Part homage to everyone who has ever been politically engaged, part “how-to” guide for those who would use history to spark a revival of progressive activism, Jim Green’s autobiographical study of movement history is about the power of the past to educate and inspire.  Telling the story of his own development as a public historian, and of his life-long effort to share movement history with as wide an audience as possible, Green recounts some of the struggles of the last thirty years, and his part in them, to show the vital role this history (and the committed historian) can play in the fight for social change.  In movement history, he suggests, we can find the knowledge, dignity, strength, and confidence to endure the present, and to build a better future.

This is an optimistic book, almost impossible to dislike, and few will challenge Green’s belief that history has much to teach us—that a movement aware of its own past will be stronger and smarter for that knowledge.  The past unquestionably is powerful, and Green, from his Radical America days to his most recent work with trade unionists trying to revive the labor movement, has been the model of the engaged scholar, telling the movement’s stories, drawing lessons from them, and communicating what he knows to the activists of his generation and the next.

But while history may be mighty, it is also less tidy than Green’s book suggests.  All these uplifting stories, all these triumphs, a more skeptical soul might say, and look at the mess we’re in.  Green gives us a nuanced analysis of what movement history is, of how it may be useful, and of how we might bring it to a larger audience, but he has little to say about how diverse and divided working people are, or what the many contradictions of working-class life might mean for our ability to build and sustain progressive social movements.

It’s not that Green is blind to the movement’s failings.  A gifted teacher who has struggled to win—and won—the confidence of conservative union officials, and a scholar who has contributed significantly to social and labor history, Green knows too much to label a failure a success.  It is rather his unshakable belief that it is in the bedrock experience of working people—in their history, in their organizations, in their struggles, in their daily lives—that we will find the fundamental truths that will guide us in creating a better world.  I am less certain; my experience of working-class life and history is shaded differently.  Just as there never seem to be decent bosses in Green’s stories, working people, even when they err, seem always to be, as if inevitably, striving for the greater good.  This seems to me to be an article of faith, rather than a proven fact.

Green offers his own life as an example of how powerful the past can be in building social movements.  He looks to his family history, including the craft pride his grandparents took in their work, and his experiences growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood, to explain his receptiveness to a radical world view.  He is sure that early experiences in the trenches of working-class life opened his mind to the progressive social movements he encountered as a young man in the 1960s.  But I grew up in those trenches, and I can find less to celebrate.

Green’s story and my story have intersected many times.  In Taking History to Heart he praises an article I wrote about my experiences working and organizing in a factory, which was published in Radical America when I was a graduate student studying with David Montgomery, a professor he counts among his heroes.  Both Herbert Gutman and E. P. Thompson, who Green finds inspirational, greatly influenced the choices I made as a young historian.  He applauds the work of the American Social History Project of which I am a former member.  We are both, in fact, dedicated to recovering and celebrating the history of progressive social movements.  But I cannot draw the easy connections Green makes between a working-class background and an appreciation for, or a willingness to embrace, the progressive lessons of the past.

In contrast to Green’s father, who was a schoolteacher and a progressive Catholic with a master’s degree, my father was a heavy equipment operator and union member who built the ribbon of highway that stretches from Maine to Michigan. With rural roots that go back to eighteenth-century western Pennsylvania, he was also a life-long Republican, NRA supporter, racist, and populist.  Mother came from solid factory stock, started working when she was sixteen, and even did a stint in a munitions factory during WWII.  She, as well as my father, had a lot of craft pride, but neither ever had anything good to say about the trade unions, to which they both belonged.  My aunt still remembers the firewood box where my maternal grandfather, a skilled worker at Pittsburgh Plate Glass, stored his Ku Klux Klan outfit.  It is highly probable that he participated in the great Klan demonstrations in western Pennsylvania throughout the 1920s, which were among the largest in the North.  I am extremely happy to be the exception, not the rule, in my immediate and extended working-class family that recently voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush.

There is little in my working-class family’s generations-old catechism of rugged individualism, misplaced optimism, arrogance uninformed by book knowledge or self-doubt, love of ambition, and belief in competition that Green would find inspirational.  But Green and I, at about the same time, were drawn to history in what he calls an urgent search to understand something about ourselves and the times in which we were living.  But whereas Green traces this impulse to fond memories of the “thrilling” stories he heard as a boy about the trade union activists on his family tree, I have vivid memories of my trade union relatives speaking not just critically, but disparagingly, of trade unions, union bosses, and progressives of any stripe.  His experiences as a boy growing up with working people embodied for him the solidarity he later found among their counterparts in the stirring struggles about which he has written and in which he has participated.  My working-class childhood contradicted many of the ideals about working-class life I learned as a graduate student and an activist.  I have not yet been able to reconcile the difference in my experience and Green’s, and Taking History to Heart does not help me because there are no workers in the book that look like the ones I grew up with, only the noble workers I first encountered in graduate school seminars.

I remain committed to social change, but I no longer believe, as Green seems to, that working people, categorically, have or had any better sense of how to shape a more just society than anyone else.  I am, in fact, more convinced than ever that progressive social change happens when the whole community is engaged, and is most successful when it builds on a common vision that is shared across class lines.  This may be heresy, but I think our stories, the ones we tell to our children, our students, and each other, must reach beyond working people and the history of progressive social movements.

That does not mean that our struggle stories are not important, instructive, or inspirational.  They are.  But is there no room in our litany for contradiction, complexity, and resonance with mass popular culture, ideals, and beliefs?  For Green, as for many of us, “doing movement history involved being a participant and an observer, an activist and a scholar.”  Most of us also accept Green’s definition of movement history “as the body of work produced by scholars and activists (who are) passionately engaged in the study of social protest for moral and political reasons as well as intellectual ones.”    There will be few readers of this review who cannot place their work, academic and activist, as Green does, “in the context of the critical writing produced since the 1960s by historians who identified with the social movements of that era, especially the civil rights movement, as well as with oppositional struggles that came before and after, such as the women’s movement” (p.2). Green assures us that this history can be objective, that it is “real history,” and that it has served us well.  But I think Green is too quick to gloss over the untidy connections between our pasts and presents, and too unmindful of the outcome of our work.  What happened to the film project after Henry Hampton, to whom this book is dedicated, died?  What happened to the miners after Pittston?  What’s happening to the teamsters after Carey?  What connections do young women make with women’s movements of the past?  How did we get from all Green’s activism, telling, and teaching, from all our activism, telling, and teaching of the past three decades, to the past election or to the continuing decline of organized labor not just as a percentage of the workforce but as a social movement in its own right?

Green takes the title of this dense and fascinating book from Steve Lerner, the Sweeney-appointed director of the Janitors for Justice campaign, who insists that the labor movement will find the militancy and tactics it needs only if it takes its own history to heart and learns from the struggles of the past.  In Part I, “Practicing Movement History”, Green traces his development as an activist historian from early childhood influences to graduate school at Yale, where he studied with C. Vann Woodward, to his encounters with New Left criticism and the History Workshop Movement, to his continuing efforts to share movement history with a popular audience.  In the three chapters that comprise Part II, “Telling Movement Stories”, he discusses specific examples of how we can recover, record, and commemorate this history, and thereby “unleash forgotten voices.”  And in Part III, “Learning from Movement History”, he pulls all the pieces together in case studies of the Boston busing campaign and its aftermath, the 1989 miners’ strike at Pittston, and recent efforts to revive the labor movement.

Green’s account of the Boston dispute and the 1983 mayoral campaign of Mel King is particularly compelling. He was provoked to tell the story because of a “moving conversation” he had with Ruth Batson, a civil rights activist, who was disturbed by J. Anthony Lukas’s version of events in Common Ground (1985) because, she said, it “left our movement” out of the story (p.206).    Green puts the story of the black education movement back into the picture to correct what he calls a “regretful reading of history,” first expressed by the Boston journalist, Alan Lupo, and later sanctioned in Common Ground, which overemphasized issues of class and paid too little attention to black activists such as Mel King (p.205). 

Green’s retelling of the Boston story shows the strengths of good movement history.  His personal relationships with Batson, King, and others who lived the story gave him not only unparalleled access to critical witnesses, but a perspective on the subject matter that no “outsider”—not even a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist—could have had.    And yet, I’m left wondering what has happened in Boston in the last two decades.  Have we been able, as King desired in 1981, “to influence larger sections of the city, bringing together an array of potential allies?” Have working people in Boston “come together” and moved “out of their isolation” to challenge what Green calls “conditions that exploit them all?” Green ends his story without ever telling us what, exactly, we can learn from the struggle in Boston about our ability to build and sustain a progressive movement.  His response to Lukas is convincing, but his larger claims for the “power of the past” are less persuasively argued (p.224). 

Throughout the book, Green acknowledges how far we’ve come since the early days of movement history.  We understand that the shortcomings of the labor movement cannot be blamed entirely on bad leaders doing dumb things and defeating the workers’ “inborn” sense of justice and solidarity, as Jeremy Brecher once proposed.  We recognize how ephemeral spontaneous outbursts against the bosses can be and how quickly cross-ethnic alliances can fall apart.  We know that working-class women can support the Ku Klux Klan.  We know that working people form militias, vote for

right-wing politicians, and embrace racism, sexism, and homophobia.  Bias of all sorts lives side by side out there, in us, with our best intentions to create a more just society.  I wish Green had had more to say about the political implications of these contradictions for those of us who take history to heart.  He’s too smart not to know, too active not to have been disappointed.

Just after the Berlin Wall fell, Tony Kushner in Angels in America told us about the loss of theory.  Jim Green tells us about the loss of a widely embraced program for social change.  As we search for a new theory and a new program, can we not look to our larger history, to political practice that is more inclusive, less selective, and more consistent with the complexities of the life we live every day?

Do we have to be forever uncritically positive to be inspirational?  Must we ignore that much that is worth having does not come from the working class?  I know that I don’t look to unions to discover how democracy works or how aged leaders might gracefully relinquish power.  I don’t look to one political sect or another to discover much about tolerance.  I don’t look to the immigrant communities to discover a rejection of the market economy.  I want to pick what works from the whole historical menu, not just from movement history, and I want allies inside and outside the working class to work with me to build a more just, global community.

While we detail and celebrate the history of struggle, must we not also worry about what makes a materialistic culture so attractive and easy to embrace?  Can union leaders intent on activating their members, which is at the heart of what Green hopes will be a revival of the labor movement, ignore the coalition campaigns in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Seattle that have fizzled or fallen short of their promise?  What happened to the Union City initiative and the effort to resuscitate Central Labor Councils that end Green’s story?  The Sweeney revolution and the progressive leadership at HERE, UNITE, and SEIU, with its focus on organizing, have not reversed the slide, nor is everyone in organized labor equally galvanized by the decline.  What does taking history to heart mean to them?  Will rereading labor history and rediscovering old progressive traditions, as Green suggests, reawaken the membership to new possibilities for addressing social injustices?  I suppose it is too soon to tell, but based on the episodic evidence I’ve seen so far, I’m not as optimistic as Green. 

I share, as I think we all do, Green’s desire to celebrate and teach the history of working people and their sometimes heroic efforts to assert their rights in this enterprise-driven, competitive society.  Yes, we must tell these stories, and no one does that better than Jim Green.  And yes, there is much in the struggle tactics of the past that can be used in our ongoing efforts to confront racism, to stand up to union busters, and to revive the labor movement as a progressive force in our global village.  It is quite another matter, however, to find in this past an alternative way of organizing society.  Green’s movement history focuses on what, after all, has largely been a campaign to make our free market democracy work better, not to overturn it, or to challenge it with an alternative model.  I think Green wants movement history to take us further, to that new world built from the ashes of the old.  I, for one, don’t see how these stories, for all their inspirational and instructive power, are going to get us there.