Labor Archives - Not Even Past

Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development under the Commune by Joshua Eisenman (2018)

The People’s Commune was both a collective farm and a local institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. It was introduced in China in 1958 and abolished in 1983. Many scholars suggest that the People’s Commune was unproductive because its remuneration system was too egalitarian. According to James Kai-sing Kung , it offered only “a tenuous link between effort and reward. This weakness of incentives led to extensive free-riding behavior, which was cured only by the eventual replacement of the collectives by family farms.”[1] The Chinese Communist Party today shares this perspective. In its official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of the peasants, and the abolition of the commune was set into motion by a couple of destitute peasants in 1978 who were attempting to improve their living standard. Joshua Eisenman offers a quite different perspective. In Red China’s Green Revolution, he argues that, instead of being an economic failure, the People’s Commune was successful in modernizing agriculture and promoting agricultural productivity during the 1970s. Some top officials of the Chinese Communist Party, not some poor peasants, abolished the People’s Commune in 1983 for their own political gain instead of its economic performance.

Poster of People’s Commune ca. 1958 (via Flickr)

Eisenman’s foremost conclusion is that the People’s Commune of the 1970s can be considered productive because of its ability to generate investment. Eisenman found that the People’s Commune was not a rigid institution. When it was introduced in 1958, it was indeed a disastrous failure and led to the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). However, it experienced a dramatic transformation in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the People’s Commune, which Eisenman called the “Green Revolution Commune,” was successful in raising the agricultural productivity in China. One of the biggest problems agriculture in China faced before the introduction of the People’s Commune was the lack of capital. In a country with scarce capital and an unlimited labor force living just above subsistence level, it was hard to cut consumption and increase saving rates, in order to make productive investments to take advantage of high returns to capital. The People’s Commune of the 1970s extracted agricultural surplus before produce was distributed among the peasants. In other words, the peasants were taxed before they got their income. This system enabled the commune to “reduce consumption and ensure the high savings rates necessary to finance agricultural modernization.” Unlike the People’s Commune of 1958, which invested household savings in poor quality capital and caused the most catastrophic famine in human history, the People’s Commune of the 1970s turned savings into productive investments like agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizer. It kickstarted a continuous development process that produced rapid growth in food production. At the same time, the People’s Commune of the 1970s tolerated the existence of private sideline plots, cottage enterprises, and rural markets. This tolerance helped the peasants maintain their lives above the subsistence level and avoid the over-extraction which took place in the People’s Commune of 1958.

Mao Zedong shakes hands with Peoples commune workers ca. 1958 (via. Wikimedia)

Many scholars suggest that the remuneration system of the People’s Commune allowed the less productive members to be free riders, and made more productive members work less hard for the commune and seek better compensation outside it. In contrast, Eisenman argues that the free rider problem was largely alleviated by Maoist collectivist indoctrination. He argues that the People’s Commune was a kind of religious community, a church of Mao. Through ceremonial behaviors, like the public recitation of Mao’s teachings, the performance of Maoist opera and dance, and the display of Mao’s profile, the People’s Commune created a self-disciplined labor force who prioritized the fulfillment of Maoist collectivist ideology over material wealth. These activities also created a strict political atmosphere in which a nonconformists felt that criticized by the entire commune. Maoist indoctrination was backed up by the People’s Militia—the semiautonomous local military institution nested within the commune. The People’s Militia was controlled by the leaders of the commune to enforce both the commune’s collectivist ideology and its external security. Eisenman points out one additional characteristic that forced peasants to accept the high savings rates. The People’s Commune was not only a collective farm but also an autarkic institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. This autarky made it almost impossible for the peasants to flee the commune and seek a better life in the world outside.

People’s Commune Canteen ca. 1958 (via Wikimedia)

Eisenman’s second major conclusion is that the abolition of the People’s Commune was carried out by top officials of the Chinese Communist Party. According to the official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of its members, so eighteen starving peasants in a commune of East China decollectivized their own commune, risking the death penalty on December 24, 1978. The improvement of these peasants’ economic conditions after decollectivization supposedly encouraged the authorities to abolish the People’s Commune. However, Eisenman argues that the fate of the Commune was decided not by its economic performance or by grassroots demands, but rather by the winner of the factional struggle within the Communist Party—Deng Xiaoping. The abolition of the Commune was a deliberate decision taken by these top Party officials to overthrow their pro-commune rivals who were still loyal to Mao’s ideology after Mao’s death. He also shows that there were many local and commune officials who opposed the abolition of the commune and refused to return to household-based agriculture. They did not dismember their commune until they were asked to do so by provincial officials. Some provincial officials admitted that they had to issue orders to stop the local officials from hindering the decollectivization movement.

People’s Commune ca. 1981 (via Wikimedia)

One of the merits of Eisenman’s study is that it offers a very useful approach to help scholars understand the transformation of agriculture in China during the 1960s and 1970s. Famine is one of the most common topics in Chinese history, and agriculture in China still underperformed until the 1960s. But during the 1970s, the situation definitely changed. Between 1962 and 1978, although China was almost completely closed to foreign trade, added almost 300 million people without suffering any massive famine. We can’t understand how Chinese agriculture accomplished this if we do not recognize the contribution of the People’s Commune to agricultural productivity. Eisenman’s study also helps researchers to dispense with their idealization of private property rights. Researchers of collective agriculture in the Soviet Union and Communist China usually are occupied with the underperformance of collective agriculture and the tragedies peasants suffered in the collective farms in these countries. These tragedies sometimes make researchers assume that private property is therefore superior. Eisenman’s study shows that the foremost obstacle faced by agriculture in many developing and underdeveloped countries is the lack of capital rather than the lack of private property rights. Small peasants cannot overcome the lack of capital by just building a closer connection between effort and reward.

[1] James Kai-sing Kung, “Transaction Costs and Peasants’ Choice of Institutions: Did the Right to Exit Really Solve the Free Rider Problem in Chinese Collective Agriculture?” Journal of Comparative Economics 17, no. 2 (June 1993): 486.

You might also like:
Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China
China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

“Stand With Kap”: Athlete Activism at the LBJ Library

By Gwendolyn Lockman

The Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library opened “Get in the Game,” a timely exhibit on the intersection of social justice and sports, on April 21, 2018. In 2014, a new wave of athlete activism began in the United States. That year, NBA teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” shirts during warm ups to protest the police brutality against Eric Garner. In the summer of 2016, the WNBA joined the conversation with the “Change Starts with Us—Justice & Accountability” and #BlackLivesMatter, #Dallas5, #__ demonstrations by the Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty. The current moment is most defined, of course, by Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests that began in the 2016 NFL preseason. “Get in the Game” charts a legacy of barrier-breaking and justice-seeking athletes from the late 19^th century to the present with an emphasis on the current relationship between athlete activism and American politics.

Colin Kaepernick at the LBJ Library, (*all pictures unless otherwise noted are by the author*).

The exhibit is remarkably comprehensive, especially for a small-scale and brief installation (the exhibit closes January 13, 2019). Visitors will find a wide selection of sports represented—horse racing, football, baseball, basketball, track and field, boxing, tennis, golf, and fencing—and attention to gender, race, media, player salaries, and social justice. Guests should be keen to linger in the center room of the exhibition, where curatorial care and intentionality is reflected in an exceedingly well communicated examination of Jackie Robinson’s post-baseball activism and the 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Letter from Jacki Robinson to President Johnson (photos by the author, materials held at the LBJ Library)

While most Americans are familiar with Jackie Robinson as a figure and the brief details of his early career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, few popular versions of his story reflect on the later years of his baseball career and after he retired. It is not popularly discussed that Robinson was among the crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, nor that he campaigned for Richard Nixon.

Robinson committed much of his time in retirement to activism, working with the NAACP, encouraging other black athletes, and communicating with several politicians. “Get in the Game” features letters and telegrams from Robinson to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The letters show Robinson’s concern that Civil Rights remain a presidential priority throughout changes in regimes, as well as his concerns about the morality and risks regarding the Vietnam War.

Robinson implored Eisenhower to do more for African Americans, writing, “I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, “Oh no! Not again!” I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.”

Robinson also engaged Presidents regarding black liberation in Africa and Dr. King’s anti-war stance. He wrote to President Kennedy, “With the new emerging African nations, Negro Americans must assert themselves more, not for what we can get as individuals, but for the good of the Negro masses. I thank you for what you have done so far, but it is not how much has been done but how much more there is to do. I would like to be patient Mr. President, but patience has caused us years in our struggle for human dignity.”

When Dr. King protested the Vietnam war in 1967, Robinson wrote to President Johnson, “I do feel you must make it infinitely clear, that regardless of who demonstrates, that your position will not change toward the rights of all people; that you will continue to press for justice for all Americans and that a strong stand now will have great effect upon young Negro Americans who could resort to violence unless they are reassured.”

Another strength of the exhibition is the number of items on loan or gifted from the Dr. Harry Edwards Archives at the San Jose State University Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change. Dr. Edwards led the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), the group that organized the boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, and continues to work with athletes, including Colin Kaepernick. The exhibition focuses not only on Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic anthem protest and its 50^th anniversary, but also the support, solidarity, and demands of the OPHR.

Mere days before his assassination, Dr. King met with Dr. Edwards and endorsed the athletes’ “courage and determination to make it clear that they will not participate in the 1968 Olympics until something is done about these terrible evils and injustices.” Five members of the Harvard Rowing team, due to compete in the Games, appeared with Dr. Edwards to officially state, “It is their criticisms of society which we here support.” Black students at Harvard Law also stated that they supported the athletes’ “willingness to sacrifice the fruits of your labor for the achievement of the goals of Black Americans.”

Though the International Olympic Committee (IOC) met one of the demands of the OPHR, that South Africa and Rhodesia be uninvited to the games, and the boycott was called off, Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and other basketball players maintained their stance and did not compete at the games.

Even for those athletes who did compete, the spirit of the OPHR continued, breeding both solidarity and backlash. An OPHR button is included in the exhibition, like the ones worn by Smith, Carlos, and the Australian runner Peter Norman who won the silver medal alongside Smith’s gold and Carlos’s bronze. Displayed adjacent to the button is a State Department memo concerned with what to do about the demands from the IOC to remove Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village, though the athletes ended up leaving on their own, returning to backlash from the press and the public.

The exhibition closes with Kaepernick and notes his connection to the 1968 Olympics. A unique strength of the materials is the inclusion of University of Texas at Austin alumnus Nate Boyer, who worked with Kaepernick to attempt to bridge the divide between his protest and American servicemen and women and their families.

A notable curatorial decision that mutes the political nature of the exhibit and fails to connect Jackie Robinson, the 1968 games, and Colin Kaepernick, is the omission of Jackie Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had it Made (1972). This is a common missed connection in the anthem protest legacy. Calling upon Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”, the introduction to Robinson’s book recalls game one of the 1947 World Series, Robinson’s rookie year. He writes, “The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. it [sic] should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment . . . As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

Though the decision to omit the autobiography is an easily defendable one—the focus on Robinson is his breaking the color barrier and his correspondence with Presidents—it stands out because of the inclusion of other athletes’ autobiographies and provocative statements. Perhaps more accessible due to the museum’s possession of an inscribed copy owned by LBJ, Bill Russell’s book Go Up For Glory (1966) is included, along with details of his delivery of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve in the military.

As visitors exit “Get in the Game,” the last item they see is the block quote, “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” from Frederick Douglass. Knowing what we do about Robinson, Smith and Carlos, and Kaepernick, it is also worth considering a quote from Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech:

“The Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical

By Jacqueline Jones

The news headlines today tell an alarming if familiar story—of workers losing their jobs to machines, of the diminished power of labor unions, rising rates of economic inequality, and the inadequacy of the two-party system to address these issues in any meaningful way. The internet and other new electronic technologies might suggest that these are present-day challenges without historical precedent. In fact, the plight of workers today echoes the plight of workers in America’s Gilded Age. Then, 150 years ago, an array of activists working outside the two-party system sought to confront the titans of industry and the politicians who did their bidding.

One of the most famous—and, to the self-identified “respectable classes,” infamous—of these activists was Lucy Parsons. Who was this prolific writer and editor and a fearless defender of the First Amendment and why did her speeches attract adoring crowds and baton-wielding police officers?

Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851, Parsons promoted the interests of the white urban laboring classes throughout her long life, right up until her death in 1942. For generations Parsons’s historical legacy has been subsumed under that of her husband, Albert Parsons, hanged in 1887 for his alleged role in the Chicago Haymarket bombing the year before. During a workers’ rally in May 1886, someone tossed a bomb into the crowd, killing seven police officers and four other people, and wounding many others. The identity of the bomb-thrower was unknown at the time, and remains a mystery to this day, but a biased judge and jury proclaimed Chicago’s anarchists guilty of murder and conspiracy solely on the basis of their radical writings and speeches.

“Police charging the mob after the explosion, Explosion of the bomb, and Hospital scene. Border images include clockwise from left: A.R. Parsons, Louis Lingg, Inspector Bonfield, Captain Schaack, Sheriff Matson, Michael Schwab, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Officer Mathias Degan, Mrs. Parsons, Oscar Neebe, Nina van Zandt, Captain Ward, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer. Pictorial West. Vol. 11, no. 11 (Nov. 20, 1887)

Lucy and Albert met in Waco, Texas, soon after the Civil War. The two made an unlikely, couple. She was tall and (according to the black and white men and women who knew her) strikingly beautiful; he was short, wiry and dapper, with carefully trimmed hair and mustache. He was a veteran of the Confederate army and the brother of a famous Confederate general. Lucy and Albert managed to marry in 1872, when Republicans sympathetic to black civil rights were in control of state politics; a year later the Democrats resumed power, and the couple fled to Chicago, where they settled in a German-immigrant community, embracing first socialism and then anarchism.

Lucy Parsons in 1886

Lucy Parsons defiantly declared to newspaper reporters, “I amount to nothing to the world and people care nothing for me.” In this she was deeply mistaken, for a media frenzy swirled around her wherever she appeared. After Albert Parsons was jailed in the summer of 1886, Lucy embarked on a series of lecture tours in an effort to raise money for the defense of her husband and the other six defendants convicted with him. She was a powerful speaker—impassioned and eloquent, able to hold large audiences in her thrall for hours at a time.

The immigrant workers of Chicago revered her, politicians reviled her, and the general public maintained an intense fascination with her—all for good reason. Parsons lived a life that was rife with contradictions. She denied that she was of African descent, instead claiming that her parents were Hispanic and Indian. She remained largely indifferent to the injustices faced by black laborers, focusing her attention on the white workers of Chicago and other big cities. In private, she took lovers after the death of her husband, but in public presented herself as a prim Victorian wife and mother and a grief-stricken widow. She glorified the bonds of family, yet did not hesitate to rid herself of her son Albert Junior when he threatened to embarrass her by joining the U. S. army. In 1899 she had Junior committed against his will to an insane asylum, where he died twenty years later.

She was a well-read, insightful critic of Gilded Age America, advocating small cooperative trade unions as the building blocks of a more just society. At the same time, she became well known for her rhetorical provocations, urging the laboring classes to “Learn the use of explosives!” to protect themselves from predatory industrialists and police forces. In describing her, Parsons’s enemies often evoked the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She was a “firebrand” who delivered “fiery,” “red-hot,” “incendiary,” “inflammatory” speeches that her critics feared would spark a bloody uprising among her followers.

Lucy Parsons c1920

The contradictions between Parsons’ mysterious private life and her defiant public persona was rooted in the struggles she faced as a radical, a woman, and a former slave, beginning with her forced migration from the East to Texas during the Civil War and her teenage years in Waco. In Chicago, she began a rigorous course of self-education, reading widely in newspapers and popular magazines as well as in dense tracts on history and political theory. Together with her husband, she participated in debates and discussions among leading radicals in the city.

In her writings, Lucy Parsons decried the effects of technological innovation on the workplace and the effects of money and influence on politics. Committed to the free expression of ideas no matter how radical, she edited several anarchist newspapers and contributed to many others. She impressed even those hostile to her and her ideas with her fluent denunciations of greedy capitalists and abusive bosses. She took delight in nimbly dodging the police officers who hounded her and tried to silence her. Her career reveals the challenges of promoting a radical message that would appeal widely to the toiling masses who were themselves divided by craft, religion, political loyalties, gender, and racial identity.

Lucy Parsons’s biography offers several overlapping narratives— a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, the rise and decline of radical labor agitation, the evolution of race as a political ideology and social signifier, and the trajectory of social reform from Reconstruction through the New Deal. She was a bold, enigmatic woman. Her power to inform and fascinate is enduring and her story, in all its complexity, remains a remarkable one for its useful legacies no less than its cautionary lessons.

Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical

For more about Lucy Parsons, anarchism, and labor, try these:

Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (1984). This is arguably the definitive account of the Haymarket bombing, written by the premier historian of American anarchism. Avrich covers all the major characters involved; workers’ movements in Gilded-Age Chicago; the rally on May 4, 1886; the subsequent trial; and the aftermath of the tragedy.

Gale Ahrens, ed., Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality, and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878-1937 (2004). This edited volume provides a good introduction to Lucy Parsons’s writings and speeches. She was a prolific writer of letters to the editor, essays and political commentary, and fiction. She also edited two anarchist periodicals, and delivered hundreds of speeches over the course of her long life.

Lucy E. Parsons, ed., Life of Albert R. Parsons, With Brief History of Labor Movement in America (1889). This book contains an autobiography of Albert Parsons, letters he sent to Lucy during his lecture tours, testimonials from comrades, and accounts of the Haymarket trial and its aftermath. Lucy published it to keep alive the memory of her martyred husband, and also to help support herself and her children. A reprint is available on Amazon.

William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 ( 2006). Carrigan examines the anti-black violence that pervaded the area where Lucy Parsons and her mother and brother lived during and after the Civil War—McLennan County, Texas.

Michael J. Schaak, Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror, and the Social Revolution in America and Europe, Communism, Socialism, and Nihilism in Doctrine and Deed, the Chicago Haymarket Conspiracy and the Detection and Trial of the Conspirators (1889). Schaak was a Chicago detective who helped fuel fear and hysteria in the general public over labor radicals such as Albert and Lucy the Parsons and their comrades. He takes note of Lucy’s prominence in Chicago anarchist circles. This book is available online.

Margaret Garb, Freedom’s Ballot: African American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration (2014). The Chicago radicals, socialists as well as anarchists, represented the white urban laboring classes exclusively, and steadfastly ignored the plight of black workers, whom they demonized as strikebreakers. Garb details the activism among black men and women in Chicago during this period.

Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (2011). Messer-Kruse carefully examines the transcript Haymarket trial transcript, and argues that the defendants were complicit in the bombing, to varying degrees. To some extent his argument relies on performances by Albert Parsons and other anarchists, who went out of their way to brag to undercover police about their possession of dynamite and willingness to use it.

“Doing” History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Originally posted on Process History on September 5, 2017.

by Christopher Babits

Near the end of the spring semester, my department asked me to teach a summer session of U.S. History since 1865. I had a short time to think about what I’d teach and how I’d teach it. For me, it was important for students to “do” the work of historians. This meant more than reading primary sources, though. In addition to this, students would engage with “essential questions” that are key for understanding the United States’ recent past. Moreover, in lieu of assigning a traditional textbook, which might not fully align with these essential questions, I decided that my students would read, analyze, and critique articles from the Journal of American History.

My first preparatory task was to frame the course around the essential questions. I wanted to create questions around a broad range of potential student interests. I chose four topics: 1) America’s role in the world; 2) economics and labor; 3) women and gender; and 4) comparative civil rights. These topics covered some of the important themes of post-Civil War U.S. History.

The questions I crafted (see Figure #1: The Course’s Essential Questions) were beneficial on several levels. Initially, they helped me with one of the most daunting challenges of syllabus creation—picking and choosing content to cover. These essential questions narrowed what I would focus on; lectures and in-class activities would always have to answer (at least) one of these questions. On top of this, I used the four questions to pick articles from the Journal of American History. From a content standpoint, these articles would provide additional detail that my lectures and in-class activities might not be able to cover in depth.

Selecting academic articles for an introductory survey can be tricky. I had to think about whether students would have enough prior knowledge to truly engage with the secondary source. At the same time, I needed to be cognizant of whether the article covered a fair amount of time, which might then help students understand important historical concepts, like change over time and contingency. Moreover, if I could, I wanted the articles to be useful for answering more than one of the course’s essential questions.

The Journal of American History, March 2014

I ultimately chose fifteen articles from the Journal of American History to help students answer the course’s four essential questions. (See Figure #2: Academic Articles for a complete list.) Erika Lee’s “Enforcing the Borders,” for example, helped students compare and contrast a wide-range of racialized lived experiences from the Chinese Exclusion Act through the 1924 Immigration Act. Her article complemented lecture material on and primary sources about the history of white supremacy. Julia Mickenberg’s “Suffragettes and Soviets,” on the other hand, highlighted the interconnections between domestic and global events. Mickenberg’s article proved useful for students interested in women’s and gender history as well as those fascinated by the events of the First World War. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s classic, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” was one of my students’ favorite articles. Hall famously critiqued the “classical” phase of the Civil Rights Movements in her article. Yet, for the purposes of my course, Hall’s article also helped students better understand the history of African Americans, the intersection of race and gender, and racialized economics. Hall’s seminal article, then, could assist students with three of the course’s four essential questions.

Students who are used to reading textbooks, however, can find reading academic articles challenging. To have them gain the skills necessary to successfully engage with these academic articles, I devoted a fair amount of in-class time to reading, interpreting, and analyzing these sources. I viewed my role as an encouraging coach who kept his approach to the analysis of academic articles straightforward and accessible. For the first three articles assigned in the class, I had students (re)read the introduction and the conclusion with a partner or in small groups. I asked students to underline and annotate where the historian(s) articulated their argument. Sometimes this meant that students had to mark several parts of the introduction and conclusion, trying to make sense of complex arguments which had multiple supporting parts. At first, this was a tough task for students, consuming upwards of 20 minutes of a 75-minute class. However, as we spent more time on this skill, students slowly gained more confidence. I was able to go around the room to work with small groups of students, focusing them on specific parts of introductions and conclusions. After a couple sessions, I asked students to paraphrase arguments in their own words. Students’ confidence grew the more they worked with one part of “doing” history—understanding historical arguments. Over time, what had taken 20 or 25 minutes soon dwindled to 12 or 15.

Students were required to write an analysis for two of the academic articles they read. To ensure further success, students were provided a fair amount of scaffolding on these assignments. To assist with article analyses, I created a reading grid that asked students to: research the historian/scholar; note and critique the sources used in the article; make historical connections to lectures and/or primary sources; and reflect on how the source could answer one of the course’s essential questions. I had detailed questions for each box of the reading grid, providing a fair amount of guidance for students to understand what they should be looking for when analyzing an article. Figure #3:The Reading Grid displays the course’s emphasis on scaffolding the analysis of academic articles.

By the end of the term, I could see that the focus on teaching with and analyzing academic articles worked on several levels. The most important, in my opinion, was how students improved from their first to their second article analysis. They had a much more nuanced understanding of historical argumentation in their second analyses. In addition, students wrote more critically about the historians’ source bases and felt more comfortable critiquing “master narratives” they had learned in high school. For those afraid of using academic articles in their surveys, I want to offer a simple reassurance: students never shied away from this hard work. My provisional course instructor survey scores indicate that students recognized article analyses as a core part of their learning. I already have a strong sense of which articles students enjoyed, but I hope my course instructor surveys include constructive criticism about the articles students viewed as least helpful for answering the course’s essential questions.

There were other outcomes to using academic articles. Many of the articles I selected emphasized U.S. History in a transnational perspective. As a result, students had to think about the United States as a place which influences—and is influenced by—others parts of the world. By carefully selecting articles, I also made it so I did not have to assign a traditional textbook. Lectures, primary sources, and the articles covered enough material for students to understand the American experience and to walk away with their own informed interpretation of the nation’s history.

As an educator now weeks removed from the course I taught, I see an even greater purpose to teaching with academic articles. As we navigate a period of deep political division, one that is fraught with fear for many, teaching with academic articles has the possibility to instill crucial civic skills in our students. By respectfully challenging those who came before them, each scholar I assigned demonstrated that disagreement is a core part of the democratic experience. Using academic articles instead of a textbook allowed my students to see that disagreement does not need to be hateful or vitriolic. Instead, it can be a productive way to move forward, pushing in the direction of the “more perfect Union” enshrined in the Constitution.

Figure 1: The Course’s Essential Questions

America’s role in the world	Determine how the United States’ foreign policy changed and/or remained consistent from the Spanish-American War through the Cold War. How did the U.S. confront the challenges it faced around the globe? Are there core tenets (or beliefs) that have guided American foreign policy? If so, what are they? If not, how do foreign policy conflicts differ from each other?
Economics and labor	Evaluate the ways the American economy has changed over the past 150 years. How did “big business” alter the landscape of U.S. industry? Why did Progressive Era and New Deal reformers pass the reforms they did? Have Americans found a way to balance economic growth and workers’ rights in the post-World War II period?
Women and gender	Analyze the political and economic fight for women’s equality. To what extent has the role and status of women changed over the past 150 years? What have been landmark victories for women’s rights? Why have various political factions opposed women’s and feminist groups? Is there work left to be done?
Comparative civil rights	The continued fight for equality has, in many ways, defined the American experience. Compare and contrast the struggle for civil rights that two of the following segments of the population experienced: 1) African Americans; 2) women; 3) Mexican Americans; 4) Asian Americans; and/or 5) LGBTQ individuals. Are there commonalities that you see in the political rhetoric and tactics of these two groups? How would you describe the unique challenges these segments of the population faced? What are the arguments, agendas, challenges, etc. that have made coalitions difficult to form, both within and between different rights movements?

Figure 2: Academic Articles

Author	Article title	Year of publication	Essential question(s) answered
Erika Lee	Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924	2002	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Richard White	Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age	2003	Economics and labor
Jürgen Martschukat	“The Art of Killing by Electricity”: The Sublime and the Electric Chair	2002	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Julia L. Mickenberg	Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia	2014	America’s role in the world; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Lisa McGirr	The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History	2007	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Julia C. Ott	“The Free and Open People’s Market”: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933	2009	Economics and labor
Rachel Louise Moran	Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal	2011	Economics and labor & women and gender
James J. Weingartner	Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from “the Good War”	2008	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Thomas A. Guglielmo	Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas	2006	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Elaine Tyler May	Security against Democracy: The Legacy of the Cold War at Home	2011	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker	Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China	2005	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall	The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past	2005	Economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Michael B. Katz et al.	The New African American Inequality	2005	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Kevin J. Mumford	The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982	2011	Women and gender & comparative civil rights
Michael H. Hunt	In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?	2002	America’s role in the world

Figure 3: The Reading Grid (PDF)

Also by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:

Finding Hitler (in all the Wrong Places?)
The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)
Another perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

The Freedmen’s Bureau: Work After Emancipation

by Jacqueline Jones

In March 1865, the U. S. Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to ease the transition between slavery and freedom for 3.5 million newly liberated slaves. The bureau had three main functions—to distribute rations to Southerners who had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War, to establish public schools for black children and adults, and to oversee labor contracts between landowners and black workers.

Alfred R. Waud, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” Harper’s Weekly (July 25, 1868)

Federal officials put great faith in annual labor contracts as a means to resume cotton staple-crop production in the South; get black workers back into the fields; and protect freed men, women and children from abusive employers. Typically, a worker would sign an agreement with an employer on January 1, and promise to work for the full calendar year. On December 31, the landowner would “reckon”—that is, tally up the amount of money the worker owed the employer for credits and supplies advanced to him during the year, the amount of cotton the worker and his family had produced, and the amount of money owed the worker from his share (usually one-third) of the crop. Northern whites in general assumed that these contracts would encourage white planters, many of whom had been slave owners, to treat their workers fairly and to refrain from coercive practices such as whippings and beatings that had been a hallmark of the institution of bondage. However, the bureau was chronically understaffed, and enforcement of labor contracts was difficult, since most bureau agents were stationed in towns, far away from isolated plantations.

The two documents below illustrate some of the limits and unanticipated consequences of these labor contracts. In the first, a letter to a Freedmen’s Bureau official, a Georgia planter named M. C. Fulton complains that the black women on his plantation are staying at home and not working in the fields as they had under slavery. He writes, “Now these women have always been used to working out & it would be far better for them to go to work for reasonable wages & their rations—both in regard to health & in furtherance of their family wellbeing.” This planter, like many others in the postbellum South, feared that the large-scale withdrawal of black women from the cotton fields would hinder the South’s ability to achieve pre-war cotton production levels.

As you read the document, note Fulton’s argument that these women “are as nearly idle as it is possible for them to be.” What are they doing? Are they in fact “idle”? According to Fulton, what is the danger of having these wives dependent upon their husbands for support? Can you think of reasons why these women would not want to work in the fields, and why their husbands would support them in this decision? How does Fulton seek to ingratiate himself with General Tillson? Does Fulton’s argue that only black women should have to work in the fields? Note his last sentence: What is he saying about class relations in the South?

The second document is a labor contract for employees on the South Carolina plantation of John D. Williams. Williams goes over the detailed terms of the agreement, at the outset stating his responsibilities, and then launching into a long list of behaviors he deems unacceptable among his workers. He notes that if any worker violates the terms of the agreement, he (Williams) reserves the right to fire that worker and deprive him of his share of the crop. In most cases a fired worker also lost his home, since most sharecroppers lived on the plantations where they worked. Williams probably assembled his workers together this day (Jan. 1, 1868), and read the contract to them, since a note at the bottom reveals that all of the black “signers” were illiterate. The last part of the contract indicates that black people were not the only southern workers to become caught up in the cycle of debt and dependency that flowed from the sharecropping system. A group of white men also signed this contract; their names are listed separately at the bottom of the document.

What are the stipulations governing the responsibilities and behavior of Williams’s sharecroppers, as outlined in this contract? In what ways are these rules broadly—and vaguely—defined? What power did Williams retain over his workers? What was their recourse, if he treated them badly or failed to live up to his contractual obligations? What is the significance of the fact that seven whites also signed this contract? Although black families were trapped in the sharecropping system in disproportionately large numbers, many white families too became landless after the war, and they too worked as sharecroppers. In fact, by 1930, southern white sharecropping households outnumbered their black counterparts.

These two documents suggest that the federal officials who conceived postwar labor contracts for the freedpeople were either naïve or overly optimistic about the role of the contract as a means to protect the economic interests of the former slaves. The annual contract was not really appropriate for the cultivation of a crop that consumed only a part of the year—April to November—leaving the rest of the year a source of conflict between worker and employer. Black fathers and sons often left the plantation in the winter or early spring to seek wage-work elsewhere, while employers wanted them to remain and work on fences or perform other “off-season” tasks. Many landlords engaged in abusive or fraudulent conduct toward their employees, making it difficult for black families to leave one place and find a better place down the road. And finally, very few sharecroppers were able to purchase even small parcels of land; most received no cash wages for their year’s labor, and many whites refused to sell land to blacks at any price.

DOCUMENTS:

To read more about Reconstruction:

The Freedman’s Bureau Online

Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1980)

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (2005)

John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961-1994)

Charles Lane, The Day Freedom died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (2004)

Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (1997)

Carol Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedman’s Aid Movement (2007)

You may also like:

Jacqueline Jones on Civil War Savannah (NEP, January 2011)
Daina Ramey Berry on Slavery, Work, and Sexuality (NEP, October 2011)
Enslaved Life and Labor in the US (NEP October 2011)

Document Sources:
The Contract: Rosser H. Taylor, “Post-Bellum Southern Rental Contracts,” Agricultural History 17 (1943):122-3
The Fulton letter: M. C. Fulton to Brig. General Davis Tillson, 17 April, 1866, Unregistered Letters Received, Georgia Assistant Commissioner, Record Group 105 (Records of the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands), National Archives, Washington, D. C.

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