Thompson - "Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism"

Thompson, E.P., “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism” in Flinn, Michael W., and T. C. Smout. Essays in Social History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749

Argument
EP Thompson addresses changing notions of time due to the development of industrial capitalism, a notion familiar to participants of Prof. Basu's seminar. Specifically, he explores changes in the "inward-notion of time."
"how far, and in what ways, did this shift in timesense
affect labour discipline, and how far did it influence the inward
apprehension of time of working people? If the transition to
mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working
habits - new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature
upon which these incentives could bite effectively - how far is this
related to changes in the inward notation of time ?" (57)

What we are
examining here are not only changes in manufacturing technique
which demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater
exactitude in time-routines in any society; but also these changes as
they were lived through in the society of nascent industrial capitalism.
We are concerned simultaneously with time-sense in its technological
conditioning, and with time-measurement as a means of labour
exploitation." (80)

"pre-industrial time" - less a sense of the tyranny of the clock to finish a task: as a woman (or man) working in the home still, to an extant, feels.

industrial time -emerges out of necessity of organizing task-based factory labor. Other forces include school.

"In all these ways - by the division of labour; the supervision of
labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and
schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports - new labour habits
were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed."

Also emerging: clear division between work and life. Puritan time-valuation: don't waste time, either in work or self-improvement.

Cohen - Racketeer's Progress

Cohen, Andrew Wender. The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Argument
Cohen complicates the historiography from the Progressive Era through the New Deal by adding a large new body of actors to the corporations and their laborers: craft workers and small businessman. Focusing on Chicago, Cohen shows how craftsmen resisted corporate modernization and battled against corporations to protect their trades' spaces. Cohen reveals a system of order and law governed not by the official legal system but by cooperation and oversight among the trade unions and associations, enforced "through fines, strikes, boycotts, pickets, assaults, bombings, and shootings." In the twenties these associations began to turn toward powerful crime syndicates such as Al Capone to defend their trade, leading to the legal term "racketeer" which differentiated (quite loosely) illegal organization from legal organization, and was often used to persuade jurors against craft unions. Throughout, corporations sought to break up the craft associations through traditional legal routes with some success, although quite often craftsmen managed to merely ignore court rulings and quickly bounced back from any union-busting moments. Ironically, racketeering during the New Deal was redefined in a way that protected craft unions.

Craftsmen were ambivalent toward Progressives and their ideas of reform, who in turn had a superior attitude toward craftsmen. Progressive Era courts rebuked craftsmen for their attempts at controlling trade.

Key Terms
open shop/closed shop - Early in the century corporations campaigned for an "open shop" relationship to craftsmen which would allow them to pursue craft services in an open market, while craftsmen sought to maintain their market power through organization in a "closed shop" excluding non-members.

Review
Jentz, JAH
Cohen "wants to displace mass production labor from the center of labor history before World War II." In the 1920s courts moved from using injunctions against union activities to criminal prosecution of craft leaders.

Elliot J. Gorn, Business History Review
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096959

"Modernizing the economy was not a smooth process?it was "violent, contingent, and contested." Powerful labor organizations, which occasionally resorted to tactics like bomb ings and beatings, prevented national corporations from wholly impos ing their will on Chicago; such labor activism also provided the tem plate for federal practices during the New Deal. Cohen goes on to contest five ideas he says dominate historians' in terpretation of the early twentieth century. Modernity implies that the American economy, along with the state and society, had attained maturity by the Progressive Era; that incorporation, technology, mechanization, and free markets had transformed the nation. In fact, large segments of Chicago were still "premodern," in the sense that many workers re mained ensconced in small-scale firms where their muscle, knowledge, and skill gave them considerable power."

Denning - The Cultural Front

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. The Haymarket series. London: Verso, 1996.

Argument/Key terms
The period from the Sacco-Venzetti execution (1927) and the Crash of 1929 to the Cold War blacklisting and McCarthyism is best described as the Age of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) because for the first time the left had a significant effect on American culture and society as a whole. The Cultural Front describes Denning's argument: that intellectuals, artists, and lower class workers were united - or at least connected - in a conscious efforts to shape society through mass culture. This period thus saw a "laboring" of American culture, as not only did culture begin to reflect lower class interests, but the lower classes themselves became active participants in the creation, performance, and consumption of culture. (xvi-xvii)

Historiographic Importance
Denning refutes the common-held belief that the Popular Front was made up of the Communist Party at its core with other sympathetic participants on the periphery ("fellow travelers"). Instead, he argues party membership was much more fluid and the specific ideologies of the Popular Front were much more varied than the core-periphery model might suggest. He thus proposes that the Popular Front be viewed as a historical bloc, with a base in industrial unions.

Taking issue with the New York school's claim that the Popular Front was an utter failure because of its central Communism, he also attempts to demonstrate both the contribution to American culture made during the period and the lasting influence of these works after 1948 (eventually inspiring the New Left of the 60s).

Key Examples

Ch. 4 Dos Passos's USA - Didn't have the lasting influence of contemporary works of fiction because it was so rooted in the time. Triology tells of the decline of the Lincoln Republic. Unites history, fiction, and memoir through four types of writing - Newsreels (unauthored accounts of historical events), Camera Eyes (autobiographical accounts of Dos Passos own experiences), biographical portraits (of real figures, and fictional narratives about 12 disconnected characters.

Ch. 6 Ghetto Pastorals - Importance of ghetto as setting for immigrant lower class tales.

Ch.7 Grapes of Wrath - Most successful of numerous migrant worker texts. Elevated the Okie migration despite the existence of other examples of migrant workers at that moment, primarily because Okies were white. Denning discusses other less well-known migrant worker stories about non-whites (Mexicans, Chinese, blacks)

Ch. 8 Popular Front Musical Theater - Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock is an allegory of the middle class eforts to usurp the power of labor unions. Harold Rome's Pins and Needles was a musical revue which had a success that has confounded Broadway historians. Most write it off as appealing through its political consciousness, but Denning argues that the songs about working-class romance are what made it successful. The cast was made up of New York laborers - amateur performers (until the show became increasingly popular). Anti-fascist sketches.

Ch. 9 Caberet Blues - Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington (discussed in Ch. 8) were thought in retrospect to not be particularly politically conscious (and often claimed as such after 1948), but Denning shows they are underestimated.

Ch. 10 Orson Welles - Denning argues Anti-Fascism was the core ideology of Welles' work from Julius Caesar to War of the Worlds to Citizen Kane.

Ch. 11 The Disney strike of 1941 - breaking Disney's paternalism

Critique
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this book. On one hand, the case studies are interesting, in-depth, and often engrossing. The overall conclusions seem, historiographically, significant. However, great portions of the book were a real slog. Denning often repeats himself. I had a strong sense that the text could have been at least 100 pages smaller to the same effect. He often quoted secondary sources that agreed with his points. He also freqently uses long lists of names. Whole paragraphs are dedicated to listing examples. Those kinds of things, it seems to me, could either be edited out or stuck in a footnote. (This uses endnotes.)