Charles Bergquist undertakes two ambitious tasks in this collection of five essays: to urge scholars to pursue work that “transcends the sacrosanct boundaries of the nation-state,” (p. 7) and to show general readers how a historical understanding of labor can advance political struggles for a “more democratic” (p. 1) future. By democratic he means more than “government by the people” with universal suffrage, regular elections, and civil liberties. He also includes “the ways private economic power affects the politics of family, the workplace, the community, and the nation” (p. 2). The five essays deal with the following topics: 1) the strength of democracy in the United States and its weakness in Latin America; 2) the impact of U.S. imperialism on democracy within the United States; 3) the opposition of the U.S. government to radical social reform in Latin America; 4) the contradictory nature of popular culture as seen in Disney comics; and 5) how democratic leadership can help citizens understand the social changes of the last generation. The most thought-provoking essays, in my opinion, are the first and the last.
The first essay, “The Paradox of American Development,” asks why the United States “developed into a powerful democracy while Latin American countries remain weak, unstable, and poor” (p. 9). Bergquist examines the emergence of the Atlantic economy and argues that differences in labor systems explain why segments of the Atlantic economy developed differently. The northern British colonies had been among the least prosperous areas in the Western Hemisphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dwarfed by the economic significance of the West Indies and Brazil. However, because the North depended on free labor, it developed into a relatively egalitarian and dynamic society. The Caribbean, the southern United States, and the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, in contrast, could never overcome the legacy of forced labor.
The last essay, “Envisioning a History and a Politics Democratic,” has a similarly grand sweep, and is constructed on the basis of three interrelated arguments. First, Bergquist argues that the success of workers and unions in forcing a social compromise from employers and the state in the 1930s and 1940s also allowed U.S. corporations to pursue the global strategies that, since the 1970s, have come to undermine New Deal and other social welfare programs. The essay’s second section explores a corresponding paradox: as the labor movement weakened, labor history prospered. Labor historians’ work is “surprisingly democratic in principle yet undemocratic in practice” (p. 196). Bergquist seeks to remedy this contradiction by analyzing the democratic character of three key elements of the historical method: its emphasis on historiography, its use of primary sources, and its belief in what he refers to as the interrelatedness of all aspects of social change.
The other three essays did not capture my imagination in the same way, although I agree with the arguments presented in each. Bergquist chose to explore the impact of imperialism on U.S. democracy by writing an essay on how U.S. scholars have ignored Walter LaFeber’s The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. But I doubt that the general readers Bergquist hopes to attract will have read either LaFeber or the various works that he critiques for slighting LaFeber. Bergquist’s arguments that U.S. foreign policy in Latin America has been driven mainly by a desire to protect U.S. corporate investment has already been forcefully made elsewhere. And his decision to address popular culture by counterposing his analysis of Disney with Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comics (Eng. trans., 1975) also struck me as not the most effective way to draw general readers into a discussion of contradictions in popular culture.
Thus, in the end this strikes me as a powerful but idiosyncratic book, certain to stimulate lively scholarly discussion but likely to have only mixed success with the author’s larger political objective of bridging the gap between scholarly and general audiences.
