Latest Read: Eight Hours for What We Will

Rosenzweig, Roy.  Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Dear fearless reader: 

Worcester, MA once was a major manufacturing center, specializing in producing wire.  In some ways, Worcester's development mirrored that of other industrial cities.  Large numbers of immigrants from ever changing locations, new wealth derived from capitalistic successes, and the process of urbanization determined the life of Worcester as a city.  However, Worcester did not, unlike most other cities in America, have a significant union movement.

Rosenzweig doesn't really attempt to explain this phenomenon.  He ascribes the failure to the strength and paternalism of the local captains of industry.  However, the lack of a union movement is significant for Rosenzweig's argument that workers, although they could not resist the control of management over their labor, found ways to resist culturally instead.

Rosenzweig considers the culture wars of turn-of-the-century Worcester through four battles: over saloons, over the Fourth of July, over parks, and over movie theaters.  In each case, he presents the history of working-class life, the attempt by bourgeois Worcesterites to assert power and control over the workers' cultural life, the workers' resistance, and ultimate accommodation between proletariat and bourgeoisie in the development of a new American culture.

Ethnicity seems to be the primary means by which working-class (and later middle-class ethnic) people organize their lives.  The saloon develops by neighborhood and is an ethnic institution.  The Fourth of July celebration was different depending on which ethnic group celebrated it.  Neighborhood parks tended to further support Worcesterites' ethnic affiliation.  However, Rosenzweig's evidence shows broad commonalities among different groups of similar class orientation.  In general, working-class people were considered "rowdy" and "boisterous" irregardless of their ethnic background.

Ultimately, ethnic neighborhoods get to keep their saloons, despite a strong temperance movement dedicated to shutting them down.  Workers simply ignored many of the laws that attempted prohibition in the 1800s.  But, the saloons do eventually become regulated and commercialized (the two main brewers in Worcester basically became controlling interests in the vast majority of watering holes in the city).  A similar process happens with all Worcester institutions and their particular cultures are subsumed within a larger, "American" culture.  But the process isn't simply one-way, or top-down.  There is a back and forth dynamic, with working-class people successfully mediating the ways in which the new culture is developed and changing larger Worcester cultural patterns at least as much as their own cultures are reshaped.

The argument is fairly persuasive, but Rosenzweig has a number of problems.  First, and perhaps not least, Rosenzweig goes to pains to say that Worcester is unlike most of the rest of America, which makes one wonder about the implied argument that Worcester is a case-study for a pattern of industrial development.  

Secondly, his argument that bourgeois Worcester was attempting to impose its culture upon the proletariat ignores the fact that bourgeois Worcester was itself going through massive cultural changes provoked by the influx of new wealth.  Perhaps the picture is better described as a battle of cultural equals over what the new culture of industrial Worcester will be.  Or not.

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, he ignores the ways in which race has to play a role in the development of culture in America.  As much as he wants to argue for a working-class ethnic culture that resists a bourgeois take-over, I kept wondering, to what extent are they also fighting to be included in the broader culture, to be considered White?  Instead, Rosenzweig refers to African-Americans exactly twice: once while reflecting on a larger cultural resistance argument by mentioning blues music in passing; and once to point out that Worcester had a small Black population.  But, particularly if he is making an argument that Worcester's experience is reflective of a broader industrial experience, even if the popluation is small, he should have looked at how that small group of "other" people played a role in the cultural development and inclusion of European immigrants into the white dominant culture.