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Essay on Workers "between the wars," 1919 to the New Deal
The book “Labor in America: A History”, by Melvyn Dubofsky who is one of the five foremost labor historians who pioneered innovative approaches to working-class experience in the 1950s and 1960s. Along with Alice Kessler-Harris, Dubofsky researched, wrote about, and erudite courses in labor history at a time when the field was not in fashion and there was little appreciation and support for the study of workers and their pasts. More than a compilation of some of Dubofsky's essays, this book is introduced by an exceedingly important memoir, a "confessional" account of what it was like charting new terrain in earlier years.
It was not an entirely pretty picture, emerging as it did in the shadow of McCarthyism, first, and parochial pseudo-intellectual antagonism to a scholarship focused on workers and radicalism, second. Those who now find much wanting in labor history, and offer their critiques of the field from sinecures secured with relative ease and little of the pain of varied institutionalized rejections, should read Dubofsky's account of these years to understand the development of an academic area they have come to gaze at as politically insufficient.If in some traditions the least heralded of the fundamental facts of the 1950s and 1960s, he was, incongruously, possibly the most dynamic and wide ranging.
He would later go on to co-author or author a weighty biography of John L. Lewis and an analytic account of labor and the state in modern America; up to 1999 Dubofsky had penned over 60 articles, introductions, exchanges, and encyclopedia entries, in North American and European publications.
The hard work that went into this writing of labor account is, as Dubofsky senses, to some extent under appreciated in our time, when the working-class past seems to have, in his words, "dwindling allure”. However the ability of present social and cultural historians to see over the heads of Dubofsky.......
