Herbert Gutman
Encyclopedia
Herbert Gutman was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York
, where he wrote on slavery
and labor history.
. 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."
Gutman was awarded a doctorate
in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison
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 Merrill Jensen
, Merle Curti
and Selig Perlman
, who had turned the University of Wisconsin–Madison into the cradle of modern American labor studies.
He later married Judith Mara, and they had two daughters.
from 1956 to 1963. 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.
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." 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 the University of Rochester 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 City College 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, at his home in Nyack, New York
. He died five weeks later at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on July 21, 1985.
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. 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.
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."
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'…".
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).
, 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 most of those enslaved 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."
(although he remained open to arguments about black family collapse in the 1930s and 1940s).
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. Oddly, this came just as Gutman had argued a year earlier for the relative harshness of slavery in Slavery and the Numbers Game.
.
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.
CUNY Graduate Center
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York brings together graduate education, advanced research, and public programming to midtown Manhattan hosting 4,600 students, 33 doctoral programs, 7 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes...
of the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
, where he wrote on slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
and labor history.
Early life and education
Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. His parents' leftism was deeply influential. He attended John Adams High School and graduated with a bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
from Queens College
Queens College, City University of New York
Queens College, located in Flushing, Queens, New York City, is one of the senior colleges of the City University of New York. It is also the fifth oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning. The college's seventy seven acre campus is located in the heart of the...
in 1948. During his teens and his college years, Gutman became involved in numerous left-wing causes, flirted with communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, and worked for the Wallace presidential campaign
Henry Wallace
Henry or Harry Wallace may refer to:*Henry A. Wallace , U.S. Vice President 1941-1945, presidential candidate for the Progressive Party 1948**Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center...
.
He received a master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in history from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. His thesis studied the Panic of 1873
Panic of 1873
The Panic of 1873 triggered a severe international economic depression in both Europe and the United States that lasted until 1879, and even longer in some countries. The depression was known as the Great Depression until the 1930s, but is now known as the Long Depression...
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
Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, a historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University...
. Gutman later dismissed it as "boring conventional labor history."
Gutman was awarded a doctorate
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
in 1959. His doctoral dissertation was on American labor during the Panic of 1873 and supervised by Howard K. Beale
Howard K. Beale
Howard Kennedy Beale was an American historian. He specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, particularly the Reconstruction Era. He also wrote biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Edward Bates, and Charles A. Beard. Beale was born in Chicago to Frank A. and Nellie Kennedy...
. During this time, Gutman worked with the eminent labor scholars Merrill Jensen
Merrill Jensen
Merrill Monroe Jensen was an American historian whose research and writing focused on the ratification of the United States Constitution. His historical interpretations are generally considered to be of the "Progressive School" of American history, the most famous exponent of which was Charles A....
, Merle Curti
Merle Curti
Merle Curti was a leading American historian. He taught a large number of PhD students at the University of Wisconsin, and was a leader in developing the fields of social history and intellectual history. As a "Progressive" historian he was deeply committed to democracy, and to the Turnerian...
and Selig Perlman
Selig Perlman
Selig Perlman was an economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.-Early life and education:Perlman was born in Białystok in Congress Poland in 1888...
, who had turned the University of Wisconsin–Madison into the cradle of modern American labor studies.
He later married Judith Mara, and they had two daughters.
Career
Gutman taught at Fairleigh Dickinson UniversityFairleigh Dickinson University
Fairleigh Dickinson University is a private university founded as a junior college in 1942. It now has several campuses located in New Jersey, Canada, and the United Kingdom.-Description:...
from 1956 to 1963. Immersing himself in the "new labor history
New labor history
New labor history is a branch of labor history which focuses on the experiences of workers, women, and minorities in the study of history. It is heavily influenced by social 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.
Gutman then took a position teaching history at the State University of New York at Buffalo
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, also commonly known as the University at Buffalo or UB, is a public research university and a "University Center" in the State University of New York system. The university was founded by Millard Fillmore in 1846. UB has multiple campuses...
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." 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
New labor history
New labor history is a branch of labor history which focuses on the experiences of workers, women, and minorities in the study of history. It is heavily influenced by social history....
" movement, it also cemented his already-considerable reputation.
Gutman left SUNY-Buffalo in 1966 to take a job at the University of Rochester
University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is a private, nonsectarian, research university in Rochester, New York, United States. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The university has six schools and various interdisciplinary programs.The...
. 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 the University of Rochester 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 City College in 1975 to teach full-time in the graduate program.
In 1977, Gutman received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
(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
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....
, 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
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
and was teaching classes at four historically black colleges for the United Negro College Fund
United Negro College Fund
The United Negro College Fund is an American philanthropic organization that fundraises college tuition money for black students and general scholarship funds for 39 private historically black colleges and universities. The UNCF was incorporated on April 25, 1944 by Frederick D. Patterson , Mary...
.
Gutman suffered a severe heart attack in late June, 1985, at his home in Nyack, New York
Nyack, New York
Nyack is a village in the towns of Orangetown and Clarkstown in Rockland County, New York, United States, located north of South Nyack; east of Central Nyack; south of Upper Nyack and west of the Hudson River, approximately 19 miles north of the Manhattan boundary, it is an inner suburb of New...
. He died five weeks later at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on July 21, 1985.
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. He developed a critique of the "Commons
John R. Commons
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.-Biography:Born in Hollansburg, Ohio, John R. Commons had a religious upbringing which led him to be an advocate for social justice early in life...
school" of labor history which focused on markets and minimize other factors such as technological or cultural changes and working people themselves.
Gutman has also been criticized for his quasi-Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
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."
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'…".
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).
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 SlaveryTime on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery is a book authored by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman-Content:Time on the Cross directly challenged the long-held conclusions that American slavery was unprofitable, a moribund institution, inefficient, and extremely harsh for...
, 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
Cliometrics
Cliometrics, sometimes called new economic history, or econometric history, is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history . It is a quantitative approach to economic history...
, 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 most of those enslaved had assimilated the Protestant work ethic
Protestant work ethic
The Protestant work ethic is a concept in sociology, economics and history, attributable to the work of Max Weber...
. 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."
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 WarAmerican Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
(although he remained open to arguments about black family collapse in the 1930s and 1940s).
Gutman's work was widely praised. It not only constituted an excellent example of social history
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
for its focus on individuals but it challenged long-held conventional ideas about the slavery's effects on black families. Oddly, this came just as Gutman had argued a year earlier for the relative harshness of slavery in Slavery and the Numbers Game.
Memberships and awards
Gutman was a member of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
.
Along with David Brody
David Brody
David Brody is a professor emeritus of history at the University of California-Davis.-Life and education:Brody was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Barnet and Ida Brody, who were immigrants to the United States. Working his way through Harvard University, he received his bachelor's degree in...
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.
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
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
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).
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
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