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Review
| The Voice of the People: Primary Sources on the History of American Labor, Industrial Relations, and Working-Class Culture, edited by Jonathan Rees and Jonathan Z.S. Pollack. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2004. 246 pages. $17.95, paper.
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| By culling fifty-four primary sources from books, journals, and government reports that date back to 1844, Jonathan Rees and Jonathan Pollack offer us innumerable insights into the history of American labor. What is striking is the way that their document set underscores the complexity of the working-class experience. First, the speeches, memoirs, testimonies and lyrics address not only the lives of workers, but also the development of trade unions and the implementation of managerial practices. Second, the book brings us into close contact with a diverse group of African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and white women and men who worked as slaves, field hands, prostitutes, store clerks, domestic help, mill hands, and assembly-line crews. To be sure, many of the voices in the collection do not belong to workers. Rees and Pollack often rely on the observations of journalists, scholars, and managers because "few working-class people recorded their feelings or experiences in writing." (p. xii). Still their book helps to deepen our understanding of what it meant to be a worker in American history. |
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The Voice of the People is not the only collection of primary sources to focus on workers. Nelson Lichtenstein and Eileen Boris produced a 562 page volume in the Major Problem series several years ago. Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph McCartin will release a 352 page compilation in Fall 2004. But the short length of the excerpts, not to mention the affordable price, makes The Voice of the People particularly attractive. Although Rees and Pollack promote their book as a supplement to college textbooks, the readability of the documents will appeal to both middle and high school history teachers. A clear organizational structure contributes to the book's accessibility. Within four chronologically ordered sections, the documents divide further into three categories: work and labor/management relations; the union movement; and working-class culture. A period overview of three or four pages introduces each of the main parts and a brief contextual explanation precedes each primary source. The editors also provide three questions at the end of every reading to encourage thought and discussion. |
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The book is not without problems. Like any collection of historical documents, it is possible to fault the selection of sources. For example, the material is noticeably skewed toward the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Excerpts by white artisans, Irish laborers, female shoemakers, freed slaves, or the workingmen's parties are not difficult to obtain and would have provided a more complete historical account of American labor. It would also have been good for the editors to have included archival material like pay roll sheets, work regulations, or time tables to make students aware that everything preserved from the past can be used to understand history, as well as to encourage higher level thinking. Finally, was it necessary to include the introductory essays at the beginning of each main section ? Admittedly they are a starting point for understanding what happened to workers. Teachers with a limited knowledge of labor history will certainly appreciate the way these clearly written essays provide some context for the primary materials. Yet no historian can adequately summarize four or five decades of historical developments in a few pages. Perhaps Rees and Pollack should have left it to teachers to provide sufficient background and instead included a few more sources. |
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These concerns do not detract from the usefulness of The Voice of the People as a primary source reader that reveals a great deal about the aspirations, challenges, and resolve of American workers. A larger question, however, is whether the demand has peaked for books that contain historical documents. Archives, libraries, and universities have digitized a plethora of primary materials about American labor history and made them available on web sites. We have at our fingertips everything from the transcripts of Studs Terkel's interviews and the photos of Lewis Hine to cartoons about labor disputes and narratives about slave life. For teachers with limited budgets or those who like to customize their curriculums or syllabi, it makes more sense to copy these online materials than to assign collections in books. Although there are still many teachers who prefer the time efficiency and expertise of published compilations, it will be interesting to see if their numbers dwindle as the Web becomes more sophisticated. |
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| Orchard House School |
Taylor Hollander |
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