US Textile Production in Historical Perspective: A Case Study from Massachusetts Book

"The language of Americanism remains supple and malleable, capable of introducing a variety of experiences and ideas into the nation's political discourse. To the extent to which liberals and radicals want to attain political power, they must learn, or relearn, how to speak this language. Those who set themselves such a task might begin their education with a consideration of how an earlier generation of political insurgents -- those active in Woonsocket and elsewhere in the 1930s -- constructed a "new, progressive Americanism" and made it an instrument of their empowerment." - pg. 336

Written in the Reagan era, this closing paragraph makes the reference to the specter of Reagan in a different review all the more clear. Yet, it has a timely factor for the post-2016 era as well. Gary Gerstle's Working-Class Americanism challenges the prevalent idea that Americanism is a conservative ideology by traveling to Woonsocket, Rhode Island during the post-World War I era, when two groups in the city -- the ethnic traditionalist French-Canadians and the secular modernist radicalist Franco-Belgians -- came together in the Independent Textile Union (ITU) and created a labor movement that turned New England into a bastion of labor organizing. Tracking the rise and fall of the ITU from 1914 to 1960, Gerstle shows how the social democratic leaders, like Joseph Schmetz, reformulated his (and his union's) socialist ideas and goals through an Americanist language that stressed socialism's connection to the American political heritage, revered the Founding Fathers, American Revolution, and Lincoln, and promoted unity through an identification with American society. Far from incompatible, he helped engineer labor successes and support for a radical, socialist vision of industrial democracy. However, this progressive Americanism alienated the traditional French-Canadians who preferred a communal, ethnic vision. In the late 1930s, they began coalescing around a distinctive ethnic unionism that pushed a parochial, communal, and patriarchal style. With the centrality of religion (Catholicism) and anti-communism, they won union control away from the ITU radicals. By the 1940s, Americanism underwent another transformation, this time through the levers of the federal government, towards cultural pluralism and anti-communism, ultimately undermining the traditionalist segment of the ITU. In the end, both the radical and traditional conceptions of Americanism lost their hold on Woonsocket.

The most enduring lesson, and theme, that Gerstle argues is the variability of Americanism as a political language. Rather than a conservative ideology, Americanism can -- and has -- encompassed disparate political traditions, on opposite sides of the spectrum separate from each other, or, like his case study shows, within the same organization. More than a labor history and a community study, Gerstle refashions political ideology through a new lens.