Published Winter 2005
 
The Origins of Working Class Studies:
An Interview with Sherry Linkon and John Russo
Sherry Linkon and John Russo founded and run the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, the first multidisciplinary center in America devoted to the study of working class culture. Now ten years old, the Center has helped define the field, most notably through its biennial Working Class Studies Conference. Linkon is a professor of English and American Studies at YSU, and she has edited In Her Own Voice: Nineteenth-Century American Women Essayists (Garland 1997) and Teaching Working Class (U of Massachusetts P, 1999). Russo is Coordinator of Labor Studies in the Williamson College of Business Administration at YSU and has published widely on labor and social issues. Together, Linkon and Russo authored Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown (U of Kansas P, 2002) and edited the anthology New Working-Class Studies (Cornell UP, 2005). A truncated version of its introduction appears in this issue. For more information on the Center, visit its web site, www.as.ysu.edu/~cwcs.
This interview took place at the Center on 22 November 2004. It was conducted and transcribed by Victor Cohen, editorial assistant for minnesota review and a PhD student in literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University.
Cohen: How did the Center for Working Class Studies get started? Was there a conscious plan from the start, or did some set of events set things in motion?
Russo: We started out simply to get a higher profile for what we were doing. In 1995 we had been teaching courses over at the union hall, courses for people on the swing shifts, so we would offer a basic composition course that you could take in either the morning or the afternoon, and not just our courses but we did a math course, a labor history course, a philosophy course. It immediately brought fifty new students into the university. Now, that's a lot of money. I want to be real clear on this: to a university that had declining enrollment, you bring in fifty new students, that's really important. The last time we checked, of those original fifty, I think twenty-five or thirty actually made it through a complete program of study.
But one other thing was clear: people on campus started carping, snide remarks like "what are you guys doing, drinking beer down at the union hall?" So what we did the first year was take all the students' work, put it on display at the Museum of Labor and Industry, and invite everybody in the university community and the media. Then we went back to those people and said, "Now put your students' work on display." There was never any question after that; we got the snotty academic thing out of the way immediately, and we had great press. So that helped start the Center.
Then word got around about what we were doing, at a time when there were museums developing around industrial history and technology. For example, the Goethe Institute invited us to Chicago to meet with museum directors from Germany in 1997-8. These museums were full of technology, but they were all depopulated; there were no people around. We tried to give a different vision, of what you lose when you erase the workers.
Cohen: So you were teachers as well as consultants for people who were trying to memorialize industry in a post-industrial era?
Linkon: They were coming out of that. There were places where they were taking factories that had been shut down and turning them into museums, preserving the machinery and talking about the rise of industry, but not so much talking about working class culture, or talking about the lives of those who worked in industry. They brought us in to give a talk about what it would mean to not just talk about work but workers.
I had gone to Germany in 1998 to do a series of lectures at universities sponsored by the USIA [United States Information Agency]...
Cohen: What is the USIA?
Linkon: It no longer exists, but it was like the education branch of the State Department, with all of the stuff that goes with that. We made contacts in Germany, in the UK, in Italy, and tried to build both a national and international network. A lot of the work that we do today is going out to various places to talk about what is working class studies, what it means, how is it developing...
Russo: We didn't set out to build a field; that was not our goal. The conferences and the Center were kind of an orphanage for people in academic disciplines who were studying in isolation, who wanted to do cross-disciplinary projects on working-class life and culture—graduate students whose senior advisors didn't understand what they wanted to do. We referred to ourselves privately as "the orphanage." But then we started to see the connections. We brought in Don Mitchell to do a reading from his book, Lie of the Land, and said "God, Look what the geographers are doing!" We knew there was enough happening in various fields and that got us into thinking how we could use their methods in our own work. We've always called ourselves interlopers, but that is a disarming way of saying, "look, we can all do this together." Geographers will call this "cultural geography," historians will call this "labor history."
Cohen: So nobody who deals with this subject wants to cede authority to you to talk about the working class from your own perspective? What do labor studies people call it?
Linkon: "Labor studies." We have an interesting relationship with them.
Russo: Labor studies people as they now exist, not like they formerly existed...
Cohen: When you say "formerly," you mean the labor schools in San Francisco, or Chicago?
Russo: And Bryn-Mawr.
Linkon: If you go back to the origins of labor studies, it was very much like working class studies.
Russo: Except it was slightly more elitist. The Bryn-Mawr school was especially this way, taking the view that "We're going to help these poor ladies."
Linkon: It was paternalistic in the sense that it was "we're going to help you express your lives because you don't know how to do that." It was working class studies, but within a certain hierarchy. Then there was a period when it became more voc-ed, but John would know more about that.
Russo: Yes, it was about teaching collective bargaining, negotiating, occupational safety and health, and grievance processing.
But, back to your question, we knew there were going to be questions about what we were doing from other fields. Any time you start doing cross-disciplinary studies, you're going to have people say, "we already do it." We respond by saying, "there was a thing called 'chemistry' and there was something called 'biology,' and then there was something called 'bio-chemistry.'" This happened when the historians were confronted with women's history. They said, "Oh, we're already doing it. We don't need a women's history." Our response was to say, "look, we're not privileging any particular approach, but all these things add to a discussion about the working class."
At some point, I started saying, "Sherry, this thing looks like a new field." About 1999, I ran it by Dave Roediger and he replied, "John, there's nothing new." We used that line to start our new book. But we needed to detach working class studies from the privileged methodological approaches that occur around this topic, which were traditionally Marxist. We take a very broad methodological approach, saying, "let's look at Marxist theory, Weberian theory, semiotics, deconstruction, self-identification . . . "
Cohen: Would you say your definition and use of "working class" is rooted more in your own experiences studying it, rather than adhering to a particular discipline or methodology?
Russo: Absolutely.
Linkon: The one thing at the heart of our work, that I don't think you can assign to any particular discipline, is the focus on the lived experience of working class people. That connects with Marxist approaches, it connects with cultural studies approaches, it connects with geography. In some ways, it's a neutral intellectual space because all of these approaches can work through it.
Another thing is that, from the very start, we began with three basic ideas. One is the idea that working class people are at the core, even though the people doing the work in working class studies may or may not be working class. That's the focus: what is the experience, what is the perspective of working class people? Second, that the work would be interdisciplinary, that there is no boundary between the history of working class communities and the uses of space in working class communities and the stories that people tell in those communities. The best way to approach studying something as rich and diverse as working class culture is across disciplinary lines. The third was that the strength we brought to this particular center is through the humanities and the arts, because that's who we were. John is the exception. Of the five people who started this, four were in the humanities and the arts.
Cohen: It's striking that there were so many like-minded people in one institution at the same time, and that you all happened to hook up with each other. Who were they?
Linkon: Susan Russo, who's the chair of the art department, teaches graphic design, and is a painter; Linda Strom, who's a faculty member in English and studies working class literature; Bill Mullen, who was a faculty member in English, studying mostly at that point the 1930s; and myself. That was the strength we had, and we were very conscious that it is what we bring to this work. I came from a background in American studies, which is where some of the interdisciplinary emphasis comes from. And John, whose PhD is in education and whose work has been in labor organizing, labor studies, and labor history.
We had reached out and developed partnerships with our colleagues in the history department, tried to do some work with the people in our sociology and anthropology departments, political science, and had mixed responses at first. We now have a good person in sociology and anthropology. The center at SUNY-Stony Brook is very social-science-oriented.
Cohen: That's the one headed by Michael Zweig?
Linkon: Yes. Michael is an economist, and most of the people who are affiliated with that center are social scientists—economists, sociologists, political scientists. That's their focus and that's the strength they bring to it. We certainly wouldn't claim that one of those is the right way and one is the wrong way to do working class studies. You just work with the strength you've got.
Cohen: Your book, Steeltown U.S.A. reflects that position, though it also shows you don't feel constrained by your primary fields. Making your first chapter a history of Youngstown through its geography was brave, especially since neither of you are geographers. Clearly, Don Mitchell and Dolores Hayden meant a lot to you. Can you talk about that a little?
Linkon: Well, John had read Lie of the Land and had really been taken by it. We invited Don in, and the structure of that first chapter was the brainstorm that I had listening to Don speak. There was something about what he was doing and the way he set up his talk that led me to think, "That's a way into this, that's a model." It really helped us think about this place not only in terms of stories that had been told about it, but the material reality of it, the physical layout of the land and how it had been used. After that, we started reading. I think for six months we just stopped and read.
Russo: I read the book and said, "We got to get this guy here as part of the lecture series," and Sherry was going out west.
Linkon: I went to a conference on American spaces and ended up spending all of the conference with this group of geographers from Boulder who were terrific. I was eating up everything they were telling me, picking their brains, but they also helped me find Don, because I went with John's instructions to talk to Don Mitchell. Well, I talked to the chair of the department, and he said, "Oh, he's not here anymore, he left to go to Syracuse this fall," but I came away with Don's address, and also a whole bunch of ideas about how you talk about a place, just from three nights of dinner conversation.
Russo: Then she got back on Sunday, gave me the number, and I called Syracuse at nine o'clock Monday morning. I said, "Hi, this is John Russo," and Don replied, "I've been waiting for this call." His talk started with a balloon ride over California, because that's what he does to read the landscape, and I thought God, why not do a balloon ride over history, over time, looking at landscape. It also gave us a way into the idea how conflict shapes the land of Youngstown in a way that other approaches, Marxist or other ways, would have made it hard to understand. We sat down and read geography for six months, and I said, "God, this is not the geography I was taught!"
Linkon: We sent chapters to Don and David Stephens, one of our Center affiliates who is a geographer. We got the feedback and were told, "You can't use that language." We were saying that the stadium was "above the jail" and were emphatically told, "no, uphill from the jail. You have to be accurate in your writing." Which is what happens when you step foot in new fields.
Cohen: It's clear why geography is such a compelling lens for telling this story, since talking about the landscape enables rich and nuanced histories of the people who lived here, how they interacted with each other, and how industry in turn tried to deal with them, and most dramatically, how the departure of the steel industry affected the city.
Russo: Thank you. We were so relieved because we were out of our domain. Plus we were writing a book together. Sherry hates it when I say this, but it really was partly the beginning of a discussion between two different generations.
Linkon: Well, different generations and different disciplinary subjects.
Russo: Yes, somebody like myself who came out of the New Left ideas, and Sherry who, ten years later, is dealing with sets of cultural studies ideas. So there was going to be conflict over the approach, but somehow the nicest thing about the book is that it's seamless. And I owe that to Sherry, because Sherry ultimately became the wordsmith. But you can't tell each other's voices.
Linkon: That's right. We argue with each other pretty energetically, so people were curious to see the book.
Russo: And that gave us a real type of strength, once we felt we were on pretty good footing. We were more willing to take risks, in terms of doing other interdisciplinary work, like art historians.
Cohen: Since other chapters focus on visual representations of labor in Youngstown...
Russo: Sherry was better on that, coming from a cultural studies background. But I had been married to an artist for twenty-five years, and I know how to read a piece of art. That gave us another type of dialogue, though historians would criticize it because they'd say, "Look, that's their interpretation."
Linkon: "How do you know that is the meaning of those paintings or calendars?"
Russo: There's not going to be any record of that meaning, but we do know, when we take people around Youngstown, when you see in the bars all the photographs, it innundates your life. It made us willing to take even more risks, in terms of trying to do an interdisciplinary work and not be fearful. We're all trained in individual areas to always be cautious, to make things conditional.
Those were difficult chapters to write because I had gotten sick—I had a bout with cancer—so we decided that we should move to working on chapters separately. We had developed a way of writing, and when we came to do individual chapters separately, we found that we were in big conflict.
Linkon: And the work wasn't as good as it was when we really wrote together. Literally, most of the writing we do together. I sit at the computer and John paces behind me, and we write sentence by sentence. Every now and then it'll be, "ok, here's the idea, or the paragraph, you go away for a while." I'll write a paragraph or two or three and then he'll come back and read it.
Cohen: What made you want to attempt a collaborative work? Certainly nobody's encouraged to do this. Did you have models in mind?
Linkon: No, I think it was our awareness that because we brought different things to it, it would be a better book. We had done one article and a couple of presentations together and we knew by that time that we worked well together, that these slightly different perspectives were correctives to each other. John was more focused on making sure we brought the history in and making sure that we brought the politics in, in more overt ways than I was used to doing. I was much more attentive to reading a text like a text, and analyzing it. As he says, there is some of difference between our approaches, but I define it less as a generational difference and more as a field difference. But part of it was just looking at the size of the project and knowing that even though the writing process would be slow and difficult, it would be easier to get the thing done if we did it together.
Russo: I had models. My teachers at UMass were [Sam] Bowles and [Herbert] Gintis. I remember them being asked how they worked together, and they said, "you just cover so much more ground." It makes it easier to read more.
Cohen: Can you talk about your own backgrounds? Did anything prepare you for what you're doing now?
Russo: I was a biology major in college and picked a very low draft number. I could have been a doctor, but I didn't know what I was doing, and I wound up teaching inner city schools in Rochester, New York, and became very interested in collective bargaining and public education.
Cohen: So you were a high school teacher?
Russo: Yeah, that's how I got out of the draft. It's a 60s story. So I taught in Rochester for a few years, and I got my master's while teaching. Then I went to UMass-Amherst, where everybody who had been involved with SDS (though I wasn't involved with SDS in Rochester) were going to follow Bowles and Gintis. Bowles couldn't get tenure at Harvard, despite the support of three Nobel prize-winners, and that's how a Marxist economics department ended up there. You had people coming from psychology, from business, from education, from feminist studies, all coming to UMass-Amherst in 1974, and Bowles and Gintis were working on a book called Schooling in Capitalist America, which was a very important book for that era. You had all these people coming in from different disciplines, and when we came together, you'd present your paper and be immediately informed by feminist theory, by Marxists, by ecologists. It was a riot; it was like riding a wave! It was the best educational experience you could possibly have, because your work was being informed by so many disciplines.
The only problem was that most of it was dealt with on an intellectual level, and I was much more an organizer. There was a labor center there that was very good, so I got my degree in education and public sector bargaining and spent a year there as a post-doctoral research fellow. There was always this tension between those who were the practical folks and those who wanted to make the fight theoretically. I know where I was on that, but the educational experience for me was teriffic.
I took a job at St. Francis College in central Pennsylvania, in their master's program, where many of my students were mine workers. I loved them; it was a great experience. Then I came here, and if you're going to be studying the labor movement, this was the place to be.
Cohen: When did you get to Youngstown?
Russo: 1980, so I've been here a long time.
Cohen: You came after the first of the mill closings in the Mahoning Valley had begun?
Russo: Yes, so in the first seven years I was speaking about what was happening in the Youngstown steel industry. It's painful—these are your neighbors, your family, so it is not an abstraction, there's no way to objectify it.
Linkon: Well, I was interdisciplinary from birth. I chose the college I went to as an undergraduate because they would let me design my own major.
Cohen: What college was that?
Linkon: Macalaster College. I went originally thinking I would either do a degree that would combine psychology and music and become a music therapist, or I would do a degree that would prepare me to go to rabbinical school. And I chose an entirely different path, which is sort of typical—"well, here's an opportunity, here's a door that opens." I ended up putting together my own major in writing, editing, and publishing. I think the most important thing I learned in college was how to write well. I really liked college, so I decided to go get a master's degree and move on toward the PhD. Because I hadn't been a major in anything, I wasn't sure I could get into a master's program in anything other than writing, so I did a master's in creative writing.
Cohen: Was that at Macalaster?
Linkon: No, it was at the University of Denver. I'd grown up in Denver, and they were the only place I'd gotten into that had offered me money. I was an above-average but not stellar college student, and so because I didn't have a major in anything, it was a gamble to give me an assistantship. But they gave them to everyone, and I got to fill in some of my literature background there and do a lot of writing. While I was there I learned about American Studies, and I started teaching Introduction to Literature courses and found that I couldn't teach any work of literature without talking about the culture of the time—what was going on, what were the social issues. And I thought, "well, the literature I can read by myself, but if I want to teach about literature, what I need to know is the culture," so I went into a PhD program at Minnesota in American Studies. I started with an interest in nineteenth century American women and the women's suffrage movement. I did a degree there, took art history classes, sociology classes, English classes, religion classes, urban studies classes—I was all over the map, as American Studies people tend to be.
I did a dissertation on fiction and politics, and so was able to get a job in an English department. I wasn't doing anything on class; I was, sort of, since you can't talk about the nineteenth-century women's movement without talking about middle-class identity, but that was about as far as my discussion of class went. But I got here and got involved in the work that these guys were doing because of my interdisciplinary background.
Cohen: When was this?
Linkon: I arrived here in 1990, so in 1991, because we started planning the 1992 conference on the 1930s, which was going to be on literature and history.
Cohen: A book came out of that conference as well, right?
Linkon: Yes, Radical Revisions. Bill Mullen and I edited that partially out of papers at that conference, partially out of other things we went out and found. In 1995, when we were doing our second conference on working class studies, I had a couple of conversations with people where I felt very clearly that as a middle-class person, not a Youngstown person coming in to doing this, I was potentially treading on toes. There were things about that that just made me uncomfortable. I said, "You know, this really isn't my work." I was at that time working on an edited collection on nineteenth century American women essays. I kept saying, "I'll get through the conference and then I'm going to quit." And then at that conference, I started having conversations with people about teaching students at schools like YSU, and teaching has always been one of my primary interests from the time I was in my master's program, and those conversations really energized me. I thought, "that's why I'm doing this."
My interest here is not in working class culture in a sort of generic way, but because these are who my students are, and if I want to teach my students well, I need to understand the culture they're coming from. And I kept listening to working class academics telling their stories as a way to understand our students. However, my students aren't like somebody who's going to go on and get a PhD; by and large, my students are going to go on and become police officers and elementary school teachers and nurses and dental assistants. So I need to understand how education works for them, how they think, where they're coming from. That's what got me energized.
Russo: I said after meeting Sherry, "You know, we really need you, you have a good grip on this in so many different areas." I was nasty, I said, "C'mon, get out of the nineteenth century." The great thing I recognized about her was she had a set of organizing skills that the other people who were involved didn't have. But there's costs to that; if you're going to spend a lot of time organizing, you're not going to write the book.
Cohen: It must have been a tremendous amount of work to get the Center going. Did Youngstown State help with it?
Linkon: The university was supportive in all kinds of ways early on. When we first went and said we want a thousand dollars to do a lecture series, they gave us the thousand dollars. When we'd asked for some reassigned time to help plan the conference, we got that time. Unfortunately, the person who took that reassigned time used it to write his own book, and we ended up doing the work. Part of what we learned was to be careful about outsourcing.
Russo: The key was two things. In 1995, the American Association of Colleges and Universities [AACU] was developing a new Diversity and Democracy project, and we wrote a proposal asking to become one of the universities involved, based on the question "Would the working class be invited to the diversity banquet?" Within thirty-six hours we got a reply.
That gave us visibility; the university got some strokes for it. We brought in these new students and the provost said, "I get it." I remember him calling me into the office and he said, "You guys get eight thousand dollars, and there's only one thing to tell you about this, that you have to get other faculty members involved. That's the deal." We made the conscious effort that we would not use any of that money to buy our own release time; we were going to throw it all into programming and networking. Now, you have to remember, Sherry's the coordinator of American Studies, I'm coordinator of Labor Studies, at that time we had 3-3-3 teaching load, and we were burned out. But this thing started really growing, and this motivated us.
Cohen: I'm curious about the reaction to your placing the working class in relation to diversity. How did that go over?
Linkon: It was fascinating. They did a two-week institute at Williams College, and they mixed everyone up. The five people from YSU were all in separate groups, with other campuses, most of which were working on issues of race. There was some discussion of gender, some discussion of sexuality, but race was the top of the heap. The response was mixed, and still is, from people who say, "Of course class matters, and isn't this great that you're talking about class, but class doesn't trump these things, race really is the most important thing." And "We're scared that if you ask for resources and attention to focus on class, that will take away resources and attention from programs that focus on race."
Cohen: How do you read that?
Russo: I think it's historic. Marxists paid lip service to issues of race and gender, even the best writers when they were talking about it, but class always trumped everything else. I think that's why you get the beginnings of black studies, women's studies, in the 1970s and 80s.
Linkon: I had another take on it, actually two separate points. One is that in some institutions it's very clear that the pressure to deal with one issue or another, primarily, is very strong. We had a sort of mentor institution in the AACU program with UMass-Boston, which has a much more racially and internationally diverse student body than we have. Our student body is overwhelmingly white, so the pressure they feel to deal with issues of race is much stronger. It's not that we don't think it's important, but class can be an entry point for our students, where it wasn't necessarily for them.
Here's the other thing: I think that giving attention to class draws attention to divisions within categories of race, gender, and sexuality that people working in those fields don't necessarily want to be attentive to. Part of it is that it suggests that there are divisions and competitions and tensions within those groups. I think that's an especially difficult problem for people studying those topics at elite institutions because they and their students benefit from class privilege and may not want to wrestle with that privilege as part of their discussion of racial, gender, or sexual oppression. We're in a position at the bottom of the heap in terms of class; not only are many of our students working class but, in the hierarchy of higher education, schools like YSU are working class institutions. We don't have a lot of status to worry about.
I guess one other thing I would say is that people are always afraid of talking about class, whether it's a fear of red-baiting or the fact that class is so complicated, and there haven't been good resources to pull it all together.
Cohen: Is that because you think that categories like race or gender are more visible through the lenses that disciplines place on them, whereas class is naturalized to such a degree that it doesn't come up?
Linkon: In part. I think it is much easier to ignore class differences. You can look around your classroom as a teacher and not know, unless you're really thinking about it, which of your students are working class and which of them are middle-class and which are elite.
It's also about the way American culture talks about class.
Russo: I think they are two sides to the same coin. I think at one time class trumped the other identities, before women's studies, and black studies, and ethnic studies, gay and lesbian studies. But once the intellectuals came to feel comfortable, those areas became privileged as they related to the study of class. The intersections are the real key to understanding this right now—class and religion, class and place...
Linkon: Another thing I would add is that, about the time we were getting started, there were a couple of things that came out, like Todd Gitlin's book, The Twilight of Common Dreams, which makes the argument that class ought to trump everything and we should set aside all these identity politics and just get back to class. It's a difficult balancing act; we say, "look, we don't want to privilege class as the only category that's important, or even that class is the most important." We've created a center for working class studies because we thought that in the general landscape of studying inequality, this was the category that wasn't getting full attention. There's a hundred centers for Africana studies and black studies, a hundred and fifty for women's studies, and fifty for queer studies, but not a one anywhere that focuses on class.
Cohen: If the assumption behind fields like Afro-American studies or women's studies is that they are going to contribute to correcting the oppression of women or blacks, is that also part of the agenda for working class studies?
Russo: Well, we recognize that there are multiple sites of oppression. I remember getting into a fight with someone, a Marxist, and I said, "You think that there's racism in Cuba? How does class and race work there?" It's not that we didn't use Gitlin and some other people; people were trying to understand what happens when the people that are liberal and left abandon the working class. Meanwhile the right has grabbed the working class, so we have to reclaim that discussion of working class life and values. There's going to be a big fight about that now.
Linkon: I would say a couple of things to your question. First, yes, absolutely, part of the goal of this is to support working class culture, to help not only working class people but people across society understand that working class culture is a culture worth embracing and understanding. We have a whole list in our mission statement for the Working Class Studies Association that talks about supporting policies supportive of working class people.
The other thing is that, if you really want to understand how oppression works, you have to understand the complex social and political position of the white working class straight man. If he becomes the enemy, that ignores the fact that he is also someone who is oppressed. It is possible to be both someone who is in the dominant position and the marginal position. It's not that he's the most important figure in that landscape of people, but you've got to understand that this is about class as well as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, place, ability—all of those categories.
Russo: I think that whole discussion has developed over time. It took us a while to think this through, partly in response to attacks people would make. Ultimately, I think, our approach paid off when we were at the Ford Foundation, when our first program officer said to us, "Look, you guys do the best job that we know of doing intersectional work. You've got a language and discourse that gets through this without getting entangled in the methodological problems, without privileging any particular identity." But this did not come full-blown. The Center, and working class studies, is a work-in-progress, all the way along, and we built on what was happening, what other people were saying, as much as what we were trying to figure out ourselves—and that related to what's happened here, as we deal with our students and understand the complexity of their lives.
And I'll tell you something, we've gotten into some ugly fights. We've had people who've said that working class studies should only be about the labor theory of value.
Linkon: At the same time, we've had people who've said working class studies should be only about making visible the voices of working class people, and their experience. And others who say working class studies should be about abolishing the working class by overthrowing the class system. Or "By studying the working class, you're glamourizing and glorifying the working class, and what we should want to do is eliminate it." And "You can't study it because you're not working class." You know, all the kinds of arguments people make about any category of identity.
Cohen: What's going to happen to the field in the future?
Linkon: Many of the people who were energetic in leading this field are ready to step back, but there are a number of others who are younger and will be here for a while.
Russo: We've done a lot of work, organizing, helping graduate students, but this is really about them. This is my speech: "This field is for you. You guys have to pick this ball up and move it forward." It's got to be for that generation, people who are currently in graduate school or just out and teaching, and they've got a real fight because they've got to deal with getting tenure and all the other roadblocks in the midst of this changing field, and many of their senior faculty members who are going to vote on them don't get it.
Cohen: So you don't see a doctorate in working class studies coming on, or a master's degree? Should there be one?
Linkon: Well, we'll have a new master's program in American Studies that focuses on working class studies. But I'm skeptical about granting degrees in working class studies for the moment, for two reasons. One is, I think it is possible for people to do a PhD that focuses on working class studies within an existing field, because this is a very diffuse field.
Russo: If you have the right people who will let you do it.
Linkon: Right. Last year I taught my course on working class literature online and had a student who's a PhD candidate in Iowa in my class, saying, "I want to do a dissertation on working class women's literature, and this is the first opportunity I've had to take a course that focuses on that." So there needs to be more growth in the field to do that.
The other thing I would say about developing a PhD is that we are in the very fortunate position of getting to learn from what women's studies and ethnic studies learned before us. And one of the lessons about PhDs is that there's not a whole lot of market for people with a degree in that specific field. Even though it's broader because it's interdisciplinary, it tends unfortunately for people with those degrees to narrow their choices in terms of jobs. You'll be more marketable with a PhD in English or History than you would with a PhD in working class studies, and it's my sense that the purpose of PhD programs is to prepare people to be professors primarily. People go off and do some other things, but that's never the first choice. One of the big problems we face in higher education these days is that we're preparing a lot of PhDs for whom there is no work. While I absolutely value the idea of studying this stuff, I don't want to set up a program that's there because I'm interested in it, nor do I want to set up a program that does a disservice to the students who enroll in it by saying, "Sure, come get a PhD in working class studies. Oh, by the way, nobody will want to hire you because they'll see that as too narrow a focus."
Cohen: Is this a problem attracting students who want to take this subject on? Who are the students for working class studies now, at YSU or outside?
Linkon: We get students typically—both undergraduates and graduates—who are just interested in the topic. They find their way to us because they've been at one of our lectures, they've taken a course and gotten interested, they've read our book—something that leads them to say, "Oh, wow, that's really cool, I want to do that." They are not by and large looking to some specific goal. We've had about half-a-dozen students enrolled in our four-course graduate certificate program at various times. The two people who've completed it so far did it in the context of getting an MA in English, and then took our courses in addition, so they got a certificate in Working Class Studies. Others are people who are just interested and want to take some graduate courses. We've got a guy who's an advisor in the School of Business who wants to do some graduate work and not quite ready to take on an MA, and he's really interested in what we're doing. We have somebody who's a librarian for the Diocese of Youngstown, who again, was just interested.
Nationally and internationally, what we're finding is that there are a lot of graduate students doing work on class within departments where they don't feel they have a lot of faculty who are really focused on it, and we become the place they turn to for support. We've had people come here and hang out for a week, and talk to us and show us their work and do presentations in our classes, and we help them find local resources, but mostly we just provide a place where people recognize what they do. We've had people who we've followed all the way through their graduate careers, and there's a crop of them just beginning to emerge.
We've done tenure reviews for people all around the country, we've served as extra readers on people's PhDs. Someone at Yale getting letters for tenure from people at YSU, it's a little weird. We've made sure people get to present at our conference, we've given them opporunities to do book reviews, whatever we can. Part of our job is to nurture the next generation of people in the field, and we don't do that as PhD advisors. We do it as sort of external cheerleaders.
Cohen: So really the Center is only partially a classroom-based institution?
Linkon: Right, the Center does not have courses of its own, in the sense that you can't look up in the course bulletin and see courses that are labeled "Working Class Studies." Our courses exist in American Studies, in Management oddly enough, in English, in History.
Russo: We never started out that way. The idea we originally wanted to do, because we didn't have much money, was to throw it into the lecture series and networking and the newsletter. But now that Sherry's got this new program in American Studies, and we have a certificate in Working Class Studies, now you have it formally entrenched as part of the academic community and disciplinary world here on campus. But that was never the goal. It really is, "you go with what you got," and you try to base it in the community's needs. In some ways it was serendipitous.
Linkon: But we started from the beginning with the idea that what we wanted to do was teaching, research and outreach. And the teaching was not about developing core courses in working class studies, but about developing ways of talking about class in a whole bunch of different courses. So we have two people in the English department who regularly, in both general education and upper-division courses, talk about working class literature and literature about work. We have a number of history courses that study the local community. They finally got a labor history graduate course—our history department used to be very traditional. They used to not count the labor history course toward the major.
Russo: Or the women's history course.
Linkon: John teaches a course in the Business School on work, and we have people who are going on to become human resource staff reading poetry about work and writing their own poetry, and listening to popular music and watching films, and thinking about the intersection between religion and philosophy and work.
Outreach has been a huge part of this all along. The lecture series does that in part, but so do the art exhibits that we sponsor, and our oral history projects, and our work with teachers in the community. All those kinds of things are ways of reaching out to the community and trying to make working class culture visible.
Cohen: Would this have happened if you hadn't come to Youngstown when you did?
Russo: Well, there's two things to say to that. The danger is the idea of exceptionalism, that somehow it's "well, you're in Youngstown."
Linkon: "You could do that in Youngstown, but it couldn't happen anywhere else."
Russo: My sense is that if you get anybody that works in any sort of urban community, if you get the right people together, and a certain type of orientation, you can combine and study that place. I mean, I've always said that this program would be best at community colleges and comprehensive universities as opposed to research universities.
Linkon: People who are most closely-linked with working class communities.
Russo: The other point is that what happens in more elite academic communities is likely to be much more theoretical, and when we talk about class theoretically, that tends to lead to objectification—people working in elite settings are just more likely to view the working class as an other, a group that's "out there" somewhere, not who we are or who are students and their communities are.
Linkon: And be much more tied to ideas about status. We don't have a lot of pressure or expectation about our status in the academic world. It's not one of the issues at YSU. Neither of us had published a book-length project we had written, as opposed to editing, until after we were full professors. We didn't have to, so that meant we had the energy to devote to the Center. It's not that we weren't doing research. We did plenty of research, lots of publishing, and lots of editing, but the pressures are different, the expectations are different, and the standards of what counts as good work are less focused on what's your standing nationally and more focused on what are you doing for the community.
Russo: We get the question, "Why did you guys always stay at Youngstown State?" And as I get older, I get less tolerant of that shit. I say, "What's that mean?" And they say, "Well, it's not as prestigious." And I say, "We developed a whole new field at this regional state university. Have you developed a new field where you teach?"
Linkon: My version of it is when I finished up my PhD and got a job at YSU, I had the distinct feeling—nobody ever said this to me outright—that my professors at Minnesota were disappointed that I'd ended up in this little podunk state university in the middle of nowhere that nobody'd ever heard of, that I would be teaching three courses a quarter, and I would sort of fade into oblivion. Fifteen years later, I'm almost the only person from my cohort who has a national reputation. Why? Because I came to YSU. As my dissertation advisor said to me the last time I saw her, "You know, Sherry, you're a classic example of having bloomed where you were planted." At a place like YSU, the pressures for traditional production are much less, and that gives you the freedom to do innovative things. And it gives you the resources to do it because they're going to give resources to things that are about teaching and about the community, whereas at a lot of research institutions, that's going to be the last thing they're going to give money to.
Russo: What they want are organizers. That's what we bring: we're very good organizers, we know what has to happen.
Cohen: It's interesting to note the global distribution of work, as we go through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, is very different than it was only twenty or thirty years ago, and that working class studies surfaces right when de-industrialization sets in.
Linkon: Yes, the kind of work that working class people do has changed from industrial to service.
Russo: That's the critique that, "Oh, you guys are just about nostalgia. That's very nostalgic stuff, the working class, and really not very relevant."
Linkon: We're doing projects that look at how the auto industry is changing; it's not just about looking back and remembering the past.
Russo: Or romanticizing the past.
Linkon: We're doing a project on nursing as a form of working class work.
Cohen: But, absent the drama of the mill closings, do you think this energy would have been as focused on the experience of working class people?
Russo: I think the drama of what happened here is important because Youngstown did become the poster child for de-industrialization. Everybody's coming to Youngstown to find out if it ever recovered because, in many other parts of the economy, work is shifting out. The drama of Youngstown, and the visual landscape of Youngstown's de-industrialization, is apparent to everybody. We will be speaking at MIT in three weeks about the reporting on Youngstown and how it changes over time from a site of sympathy over de-industrialization to a site of corruption. It's largely about how these second- and third-tier cities get portrayed over time when they don't develop a certain sort of way. This challenges traditional ideas about economic theory such as "creative destruction."
Linkon: Or follow the appropriate progressive timeline.
The other thing I would mention that made Youngstown a good place for working class studies is its history in terms of the labor movement. Not just the demise of the steel mills, but the things that happened here before then, the growth of a working class culture around a single industry, the rise of the union movement, and the militancy of the union movement here. These created an atmosphere in which talking about class didn't seem alien. We could say that to our students, who would start a course saying they were middle class, and by three weeks into the course they'd be identifying as working class and going back and talking to their families about it, and learning things about their family's history with unions and with industrial work especially, and other kinds of working class work that they had never been aware of.
Would that have happened at any other institution like this? Maybe. You know, I was teaching at Metro-State College in Denver before I came here, which was another working class institution, though different in other ways. Maybe I would have gotten to it, but here it's so present, it's kind of hard to ignore.
Russo: A number of very prominent scholars have said, "We'd like to come there." And I said, "Well, why? This is very interesting; everyone wants to leave." "Because I've got these students, and they're just so detached, I feel alienated from them, I don't care." And we're talking major instititons. They're caught in the web between elite institution and studying in the abstract, as opposed to studying a place while you're in it.
Cohen: One of the things about the book, Steeltown, is that every chapter is clear about the legacy of class conflict in Youngstown. The book does an excellent job showing how it was everywhere from public sculpture to the housing stock. What about your upbringing prepared you for a project like that, or enabled you to see it through?
Linkon: It's a great question. My father's career started as a labor negotiator on the management side. I come from a vehemently anti-union family. A friend of mine said, "You're Jewish, aren't you? And your family was anti-union?" That's what I grew up with. At the same time, my mother, throughout my childhood, was organizing community projects of various kinds dealing with race and gender issues. She created a day camp that brought inner city black and hispanic kids together with white upper middle class kids from the suburbs, not to talk about those things, but to just spend time together, create relationships. She was a great organizer.
So I've got my father, on the one hand, saying not only unions are bad but the model of a good career is that you keep moving up. My father says about every six months, "When are you going to become a dean?" The idea that I would be, at 45, a full professor and that I'm not ever going to get promoted again, he just cannot deal with. He's got what Barbara Jensen would call "the becoming mentality." My mother, on the other hand, gave me that model of organizing and doing community work, and saying "What are the sources of injustice and misery in the world?"
We get asked a lot, "how do a couple of essentially middle-class people become so committed to something that's not about their own history?" Part of it is that this is very much about my own history, and I think John even more so. He worked in auto plants as he was going through college and has more of that hands-on industrial experience. But to understand—and this is part of the conflict of Steeltown—that it doesn't just affect working class people; those divisions within our society affect all of us. They give me privileges that I need to be very conscious of, they give me ways of seeing the world that I need to be very consicous of. Working with working class colleagues and working class students helps me understand all of this and think critically about it.
Russo: It's funny where you get that set of values. I remember my father was a great athlete in the 1920s, little short guy but a great basketball player. Ultimately he was a man who was a product of the Depression and who got an office job for the Bureau for Public Roads, but reading two books a week for all of his life. I was part of the Left and the anti-war movement during the 1960s, and my sister became a feminist professor, very brilliant, at Hampshire College. How these two middle class parents got these kids, I'll never know. I'd worked in factories in college, and one time in the 1980s, I was visiting my father back in Michigan, and he starts baiting me, and I said, "You don't know a goddamn thing about the labor movement, so don't give me that." And he looks at me the only way a father can look at a son, opens up his wallet and pulls out a union card from a government employees union, 1954. He was its president and only member during the McCarthy era. And I said, "Why have we never had this conversation?" And he replied, "You have to make your own way in life. You have to do this on your own." This man would never mention politics, he was always "cover yourself first," that sort of mentality, but somehow along the way I got something.
Cohen: One last question: what are the other venues for this kind of work?
Linkon: Youngstown is not the only place it is going on. A couple of people who came to our conference in 2003 from western Massachusets, Betsy LeondarWright and Felice Yeskel, are focused on cross-class organizing, organizing projects that bring middle class and working class folks together. They are working as independent entities, doing consulting, running educational programs, doing community organizing stuff. Betsy's created this wonderful website called classmatters.org that offers a really good, basic, ordinary-person everyday definition of class, has a running online discussion where she invites people to answer the question of the month, has a really good list of resources, and is doing organizing informed by what is going on in the academy.
The other example I would cite is Bread and Roses. They are the cultural wing of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199 in New York, and they do arts projects. For example, they do this wonderful photography project called Unseen America, where they provide instruction in photography and cameras to their union members, most of whom are relatively low-income people of color, and lots of women. They say, "Go document your lives," and they've been creating these exhibits. They've put on a musical, they've done writing workshops, they've done this huge variety of arts projects, sponsored by the labor movement—not entirely unlike other organizations like Laborarts.org or the Labor Heritage Foundation, groups that are organizing arts projects, things that give opportunities for working class people to talk about their lives and their experiences and to make that part of public discourse.
Those are all within the context of the labor movement, so there's all kinds of things that are going on beyond the academy. In some ways the academy has come late to this. One of the things we say in our introduction to the new book is that it's not as if nobody's done research on the working class before; this is new in the way it pulls things together and the way it sees its relationship to our communities, especially the working class. |
