Remembering the American Industrial Landscape

Paper presented in the Plenary Session
Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Meetings
Providence, Rhode Island  2003

Paul A. Shackel

Where history, archaeology and memory meet at industrial sites is where we find the excitement of our discipline as well as some of the troubling aspects of how nations and communities use their past. Industrial archaeologists have a long tradition of documenting the engineering feats of the industrial age, but more importantly we need to place working people in the equation and making them part of the official history of industry. I believe that by understanding how we, as a society, choose to remember a past can tell us a lot about who we are as a community and a nation.

It is difficult to create an interpretation that highlights the stories of both labor and capital equally.  The preservation of industrial buildings is, in itself, an expression of remembering the process of industry. While many publicly funded museums rush to save old factory buildings and extol the glories of economic and social progress as a result of industry, many working-class members view the preservation of these buildings and ruins as an attempt to save a degrading phase of human history.  Robert Vogel once noted that "The dirt, noise, bad smell, hard labor and other forms of exploitation associated with these kinds of places make preservation [of industrial sites] ludicrous.  'Preserve a steel mill?' people say, 'It killed my father.  Who wants to preserve that?'" (quoted in Lowenthal 1985:403).  While I am not advocating the destruction or the neglect of industrial buildings, I would like to encourage dissenting views and see a more inclusive history at these sites. Let technology share the pedestal with labor.

In my own experience, I have visited many historic industrial sites that only interpret industry, and issues related to labor are often glossed over. I was just at a museum that is known for its interpretation of early American engineering and industrial achievements, and in one instance I saw a demonstration of a lathe. The lathe was operating by itself, shaping a piece of wood into an irregular form.  There was no interpretation about the craft that this machine replaced, nor was there any information about the worker who tended the machine.  In another exhibit I saw the history of waterpower with a video that demonstrated tub wheels, overshot wheels, and turbines.  It was a demonstration of technological advancement, but people were again missing.  The omission of workers in the story of technology, I am afraid to say, is the norm rather than the exception when we experience the memory of industry at publicly funded sites.  On the other hand, the relatively new museum at Lowell National Historical Park is one exception as the exhibits explain the trade-off between capital and labor.  While capital is celebrated and the benefits of industrialization are highlighted, some of the key issues related to the struggles of labor are also interpreted.

There are few communities that celebrate labor rather than industry.  Not too many municipalities have the perspective or courage of interpreting labor history as the declining city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. The official memory of Lawrence is presented in the Lawrence Heritage State Park, situated in the midst of Lawrence's decaying industrial core.  The museum is located in a restored boardinghouse with two floors of exhibit space devoted almost entirely to labor issues and the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912. The strike closed most of the northeast region's mills until slightly better wages and conditions could be obtained by labor unions. The exhibit does not place industry on a pedestal.  Therefore, while the official history of the United States has a long tradition of emphasizing and glorifying industry and capitalism, Lawrence is one of the few publicly funded museums that remembers the struggle of labor.

So then, what are the questions that we can ask to help us create a labor archaeology?  An important document that provides a basic outline for these questions can be found in the Labor Archaeology National Historic Landmark Theme Study, a report being developed by National Park Service and originally drafted by Theresa Solury, now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nevada-Reno.  Using this document as a framework I want to provide an overview of some of the ways archeologists have explored issues related to labor archaeology at industrial sites.   Workers' housing is one important area of research.  At the beginning of the industrial era in the United States many companies provided housing for their workers. So, while industrialists controlled the workers' lives in the factory, they also could monitor them away from the workplace by creating regulations in housing.  The work at Lowell, Massachusetts, best summarized by Stephen Mrozowski, Grace Ziesing and Mary Beaudry in their 1996 book shows how industrialists developed boardinghouse policies for a new workforce of mill girls. Lowell, like many other industrial communities, contained rows of similar looking boardinghouses situated in close proximity to the factory.  The interiors created an atmosphere of egalitarianism as all of the rooms were the same size.  These strategies helped companies to create a compliant workforce as they controlled workers' lives at work and at home.

But not all industries operated in this fashion.  For example, the work that I have done at the Harpers Ferry armory shows how armory workers ignored any form of corporate paternalism and this deviation came home to haunt those who tried to manage labor in the gun factory.

In the early nineteenth century many Harpers Ferry workers built their own houses anywhere in town, including in the middle of alleys and streets.  In contrast to Lowell, the workers' houses were all of different sizes and shapes and of different building material.  The workers could express their own personal identity with their families within the confines of their own homes.  At the same time the Harpers Ferry armory workers defied any attempt to become a unified and interchangeable workforce, and they resisted the industrial process much longer than the mill girls at Lowell or their armory counter-parts at the Springfield Armory. The archaeological record shows that some workers may have practiced their craft in a piece-work system at home until about 1841 when the military took control of the facility and made all workers abide by a standard work discipline.  The armorers answered the new work discipline with strikes, factory slowdowns, and murder.

I find Michael Nassaney and Marjorie Abel's analysis of the John Russell Cutlery Company a compelling story. They discovered a large quantity of inferior or imperfectly manufactured parts related to interchangeable manufacturing near the former cutting room and trip hammer shop.  While it would be easy to conclude that these artifacts form a typical industrial waste pile, these archaeologists went one step further and looked at the larger context of nineteenth-century industrial labor relations.  Nassaney and Abel propose that the abundance of imperfectly manufactured parts may represent a form of defiance against the implementation of the new industrial work system.

Another example of labor archaeology would be the examination of labor protest camps, and the Ludlow Tent Colony Site in Colorado, examined by the Ludlow cooperative, serves as a good example.  The Colorado Coal strike ignited a year long cycle of violence and retribution beginning in 1913 and culminating when the militia charged the tent colony and set fire to the tents, killing 2 women and 11 children. The archaeology of the tent colony can address questions about the formation of temporary communities, protest labor movements, and government and military intervention. More importantly, the archaeology at Ludlow, which is supported by the United Mine Workers of America, raises the visibility of this bloody episode in labor relations and it is helping to make this incident part of the broader public memory.

Another case that provides clues related to labor unrest is the bottling works associated with a brewery in Harpers Ferry.  While monitoring some of the stabilization and rehabilitation of the building, we found more than 100 empty beer bottles stashed behind the wall lathing in the former bottling room.  We also discovered more than 1,000 beer bottles in the basement of the bottling works' elevator shaft, most of them broken after falling more than two stories.  In the 19^th century the typical brewery worker labored about 14 hours a day, six days per week, and on Sunday for about half this time. By 1910 brewery unions had fought for a 10-hour workday.  Workers were exposed to radical temperature shifts and breathed contaminated air such as carbonic acid and sulfuric acid and diseases like tuberculosis were common.  Brewery-related accidents were almost 30% higher than other industrial trades because of the higher speeding of machinery.  The archaeological evidence suggests that workers drank the owners' profits and concealed their subversive behavior by disposing the otherwise re-useable bottles in walls and dropped others down the elevator shaft.  The burning of the brewery in 1897, 1906, and 1909 coincides with times of labor unrest and brewing unions eventually made major strides to improve the conditions of the workers.

The questions related to labor archaeology are numerous and they need to be made part of the national public memory.  I have mentioned only a few case studies related to labor, but there are many issues that a labor archaeology could address.  For instance, the relationship between race and industry presents a unique opportunity for those interesting in labor archaeology.  Industrial slave labor is under studied and this topic has the potential to reveal not only the inequalities found between labor and capital, but it can also highlight the injustices found in race relations in an industrial context. Race and labor also becomes an interesting scenario during the post emancipation era.  After the Civil War, northern industrialists had a chance to hire and train a newly freed workforce. Instead, industrialists turned to a new generation of European immigrants, thus shutting out African Americans in many northern industries and keeping many tied to tenant farming in the south.

From the 1890s northern industries began their large-scale flight to the south in search of cheaper unorganized labor.  But before this transition could happen, a shift in the official memory of the Civil War was necessary. Until the 1890s the struggle for emancipation served as one of the official memories of the Civil War.  But after the death of Frederick Douglas and the beginning of the Jim Crow era the emancipationist view of the war lost out to a reconciliationist memory.  Reconciliation developed between white northerners and white southerners, and African Americans were not part of the scenario. Whites operated the new southern industries and African Americans remained disenfranchised. An industrial archaeology in the post-bellum south needs to understand the local and regional contexts, and it cannot overlook the issue of race.

The competition for memory between labor and capital has been a long struggle with capital controlling the meaning of the past. When we look at the historic American industrial landscape that uses public money to interpret industry we often see renovated buildings and stabilized ruins that tell the story of our former industrial prowess. In 1878, Abraham J. Ryan wrote about a land of ruins in the post-bellum south.  He explained

A land without ruins is a land without memories, a land without memories is a land without liberty.  A land that wears a laurel crown may be fair to see; but twine a few sad cypress leaves around the brow of any land, and, be that land barren, beautiless, and bleak, it becomes lovely in its consecrated cornet of sorrow, and it wins the sympathy of the heart and of history (quoted in Wilson 1980:59).

Industrial ruins may win the hearts of history and they are a way to remember a prosperous economic past, but we also need to make sure that they are part of the memory of a labor archaeology.

So how can we commemorate the individual and workers' histories when we excavate industrial sites?  Michael Shanks and Randy McGuire (1996) remind us that the act of archaeology is a form of commemoration and when we do archaeology we create a memory of the past that is rooted in our present day concerns. This means that if we are concerned about a labor archaeology we need to develop and answer questions that can help us tell the story about labor.  It is a way to remember and unveil a history that has been buried all too long.

The archaeologies at Lowell, Harpers Ferry, the John Russell Cutlery factory, and Ludlow are about labor and labor issues.  I am currently concerned about the way in which current political appointees at varies levels of government are supporting a new consensus history with the goal to make us feel good about our past and ourselves.  Sometimes issues about labor do not make us feel good about our past, but they are important lessons that should not be buried.  Initiatives to create an inclusive history are becoming more difficult to pursue in this political climate.  Let us not forget during the Reagan and Bush administrations when Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, argued in her report to Congress that scholars were occupying themselves with issues related to gender, race and class, while "truth and beauty and excellence are regarded as irrelevant."

Cheney packed the Advisory Council "with critics of multiculturalism and women's studies" and they rejected any proposal that seemed "vaguely left wing" (quoted in Nash et al. 1998:103).  And columnist George Wills wrote a few years later that these scholars were "forces...fighting against the conservation of the common culture that is the nation's social cement."  That attitude has reemerged once again.  After several years of trying to create a more inclusive official history, one that we can learn from, we are faced with the current Secretary of the Interior, Gail Norton, who has temporarily rescinded the National Historic Landmark designation of the Fresno Landfill because of the negative connotations associated with the site, such as being a superfund site (Melosi 2002).  But what about historic mills? They were about technological development and entrepreneurialship, but they exploited workers.  And what about coal mining towns?  Coal extraction was about technology and profit, but the process also destroyed landscapes and polluted water.  Even worse, what about the Japanese interment camps of Manzanar? (Melosi 2002:34). These are all examples of the American past that we choose to remember and use to teach us about the past by making them part of our official history.  I wonder, then, if a place that celebrates labor strife like Ludlow could receive National Historic Landmark designation in today's political climate.

I think its chances are slim. Nevertheless, I still believe that our job as archeologists is to make these events a part of the official history and nominating these sites to the National Register of Historic Places and as National Historic Landmarks is one way of doing it.  These designations can make industrial places a prominent part of our past and the designation should also be about remembering people and their struggle.

The question for us today is this: Will archaeologists working at industrial sites be courageous like the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts and commemorate labors' heritage, or will we fall back and create an official history that glorifies technology. That is the challenge, I believe, for any of us who choose to perform archaeology in industrial contexts.

References Cited