John Bodnar

Power and Memory in Oral History: Workers and Managers at Studebaker.

No one who has conducted oral history interviews has escaped the question, But how do you know it is true? The issue of veracity remains important for anyone interested in analyzing oral expressions of memory in historical research. Obviously, memories are limited, and a complete reconstruction of the past through memory (or any other means) is not possible. Oral historians have generally combined the memories they recorded with other kinds of records or cross-checked their interview material with data gathered from other interviews. Their work has yielded extremely valuable insights into particular historical questions, but it has not eliminated the need to think carefully about what people actually remember about their past. An analysis of the memories revealed in oral interviews with men and women who formerly worked at the Studebaker Corporation automobile plant in South Bend, Indiana, offers suggestions about the nature or truth of the memories captured in oral interviews. This material, recorded mostly between 1984 and 1985, allows not only a partial reconstruction of the traditional history of labor and management at the plant, but, more importantly for our purposes, a partial reconsideration of the social construction of memory: the interviews can be read not only to discover what people remembered but also to discover how they went about the process of organizing and creating their memories in the first place. David Lowenthal has written that the contingent and discontinuous facts of the past become intelligible only when woven together as stories. Indeed, what appears most compelling about the Studebaker memories is not the details of life in the plant, which was much like life in other auto plants, but the narrative structures or central plots in which individual memories and discrete bits of evidence were placed. Those plots actually reveal the way in which workers and managers at Studebaker gave meaning to their experiences; they organized the past for both the historical actor and the interviewer who attempted to understand it.,

Symbols and Servants: Immigrant America and the Limits of Public History

Every generation attempts to preserve symbols that explain its past. Government officials, scholars, and the general public currently are investing substantial amounts of time and money to commemorate the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 and the opening of an immigrant station on Ellis Island six years later. These symbols of American immigration represent a distinctive view of American history. They stand for the notion that immigration to this country was essentially a strike for personal freedom and the enhancement of individual opportunity; they reaffirm the belief that this nation is today what it has always been: a place of hope and opportunity for diverse and less fortunate people throughout the world. In the power of their symbolism and appeal, however, they frustrate a full consideration of the historical process they celebrate. Immigration, the movement of millions of individuals to this country, cannot be considered in its full complexity. The possibility that motivations besides those of opportunity and freedom shaped immigration is not allowed. Despite the good intentions of many, the rush to enshrine these historical sites threatens to turn historical reality into a cliche. The perception of the island and the statue as symbols of immigration to the United States and of the essentially progressive nature of that process is widely held. The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Commission, whose formation was announced by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, launched the Liberty Centennial Student Campaign, headed by Elliot L. Richardson, former secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Richardson proclaimed that the purpose of his program would be to use the statue and the island as symbols of the ethnic diversity of America and of liberty as enduring national values. An enthusiastic official of Hamilton Projects, Inc., the licensing agent of the commission, expressed hope of raising some

Pierre Nora, National Memory, and Democracy: A Review

300 million for restoration work at both sites through the sale of commemorative products because they strike a patriotic chord in peoples hearts and make people feel good about spending their money for such a cause. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) television network contributed to the momentum by initiating a series of one-minute programs entitled An American Portrait in honor of the 1986 centennial of the statue. The series was designed to John Bodnar is professor of history at Indiana University.

Response to Charles Tilly's “Neat Analyses of Untidy Processes”

The study of national memory emerged at a time when the coherence of what was generally known as national history was severely contested and disturbed. The opportunity to review an English-language edition of Pierre Noras massive study of French national memory for an American history journal is a reminder not only that this disruption marked the histories of many nations but also that the fracturing of national histories involved a beginning-a political transformation-that has yet to be fully examined or conceptualized. Scholars such as Michael Kammen in the United States and Raphael Samuel in Britain have brilliantly established the outlines of this alteration in nations other than France. It is less certain, however, when and how this change began and what the political consequences were for the nations involved. The rise of modern nations was rooted in a crisis of authority. In the late eighteenth century democratic revolutionaries with visions of popular participation in government and greater personal freedom came forward to overturn autocratic regimes. Imbued with the faith of the Enlightenment in human reason and potential, these new states in places such as France and America took up the highly romantic project to make the future better than the past. This democratic upheaval did not eradicate conservative ideals less trusting of popular rule and personal independence. Indeed, a struggle between democratic and conservative dreams marked

Getting Inside the World of Industrial Workers: A Review Essay

In October, 1984, the National Indowment for the Humanities sponsored a conference at Northern Illinois University intended to further the search for a synthesis in American labor history. Confronting the explosive growth in the field over the past decade, conference papers addressed diverse topics such as race, gender, and class, and attempted to reach some understanding of how these factors were related. Many participants clearly had raised expectations on the first day that a better understanding would result between the core of American labor history and its recently developed periphery. After two full days of presentations, questions, and debate, in the opinion of many in attendance, a generalization on the current state of American labor history could be made. The course of the discussion and comment was clearly dominated by a majority group of scholars who focused analysis on the rela tionship between the organization of production, the formation of social classes, and workers collective action. Workers were generally presumed to be inherently militant in a political sense; an absence of militancy was generally the result of a lack of effective political power. Indeed, the struggle for politi cal and economic power, for most in attendance, generally explained the na ture of workers movements and objectives. To be sure, female historians ar gued that gender often explained workers orientation; some even linked con sciousness with ones standing in a racial or ethnic community. But defenders of gender, race, and ethnicity were fewer in number and much less frequently heard from during the conference proceedings. Ultimately the conference reaffirmed a recent trend among American la bor historians. The traditional preoccupation with the relationship between the organization of production, the formation of social class, and collective action and the struggle for political power has survived the formal methods of analysis and social history orientation of the 1970s. During the present decade it has reasserted itself with new vigor and preempted other perspec tives, which threatened to mute considerations of class formation and conflict. Possibly this resurgence has become even more compelling since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the decline in influence of organized labor in na tional political affairs.

The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. By Oscar Handlin

Scholars interested in industrial workers in early twentieth century America are suddenly being treated to an outpouring of scholarship. Following the impetus supplied by historians such as Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery, new studies are appearing which are not only providing details on the material condi tions of these workers but also expanding our understanding of their entire cultural world. Since most of the men and women who toiled in American mills and mines in the half-century after 1890 were recent arrivals from rural or less developed regions, moreover, the findings of this new scholarship have implications not only for labor studies but for the history of immigration and of the family as well.l New history is produced not only by new perceptions and questions but also by new methodologies. Historians have moved beyond the confines of the older, institutionally based labor history and into the complex interior of workers culture and consciousness by employing certain devices for the first time. The books under review in this essay reflect both the wider approach to the study of workers and new techniques, such as heavy reliance on oral history interviews and quantitative meth odologies. The most massive study in the group reviewed here is Tamara Harevens Family Time and Industrial Time. Focusing almost exclusively on the Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester, New Hampshire, Hareven devotes most of her attention