Roundtable On Higbie’s Labor’s Mind: Review By Cole

Toby Higbie’s new book is a pleasure to read and highly recommended. Higbie, a professor of history at UCLA, spent years researching in the archives of universities and labor colleges, devoted countless hours to analyzing cartoons published in working-class and union newspapers, and thought deeply about a 1920 play featuring robot workers who rose up to overthrow their human overlords. What’s not to like?

Reading about the thoughts and dreams—the mindscapes and interior lives of working-class people in early 20^th century America—is both educational and illuminating. Or, to use a term a student of mine recently wowed me with, Higbie’s book is elucidating. Though focused on the first four decades of the 20^th century, Higbie reaches back into the 19^th century, across the second half of the 20^th and into the 21^st. He mines workers’ private letters and journals (sadly, too few exist), union publications, “mainstream” media, and artistic renderings of working-class intellectuals, especially cartoons reproduced in newspapers and magazines. Higbie already took workers’ interior lives quite seriously but, for those who have not done so, they certainly will after reading this book.

I’m a labor historian and even I learned a great deal. For instance, in late 2017, shortly after publication of Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, an anthology I co-edited, I received a random email from someone on behalf of the College of Complexes. He invited me to present at this self-described “Weekly Free Speech Forum.” I never had heard of this group, but I soon learned it began way back in 1951—a rare beacon of light and openness in the dark era that was the 2^nd Red Scare. Higbie examined, in great depth, the College of Complexes, placing it into a much longer history of working-class culture in Chicago, rich with “organic intellectuals,” bohemians, and radicals of all stripes best known for groups like the Dill Pickle Club who met in Bughouse Square—now Washington Park that borders the august Newberry Library in the Gold Coast neighborhood, rechristened from what used to be called Towertown. My presentation was one of the wackiest I’ve ever done but, only after reading Higbie’s book, did I fully appreciate that I had participated in an intellectual tradition dating back not just to the McCarthy era but actually the late 19^th century. Indeed, the College of Complexes was one of many worker forums, informal institutions, and organizations that enriched working-class people’s intellectual lives.

Higbie’s book about working class Americans’ habits of reading and thinking is a gem. His respect for the power of learning, specifically via reading, may feel quaint in the era of internet, social media, and maximum screen time. And, yet, reading about Sadie Goodman, a garment worker who attended a labor college in the 1920s, convinces one of how truly life-changing such educational experiences were: “the world begins to stretch out. You begin to see and hear things that have always been there, but to which you have been deaf, dumb and blind” (62).

Time and again, men and women from working class, often desperately poor, backgrounds found themselves—their true selves, their ways of seeing changed—thanks to the power of learning. Specifically learning among and from their fellow workers. Higbie also explores the stereotypes, still widely held despite their obvious limitations, regarding the dichotomy between experience and formal education, between the “school of hard knocks” and formal education. Perhaps too much to ask, but it would have been nice to have discussed, if only briefly, working-class intellectuals before 1900; Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Tom Paine are repeatedly invoked by Higbie but not examined. Perhaps surprisingly, Ben Franklin does not receive a single mention.

For those who like their past “useable,” Higbie hammers home the vitality of worker education programs and labor colleges. In the “dark” times of the 1920s, when mass strikes and unionism had been squashed after WWI, such programs started to grow. Subsequently, “by the late 1930s labor college graduates were waiting in place as legal and political changes opened the door for mass unionization” (64). He makes a convincing case that labor colleges nurtured the people who became the organizers and intellectuals when union and social movement organizing exploded in the 1930s. Those wanting to help revitalize labor unions—or for that matter any other social movement—in our times take note! Some already have as the New Brookwood Labor College, in St. Paul, Minnesota, testifies to.

His last chapter, on visual culture and working-class consciousness and intellectual life is brilliant. He features the story of Czech writer Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) which envisioned an industrial army of robots gaining consciousness and then rising up to overthrow their (human) oppressors. Higbie rescues this play, popular in the 1920s and 1930s, for what the robot meant to different people during the interwar era when the term first was used. He discusses how, “As a cultural symbol, the robot encapsulated concerns that factory work was changing the minds, bodies, and habits of working people, and not for the better” (120). Higbie explores how the machine, “was the physical union of employer power and worker dependence, subsuming the worker’s individual identity into the private purposes of production” (120). By the 1930s, “the robot as a symbol of automation run amok” (123) was widely embraced. Of course, these matters have tremendous import for our times. In 2019, it might be hard to imagine a human who hasn’t considered the potential of being made “redundant” due to technological “progress.” The Luddites—English textile workers who destroyed their machine looms in the early 19^th century and launched a thousand memes in the 21^st—were not entirely wrong to fear that employers introduced new technologies to reduce costs by firing workers. Really, though, the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were anti-poverty. Then, as now, who controls technology is the issue.

Higbie also dissects why many workers meekly follow the bosses’ commands rather than rise up with fellow workers. In this regard, Higbie’s discussion of the cartoonist Ernest Riebe’s classic Mr. Block series, which appeared in IWW (Industrial Workers of the World or Wobbly) publications, is especially rewarding. Mr. Block literally had a block-head to make crystal clear how dumb he was. What does a dumb worker do? Listen to the boss without question, accept whatever poor wages and hard tasks assigned, hate his fellow workers because they belong to a different ethnic or racial group, blindly support his country, refuse to join a union, and don’t question the inherent inequality of capitalism.

Rather than discussing Eric Hoffer, as Higbie does in his Conclusion, allow me to discuss some far less well-known “longshoremen-philosophers.” The three I’ll highlight organized with their fellow workers unlike Hoffer, who benefited from his union membership but never contributed to it. In my own research that resulted in the publication of my book, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area, I had the great good fortune to interview and befriend numerous worker-intellectuals.

Cleophas Williams migrated, during World War II, from rural Arkansas to Oakland, where he found a job on the waterfront. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, new members of Local 10–the San Francisco Bay Area branch of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)–were obligated to attend the California Labor School, briefly discussed in Higbie’s book. Williams, who never went to college, wasn’t excited at first but came to love his classes and appreciate the opportunity to learn (labor) history. Twenty years later, he his fellow workers in Local 10 elected him their first African American president. He was a civil rights and union activist for forty years.

Around the same time Williams started taking classes in San Francisco’s California Labor School, Herb Mills dropped out of high school and went to work at the legendary River Rouge auto factory just outside Detroit. With the encouragement of his fellow workers, Communist activists in his UAW Local 600, however, he completed his high school degree and then attended college at the University of Michigan. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, joined the Army (a very working-class thing to do), and then enrolled in a PhD program in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, on the GI Bill. After helping found the legendary student organization, SLATE, he dropped out when admitted to ILWU Local 10. A few years later, he was granted a leave of absence to finish his dissertation, at UC, Irvine, and promptly returned to Local 10, where he became one of the most important dock leaders for the next twenty years. Along the way, he wrote op-eds, popular and scholarly articles, and even a novel.

Howard Keylor graduated high school in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio during the Great Depression and soon found himself in the Army. Surviving the US invasion of Okinawa, he joined the ILWU (and the Communist Party) where he became a rank-and-file activist for forty-plus years. He was involved in the ILWU’s 1948 strike and became a leader of his union’s anti-apartheid activism in the 1970s and 1980s. He marched in solidarity pickets on the Oakland waterfront, in 2014, to protest the Israeli bombing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. In his late 80s, he still was sending out book reviews to his extensive email list. I was one of his subscribers but so was Mumia Abu-Jamal, still languishing in a Pennsylvania prison.

Higbie’s book helps us understand people like Williams, Mills, and Keylor. They—and the men and women featured in his book—belong to a long and continuing tradition among working-class people. Such folks fascinate me and, if you read this book, they will come to fascinate you as well.