Sharon McConnell-Sidorick
The study of the history of working-class life in America underwent a major transformation in the 1970s. Moving beyond labor history’s earlier institutional paradigm, with its focus on union structures and leaders, the New Labor History expanded its reach into new territories of working-class culture and community, to the point that the field today is generally referred to as Labor and Working-Class History. Bruce Laurie was one of the young historians who pushed out the boundaries of labor history, and his Working People of Philadelphia had a substantial impact on how later historians viewed antebellum workers.
Beginning as an influential dissertation in 1971 under the tutelage of David Montgomery, a notable American advocate of the New Labor History, Laurie’s work stands out as an important early example of the new school, which was in turn heavily influenced by the “New Social History” pioneered by E. P. Thompson.
My own first reading of Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was transformative. Thompson offered new research methods and, more importantly, a new way of seeing that resonated with my own social background. Contesting previous approaches to history that privileged elites, institutions, or great technological change as the driving forces of history, he revolutionized the way ordinary people were treated in historical discourse. Followed by other advocates like Eric Hobsbawm and Herbert Gutman, Thompson sought to emphasize the activities of ordinary laboring people as a central factor in the historical process and the influences of culture in the making of working-class lives. His goal in doing so was to rescue from obscurity the fundamental dignity of the forgotten masses of people who make, and have made, history. History, he argued, is an active process owing as much to agency as to structures, and class is not simply a static category, but happens in human relationships embodied in real people in a real context. These ideas opened up a whole new world for historians of the working class and were foundational to my own approach. People mattered. The working class had been made not just by patterns of capital accumulation and market competition, but also by the ideas, aspirations, and struggles of workers striving to influence the conditions of their lives. Power was, and always had been, contested and never merely given, and it was through such contestation that the working class made itself.
Bruce Laurie located Working People of Philadelphia firmly within this paradigm, attempting to explore the complexities of working-class life in Philadelphia beyond memberships in institutions or unions. In the course of his impressive research, he wrote not only an important labor history, but a major contribution to the history of Philadelphia as well. Laurie’s work was an early product of the Philadelphia Social History Project, the groundbreaking institution that coupled the cliometric turn in history and the New Social History, tabulating vast amounts of quantitative data about Philadelphia’s early residents and providing the foundation for numerous books and articles, including several by Laurie, a research associate of the Project. He was one of the first to utilize the manuscript manufacturing census, identifying five distinct work environments in the city that provided dissimilar work experiences and encouraged different responses from working people. He demonstrated that, unlike in areas such as New England, industry in antebellum Philadelphia developed unevenly, with small workshops and handwork often co-existing alongside large manufactories and factories. Laurie’s focus on the uneven development of manufacturing in Philadelphia provided crucial insights into the need to pay attention to the specificities of locale and population history and encouraged historians to reformulate methods of measuring social stratification and mobility, influencing many subsequent works.
Laurie did not stop there, however, but attempted to push beyond institutions and statistical data to understand the intricacies of workers’ actual lives, their motivations, and factors that shaped their world, especially religion. Sometimes his claims appear speculative and some critics charged that he stretched the evidence to make his points, but it is an early endeavor to understand Philadelphia’s working people in all their complexity.
Laurie’s work illuminates a period of working-class history that is relatively little understood, examining both formal and informal associational activities derived from traditions and experiences outside the orbit of industrialization. Different work environments and the diversity of cultural lifestyles led him to identify three distinct subcultures of the city’s working class. These included Traditionalists (The Boys of Pleasure)—workers who maintained pre-industrial lifestyles that mixed work and leisure habits; Revivalists (The Militias of Christ)—those that joined the evangelical fold espousing sobriety, the Protestant work ethic, and middle-class values; and Radicals (Thomas Paine’s Progeny)—those that espoused Enlightenment rationalism, republicanism, education, and anti-capitalism. People were both constrained and sustained by their cultures. Even earlier, Philadelphia had been the home of the first trade union in America, and Laurie acknowledged the solidarity workers achieved during the period of the General Trades Union in the 1830s and the Workingman’s Party in 1851, but argued that these attempts gave way to cultural and ethno-religious differences. By analyzing the subcultures he identified, Laurie then described the divisions in the working class that underpinned the lack of sustainable class consciousness among them. That conclusion may have been different had he extended the study beyond the 1850s to the following decade, when workers gathered in a Kensington row house to found the Knights of Labor, an organization with roots in the earlier period that marked a new level of class consciousness among the city’s workers.
One of the major contributions of this study, however, is that it gave working people agency in the shaping of their lives; further, he was one of the first American authors to acknowledge that workers had an intellectual history. This new approach, pioneered by historians like Laurie, would go off into different threads of labor history, some recurring in importance, most recently with the rediscovered interest in religion and the working class. The opening of these new vistas by Laurie and his contemporary New Labor historians made it possible for later scholars to look at whole new aspects of working-class life. It gave me permission to delve into working-class youth culture and labor feminism in Jazz Age Philadelphia in what would otherwise have been a fairly standard institutional history of the hosiery workers’ union.
Notwithstanding this vital contribution, Working People of Philadelphia is an early example of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the New Labor History. While the new paradigm recognized workers’ agency in the shaping of their own lives, critics charged that it neglected institutions and elites. Some, including myself, are convinced that labor leaders and unions shape workers’ goals and values as much as they also reflect them, that identities are always multiple and subject to change, and that power is always contested. Scholars in the twenty-first century have been working to bring the analysis of class back into a central place in history, including in the new field of the “snew history of capitalism.” Now, however, they do so with the inclusion of those other factors that make up the fuller reality of working people’s lives. Thanks to the earlier contributions of books like Working People of Philadelphia, historians will never again be able to credibly present working people as pawns in an impersonal historical process in which they had no active part.
Working People of Philadelphia is important as a classic example of the early days of the New Labor History, but it is also valuable in its own right. It has had two previous lives, as a dissertation in 1971 and a book in 1980. Now, thanks to Temple University Press and the National Endowment for the Humanities, it will get a third.
SHARON MCCONNELL-SIDORICK is a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars. Her book Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia’s Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2017.