library shelves those hard-to-get texts that examined labor as a vibrant, multifaceted movement of people rather than a group of arrangemerits among things...

...The following decade, in startling contrast, was a time of dis-sensus: disagreement, dispute, discord, dissent...

...The proof was inherent in the vice of the parent and the virtue of the young...

...As Stein sees it, each of his Arno collections covers one of the categories that "divide us as a people...

...and George Price, founder of America's first union health center, discusses safety, sanitation and welfare in The Modern Factory...

...In fact, it is precisely this crossing over and interlacing of materials that gives Stein's collections their distinct character...

...From the pages of The Independent (1902-06) are lifted 26 self-portraits by workers, very much in the style of current oral histories, including gems from the lips of a bootblack, a tramp, a Swedish immigrant, an Irish cook, a farmer's wife, a professor's wife, a Japanese servant, a pushcart peddler, and a washerwoman...

...to go by change alone is to expire as a bubble...

...These and other writings suggest that, since much that is regarded as "new" is really old...

...Everybody knew about wheels and women...

...Although there is not a single recent book in these collections, they are singularly relevant to the mood of the "60s and probably even more so of the '70s...

...Take, for example, his collections on labor...

...The American Labor Movement...

...Mother Jones' Autobiography...

...The magnitude and marvel of the materials have gone lost as the gleam has gone grey in the eyes of the beholder...

...The idea of labor courts as a means to end strikes is handled in a debate over the Kansas Industrial Relations Court of 1920 between Governor Allen and AFL President Samuel Gompers...

...The "new worlds" were coming out of the womb of the old, kicking and screaming: demonstrations, picket-lines, marches, sit-ins, pray-ins, wade-ins, bombings, burnings, riots—in the streets, on the campuses, in churches, at conventions, in the halls of Congress and around the walls of the Pentagon...

...After overcoming the sense of inadequacy and guilt adults so commonly felt at that time under the lash of urgent youth, I submitted that I favored continuity because I thought it would be a shameful waste of time if every generation had to reinvent the wheel and rediscover the connection between fornication and conception...

...Old harmonies turned to dissonance: civil rights uprisings, antipoverty wars, public employe strikes, in-tergenerational struggles, Women's Liberation, student unrest, Chicano challenge, political protest, ideological disestablishmentarianism, ecological outcry, consumer resistance, underground journalism, sexuality running in the raw and homosexuality bursting out of the closet, countercultural colonies dedicated to drugs or organic gardening or Hari Krishna, Utopian proclamations...

...To give authority the authenticity of age, movements discover or invent geneologies...

...Florence Kelley considers Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation...

...Unable to live at either extreme, we alternate between them, with Mother Nature playing her mediating role as Libra...

...Indeed, the very special contribution of this series consists in unearthing rare treasures covered by time and avoiding commonplace old milestones available at any library worth its shelves...

...There is the delightful "primitive...

...Unwittingly, Stein has been preparing himself for this mission all his life...

...It includes many old goodies: the study of American labor by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, the son-in-law and daughter of Karl Marx...

...Stein uses history to free us from the corsetry of contemporary disciplines, remembering that at one time studies like the epic classic History of Labor in the U.S...

...Act Three in the movements—starting in the late "60s and continuing into the 70s—is the break with discontinuity: Telemachus in search of Ulysses, the son seeking a spiritual father, the longing for legitimacy...

...Hardman's American Labor Dynamics...

...Then there is Ordway Tead's one-of-a-kind opus on Instincts in Industry: A Study of Working Class Psychology, not to mention the topsy-turvy look into What's on the Worker's Mind, by Whiting Williams, a corporate executive who, in his own words, "put on overalls to find out...

...By applying a "holistic humanism" to his selections, he makes useful entities out of what would otherwise be mere bits and pieces...

...There are two jumbo volumes on labor in politics (an especially valuable compendium at this moment when unions are so deeply into politics but the literature does not offer even one up-to-date history of working-class politics...

...The Eisenhower decade was not inclined to look to the past for social roots, having internalized history—or what it thought was the American tradition—in its quiescent conservatism...

...And by breaking down the walls of our academic cubicles, in time as well as in space...

...There is the ethical thundering of Henry Demarest Lloyd, pounding away at the conflict between wealth and commonwealth...

...My quest for a continuum made me irrelevant, a fuddy-duddy, a sad reminder of a corrupt and dying yesterday...

...It is not enough for a leader to be charismatic: He/she is still only a human, subject to challenge by fellow-beings...

...Only later did the causes turn introspective, wondering where they stood in the scheme of things, sensing that motion, no matter how packed with emotion, is not really a movement, and that rhetoric, without research and reason, is—like other forms of masturbation—pleasing but without progeny...

...He turned into a bibliophile during the '30s at City College, where he was deeply influenced by historian J. Salwyn Shapiro's lectures on the encyclopedists, and philosopher Morris R. Cohen's dialogues on everything...

...There are the two volumes by Virginia Penny, a self-propelled lady from Louisville who more than a century ago protested the confining of women to a few limited chores and turned out a mini-encyclopedia of over 500 jobs that a woman could handle as well as a man...

...James Oneal's The Worker in American History...

...the precedent-making brief submitted by Louis D. Brandeis in 1907 to justify the Oregon law limiting the female work day to 10 hours...

...a New York Times company"—has been engaged in a massive publishing venture that reveals almost as much about the state of our times as it does about the American past...

...Act Two was Articulation: the word—the rhetoric required to justify the excesses...

...A big break with the past was the ultimate warranty for a future...

...To date, more than 70 different subject areas have been covered, with another dozen in the works...

...The organization of public employes is treated in Sterling Spero's 1927 study of the postal service and in David Ziskind's 1940 study of One Thousand Strikes of Government Employes...

...For the Arno publications are a resource made for "movements"—to the left, right, and down the middle...

...cabinetmaker John Dealtry, with his self-printed book on The Laborer: A Remedy for his Wrongs...

...The brand new question of how to create an educational system that will foster true equality in our society is addressed in a speech by Frances Wright delivered in 1828...

...Frank Tannen-baum's The Labor Movement...

...But the turn to the past is not, of course, limited to scholars or movements looking for forbears...

...In American Labor: From Conspiracy to Collective Bargaining (105 vols., $1,409.50), Stein restores this lost vitality by tapping the intelligence of earlier days not obsessed by the dreary mechanics of institutionalized interaction...

...It was an era of consensus, an ideologic ice age that softly celebrated our arrival as "one nation indivisible" with liberty, and hopefully, justice for all...

...THE ARNO SETS provide many leads for those in search of antecedents...

...Stein responds to a great yearning in these troubled days: the desire for an integrated view of our fragmented world, one that uses history to open pathways not only to the past but to our fellowmen as well...

...And modern credos are not immune from the compulsion to establish spiritual ancestry—to prove that the newborn thing is no bastard...

...Thus the pulsating blood that made "labor" much more than a commodity has been drained out of it...

...or, a Disquisition on the Usages of Society...

...What we derive from an undertaking such as Arno's depends very much on the editor of each set, who must both oversee the "dig" and select for preservation the parts of the past he considers relevant to the present...

...Yet he manages to tie these divisions together with the common strands that unite people in their diversity...

...Although joined by a coeditor with professional standing in the given fields, Stein has left his distinct imprint on all the projects he has been involved in—one that is likely to shape subsequent collections...

...There is no end of Utopias—fanciful and feasible?gathered together into two original Arno anthologies covering the dreamers of the 19th and 20th centuries...

...Made up mainly of books out of print and out of copyright, they resurrect a body of buried writers and writing...

...My colleague was not convinced...

...We seem once more to be riding the pendulum that keeps mankind on balance by putting us eternally off balance...

...Richard Ely, a moderate college professor at John Hopkins, the reputation of being a raving anarchist...

...But what needed knowing was what was new, the knowledge of the Now generation with whom worthwhile history would begin...

...If you could assert that nobody else had ever done your thing before, you were in...

...While a few academics in the field of labor (mainly historians) still follow this "humanistic" tradition, the subject has generally been consigned to narrow niches in economics and business management, entrapped in econometrics, legalisms or manipulative psychology...

...Later he became, and still is, editor of Justice, the publication of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union...

...A movement—like a religion or a state—needs legitimated authority...

...A faith seeks its source in some greater influence, be it Jehovah, the sun, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, or even the Devil...

...My presentation was stopped cold by a young colleague who, politely but condescendingly, interrupted me to say: "But you're not teaching discontinuity...

...Exactly what any one of them did or said may be less important than the realization that there were men and women back then who thought and acted in ways akin to the would-be doers and sayers of today...

...The undertaking is a series of multi-volume reprints intended primarily, but not exclusively, for libraries...

...the early analysis (1886) of the labor movement that won its author...

...The Arno set reminds us that labor is a study in ethics, ethnics, politics, ideology, warfare, economics, theology, history, sociology, psychology, and animal behavior...

...All sorts of folk have, in our time, developed the backward glance, as evidenced by the popularity of granny gowns and glasses, antiques even if junque, handlebar mustaches, and unabashed nostalgia for anything old-fashioned...

...READING THROUGH these volumes, with their many ways of viewing the worker and his social expressions, one is struck by how restricted our view has become—not because labor is any narrower a manifestation of the human spirit today than it was 50 or 100 years ago, but because the scholars have been plodding along with self-imposed blinders...

...By making the human dimension central to his editorial philosophy, he merges his separate subjects—the things that divide us—into related aspects of man's being...

...J.B.S...

...I recall a faculty meeting where I outlined a curriculum to draw on the American experience as a guide to creative conduct...

...To go by tradition alone is to perish as a fossil...

...The question of child labor, recently reopened by educators who want to remove bars to the employment of the young as a way to speed "career education," is analyzed by poet Edwin Markham, Judge Ben B. Lindsay and publicist George Creel, in Children in Bondage...

...The collection points up, too, the relevance of history for those who are concerned with the problems of the hour...

...Mary Beard's elegant short history...