The Making of... [link to preprint]
When I finished rewriting my doctoral dissertation for publication in 1981, I had to think of something else to do in order to advance, or at least sustain, my career as a research-active academic historian. Mrs. Thatcher was Prime Minister, public finances were tight, and British universities were coming under pressure to account for what they and their staff did with the large sums of public money that were then doled out to them with remarkably few strings attached. Universities were perceived to be full of "dead wood" (or dead heads), losers who had been hired in the Great Expansion of the 1960s and 1970s, and who spent their time drinking, engaging in left-wing politics, and seducing their students. The dead wood had to be forced out of academe, or shocked into useful action. And thus began the sequence of external audits, research assessment exercises (now the "excellence framework"), etc., that we have all grown to love. In that environment, any young academic with a modicum of ambition needed to have a convincing or at least plausible answer to the increasingly insistent questions from superiors about his "research strategy." You couldn't afford to be without one, and it had to produce evidence in the form of grant applications and publications, in return for which job security and even promotion beckoned.
The obvious thing for me to do in finding an answer to the "what next?" question was to follow the line of least resistance -- to build on the fact that almost a decade's research into the history of US industrial relations in the 1930s and 1940s had equipped me with knowledge and questions about earlier periods. I was able to translate these into a plausible application for a Senior Fulbright Award, which took me to Princeton and its wonderful Firestone Library for the latter half of 1982. When I got there, I certainly did plenty of reading, though (as usual) without any very clear plan; but I was easily diverted from my path (an enquiry into employer policy and behaviour during the first and second great Open Shop campaigns, either side of the Great War, whose impact on the industrial relations system I would also explore) by David Brody's suggestion that I should pop down to Philadelphia and look at the records of the Metal Manufacturers' Association, which had recently come into the public domain.
For a few years from then on, I really couldn't decide whether to keep going with the broad, national-level work (which would probably have produced something with elements of my friends Sandy Jacoby's Employing Bureaucracy [1985] and Joe McCartin's Labor's Great War [1997], and also Jeffrey Haydu's Between Craft and Class [1988] and Making American Industry Safe for Democracy [1997], so it is just as well that I did not persist with something that would have become quite unoriginal) or to zero in on Philadelphia. I could raise grant money for the "official" project (from the Rockefeller Archives Center, for work on the "Rockefeller network" in industrial relations so well described in the late Howard Gitelman's Legacy of the Ludlow Massacre [1988] and Bruce Kaufman's Origins and Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States [1993]; and from the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian, for a very enjoyable six-month fellowship in 1986), but I really couldn't see where it was going, so eventually I laid it to one side, having taken grant money more than once for one purpose and spent most of my time on and in Philadelphia instead.
One aspect of my "official project," 1982-1986, had always been its comparative approach -- I was going to look at U.S. developments in a transatlantic perspective, because it seemed obvious that this was the way that Americans had interpreted them at the time. Much of my research was in ideas about industrial relations, and here, for example, it was unmistakable that the British Whitley Committee had a considerable impact on thinking, and to some extent practice, in the U.S. in the late 'teens and early twenties. I did quite a lot of talking about this with Dan Rodgers while I was at Princeton and he was starting work on what would eventually turn into his masterpiece, Atlantic Crossings [1998]. So I began to build up loads of notes about British views of American industrial relations, and vice versa, with the thought that eventually I could turn them into something. In the short run, all I turned them into was a couple of seminar and conference papers in Britain, and a well-received talk while I was at the Wilson Center, but nothing more. However, even after I laid them to one side, into the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, I did not forget about them, and whenever I came across another nugget in my reading, I tried to make a point of noting it and adding it to the pile. (I was not the only scholar who could see these connections -- Larry Gerber, in a series of articles culminating in The Irony of State Intervention: American Industrial Relations Policy in Comparative Perspective[N. Illinois U.P., 2005], dealt with much that I would and should have, had I persisted with Plan A.)
The only direct outcome of the years of work on the "official project" was a conference Nelson Lichtenstein and I organized back at the Wilson Center in the spring of 1988, the paper I wrote for it ("Industrial Democracy and Liberal Capitalism, ca. 1880-1920") and the edited volume in which that eventually appeared, five years later. It informed the whole of Bloodless Victories, but usually not in ways that were obvious. The clearest evidence of my interest in the transatlantic trade in ideas about the organization of industrial society was a paper I wrote for a European conference of American historians in 1998, "War in the Social Order: The Great War and the Liberalization of American Quakerism," where I was able to bring my Philadelphia employers and the Anglo-American dialogue about the future of class relations together in one small place.
Then, in the run-up to the 2008 national Research Assessment Exercise, I found myself in a not unusual (for me) but even so very uncomfortable place. After finishing Bloodless Victories I had once again entered the "what the hell next?" doldrums that have recurred throughout my career, so it looked as if I would not have enough good pieces of published work to enter (I had made the great mistake of publishing two big pieces, Bloodless Victories and "The Rocky Road to Mass Production," at the end of the previous assessment period, so I could not use them again). There were only two choices: (1) take early retirement and walk out under a cloud of shame; or (2) dig something up, finish it off, and publish it fast. No choice, really. So I dug out my old conference and seminar scripts from the 1980s about the Anglo-American stuff, delved into the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet for research notes, got some advice and encouragement from Dan Rodgers, who was a visiting professor in Cambridge at absolutely the right time for me, and started a desperate rewrite job. Then I pulled in a favor from Craig Phelan, recently appointed editor of Labor History, with my support and under unusual circumstances, after almost the entire editorial board had defected and set up a rival journal, Labor, in I think 2004. Labor History remained short of good content, so it was not difficult to persuade Craig and his co-editor Gerald Friedman to accept my article, to give me enough space to develop my ideas, and to publish it in plenty of time for it to count in the last RAE. Not only that, they and the board were even kind enough to award it their Best Article prize for the year.
It is actually pretty good, it did what I wanted it to, it used up a lot of the reading I did in the early 1980s (at last!) and it incorporated the best of the nuggets I came across in all the years afterwards (notably about Abram Hewitt, first encountered while reading the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in the 1990s on the trail of articles about the history of metallurgy). I don't really see myself ever writing anything else about this, and I don't think I need to.
And the significance of all this to my stove industry work? It made me appreciate all the more the importance of the stove trade's experiment in national collective bargaining through the 1890s in shaping discussions about British-style labor relations, the "road not taken" as a result of American metal trades employers' decision to pursue non-union alternatives in the early 1900s.
Extras: t.b.a.