Not too long ago, people saw history mainly in terms of kings, warriors and battles. Of course, that's no surprise. History is the story we tell ourselves about our past, and when you tell a story, you can't include everything. You have to choose what to put in and what to omit, and you base your choice on a certain attitude towards life or a certain point of view. So when people believed that only the doings of their rulers mattered, history was told from the rulers' point of view.
Nowadays, our ideas about what's important are broader, and our history books are beginning to talk about the contributions of groups that found no place in earlier histories. Students are learning about the role of women and minorities in building our society and about the importance of religion. But one group students still don't hear much about is organized labor.
That's a strange omission when you consider the part organized labor has played for over a century in getting decent working conditions for U.S. workers and in passing important social legislation. Perhaps as our ideas about our history continue to evolve, labor's role will come into focus and new history books will be written to reflect this view.
But we don't have to wait for this to happen. There are more and more good materials that allow teachers to pick up areas of special interest and integrate them into standard history courses. The quarterly magazine Labor's Heritage is one that can help give students a terrific introduction to the place of the labor movement in the history of our country.
Labor's Heritage, which is put out by the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, is two years old. Called one of the "best new magazines of 1989" by the Library Journal, it's designed for the general reader with an interest in American history, and its articles, which range widely over the field of labor history, are well written and handsomely illustrated with contemporary photographs and pictures. Like all good history, Labor's Heritage aims for even-handedness, so there are some articles about things the labor movement can be proud of-like the integration of teacher training programs in Delaware at the end of World War II (January 1990). And there are others about things we can't remember with pride-like the racial discrimination in World War II shipyards that is discussed in an article about the African-American writer Chester Himes (July 1989). Here are a couple of articles that I think young history students would find especially interesting.
"Labor Espionage: The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike in 1914-1915" by Gary M. Fink (April 1989) uses the reports of a company spy to tell the story of a bitter strike early in this century. The spy, Harry Preston, was so successful at getting in with some of the strike leaders-even as he was secretly stirring up trouble-that at one point he was offered the presidency of the striking local.
Besides showing how far management would go to break a strike, the article presents an inside view of the problems leaders had in keeping the strike going. Of course, Preston is biased, but the tremendous difficulties of feeding and housing people who had lost their paychecks, and the company houses where they had lived, come through. So do the problems with hangers-on who were there for the free food rather than out of any commitment to the strikers' cause-and the rivalries among various union leaders, which Preston worked to exploit.
"The Company Store in Coal Town Culture" by Lou Athey (January 1990) deals with daily realities rather than the extraordinary circumstances of a strike. Athey describes everything about these stores that mining companies ran for employees from their architecture to their stock and trading practices. And he shows how companies often used their stores to gouge employees as well as to maintain control over them. Though miners and their families may have seen the company store as a convenience, the enormous markups at stores that were, in effect, monopolies meant that miners were subsidizing the companies with their hard-earned wages. And when the companies issued scrip- coupons redeemable for goods and services in the company store-they also did wonders for their cashflow because many miners spent their week's wages before the paychecks were ever issued.
Tomorrow will be Labor Day. Yet if you asked most students what this means, they'd only be able to tell you that it's the time for Labor Day Sales and the last long weekend before school starts. The articles I've just described -- and many others in Labor's Heritage -- would offer students a solid and exciting introduction to the role of trade unionism in U.S. history and the lives of working people. Why not donate a subscription to Labor's Heritage to the library at your local school and give students there a chance to get introduced this year?