Can Historians Steal Agency?: Historiographical Comparisons Between Labor History and the History of Slavery

Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

“By making victimization the main story line of a struggle in which strikers actually inflicted more deaths than they suffered, historians have treated men, women, and children who demonstrated tremendous capacity for action as having been almost entirely acted upon.”[1] Thomas G. Andrews’s assertion in Killing For Coal is strikingly similar to arguments made against the work of Stanley L. Elkins, as reiterated by historian Nell Painter in a chapter titled “Soul Murder and Slavery.”[2]

While Elkins and Painter are best known as historians of race and slavery, Andrews has made his mark as a labor and environmental historian. In Killing For Coal, he provides a long view of the story leading up to the Colorado Coalfield War of 1914. He argues that the Coalfield War was not just an isolated outbreak of violence, but rather the boiling point of over a half-century struggle between mineworkers, capitalists, and the state. Andrews laments that scholars addressing the Coalfield War before him have skimmed over the event as an isolated example of Progressive Era Labor activism. Alan Dawley’s Changing the World (2003), Shelton Stromquist’s Reinventing “The People” (2006) and Maureen A. Flanagan’s America Reformed (2007), to name a few examples, miss the holistic approach Andrews calls for.[3] His argument, though made in reference to a different subfield than those aimed at the work of Elkins, is one that should be heeded by all historians. The historiographical isolation of events, power systems, and actors has a limiting effect on the retelling of the past.

Painter provides a glimpse of what Andrews’ holistic methodology looks like in the history of slavery. Stanley Elkins argued in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959) that the psychological damage inflicted on enslaved people in the American South permanently infantilized them.[4] He likened the results of slavery on people of African descent to the psychological damage experienced by victims of Nazi concentration camps. Elkins’ work received criticism very similar to that which Andrews dishes out to his peers: the total victimization of a people, whether they be slaves or mine workers, denies those people of their ability to act and relegates them to the position of being acted upon. As Painter points out, Elkins’ approach denies the slave “psychological personhood [and] impoverishes the study of everyone in slave-holding society.”[5] In Andrews subfield, studies as limited as Elkins’ distort “our ability to understand the tumultuous relationship between mineworkers, mine operators, and the state.”[6] Ultimately, Painter and Andrews are agreeing on the same alterations to history telling: a recasting of American labor history that gives the working classes some credit (or blame) for their actions. In the case of the Coalfield War, historians would be amiss to rest on the Coalfield War’s identity at a massacre rather than a battle fought by two parties. To do so would exclude yet another point made by historians of race as well as labor historians. As Michael J. Pfeifer argues in his 2011 work, The Roots of Rough Justice, the formation of American criminal justice occurred as a result of a combination of factors throughout the United States in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, Pfeifer points out Southern slavery and Western industrialization as factors that weakened due-process forces in those regions.[7] This fact is reiterated in Andrews’ telling of the years leading up to the Coalfield War, a period in which workers fought for their health and safety with no recourse. Finally, in 1914, their requests had been stifled too long and the workers took action. As Painter and Andrews both show, historians should avoid stealing the agency of historical actors who spurred change and experienced long-lasting damage in oppressive situations.