Professor Mines History to Show How Americans Create Conceptions of the Past

[AlphaCentauri]

Barry Goldberg, Ph.D., says that while early members of the American labor movement compared their situation to that of slaves, many were explicitly racist.

The Declaration of Independence includes the phrase “All men are created equal,” but ideas about the meaning of equality and the boundaries of American freedom have changed much since 1776.

As those changes have occurred— first through the emancipation of slaves and then through the women’s rights, labor and civil rights movements—Americans have struggled not only to shape their future, but to reinterpret their past.

For Barry Goldberg, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, a rich example of this is how American wage workers and their advocates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries talked about slavery. As the age of industrialization emerged, Goldberg said, people began to ask new questions about issues such as equality, liberty, freedom, justice and what constituted a fair day’s work.

Aware of the bloody cost of what Abraham Lincoln called America’s “new birth of freedom,” they were still grappling with the ideological legacy of racial slavery as they engaged with the new discipline of the assembly line and new patterns of social inequality.

In particular, he said, when discussing ways to better their working conditions, labor activists often compared the plight of white wage earners to that of black slaves and their struggle to the movement to abolish slavery. They mobilized words and images drawn from black bondage, the anti-slavery crusade, racist defenses of chattel slavery and the Civil War to redefine democratic freedom in industrial America.


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