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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of Labor, Introduction and Notes by James R. Barrett (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2004)
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| LABOUR HISTORIANS, and North American labour historians in particular, have reason to celebrate this new edition of Hutchins Hapgood's The Spirit of Labor, first published in 1907. The book is a fascinating piece of history — what Hapgood calls a nonfictional "human document" (9) of the life and thought of Anton Johannsen, a militant Chicago woodworker, unionist, and anarchist in the early 20th century — as well as a very enjoyable read. It will be fun and interesting in the advanced undergraduate or graduate classroom (as David Montgomery's blurb on the back cover reminds us), and James Barrett's insightful introduction and helpful annotations add a great deal to the text. |
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For precisely these reasons, it presents a somewhat tricky reviewing problem. First, discussing the book on its own merits, as one might a contemporary scholarly work, is not really the point of the exercise, for The Spirit of Labor has been reissued because of its import as a historical document. Reviewing it purely on those terms would be not entirely unlike reviewing a file folder in the archives. Second, Barrett's well-researched introduction, which contextualizes the book in terms of Hapgood's life, and the intellectual and social milieu of the time it was written, does an excellent job of placing The Spirit of Labor, and suggests a useful critique. |
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Hapgood was a widely read radical "bohemian" New York journalist. He counted among his friends many of the more prominent social reformers and politically progressive artists of his day: Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Eugene O'Neill, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Georgia O'Keeffe — the list goes on. Like many of these intellectuals, Hapgood was a member of the upper class whose commitment to social justice led him to confront class oppression, and whose relative affluence allowed him the leisure to investigate and write about it. After publishing other intimate (and very popular) nonfictional "human documents" of the urban poor —The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902) and Autobiography of a Thief (1903) sold well — Hapgood turned his attention to the labour movement, and to Chicago, "the place where labor [was] the most riotous" (12) in the early 20th-century US. He set out to meet a particular "kind of man," one who embodied his (highly romantic) view of the American working man. Johannsen, a German "mechanic" raised in Iowa, active in the woodworkers' union, met the requirements with "his intellectual vigor, his free, anarchistic habit of mind, and the rough, sweet health of his personality." (16–17) |
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The Spirit of Labor tells the story of Johannsen's youth and years as a "tramp," but most of the book is a detailed description, often in Johannsen's own words, of his intellectual and political life in Chicago's radical circles and labour movement. Hapgood's stories of the people and ideas of Chicago's "anarchist salons," unions, and district councils, and of Johannsen's stormy relationship with both his employers and union leadership make fascinating reading. As Barrett points out in his introduction, Johannsen was not typical of his coworkers or US workers in general (xxx); nor, I would add, was he typical of those outside his class. He was, by his own account and Hapgood's, unswervingly honest, rigidly principled, uncompromising, dynamic, eloquent, and politically savvy. He was a committed anarchist, but he embraced what he saw as necessary institutional means toward change, i.e. the union and its leadership. (275) He was a very successful and popular leader in organized labour, although he rose highest in the hierarchy in the period after Hapgood's book was published (at the end of his life, he spent a decade as the Vice-President of the Chicago Federation of Labor). |
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Hapgood's account is greatly enhanced by his reflections on his "outsider" status among the working class, for he was a sensitive writer, and a honest self-critic. At no point does he try to "sell" himself as anything other than what he was: a wealthy man whose wealth was fortuitous and unearned. This critical reflection is usually suspended in his description of what he calls the "intellectual proletariat." He is prone to statements like "it is this being the real thing, or based upon the proletariat ... which gives them their consistency, their meaning and their eloquence. It is they who get radical ideas, instincts and hopes first hand, and have consequently that freshness of mind and of expression which springs from having come actually in contact with the material of their emotion and thought." (324) Still, the book is no less interesting or enjoyable for Hapgood's romanticism; in fact, it resonated much of my own (often uncritical) optimism, a readerly response that was surely among his hopes for the book. |
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Given the documentary force and meaning of the text, the most appropriate read a review can offer is, I think, less critical, and more suggestive. Barrett's introduction is very helpful in this regard, for he points out not only what is notably missing from Hapgood's story — for example, the significant role women played in Chicago's radical circles (xlii), and the increasingly influential IWW (xliv) — but he brings up a plethora of questions that would be useful in any critical discussion about The Spirit of Labor: Why was the working class exceptionally radical in Chicago, and why at this moment in history (xli)? What does Hapgood's work and life tell us about the cultural significance, and (im)permeability of class stratification in early 20th-century US (xlvi)? Alongside the original text, the questions Barrett raises make the book an exciting teaching opportunity. |
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Moreover, these questions, and the critical reflection they might inspire, are invaluable in today's academy, and not merely because of the windows it might open on events past. Reading The Spirit of Labor is meaningful today because it exposes us not only to Hapgood's humanity, hope, and the inevitable limits of his moral vision, but to our own as well. It forces critical and radical scholars to think through what it means to be a politicized academic or intellectual today, to be in a position of relative privilege, sharing Hapgood's sympathy and hope, but often sharing also his self-consciously "outsider" status. Indeed, I think The Spirit of Labor could be paired in a seminar very profitably with Thomas Geoghegan's Which Side Are You On? (New Press 2004), a much less sanguine, but equally reflective "insider/outsider" look at the labour movement in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s. Geoghegan's brutal honesty reasserts part of Hapgood's legacy, nearly a century later: the undiminished importance of an intellectual openness to difficult personal and political questions — questions about the privileges accorded by class, race, citizenship (we would add gender of course; maybe more) — and to the ways in which their fundamental contradictions shape not only the social worlds we study, but the classroom, the archive, and the written word. |
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Geoff Mann
Simon Fraser University |
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