May 11, 1984
Statesmen and politicians have long participated in recounting the history in which they played a role, both through their own memories and as major informants for historians. With the increasing emphasis on “history from below” in recent years, there has been a natural increase In finding ways that non-elite groups, too, can be involved in recording and interpreting their own history. The Brass Workers History Project, in which I have been involved for the past several years, is one such effort. The project’s work has been described and presented elsewhere; here I would like to talk more personally about what it is like to do history this way and tell ‘some of the things we learned that might be -useful to others contemplating history projects involving worker and community participation.’
I approached the participation aspect of the project with considerable trepidation. My initial fears of the response we might meet-most of which I suspect would be shared by almost anyone going into this kind of work for the first time-covered a wide gamut. I anticipated that we would be met by incomprehension, if not general suspicion and hostility. I was afraid that we would be caught in the fractional cross-fire that results from continuing hostility among different groups in the community. I was afraid We would not find people willing to be interviewed, or that even if they agreed, they would be inarticulate or inhibited. I had no confidence that workers or other community members would have any interest in participating in the project. I think these were realistic fears. That they were not realized was partly a matter of luck and partly a result of approaches we developed which seemed to ease many potential problems. I hope that describing these will help smooth the path for those who try this kind of work in the future.
Almost from the time I became interested in labor history in the 1960s, I wondered if it would be possible to do labor history with the participation of the workers who had lived it. In the late 1970s, I started getting to know people in Waterbury, Connecticut, lie main city in the Naugatuck Valley, thirty miles from the rural area where I had grown up and now live. Once the center of the American brass industry, the Valley was now in many ways a typical declining Northeastern industrial area. I began on a part-time basis to gather material for a possible social history of the working people of Waterbury.
Among those I met were Jan Stackhouse and Jerry Lombardi, video documentary makers who lived in the lower Naugatuck Valley Jan had been a union organizer and had coordinated -the local women’s center; Jerry has been active in Valley community organizations I ions. They had made videotapes on local unemployment and on a major local brass strike, and were interested in trying to do something on local labor history. Hank Murray, then education director for UAW Region 9-A which represented most unionized industrial workers in the Valley, was a friend of theirs; he suggested that we focus on a history of the brass workers in the Naugatuck Valley.
By the grapevine we learned that the National Endowment for the Humanities was expanding its funding of labor history Projects, especially ones that produced programs for the general public, rather than just for scholars. We designed a project that we thought would appeal to them. We proposed to produce a popular book and a videotape documentary on the brass workers intended it, make available to a general audience the themes developed by the new labor history.” We would involve workers and other community members who had lived that history, thus developing a model for workers’ participation with historians and media in recounting their own history.
The forms of worker community unity participation we proposed were frankly experimental. In addition to the historian and media producers, we included a job for a community outreach person who would be responsible for taking the initiative in this area. We proposed to organize history committees in local unions, senior centers and other organizations, and to help them preserve their own history while involving them in our project on the brass workers. Drawing on the experience of the Massachusetts History Workshop, we planned to run reunions of former brass workers. And we planned to set up a Labor/Community Advisory Panel.
The Institute for Labor Education and Research, which had received previous grants from NEH, agreed to serve as our nonprofit sponsoring organization and as intermediary with NEH. There then began a long series of revisions in response to NEH queries. During this period, we would have liked to conduct extensive discussions around the Valley to get input from worker and community groups to help shape the project. But we felt we could not justify getting people excited and involved, only perhaps to find that funding would not be forthcoming. So our initial contacts tended to be limited to higher union officials, heads of local cultural institutions; and others whose statements of support were needed for the grant application.
After many months, the NEH came through with a substantial grant. Unfortunately, it provided one less staff member than the proposal. We had to cut the community outreach person. The result was to introduce a continuing tension between the need to produce high-quality products and to conduct a substantial community outreach program. The closest we came to resolving this tension was an early decision to limit our community outreach activity to that which would contribute directly to the book and documentary we had to produce, a necessary decision but one which limited the effort we could put into community activities in their own right.
One of our first activities was to make the rounds of local organizations which might in one way or another be affected by our activity: union locals and retirees chapters, senior centers, local historical societies, and the like. These courtesy visits recognized the importance of whatever group we were approaching, and allowed us to explain what we were doing before they heard about it-quite possibly in distorted form-from somebody else. This also laid the groundwork for future requests for help. In the case of the unions, our ticket-of-admission was our official support from the regional office of the principal union, although it is important that we related to locals independently where they were not on best of terms with the regional office. Visits to historical societies and other cultural institutions allowed us both to solicit their help and to acknowledge their “turf’ and make clear that we were not planning to invade it. They were pleased with our plan to turn over the material we had collected to a local historical museum-a policy which also indicated our desire to contribute to rather than exploit the community.
Some of our best initial contacts came from going to community events sponsored by local groups. For example, at a cultural exhibit at the Lithuanian Club of Waterbury, which we saw announced in the newspaper, we met many people who were extremely helpful over the course of the project, including a man who had for years been collecting old photos of the Lithuanian community, and who became one of our star interviewees.
On the whole, we were met with a combination of interest and reserve. We developed the philosophy that people were right to be cautious in dealing with us. After all, they had very little reason to think we were there for any reason except to rip them off, turning their lives, sufferings and triumphs into the stuff of our own academic or media careers. We had all seen too many cases in which individuals and communities were exploited by scholars and media people, their stories taken and nothing given In return. In fact, people are often less wary of such exploitation than they should be. This attitude helped us to respond positively, to- people who showed signs of wariness in dealing with us. And it helped us control our own subjective anxiety in the face of lack of immediate acceptance.
I am sure that our attitudes in face-to-face situations were important to the responses we received. To the extent that we communicated interest and respect for individuals we dealt with, they in turn were likely at least to give us a fair hearing. To the extent that we communicated lack of respect, we turned people off. One of the clearest cases of the latter occurred when we had set up a session for a group of previously-interviewed workers to be photographed. They had dressed up in their best and were looking forward to the occasion.
Unfortunately, the photographer was unable to make the session and unable to call. We were told later that they had been very upset by this, and had interpreted it as a sign that they were not important enough for us to make sure that the photographer showed up. Fortunately, this incident was unique it would not have taken too many of this kind to undermine people’s faith in our respect seriously.
One of the things we learned was that it took time and effort to gain people’s trust. Phone calls or visits were constantly necessary to gather photos, track down interviewees, or check facts; they had the secondary benefit of telling people that we were still there, still working, and still interested in their participation. It communicated our seriousness and commitment. Maintaining contact on a one-to-one basis was a time consuming job. But after three years, we have a range of contacts and a depth of trust that would allow an infinitely greater degree of participation than would have been possible in the early months of the project.
The personal demands of this work were considerable. We tried to deal in a human way with the two hundred or so people who became involved in one manner or another with the project. We tried not to rush when we were with people, not to act like reporters running to file their story, not to schedule so many meetings and Interviews that we could not be “there” for those we talked with-despite the pressure of completing the final products within tight deadlines. We had to learn to deal diplomatically with a very wide range of people, and to get rid of our own prejudices, which we were constantly discovering.
Even after several years we were not accepted as insiders. Those who liked and trusted us, however, no doubt concealed some of the dirty linen they would have let hang out with members of their own group. (On the other hand, we were able to relate to many different groups In the community in a way that would have been difficult for anyone identified with one particular group.) The status we achieved with many people might be described as “pet outsider.” As long as we did not feel a personal need for some deeper form of acceptance, this provided a very good basis for the work of the project.
We worried a lot initially about how to explain what we were up to. We knew how to describe and justify what we wanted to do to radical historians and academically-educated social activists. For them, “people’s history” done with and for those whom it was about was understood as a potential contribution to movements for social change. We had learned how to present it in the unique combination of academic and populist modalities that marked the NEH of the 709. But neither of these raps corresponded to either the language or the frame of reference of anyone we would be dealing with in the Valley-indeed, they would be almost universally alien and alienating.
We spent many hours discussing how to present what we were doing, and eventually came up with a press release, a brochure explaining the project and soliciting participation, and a pretty good idea of what we should say when we spoke to meetings. Although I am sure the brochure was excellent, it strikes me that I no longer recall what it said. We distributed it quite widely and gave copies to everyone we dealt with in the early stages of the project, but I can remember only one person who actually responded to it directly. Talks and phone calls rather than flyers or even letters gave us most of our contacts.
After a few score efforts to explain the project to various people, I concluded that, whatever we said, people would evaluate our behavior on the basis of their own knowledge and experience. They would decide who we were and what we were doing on the basis of that, more than on the basis of what we said about ourselves.
More important, I came to the conclusion that It was all right for people to form an understanding of the project that differed from ours. Whether their idea of what we were up to coincided with our own mattered less than whether they felt they had good reasons to cooperate with us or to avoid us. I believe, for example, that there were people who thought that what were doing was silly, or that the products we talked about were mere fantasies which would never be realized, and yet who gave time and assistance to the project. In some cases they may have done so because we were nice, idealistic young people whom they wanted to help, in others because we listened with interest and respect to reminiscences they enjoyed sharing.
Over time, I came to think of introducing the project less as explaining what we were doing than as negotiating a basis for a mutually rewarding relationship. I described the project as briefly as possible-of ten saying little more than that we were telling the story of the brass workers and their families, that we were producing a movie and a book, and that we wanted to talk to people about their experiences. If people asked questions, we answered them frankly. But we did not go into detailed explanations unless people wanted them. This actually allowed people to focus on what about us was of interest to them, without the distraction of a long explanation, much of which they had no reason to care about. As a result, the project came to be many things to many people something with which we learned to be comfortable.
The Valley was notoriously a place of social factionalism. Some of the past lines of cleavage we knew. The local labor movement had been the locus of severe left/right battles in the 1930s and 1910s, which at times had brought people who worked side by side it) fisticuffs. Local politics were notorious for ethnic rivalry, and racial tensions had been high in several of the communities.
Other tensions we were unaware of and only discovered over. For example there was considerable rivalry among the various union locals, and divisions within the district between pro-and anti-administration forces. One of the locals itself was polarized into two factions, one of which had held a sit-in at the union office a few years before. All in all, we felt like we were entering a mine field.
It is easy in a situation like this to become socialized into and identified with one or another group. We tried to avoid this by taking the position that “we’re here to learn, not to take sides.” We tried to be sympathetic to different positions, even to those with which we personally disagreed, on the grounds that people had reasons for their feelings and beliefs which it was our responsibility to understand, regardless of our own opinions.
Initially we had intended to organize reunions and group interviews. We were worried, naturally, that these might lead to sterile confrontations in which the old battles would simply be relived and rehashed-and which might embroil us in conflicts that would undermine our future community relations. Ultimately we decided that we would meet with people only individually or in their own groups. (We also avoided telling people what others had been saying to us.) At the time this seemed rather the coward’s way out, but in retrospect I think it is really a form of respect for community divisions: if people had chosen to be antagonistic, it was not really appropriate for us to try to force them to change.
Of course in a broader sense it was part of our job to help people see their immediate experience in a larger context, and thereby to see what they had in common with people they might otherwise consider antagonists. But reconciliation could only be a result of our work, not a premise. A particularly dramatic example was the case of two men who worked closely with us who had been rank-and-file leaders on opposite sides of the left/right union struggle in the 1940s. After working with each of them separately for nearly two years, we finally decided we would risk inviting them both to a party along with several dozen other participants in the project. They initially greeted each other with wariness, but after the hours had passed and the liquor had flowed, we found them together in a back room, helping each other explain to a circle of younger activists why people like them had never sold out. As each of them spoke, he tapped the other on the knee and said, “As Mike will tell you” or “As Bill will tell you.”
We had a number of reasons to be afraid of red-baiting. The local newspaper had a reputation for being outspokenly right-wing, and for being entirely willing to attack local manifestations of radicalism it did not care for-including such wild-eyed radicals as the Ground Zero campaign. One of the brass companies had a right-wing spokesman and a record of previous run-ins with local radicals who had tried to dig into Its history. Our “ridiculous” project would make a perfect target for any local politician who wanted to get a headline exposing waste in government and subsidy to subversives all at the same time. Once any charges were made the project would be in deep trouble, and fine distinctions about democratic radicalism, or even the fact that I had been personally attacked in the Daily World as “rabidly anti-Soviet,” would hardly repair the damage.
Perhaps we were paranoid to worry about such matters, but we. certainly tried to exercise basic caution. No Mao posters went tip in the office. We did not discuss the relative merits of Marxism arid anarchism in the local restaurants. We made it clear that we were sympathetic, though not uncritical, toward the labor movement. )an and Jerry remained active In anti‑racist and other community activities in their town, but only in cooperation with other local people. Except for a major feature article on the project in the local paper, we kept a pretty -low profile.
To some extent we were protected by the auspices under which we functioned. We were, after all, sponsored by a government agency; we might have been more vulnerable had we been directly identified with “the left.” We had the blessings of the UAW establishment, and maintained good relations with all sections of the state labor movement. We worked closely with people who had been active in the anti-communist section of the local labor movement, as well as with some who had been on the other side.
I think that what protected us most, however, was that scores of people met us, talked to us, and could see with their own eyes who we were and what we were doing. That we had made the’ rounds of community organizations and institutions meant that we were not some mysterious invading force, but people whose actions and character had been observed. I suspect that grapevine information on us spread pretty far, especially in labor circles, if only for its novelty value. This meant that if anybody were suspicious of us, they had ways to check us out other than asking the local paper to calling the FBI.
After we had made our initial round of courtesy visits, we were Somewhat awed by the problem of how to proceed with the community participation aspect of our work. We had found plenty of people who expressed some degree of interest in the project, but nobody who was ready either to start working with us on a regular basis to organize a history committee in their own organization.
We decided to try to push ahead with interviewing, because it would allow us to get started on the products of the project, it might get some people interested enough to participate further with us, and in any case it would get us out of the office and into contact with the people with whom we were supposed to be dealing. It was a lucky decision, and I would advise any community history project that feels “stuck” simply to go out and spend some time doing interviews.
Finding people to interview turned out not to be a problem. We asked everyone we met to suggest people to interview, and virtually all of them came up with suggestions. We often started by interviewing our initial contact people at unions or senior centers then asking them to arrange interviews with other members, relatives or friends. In effect, we utilized the networks we had or were establishing.
For most people, the fact that we came to them through a friend, relative or acquaintance probably made a big difference in our acceptability. Many people, of course, said that they did not really know anything and there was no reason to interview them. We tried to emphasize our belief that they personally did know things that were important to us: that they may not have been that involved with the union, but that we were extremely interested in what they could tell us about the rolling department of the brass works or growing up in the North End. I would estimate that in the end more than three-quarters of those we approached for interviews ultimately agreed. Those who would not talk with us- no doubt had a variety of reasons for the decision; two we surmise on the basis of grapevine information were suspicious that the project was more racket than something legitimate, and fear of exposure on the part of oft-burned immigrant radicals.
We found setting up the interviews a tedious process. I have a personal aversion to calling strangers on the phone, which made this a high-stress activity for me. People were hard to reach on the phone, which made this a high-stress activity for me. People were hard to reach on the phone. Many people would put you off and require repeated calls- perhaps this was in part a way of testing the seriousness of our interest. Without a reminder call the day before, few people remembered our appointments at all. And even with them we had to tolerate a fair number of no-shows. Ultimately we had to accept that we were very low on people’s list of priorities. It is hard to see why we should have been otherwise.
After our first twenty or thirty interviews, we began to see the limits of our starting approach. We were very strong in those areas where we had initial contacts, such as among unionized workers and the Lithuanian community. And we were strong with people who tended to be more like ourselves: I had far more interviews with men and than with women, for example.
To compensate for this, we began to put extra effort into getting a broader cross-section of the Valley’s working class. This required more work with less reward, since we did not have the pre-established networks we had in other areas. And it was more anxiety-provoking, since it meant dealing with people with whom we had less in common. But we discovered that with persistence we could find the people we needed. We defined the categories of people in which we were weak, and then asked anyone we could if they had people to suggest. A visit to the priest of the Catholic parish that served the Puerto Rican community brought us an introduction to the first Puerto Rican to work in the Waterbury brass mills. A plea to a union organizer brought us to a black woman union activist whose mother had been one of the first black women to work at the Scovill Manufacturing Company.
At the outset of the project, we had been told the anthropologist’s adage, “Behind we very great ethnographer lies a great informant.” Looking for that “great informant” was far from my original idea of how to do community history. But over time I learned that there are indeed “natural historians” who have an interest in and talent for the history around them, just as there are people who are good at making cars run or flowers grow. Finding them is largely a matter of chance- two of the best were uncles of people who wandered into our office in response to a newspaper article on the project. “The only generalization I can make is that they tend to be over-represented on past and present union education committees.” But over the course of the project we found quiet a few, and they were not only exciting to talk with but gave our book and film a depth of insight that the staff could never have achieved without them.
The staff had all done some interviewing before, but never open-ended historical interviews with people who were not used to any public role. We had to discover the art of this kind of interviewing as we went along. For me, respect is the alpha and omega of good interviewing technique. You have to regard your source as someone who is at least your equal, from who m you have a great deal to learn. Many academic interviewers may think their subjects’ reticence results from inarticulateness or generalized suspicion, but people are very sensitive to condescension and contempt. If those who study working-class communities in fact feel themselves superior to those they study, their subjects will be well aware of it.
When people agree to be interviewed, they are putting part of the meaning of their life in your hands. They should only be asked to do so if you are willing to respect it, and to guarantee that you will not trash it, either in your personal interaction with them or in the way you use what they give you. They need to know that they will not be forced into areas they find embarrassing or uncomfortable; that you will be sensitive enough to back away from such areas before they have to say, “I’d rather not talk about that.”
We regarded the people we were interviewing as experts on the part of the worked they inhabited. We were genuinely interested in what they had to tell us. This helped us overcome many people’s feeling that “I don’t really have much that you would be interested in” or “I don’t remember too much about the old days.” In fact, I came to the conclusion that feelings of inadequacy were often more important in inhibiting people’s participation in interviews than anxiety about what might be revealed.
In the end we had little difficulty getting people to talk freely. (No doubt people withheld some things-but in many cases they probably had good reasons for doing so.) I think the main reason is that we tried to be worthy of people’s trust.
We did do a few group discussions and interviews, and the staff learned a good deal From the back-and-forth responses. But they turned out to be rather difficult to manage; everyone wanted to talk at once, and wanted others to listen to them. Even with several staff members, each trying to respond to some of the participants the results tended to be rather unsatisfying for all. Where elderly participants were hard of hearing the situation was aggravated. And the tapes of such sessions proved extremely difficult to transcribe. Meetings with groups can Still be valuable for a community history project, but we suggest that they be viewed primarily as a community activity, rather than as a form of group interview.
The worker/community participation aspect of our project was frankly experimental. It included a series of ambitious proposals for community meetings, history committees, and the like. We had decided not to solicit participation ahead of time because we could not guarantee the funding that would allow the project to go forward. We had no assurance that even a single person would be interested in working with the project in any way. The task was difficult in itself, and was almost bound to engender insecurity, tension and self-doubt in the staff as we sat isolated in our office and tried to do Something nobody really knew how to do.
One of the the first things we learned was to make initial requests for participation limited. Asking someone who had never thought about it to organize a history committee in their union local was totally inappropriate. On the other hand, asking them to be interviewed, to set up an interview with an acquaintance or family member, or to go through the box of old family photos with you, was a reasonable approach to which you were likely to get a positive response.
We initially defined the project as a way we could help people in the community tell their own history. Thus, we offered to help people do things: collect the history of their own organization, set up a history committee, or learn how to operate video equipment. We rapidly learned that most people defined participation very differently: as them helping us. I believe now that our initial approach was rather arrogant, and that theirs represented a more realistic picture of the situation. Ideally, people in the community might have decided that this was their project and we were there merely to help, but that was never likely to occur, given the way the project had in fact originated. Short of that, the fact that people defined their participation as “helping us” allowed them rather than us to feel the “pride of the giver.” Perhaps this helped keep our expertise, education and sanction from the outside society from being intimidating.
We learned very rapidly that we would not receive instant mass interest and participation in the project. People were glad to let us talk briefly to their organizations’ meetings, for example, but nobody offered to set up a history committee. We rapidly shifted from the idea of committees to the concept of a liaison person who would connect us to various groups.
The strategy for participation that we eventually evolved was to build an informal support network around the project. We made a point of calling people we had met and asking for their opinions or help. Occasionally we would ask someone to go on an interview with us, make a contact, or otherwise take one home. Stackhouse had a particular knack for this kind of relating, which proved an important strength for the project, but everyone on the staff did a large amount of such work, drawing on their individual skills and proclivities. This process was time consuming, but its cumulative effect was substantial.
As we went along, we discovered more and more people who became interested in working with the project. A local black poet read about us in the newspaper and walked into our office one day-eventually to become a paid part-time participant member. A woman union activist who initially had set up an interview for us, ended up running an “old photo contest,” publicized the project up and down the Valley, and did interviews for the project on her own. Another volunteer made excellent maps for the book showing ethnic succession in the area.
People participated-from giving an interview to organizing for the project-for a variety of reasons. Some, particularly those who had been active in unions and ethnic organizations, felt that they had been part of something that was historically significant, something worth preserving. Some already had special interests, such as a particular neighborhood or ethnic group, and felt they could learn more about it by working with us. A few, particularly the labor and community activists, had social messages which they felt we could help pass on to coming generations. Some were history bluffs who enjoyed this kind of activity for its own sake. Some people were proud of their lives and of what they could remember, or simply enjoyed reminiscing about old times.
Participation grew steadily with time. Over the course of several years we met dozens of people who were interested in working with the project. By now, I believe we could even succeed with some of our more ambitious schemes, such as history committees and reunions. But there was no way we could have generated substantial participation at the outset.
Ultimately, we had over two hundred people involved with the project in one way or another. They contributed their stories, helped line up interviews, donated photos, set up photo sessions, and helped in many other ways. As we completed rough versions of the book and documentary, dozens of people reviewed them and gave us their comments. Twenty-five people served on the project’s Community/Labor Advisory Panel. This participation certainly made It the results far different than they would have been with historians and media professionals turning out products on their own. But the forms of participation were very different from what we had initially envisioned. Instead of formal “history committees” regularly in our office, participation took the form of a myriad of fluid, informal contacts with people who helped the project in numberless specific ways.
Perhaps the greatest lesson we have to pass on to future projects is that participation takes time-plan your project with plenty of it. Our community participation might have developed far better if we had had a staff person on for a year doing interviews and making community contacts before we put on a full staff sprinting to finish elaborate products within grant deadlines. A project with one person working half time for six years might succeed far better than one with three people working full time for a year. For with persistence, labor/community participation in doing history can really work.