Teaching Class

By Historical Agent

Most of us have (unfortunately) taken history courses that didn’t cohere around any narrative or set of arguments. Now that I’ve started teaching, I realize that even doing it poorly is much harder than it looks. Often I don’t see inadequacies in my lessons till I’m standing in front of my class and realize that I’m actually boring myself. I watch the students stop taking notes, fidget, and nod off as I ask myself, “Why am I telling them this? What’s the point?”

One such moment occurred the last time I was teaching the second half of the U.S. history survey (1865 to the present). I was lecturing about the labor movement in the late nineteenth century, arguably its most dramatic period: massive strikes met by state repression; the colorful culture of the Knights of Labor; the black flags of anarchists; the retrenchment of the American Federation of Labor. So what was the problem?

I don’t think it was that the students were uninterested in labor history. In fact, many of them wrote about strikes or union leaders for their research papers. The issue, I think, was that I was presenting labor history as just another social movement, with class as a natural category that transcends time. It seems like a trap that’s been set by a milquetoast interpretation of identity politics: students understand that hierarchies exist, but the liberal framework professors often use suggests that the only purpose of social movements is to make the hierarchies less onerous.

I was lucky enough as an undergrad to take the U.S. history sequence (both semesters) from the same fabulous Marxist professor, who really understood how to teach labor history. Now I’m trying to remember how she did it (didn’t save my notes—drat!). Part of the problem I have is that I usually only teach the second half of the survey; I don’t know if students have any idea of what concepts like the division of labor are. To start with the Great Uprising of 1877 is like telling them to walk into a movie an hour after it’s started.

Ultimately, what I want to do is figure out how to get students to see that the industrial working class had to be created. If this bores them too, I don’t care. It won’t bore me. And it will be on the exam.

I’m really curious to hear G Spot readers’ experiences with learning about class formation, especially if it was in a U.S. history course. Maybe it’s something the labor movement teaches better than college professors.

Comments

[Nora Carrington]

I took 20th Century history (beginning with 1877 post-Reconstruction) from Allen Weinstein, biographer of Alger Hiss, formerly of Smith, currently at Yale. He assigned Studs Terkel's Hard Times. I had no *idea* there's been a Left in the United States before the 60s civil rights and anti-war movements (this was 1975). Then I read Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, which is one of the 5 best books in the history of the world, so far as I'm concerned (structure, quality of the writing); it dances between social and political history and the psychology of political engagement.

But learning about the IWW and anarcho-syndicalism I mostly had to do on my own. Early US labor history I learned in graduate school (Ph.D. philosophy, MN '90) in the context of women's history; the mill workers, etc. I took several courses in Marxism in graduate school, but I never did learn much European labor history.

[stickler]

Well, if you want to teach US History from the standpoint of labor, you could do worse than to use Who Built America as your textbook. It gets a little tedious (but what textbook doesn't?), but it sure does highlight all the things you mention. I haven't used it in my history survey course in a few years, but had good luck getting students to connect with labor issues when I did.

(Ah, I guess html gets stripped out here. The site for the Who Built America series:

http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/books.html

Worth a look.)

[HR]

As a lit professor trying to explain class in 19th and 20th C texts, I usually start by asking students to talk about class -- their own, their parents', their grandparents', what defines class, etc. From there the conversation generally runs itself: what is class mobility? how is class different from caste? who decides what class you are? where does culture fit in? is class more relevant in some areas of life than in others? Who benefits from class stratification? How is class and class difference portrayed on our TV? (this was a lot easier in the days of Cosby and Roseanne....)

[Sir Charles]

I would recommend two books that deal with major episodes of labor-capital conflict that as I recall give an abundance of background that might generate both interest and provide context:

The Haymarket Tragedy by Paul Avrich and The Battle for Homestead by Paul Krause.

As I understand it, there is a companion piece to the latter called "The River Ran Red" which consists of eyewitness remembrances of the Homestead strike, although I have not read it.

The Who Built America series may be useful too, but it is a bit daunting.

[arbitrista]

Hmm. My notion of class came from having to go to a private school for a couple of years. I was pretty much a raving Marxist for a couple of years after that.

[Hogan]

Just thinking out loud, but there's an analogy between how agrarian and craft workers are made into an industrial working class and how children are turned into students (a different kind of class). Time structure and discipline; deference to authority; everyone engaged in the same structured tasks; needing permission to perform basic bodily functions; the assumption that this arrangement is just how it is, the natural order of things, and not something those in authority need to explain or justify. In later years, the creation of "school spirit" events to encourage emotional identification with the institution. Might be a starting point for discussion.

[Bigbalagan]

You're teaching college, so unless its community college or some other fringe unit, you're talking to middle-class kids (like I was) who mainly never worked as "labor". If they did, say for weekly dosh at a fast food joint, they didn't see it as a career.

The problem is that you can't figure out what is motivating the characters in the labor play unless you have some way to really relate. I worked Xmas rush jobs at UPS (a Teamster shop) and I got a real eyefull, not only of classic tighten-the-screws management, but also of how the union people were screwed by their own union.

Your only recourse is to find something that really makes the situation for conscious working class people in the period you're teaching vivid, present, in a way where they can relate to the underdogs and feel angry.

And give yourself some slack, you're only working against the most sophisticated, widespread and best funded propaganda megamachine ever seen on the planet, here in the US. Your students are in most cases starting way behind the curve.

[Mitchell Freedman]

You might want to scroll through the Philip S. Foner series of US labor history books. And you might review books like Charles Sellers' "The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846" (Oxford, 1992) or Steve Fraser's "Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life" (HarperCollins, 2005). These works will provide some background as to how the labor movement grew in fits and starts, but that westward population expansion did undermine worker solidarity to a significant extent (That's more how I see things, anyway...).

I also think it is no accident that the first nationwide often wildcat strike occurred in 1877. Much of our expansion was over by then, and there was by then a fairly developed capitalist system in place. One doesn't have to be a Marxist (wasn't Marx himself who said he was not a Marxist?) to understand where the economics, politics and culture collude and collide. When the 1873 Depression led to wholesale declines in wages, layoffs, etc., it is not really surprising that people became desperate by 1877, especially with the Centennial of 1876 putting people in a revolutionary mood...We were, at the time, less than 100 years away from Shay's Rebellion and the like, weren't we?

[donna]

After reading this article this morning on teaching math:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/osu-ced042108.php

I wonder if the same applies to history. Maybe if we taught the theory of history first in the abstract, more people would be able to learn from the concrete examples, instead of just making the same mistakes over and over.

Worth a thought....

[luko]

Heya,

I'ts been many years and I was not much of a student. I was a piece of burnt toast by the time I finally figured out I had been in college 4 years and hadn't graduated. But anyway, two thoughts - they came together for me (as much as they could under the circumstances).

I don't see how you can understand US labor history without also looking at industrialization in England and Germany. I, too, had a marxist professor for history and that framework really works for the subject and the time. Engels, Luxemburg. Dialiectic. The end of history is kind of quaint (seeing as how it didn't end) but does help to point out the conceit of people who think they have all the answers.

Then I had an econ professor who was a bat-shit crazy gold-standard Republican. Nobody paid any attention to him but I liked him for some reason. Boom and bust, boom and bust. The graphs were telling - you follow them up and down, every 10 years (or whatever). People completely at the mercy of unfettered capitalism. Working and raising families and eating well one year and the next out on the street with nothing but rags on their backs.

You can build a picture in your mind that makes you really care about the subject. Then add the context of industrialization in Europe (which came first) and form the theory.

Haven't thought about it in years.

Like your blog. I come over sometimes from Digby.

Regards.

[Historical Agent]

Thanks, everyone, for your collective wisdom. I’ll definitely try the books and strategies recommended here. I think some of the older literature (like Philip Foner) might get at these issues—I think they were trying to do for American history what E.P. Thompson did for the English.

What I’m struggling with is really the history of class formation, not labor history per se. My lecture is cribbed substantially from Who Built America? (although I use the first edition, from 1992, and it’s probably changed a lot since then). The websites of the American Social History Project have great info too. I also rely on Avrich’s book on Haymarket—how can you not love teaching Johann Most?

Who Built America? is great in a lot of ways: it demonstrates that the working “class” was more than just people working in factories and it does a good job in showing how these classes were both stratified and interrelated. But how did they come to be in the first place? You need to deal with structural changes, and I think that Who Built America? (at least the edition I have) sometimes just digs up random people from the archives to show that they too were struggling for a better world. It’s a bit easier for students to see structural changes when you’re looking at, say, the proletarianization of southern sharecroppers—that’s a process that you can pretty much fix at a time period that’s within the scope of the survey. But the formation of the “second” industrial working class, I think, is harder to explain without digging back to cover the first. And that seems to require reaching back to pre-Civil War days. Argh, too much work! Not enough time!

I do agree with Luko that the international context is crucial, and for that I’ve got my handy E.P. Thompson, which helps. Don’t know as much about Germany yet.

My students, by the way, are pretty great, despite their fidgeting and occasional nodding off. I teach at a public university in a state where the income differentials are substantial—those who grow up in the snazzy suburbs get a great high school education and by and large attend elite private universities. They consider the uni where I teach a safety school. So I get some upper-middle-class students, but it seems like at least half of them are from really modest backgrounds. Many work full time and commute half an hour or more to school. I always have several ROTC-ers and reservists (had one ship out in the middle of the semester this year—a pretty lousy student, but I was still sad). So it’s not like class is irrelevant to them. I just think they might be bored with the conventional approach to teaching social movements—if they think it’s just a matter of memorizing some strikes and different unions’ goals and strategies, why should they care? (The same goes for teaching the civil rights movement, by the way.)

Again, thanks for the suggestions. You learn as you go.

[jcubed]

I try to start my discussion of the labor movement with the market revolution and/or the social changes that accompanied the economic transformations of industrialization. I set up a (probably oversimplified) distinction between the characteristics of work in industrial and pre-industrial societies. By addressing some of the social/cultural implications of changes in the way work gets done, you can bring in issues like class formation, the changing nature of relationships between workers, managers and owners, and a host of other issues that get beyond the narrative of strikes, organizations, and leaders.

[Monte Davis]

Along with strikes and the vague, occasionally explosive menace of "immigrant" anarchism, there was another spur to anxiety: Lincoln, Garfield, & McKinley killed in the span of 36 years. (Why yes, I did just listen again to Sondheim & Weidman's wonderful _Assassins_. Why do you ask?)

[Monte Davis]

Along with strikes and the vague, occasionally explosive menace of "immigrant" anarchism, there was another spur to anxiety: Lincoln, Garfield, & McKinley killed in the span of 36 years. (Why yes, I did just listen again to Sondheim & Weidman's wonderful _Assassins_. Why do you ask?)

[Tom O'Shea]

When I teach about class and class formation, it's part of a world lit course, and becomes only one aspect of my stuff on ideology. My ideology--like my race, class, gender, etc.--is more or less invisible until opposed. Class formation becomes a matter of class self-identification in response to opposition. Cheap and easy, I know, and it doesn't really do the job, but it's what I have time for, and tons more than the students will get anywhere else in my department.

I talk about syndicalism as prelude to Modernism. About Heine's "Silesian Weavers," and Percy Shelley's "England in 1819." About Marx writing a domestic romance novel--can't remember the title, though. All of which demonstrate the idea of class ID.