A few years back, my wife an I spent some time visiting with my Great Aunt Anna, who was then nearing 100 years old. She regaled us with tales of life in the mill town of Manchester, NH from her childhood in the early 20th Century. One vignette in particular has given us a good many laughs over the years, as we retell it to each other from time to time. Anna told us about the Polish ice trucks driven by men who would come home every night drunk on vodka, literally falling over their horses. "Those Pollocks," she said, "they weren't like the Irish. The Irish were sober, hard working Christians." The humor lies in this one fact, my wife is third generation Polish. My aunt didn't know that when she recounted the tale. At the moment it seemed an awkward impasse, in the years that followed we found it a source of great mirth, yet that story points inescapably to the centrality of work, and the work ethic, to industrialization in America.

As Herbert Gutman argues in his now famous essay "the Work Ethic remains a central theme in the American experience, and to study this subject afresh means to re-examine much that has been assumed as given in the writing of American working-class and social history." (p. 3) Calling us away from the "Big Problems" of organized labor so important since the days of the "Wisconsin School" he thus begins his 1966 essay, with a call for labor historians to return to the study of the "work ethic" as an appropriate topic of study and goes on to emphasize the importance of studying the lives of ordinary people to understanding industrialization.

Gutman urges us to learn from the work of British labor historians. Pointing especially to the work of E. P. Thompson on the persistence of preindustrial patterns of work in Britain during the British Industrial Revolution, he encourages us to look at the impact of culture on work as well as the extant social relations that delimited the bounds of the possible. By following Thompson, we can learn a lot about the persistent tensions between workers and their employers, tensions that shaped industrialization. These tensions varied at different stages and with the attempt to industrialize new groups of immigrants, but there was much about them that remained common. Recognizing that labor in the antebellum period also included slaves and ethic minorities like Mexicans, he narrows the focus and concentrates on free white labor (p. 537) His study recounts the integration of three distinct waves of immigrants into the US workforce. The periods he covers are 1815-1843, 1843-1893, and 1893-1919. The working class, as Thompson pointed out (Making of the English Working Class) was remade over and again as new waves of immigrants learned the discipline of industrial work. Through this process their ethnicity was a source of commonality and served as a source of resistance to the new industrial ethos thrust upon them.

As in the story recounted by my aunt, the impact of alcohol use on work was a major major point of contention between preindustrial workers who came to the US from Western Europe in the early 19th C and their employers who were seeking to maximize productivity using new equipment and manufacturing methods. This explains a great deal of the reform zeal of the "Second Great Awakening" in the antebellum period. Linked to festivals and rites of passage, the consumption of alcohol on the weekend lead to Blue Mondays at work. Moral reform movements that urged temperance on workers were often an ethnically charged attempt to acculturate workers to the disciple of the five day week and two day weekend. Mill owners would employ the stick, docking worker's pay, or they could also employ the carrot, by co-opting worker traditions. Manufacturers in towns like Fall River, MA and Patterson, NJ, Gutman points out the mill owners institutionalized traditional celebrations. Worker resistance, just plain refusal to work, could cause serious damage to the output of the factory as well, This was the case with a Nantucket manufactory that tried to employ the wives and children of whalers and fishermen. Unwilling to conform to the discipline of factory work, the workforce melted away and the factory closed.

Jumping forward in time to the Southern and Eastern European immigrants that came in the early 20th C, he points out that many of the same patterns replayed themselves. In his words "to shift forward in time to East and Southern European immigrants new to steam, machinery, and electricity and new to the United States itself is to find much that seems the same. American society had, of course, changed greatly, but in some ways it was as if a film - run at a much faster speed - is being viewed for the second time: primitive work rules for unskilled labor, fines, gang labor, and subcontracting were commonplace." (p. 546) Just as workers in antebellum America resisted the subdivision of tasks and the breakup of the apprentice system in New York, Chicago's Jewish glove makers resisted subdividing the task of making gloves, clinging tenaciously to the "luxury" of being able to put together the whole product. Slavic and Italian immigrant, though steeped in different cultural traditions, still maintained a similar resistance to integration into labor discipline. "A Polish wedding in a Pennsylvania mining or mill town lasted between three and five days. Greek and Roman Catholics shared the same jobs but different holy days, 'an annoyance to many employers.'" (p. 547) Alcohol played a large role in these festivals as well, and tensions ran high over alcohol use in this period as well.

By juxtaposing the experiences of Lowell Mill Girls in the period from 1815-1843 with that of South and East European steel workers in 1893-1919, he is able to real a great many continuities amidst the many great elements of change. Both groups resented and resisted the integration into factory discipline. The paternalism of the Lowell mills, combined with the short stays there by New Hampshire farm girls, made it easier to tolerate the factory work as a temporary stage in life. Even so mill records reveal that in a single year 28 women were relieved for misconduct. Local residents in Lowell made fun of the "girls" names and their "Yankee twang." Some girls changed their names to blend in. Getting rid of the New Hampshire accent was a little more of a challenge. Even the company sponsored Lowell Offering, if read closely, reveal signs of these women's shock at new conditions and discomfort with the new regime. The same assumptions that factory work would be temporary lightened the burden of iron workers in Carnegie Pittsburgh plants. The men who came to work there in 1907-1910 from Southern and Eastern Europe thought they would earn money, save and return home and purchase farm land. In economically challenged times, in times of recession, when Carnegie's managers sought to maximize profits by putting people out of work the tensions showed through. It was the first world war that blocked their route back to Europe and settled factory work as a permanent condition upon them.

Shifting focus to the period between 1843 and 1893, Gutman points to continuities that cross the divide of the American Civil War. The conflict did not alter the pattern of conflict and accommodation that was taking place between workers and employers at this time. Early in the period worker sociability regulated the pace and nature of work. Pointing to the "cake time" and afternoon candy breaks of immigrant cabinet workers in New York and the way in which Lynn cobblers paid one of their number to read to them from a newspaper while they worked, he argues that the Civil War didn't change this significantly. In 1877, New York cigar manufacturers were complaining about the work habits of their employees who would "roll a few cigars and then go to a beer saloon and play pinnocio or some other game, ... working probably only two or three hours a day." Skilled coopers lounging about on payday (Saturday), drinking beer and frequenting saloons into Sunday, lead to Blue Monday. Instead of jumping into work on Monday, they spent the day getting ready. These traditions of work and leisure were a constant source of tension between 1843 and 1893. Employers and owners reacted often with the stick, but sometimes with the carrot. One manager triumphed over obstinate mule spinner in Fall River, MA by smashing the old mules with sledge hammers and replacing them with ring frames run by girls. The Labor Day holiday arose out of the tradition of Blue Monday.

Gutman points to the persistence of powerful ethnic subcultures across the great divide of the Civil War. Industrialization did not destroy immigrant families, rather these families provided a source of support and comfort. Pointing to statistics from Patterson, NJ he demonstrates that worker families were persistently headed by male heads and surprisingly the two parent household was even more common amongst the immigrant population than the native born. Rituals and festivals continued to be marked by the ethnic subcultures. Working class society was buoyed by "friendly and benevolent societies as well as friendly local politicians, community-wide celebrations, and occasional library ..." (p. 564) The Gilded Age popular culture was also marked by ethnic heroes like the fighter John L. Sullivan. Ethnic ties also lead to worker solidarity in an era not given to stable labor unions. Leaders like the upwardly mobile Hugh O'Donnell lead the skilled Irish workers in the Homestead lockout at Carnegie Steel. The belief in republicanism also unites workers across the divide of the Civil War. In 1844 New England shoemakers could launch their strike on George Washington's Birthday and appropriate the Declaration of Independence in listing their demands. In 1874 a Boston labor weekly could condemn the Erie RR as King George and the government of PA as the Parliament. The period witnessed the transformation of an Old America into a New America, and workers appropriated the language of the Old to resist the New.

Gutman also casts the ethnic gangs and political bosses in an interesting light. The gangs were for Gutman, American instantiations of the European tradition of "King and Church" and served as a protective third party in support of the workers' interests. Ward bosses were in the business of protective social measures long before the progressives who attacked them. Though "Luddism" found little expression in America, there were food riots in 1837 and later in 1902 where workers protested against rising food prices. Smashing the windows of a flour wholesaler and dumping flower in the streets, workers in New York in 1937 cast their actions in a framework reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party. In New York in 1902, Jewish women protested the increasing prices for kosher meat. Raiding butcher shops they doused meat with kerosene on the meat. They carried the meat on sticks through the street. Religious symbols and the symbols of American patriotism figured prominently in worker protests. "Peasant parades and rituals, religious oaths and food riots, and much else in the culture" were sources of strength and solidarity for the workers of the populist and progressive eras, even if the national leaders of these "movements" saw them as anachronistic.

In closing, he issues a call that has been headed by many historians in the intervening 35+ years "Contact and conflict between diverse preindustrial cultures and a changing and increasingly bureaucratized industrial society also affected the larger society in ways that await systematic investigation." (p. 580) Pointing to the longee dure of Fernand Braudel, he urges us to consider that recovering the past of workers is not about merely telling the stories of history's "losers" but it is also about understanding how conflict has been key in making America what it is today. This conflict impacted popular culture and fueled moral reform movements. Nativism, as a reaction to workers' culture, was a powerful force in American history. As with the racism of southern slave holders, workers shaped the nativist world as well.