Herbert Gutman

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Herbert Gutman (1928 – July 21, 1985) was a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and  labor history.

Contents 1 Early life and  education 2 Career 3 Research focus and  critical assessment 3.1 Slavery and  the Numbers Game 3.2 The Black Family in Slavery and  Freedom, 1750–1925 4 Memberships and  awards 5 Published works 5.1 Solely authored books 5.2 Solely authored book chapters 5.3 Solely authored articles 5.4 Solely edited books 5.5 Co-edited books 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

[ and  education">edit] Early life and  education

Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City. His parents' leftism was deeply influential. He attended John Adams High School and  graduated with a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1948. During his teens and  his college years, Gutman became involved in numerous left-wing causes, flirted with communism, and  worked for the Wallace presidential campaign.

He received a master's degree in history from Columbia University. His thesis studied the Panic of 1873 and  its effects on New York City, and  focused heavily on workers' demands for public works. it  was written under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter. Gutman later dismissed it  as "boring conventional labor history."^[1]

Gutman was awarded a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1959. His doctoral dissertation was on American labor during the Panic of 1873 and  supervised by Howard K. Beale. During this time, Gutman worked with the eminent labor scholars Merril Jensen, Merle Curti and  Selig Perlman, who had turned the University of Wisconsin into the cradle of modern American labor studies.

He later marred Judith Mara, and  they had two daughters.

[edit] Career

Gutman taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University from 1956 to 1960. Immersing himself in the "new labor history", he researched and  wrote a series of community studies about railroad workers, coal miners and  ironworkers. During his earliest years as a labor historian, Gutman's thesis was that "workers derived their strength from their small-town milieus and  from alliances with class elements unsympathetic to the rising industrialists…" But, as Gutman later admitted, this conclusion was wrong.^[1]

Gutman then took a position teaching history at the State University of New York at Buffalo beginning in 1963. At SUNY-Buffalo, Gutman began adapting more  statistical and  quantitative methodologies to the study of American history. But in 1964, the preeminent British social historian E.P. Thompson came to the United States expressly to visit Gutman. "Gutman's insights into the strengths of working-class resistance to industrial capitalism and  the realization that one source of this resistance lay in traditions and  ideas derived from previous forms of social organization made Thompson's emphasis on culture and  the 'making' of the working class particularly attractive."^[1] Gutman's essay "Protestantism and  the American Labor Movement" appeared in the American Historical Review in 1966. it  not only put him in the forefront of the "new labor history" movement, it  also cemented his already-considerable reputation.

Gutman left SUNY-Buffalo in 1966 to take a job at the University of Rochester. During this time, he conducted most of the research for his massive, path-breaking work, The Black Family in Slavery and  Freedom, 1750–1925.

Gutman left SUNY-Buffalo in 1972, and  became a professor of history at the City College of New York. He joined CUNY's Graduate Center in 1975, and  stopped teaching at CUNY in 1975 to teach full-time in the graduate program.

In 1977, Gutman received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to teach labor history to union members. The series of lectures, called "Americans at Work," continued until 1980. The lectures attracted widespread attention from unions, workers and  Gutman's peers for their engaging style, detail and  application to current events in the labor movement.

The enthusiasm generated by the NEH lectures led Gutman to co-found the American Social History Project at CUNY Graduate Center. The project, funded by NEH and  the Ford Foundation, began collecting original documents, oral histories, biographies and  other historical documentation relating to the history of labor and  workers in the U.S.

In 1984, Gutman received a Guggenheim Fellowship and  was teaching classes at four historically black colleges for the United Negro College Fund.

Gutman suffered a severe heart attack in late June, 1985. He died five weeks later at his home in Nyack, New York, at the age of 57.

[ and  critical assessment">edit] Research focus and  critical assessment

Herbert Gutman focused on the history of workers and  slaves in the United States.

Gutman is  considered one of the co-founders and  primary proponents of the "new labor history," a school of thought which believes ordinary people have  not received the proper amount of attention from historians.^[2] He developed a critique of the "Commons school" of labor history which focused on markets and  minimize other factors such as technological or  cultural changes and  working people themselves.^[1]

Gutman has also been criticized for his quasi-Marxist theoretical leanings. it  is clear that Gutman at one time may have  been an  academic Marxist. But by the late 1950s, Gutman had moved away from Marxism. Instead, Gutman retained "what he called 'a really good set of questions' that Marx had inspired (e.g., what were workers, not just leaders, doing on a day-to-day basis?). These questions reshaped labor history and  also appealed to students of Afro-American history."^[3]

Gutman was often criticized for overemphasizing the experiences of working people and  blacks as historical agents, and  "sometimes summarily dismissed as a 'romantic' and  lacking in sophisticated 'theory'…".^[4]

Gutman is  best known for two major studies of slavery in America: Slavery and  the Numbers Game: A Critique of "Time on the Cross" (1975) and  The Black Family in Slavery and  Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976).

[ and  the Numbers Game">edit] Slavery and  the Numbers Game

The former deconstructs the assumptions and  poor methodology in the book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, by Robert William Fogel and  Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross directly challenged the long-held conclusions that slavery was unprofitable, a moribund institution, inefficient, and  extremely harsh for typical slave. The book received a large amount of mainstream media attention for its revisionism, impressed the historical community with its use of cliometrics, and  outraged many in the civil rights community (with some calling it  a rallying cry for racism).

Gutman systematically took Fogel and  Engerman to task on variety of fronts. He argued they relied on evidence from a single, unrepresentative plantation. He also noted the authors were extremely careless in their math, and  often used the wrong measurement to estimate the harshness of slavery (for example, estimating the number of slaves whipped rather than how often each slave was whipped). In Slavery and  the Numbers Game, Gutman argued that Fogel and  Engerman also routinely ignored better, readily-available data as well. Gutman roundly criticized Fogel and  Engerman on a host of other claims as well, including the lack of evidence for systematic and  regular rewards and  a failure to consider the effect public whipping would have  on other slaves. Gutman also argued that Fogel and  Engerman had fallen prey to an  ideological pitfall by assuming that slaves had assimilated the Protestant work ethic. If they had such an  ethic, then the system of punishments and  rewards outlined in Time on the Cross would support Fogel and  Engerman's thesis. Gutman conclusively showed, however, that most slaves had not adopted this ethic at all and  that slavery's carrot-and-stick approach to work was not part of the slave worldview.

Gutman's critique was so thorough that later reviewers called Time on the Cross "severely flawed and  possibly not even worth further attention by serious scholars."^[5]

[ and  Freedom, 1750–1925">edit] The Black Family in Slavery and  Freedom, 1750–1925

The Black Family in Slavery and  Freedom, 1750–1925, published a year after Slavery and  the Numbers Game, is  a detailed study of black family life under slavery in the U.S. The book draws on census data, diaries, family records, bills of sale and  other records, and  argues that slavery did not break up the black family. Gutman concluded that most black families largely remained intact despite slavery. Gutman further argued that black families also remained intact during the first wave of migration to the North after the Civil War (although he remained open to arguments about black family collapse in the 1930s and  1940s).^[2]

Gutman's work was widely praised. it  not only constituted an  excellent example of social history for its focus on individuals but it  challenged long-held conventional ideas about the slavery's effects on black families.^[2] Oddly, this came just as Gutman had argued a year earlier for the relative harshness of slavery in Slavery and  the Numbers Game.

[ and  awards">edit] Memberships and  awards

Gutman was a member of the  and  Sciences">American Academy of Arts and  Sciences.

Along with David Brody and  David Montgomery, Gutman was editor of the Working Class in American History series at the University of Illinois Press. In the late 1980s, the University of Illinois Press established the Herbert Gutman Award for the best book in American history published by the press.

[edit] Published works

[edit] Solely authored books

• The Black Family in Slavery and  Freedom, 1750-1925. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. ISBN 0394724518
• Power & Culture: Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. ISBN 0394560264
• Slavery and  the Numbers Game: A Critique of 'Time on the Cross'. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ISBN 0252071514
• Work, Culture and  Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. ISBN 0394722515

[edit] Solely authored book chapters

• "Labor in the Land of Lincoln: Coal Miners on the Prairie." In Power and  Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. Reissue edition. Ira Berlin, ed. New York: New Press, 1992. ISBN 1565840100
• "The Negro and  the United Mine Workers of America: The Career and  Letters of Richard L. Davis and  Something of Their Meaning, 1890-1900." In The Negro and  the American Labor Movement. Julius Jacobson, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1968. ISBN 038501113X
• "Work, Culture, and  Society in Industrializing America." In Work, Culture, and  Society in Industrializing America. Herbert G. Gutman, ed. New York: Knopf, 1976. ISBN 0394496949
• "The Workers' Search for Power: Labor in the Gilded Age." In Power and  Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. Reissue edition. Herbert G. Gutman, ed. New York: Pantheon, 1992. ISBN 1565840100

[edit] Solely authored articles

• "Protestantism and  the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age." American Historical Review. 72 (1966).
• "Reconstruction in Ohio: Negroes in the Hocking Valley Coal Mines in 1873 and  1874." Labor History. 3:3 (Fall 1962).

[edit] Solely edited books

• Work, Culture, and  Society in Industrializing America. New York: Knopf, 1976. ISBN 0394496949
• Power and  Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. Reissue edition. New York: Pantheon, 1992. ISBN 1565840100

[edit] Co-edited books

• Gutman, Herbert G. and  Bell, Donald H., eds. The New England Working Class and  the New Labor History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. ISBN 025201300X
• Gutman, Herbert G. and  Kealy, Gregory G., eds. Many Pasts: Readings in American Social History, 1600-1876. Vol. 1." Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973. ISBN 0135559049
• Gutman, Herbert G. and  Kealy, Gregory G., eds. Many Pasts: Readings in American Social History, 1865-Present. Vol. 2." Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973. ISBN 0135559383

[edit] Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c d} Kealy, "Herbert G. Gutman, 1928–1985, and  the Writing of Working-Class History," Monthly Review, May, 1986.
2. ^ ^{a b c} Serrin, "Prof. Herbert Gutman, Labor Historian, is  Dead," New York Times, July 22, 1985.
3. ^ Rachleff, "Two Decades of the 'New' Labor History," American Quarterly, March 1989.
4. ^ Painter, "Herbert Gutman, Historian of Class," Washington Post, January 17, 1988.
5. ^ Haskell, "The True and  Tragical History of 'Time on the Cross,' " New York Review of Books, Oct. 2, 1975.

[edit] References

• Haskell, Thomas L. "The True and  Tragical History of 'Time on the Cross.' " New York Review of Books. 22:15 (October 2, 1975).
• Kealy, Gregory S. "Herbert G. Gutman, 1928–1985, and  the Writing of Working-Class History." Monthly Review. May, 1986.
• Painter, Nell Irvin. "Herbert Gutman, Historian of Class." Washington Post. January 17, 1988.
• Rachleff, Peter J. "Two Decades of the 'New' Labor History: Power and  Culture: Essays on the American Working Class by Herbert G. Gutman." American Quarterly. 41:1 (March 1989).
• Serrin, William. "Prof. Herbert Gutman, Labor Historian, is  Dead." New York Times. July 22, 1985.

[edit] External links

• American Social History Project, City University of New York
• City University of New York
• "Who Built America?", American Social History Project, CUNY Graduate Center