Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti, eds., Where are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites (review)

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 93 (2024)

Reviews / Comptes rendus

Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti, eds., Where are the Workers? Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historic Sites (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2022)

Robert Forrant, a labour historian at the University of Massachusetts, and Mary Anne Trasciatti, director of the labour studies program at Hofstra University, have brought together eighteen public historians working across a variety of institutions to argue that labour history deserves a place in museums and historic sites. In their introduction, the editors insist that there is especially a need for more “place-based public labor history” (4) and that it is important to “bring the complexities of labor and working-class history to life.” (12) The first part of the book offers seven chapters on the practice of representing and documenting labour history-making, while the second offers five chapters focusing on the ways in which activists and historians have been making labour history public. There is a fruitful overlap between the two parts and between the various chapters which were shared between the contributors before publication. Readers will also appreciate that every chapter offers visuals that both illustrate and inform the observations and arguments being put forward. It was also nice to see that the editors (and press) saw fit to include an index, somewhat of a rarity these days with edited volumes.

The first chapter by Lou Martin reveals the complex histories of the coal mining community of Matewan, West Virginia in the making of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum that opened its doors in May 2015. The ways in which three different institutions – a museum, a historical society, and a labour hall - mark the history of the granite industry in Barre, Vermont is the focus of chapter two authored by Amanda K. Gustin, Karen Lane, and Scott A. McLaughlin. The next three chapters reveal the lively processes of retelling the stories of labour history in the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts (Jim Beachesne, Kathleen S. Flynn, and Susan Grabski), Columbus, Georgia (Rebecca Bush), and Gastonia, North Carolina (Karen Sieber and Elijah Gaddis). The archive-based exhibits that marked the 2019 centenary commemoration of the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas, which saw the murder of some 200 African American share-croppers seeking to organize for better working conditions, is discussed by Katrina Windon in chapter six. Conor M. Casey traces the ways in which the Labour Archives of Washington in the Pacific Northwest has moved towards democratizing documentation and corrective collecting to ensure labour histories in Chapter 7.

That telling such stories is not a straightforward process of reclamation is a common theme. Legacies are complicated and contested. Competing memories, different understandings of space and place, and disagreements about what heritage and history should be preserved and what not, all require thoughtful and responsive approaches by public historians, curators, archivists, and many others taking on the task of remembering under-represented, silenced, or erased histories of working people and labour. Positive and even nostalgic memories of lives past compete with those determined to remember past injustices and oppression. Established narratives – such as corporate or civic presentations of mining or textile industries as bringing wealth and opportunity to communities – are revealed to be impoverished when confronted by stories about the brutal repression of attempts to improve working and living conditions through unionization and industrial action, and that of course can generate resistance from those preferring a more saccharinized version of the past.

This is revealed most vividly in the extraordinary story of the Maine Labor Mural told by Rebekah Bryer and Thomas Macmillan in the final chapter of the book. Featuring panels that celebrated the history of labour in the reception area of the Department of Labor building, it was removed on order of the Republican governor thus galvanizing opposition to his anti-union legislative proposals. The mural is now on display in the Main State Museum and Archives but with no reference to the role it played in the controversy. The remaining four chapters in Part 2 of the book are equally rich in detail and analysis. Rob Linné’s chapter celebrates bottom-up public history in the shape of the participatory art projects known as Chicano muralism that commemorate immigrant workers in many parts of Texas. Rachel Donaldson details the challenges of creating public histories of agricultural workers and labour organizations through the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union’s establishing of a museum in Tyronza, Arkansas while Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan details the many ways workers and labour histories are richly commemorated across the cityscape of Paterson, New Jersey. Erik Loomis leads off with a critical overview of how the National Parks Service presents and interprets the history of working-class lives in sites across the United States.

The many historical co-productions that are discussed in these chapters are products of shared authority and collaboration. They are most successful when communities, heritage activists, public historians, and academic historians come together. Another thread across the contributions is the resonance between past and present. Striking teachers in West Virginia in 2018 wore red bandanas as had those participating in the 1921 Miners March. A 1904 photograph of May 1^st celebrants at the Socialist Labor Party Hall in Barre is joyfully restaged a hundred years later. The authors make clear the contemporary relevance of the stories they tell of attacks on immigrant and black working people, and the stories told in this book speak to the ongoing battle of workers across many sectors in the United States to unionize.

At the opening of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in May 2015 a board member remarked “When people don’t know who they are, they become much easier to manipulate. This museum is our own form of reclamation.” (35) Forrant and Trasciatti are to be congratulated for bringing together an impressive group of public historians to share significant stories of labour and working class histories being told in a range of local and regional public history institutions from across the continental United States. It would have been illuminating to know what the editors and authors think about how the history of labour and working people is treated in the National Museum of American History and other national museums, which might have had greater appeal for a non-American readership. That said, this compelling collection of essays deserves to be read by all public historians and should be read by labour historians wherever they may live and work. This is because the erasure of working class and labour history in public representations of the past is a global occurrence and this book not only serves as a call to action, but it also points the way forward.

David Dean

Carleton University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.030.