Symposium honouring Marianne Debouzy thirty years of social history.

Kesselman, Donna

SCHOLARS FROM NORTH AMERICA and Europe met on 6 and 7 November 1998 in Paris to honour Marianne Debouzy, retiring professor of History, and a member of Labour/Le Travail's International Advisory Board. Organized by historian Jacques Portes at Paris University 8 and Catherine Collomp at Paris University 7, the event was memorable for its convivality as well as its uncompromising intellectual exchange and dialogue, a most fitting tribute to Marianne's scholarship.

In an essay appearing below, Alan Dawley reflects upon Marianne's work and its influence among scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Dawley's piece is followed by the publication of some selected papers in full. The proceeding summary aims to relate the concerns of researchers present from Quebec, the us and Europe (France, Italy, Germany), whose debt to Debouzy and international concerns are perhaps not well enough known due to barriers of geography and language. Contributions have been regrouped into broad categories of labour and social history: The Working Class: Struggles, Employer Relations, Representations (Bruno Cartosio, Ferdinando Fasce, Annick Foucrier, Pierre Gervais); Immigration (Catherine Collomp, Michel Cordillot, Bruno Groppo, Dirk Hoerder); Workers and the State (David Brody, Alan Dawley, Donna Kesselman); Other Contributions (Ronald Creagh, Nelcya Delanoe, Michele Gibault, James Green, Hubert Perrier, Bruno Ramirez, Sylvia Ullmo). The categories are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, as James Green notes in his concluding paper below, what characterizes the maturation of our field of social history is its very complication, its attempt to weave the multiple threads of human interaction into a more complete historical fabric, a central strand of which is class relations in all of their complexity.

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Working Class: Struggles, Employer Relations, Representations

In "From Workshop to Factory: Managing Workers during the First Industrial Revolution", Pierre Gervais (Paris University 8) probed the nature of working-class struggles at the time of early capitalist exploitation. The advent of newly integrated production facilities, says Gervais, did not in itself overturn former management practices. The Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mill was one example of transition, a "mechanized workshop" where artisans produced at a single location as a layer of sub-contractors, selling their goods at a negotiated price to factory owners who then resold them to merchants. "Profits" were split between producers and factory owners, not reinvested to improve productivity, and merchants were the system's greatest beneficiaries. Social conflict, then, did not yet pit wage-earners against employers but vented resistance to declining prices in a modernizing market which was squeezing out the less productive craftsman-based mode. Industrial rationalization implied shopfloor relations based on reduced production costs, a tough step to take for both artisan-producers and managers. In early 19th-century America, then, differentiated forms of struggle cohabitated as industrial management techniques were introduced at varying rates.

The "1917 San Francisco Strike of French Laundry Workers" studied by Annick Foucrier (Paris University 13 at CNRS) shows how workers' struggle sparked new dynamics among the city's French immigrants. Workfloor tensions had already led to separate professional and workers' associations--preceded by "French" to denote their specific heritage--while paternalist relations between dry cleaning employers and employees during off-time helped sustain community ties. The strike marked the growing class mindset of these former rural peasants from the French Beam region, all the more cogent as homeland nostalgia might logically have deepened the sentimental appeal of wartime cross-class alliances, The Syndicat d'Ouvriers blanchisseurs francais, the French Laundry Workers Union's informal links with the IWW, accented a militant, workers' internationalist stand, while at the same time, strike demands reflected those of all American workers for better working conditions and shorter hours.

In his paper about 19th century Mexicanos' attempt to control their land in New Mexico, Bruno Cartosio (Bergame University) developed the theme of working-class representation: how myths are formed and carried on in relation to struggle, and how social groups--especially when structured along ethnic lines use myths differently. ("Robin Hoods in the Southwest: Reality and Myth of Resistance to Capitalist Transformation in Territorial Now Mexico.") A dangerous outlaw in American Wild West folklore, Billy the Kid, became a Robinhood-style legend for the Mexican community. The fight of the Mexicanos' Gorras Blancas (White Caps) movement, engaging in direct action to cut fences placed on their land, was comparable to the mythification of Billy, perceived as fighting against the common enemy of Anglo expropriators (land speculators, cattle growers, railroads) and the courts promoting such interests. Fundamentally, like in Lowell, Mexicanos were struggling against emerging capitalist property relations, here regarding land ownership. Billy symbolized the Mexicanos themselves, the little guys fighting against an unjust social order of Anglo tyranny based on wealth. Myths and their representation can have multiple functions, interpreted differently according to class interests.

Popular culture is therefore marked by struggle and, further still, is an object of conquest by class actors manoeuvring for ideological space. Stakes were raised with the advent of radio in 1930s America, explained Ferdinando Fusee (Genoa University) in "Corporate Democracy on the Airwaves: Radio, Big Business and Public Discourse in the New Deal Era." The National Association of Manufacturers' sponsoring of the radio-soap opera "The American Family Robinson," from Centerville, USA, illuminates how Big Business helped to shape the now stereotyped representation of middle-American small-town life, of individual freedoms and family values as euphemisms for free enterprise. Implicitas well was the idealization of local business and a cult of democracy rooted in commonsense wisdom, a means of discrediting the distant, bureaucratic and interventionist state. Corporate America was thereby hoping to reassert a pro-business ideology while contesting the New Deal's popular discourse and appeal. Fasce's broader work on big business public relations depicts how such communication strategies turned away from abstract polemics, preferring to promote a classless model of society to wider publics. While carried out in the name of public relations, corporate communication strategies were also aimed at modeling popular culture.

Immigration

Themes dealing with working-class struggle are not at odds with those presented here under the heading of immigration. Questions of ethnicity and assimilation were part of both Annick Foucrier's look at French immigrant Workers' struggles and Bruno Cartosio's depiction of Mexicano resistance to advancing Anglo-capitalist society.

In contributions published below, Michel Cordillot (Paris University 8) and Dirk Hoerder (University of Bremen) situate individual immigrant lives within our conceptualization of historical trends. For them micro, multifaceted studies must relate to the broader problematics of immigration producing a scholarship of constant back-and-forth interaction between individual and collective experience.

Hoerder ponders the multiple identities of immigrants, the various dimensions of their "life courses" as breadwinners, women and men of their times, members of families and localities. When working through new kinds of sources (diaries, letters, autobiographies, fiction, etc.), Hoerder is constantly searching for new problematics. The piece published below, "In the Shadow of the Big House--The Little People in History," compares two immigrant families with concerns of the complexities of social relations in mind: at the centre of his analysis are Felix Albert--marginal farmer, casual labourer, small businessman--whose family migrated from the St. Lawrence River Valley in Quebec to New England in 1881, and Josef Jodlbauer, an Austrian journeyman baker, member of the Austrian labour movement and advocate of social democracy, whose private life was the determinant factor in his immigrant flight to the US in 1910. To correctly reflect these workers' bona fide itinerary, says Hoerder, labour historians must relinquish their rigid categories rooted in production relations.

Michel Cordillot proposes a method to do so when presenting the soon to be published dictionary of immigrant labour activists, Les Ouvriers Francophones aux Etats-Unis: de l'Approche biographique a la prosopographie (Biographical Dictionary of French-speaking Radicals in America). Cordillot explains how a comparative perspective of individual itineraries--presented as a coherent corpus--may help to account for immigrant choices and commitments while detecting yet unidentified logics.

Bruno Groppo (CNRS) and Catherine Collomp presented their new research on. the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), based on the recently opened Tamiment Library archives. The project sheds new light on the internationalist campaigns of American labour within the US and relations with the European labour movement in the pre-Cold War years. Jewish unionists organized labour and broader public resistance to nazism and anti-semitism, while carrying out concrete solidarity actions for victims of fascist regimes. The degree of commitment was at least partially cooled by support for the Roosevelt administrations' war effort. CIO leaders including Sidney Hillman, avid JLC activist during the 1930s, trailed far behind AFL unionists, who relentlessly pursued this internationalist cause for democratic and trade union liberties throughout the war. David Dubinsky and the Jewish Daily Forward's B.C. Vladek pulled the AFL's Strings in Washington, lobbying the Roosevelt administration to loosen its strict application of immigrant quota policies and grant visas to Jewish labour activists, personalities of the arts, and others victimized by European nazism.

Internal politics may also explain CIO reticence, given the JLC's clear break with Communist movements. Groppo and Collomp are currently exploring networks of contacts around the JLC made between sectors of the us and European trade union movements, especially in Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Russia. Most were made through European Social Democrats, often in circles linked to Bund and Menshevik exiles. The JLC thus helped to structure a broad, noncommunist current of the international workers' movement.

Workers and the State

The symposium placed the role of the state in both historical and international perspective. Examples taken from World War I, the New Deal, and today's global market showed the state's facility to develop institutions and ideologies, to renew its authority in the face of workers' struggle.

David Brody attributed labour's current woes to the fundamental ambiguity of workers' institutionalized gains. In his contribution, "The Uses of History: Explaining the Failure of New Deal Labor Law," Brody claimed that labour law was grounded in public policy, rather than inalienable rights. By translating the 1935 Wagner Act's call for representation through "workers' own choosing" into NLRB-supervised voting, the New Deal state actually reinvoked the judicial "individual rights" doctrine which historically allowed courts to expand the boundaries of private property in workplace relations. In a significant distinction, Brody claims that workers' organizations remained a freedom or liberty of individuals rather than a state-sanctioned, collective right. This shortfall allowed successive governments to politicize and distort state-run certification processes. Brody proposes restoring workers' collective right to freely determine their own forms of representation, reforming certification elections and union recognition procedures.

Alan Dawley addressed the public/private sphere from another angle in his piece "Enforced Consent: Progressives and the Public Sphere." Dawley started by looking at a social conflict which took place on 6 October 1919, in Gary, Indiana, and its crackdown by federal troops. How should history analyze such conflicts? Cultural historians might look at workers' identities and representations, while communication theory has raised the important issue of public vs private spheres, as through the nature of property or the participants involved. For Dawley, defining the public sphere must also include the extent to which government can impose social discipline through the use of force or allow consent. The boundary inevitably reflects the interplay of national and international forces, with war and revolution playing pivotal roles. The Progressive Era's expanding public sphere was marked by broad citizen participation; inversely, the World War I years' constraining consent boundaries were embodied in the White War Plan, secret contingency-plans for combating revolution in the US. Though never put into effect, the degree of state coercion implied was being displayed in the unprecedented use of the American government to stifle workers' conflict at home and engage military-driven expansion abroad. The White Plan also showed how the government drew wartime boundaries of "Americanism" along political, ethnic and class lines in order to favor establishment-based structures of power.

In a paper published below, "Workers and Justice in the Global Market," Donna Kesselman (Paris University 10) describes how legalistic ethics, especially the crusade against alleged union corruption, are components of American capital's current discourse of global domination, US courts are part of an emerging institutional configuration which tends to undermine trade union legitimacy.

Other Contributions

Sylvia Ullmo's (Tours University) paper, "The Shattered Dream of GI Children," falls into another category. It deals with devising a satisfactory legal statute for the thousands of children of American Vietnam vets (and often their mothers) who attempted to obtain the right of entry into the United States. Neither immigrants nor refugees, foreigners or us citizens, and finally, alter years of legal battles a bit of each at the same time, the experience of such "in between" peoples places the identity debate at the most concrete and vital level. Based on original research carried out by a trilingual colleague--French, English, Vietnamese--the paper traces the unglorious odyssey of children who for the large part (98 per cent) have not been recognized by their fathers. Victims of anti-Anglo and anti-African-American racism at home, subjected to an obstacle course of often prohibitive bureaucratic and monetary entanglements, destined for the most part to lead tragic lives of marginalization in American society, these children mark the failure of the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act, the last of a string of broken American promises to the Vietnam people. For Ullmo, the failed repatriation of GI children mirrors the mixed and ambiguous feelings of America for the GI's themselves, and the guilty conscience which gestured ineffectively to redeem their offspring.

The problem of formulating appropriate categories raised by Ullmo makes the link with one of the symposium's central discussions, the need to review our frames of reference and conceptualization in view of societal transformations, a topic addressed by a Round Table Discussion involving John Atherton, Nelcya Delanoe, Michele Gibault, and Marie-Christine Granjon. Central to this concern is the issue of social and working-class history's accessibility to various publics. Bruno Ramirez gave us one concrete example of accessibility by projecting his film about Italian immigrants to Quebec, La Sarrasine. Bruno explained at greater length why a labour historian became a filmmaker, and offers further reflections below.

In a concluding paper James Green suggests that social historians have met the combined challenges of academic rigour and accessibility. Their ability to reach wider reading publics, notably the popular audience of the labour movement, is a sign of the coming-of-age of what he calls "our collective project." Social history has managed to portray workers as living and feeling beings in a "real" world of power-driven, institutionally structured battles. Such problematics have led to a richer historical composite, thereby legitimizing the break from an older traditionalist historiography, embedded in its elitist and institutional biases. Contrary to criticisms of their supposed subjectivity, the intellectual integrity displayed by social and labour historians willing to express their own militant convictions has led to what Green calls "Movement History."

The meeting of researchers from different countries was thus not merely a sign of friendship. Marianne Debouzy's work has provided pioneering suggestions and answers to questions many are beginning to ask, especially regarding international comparative studies. Such productive provocation does not just mean expanding the corpus one reads. It implies developing conceptual tools of commonality and difference, not renouncing but relativizing one's own intellectual culture, be it national or political. Armed with such tools of conceptual insight we can hope to move on towards another 30 years of labour and social history.

Donna Kesselman, "Thirty Years of Social History," Labour/Le Travail, 45 (Spring 2000), 217-23.