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SECTION III
OTHER ARTICLES
WHEN COMMUNITY COMES HOME TO ROOST: THE SOUTHERN MILLTOWN AS LOST CAUSE
| By Leon Fink |
University of Illinois, Chicago |
| `Community' remains something of a mantra for social historians. Not only as a favored unit of analysis—as in the perennial community study—but often as a practical, public history project, the recovery or reconstruction of community carries a positive moral and political caché for most of us. Through active support of archival oral history collections, local museums, and vernacular memorials (e.g. `labor landmarks'), harnessing scholarship to a popular project of collective memory has long served "New Labor History" practitioners like myself as a prime source of fulfillment outside the classroom. With an aim not only to recover a version of the past but to use it to define an alternative vision of the future, such community history has often merged with a kind of writing about social protest in specific settings that the historian James Green calls "movement history": "There is a role for historians in this desperate era, a role we can play in recovering lost memories and recalling forgotten places in movement history, a role in recording silenced voices and retelling tragic stories."1 |
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But whose memory and which places will be preserved? In throwing open the historical record to voices `from below' and further encouraging local communities to collect and write their own histories, publicly engaged social historians eventually encounter the tensions between heritage—particularly its current, popular counterpart, heritage tourism—and history. While the latter upholds a standard of distanced reflection and continual reinterpretation, the former aims for fixity and wholeness, evoking emotions of pride and sometimes even reverence. The "heritage syndrome," concludes Michael Kammen, "accentuates the positive but sifts away what is problematic" in the record of the past.2 Nor is it a problem that can be easily whisked away. The problem of heritage may well be embedded in the very undertaking of community history. As cultural historian Raymond Williams discerned thirty years ago, among "all other terms of social organization, `community' seems never to be used unfavorably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term."3 As the most positive association that can exist within a social group, the construct of community is regularly invoked by historical agents and analysts alike. Indeed, historians who invoke community in the past—with the usual explicit or implicit complement of "erosion" of community in the present—open the door to today's heritage seekers to rescue what they can from the detritus of broken dreams. That such initiatives can veer off in a politically reactionary direction is reason enough to re-think what historian Thomas Bender, in another context, called "the problem of community."4
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What follows is a bittersweet reflection upon my own encounter with a community history and heritage project. A labor historian who has regularly invoked the community concept, I was intrigued, in this case, by a southern town's use of local history as a tool for community revitalization. I cultivated contacts with the leaders of the project, as well as other townspeople, to gain a deeper understanding of the connections between historical memory, civic identity, and (present-day) political action. The more I delved into my investigation, however, the more complicated, and ultimately disturbing, were my findings. On the one hand, I witnessed an impressive harnessing of history to community identity—a narrative about working-class Americans, borne of exploitation and struggle—heightened by the use of oral history in the hands of local "organic intellectuals." On the other hand, "heritage" history here ultimately appeared less to do full justice to the known historical record than to confirm and disseminate certain conservative and exclusionary political values of the project organizers and main patrons. On both intellectual and political terms, the unhappy outcome, for me at least, forces a critical reckoning with the "will-to-community" within historical studies as well as contemporary affairs. |
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