John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1845 “Songs of Labor” were seen as the first “high culture” celebration of working class life, prefiguring Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” by a decade. Whittier’s portrayal of “mechanic” life and culture, long seen as a simple paean to the importance of labor in a republican nation, can also be read as a celebration of the whiteness of the working class. In fact, Whittier, a rare poet who was an active politician, drew ideas from radical Jacksonian Democrats that infused his work with racialized definitions of labor. Even some contemporaries perceived and implicitly noted the whiteness of “Songs of Labor.”
This paper uses textual analysis of the six poems that constitute “Songs of Labor” to show the connections between Whittier’s poetry and Jacksonian conceptions of a white working class and particular labor ideologies current in the 1830s and 1840s. It also draws upon Whittier’s correspondence to show his interest and personal connections to some of labor radicals, such as Orestes Brownson, who supplied some of his ideas. Finally, it surveys contemporary reviews of “Songs of Labor” to reveal that the racially marked ideas of class Whittier employed were read as such in his own time.
About the presenterTimothy Messer-Kruse
Timothy Messer-Kruse received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1995 he joined the History department at the University of Toledo where he served as chair from 2003 to 2005 and was recognized with the university’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2003. In 2006 he was appointed chair of the Ethnic Studies department at Bowling Green State University. In 2013 BGSU awarded him the Olscamp Research Award for outstanding scholarly achievements. Messer-Kruse is the author of six books. While his area of specialization is in the field of U.S. Labor History, he has published on a diverse array of subjects including race relations, Gilded Age labor culture and radical social movements, the Chinese exclusion movement, the impact of changing technology on child labor, the campus culture of the Ku Klux Klan, the invention of corporate lobbying, class conflict in early auto racing, and the intersections of art and industrial design at the dawn of the twentieth century. His first book, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876. (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) unearthed previously unknown connections between the abolitionist, women’s rights, and socialist movements in America. His detailed study of the largest Depression-era bank failure, Banksters, Bosses and Smart Money: A Social History of the Great Toledo Bank Crash of 1931 (Ohio State University Press, 2005), appeared several years before history repeated itself in 2008. His study of race and culture in the 1980s, Race Relations in the United States, 1980-2000 (Greenwood Press, June 2008), was the final volume in a five-volume series of American ethnic history. His most renowned work uncovers new evidence and boldly revises long-held interpretations of the famed Haymarket Bombing in Chicago in 1886 and the anarchist movement behind it. Out of this research he has written two books, The Haymarket Trial: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks (University of Illinois Press, 2012). The Haymarket Trial was named the “Best Labor History Book of 2012” by the journal Labor History and awarded its annual book prize. Messer-Kruse’s most recent book Tycoons, Scorchers, and Outlaws: The Class War that Shaped American Auto Racing (Pivot Press, 2014) explores the cultural and class origins of American automobile racing.