Gutman, Herbert G

GUTMAN, HERBERT G (1928–1985). US labor and social historian and teacher, Herbert Gutman was born in Queens, New York, to Joseph Gutman and Asne Zaentz Gutman, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Raised in a radical and Yiddish-speaking working-class environment, Gutman was influenced by his parents’ enthusiasm for socialism and communism. He attended Queens College where he earned a B.A. in 1949, received a Master’s degree from Columbia University in 1950, and a PhD in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1959. He married Judith Markowitz in 1950. As a young man Gutman briefly joined the U.S. Communist Party and served as a counselor at the party’s Camp Kinderland in upstate New York, which led to his being called before HUAC in 1955 and the FBI to open a detailed file on him and his associations.

Gutman’s graduate studies led him to believe that the traditional focus of historical inquiry on “Great White Men” had to be broadened if the nation’s true past were to be fully understood. As his friend and long-time colleague Ira Berlin wrote of Gutman's historical approach, “his own interest was in understanding what people, particularly working people, did for themselves, not what was done to them or for them. ”Gutman set out to uncover what ordinary working people had believed and how they had behaved in their local communities, large and small. Emerging scholarship by his academic contemporaries, especially English Marxist historian E. P. Thompson and U.S. social and cultural anthropologist Sidney Mintz, influenced Gutman’s pioneering research work, which centered on the post-Civil War Gilded Age through close reading of local primary sources, especially working-class newspapers in small towns, industrial cities, and coal mining communities in the old Midwest. These sources, Gutman believed, held the key to uncovering the ways US workers responded to the dramatic transformations wrought by industrial capitalism, in the process making working people active agents fighting for social, economic, and political change. Perhaps his most influential scholarly article was his long 1973 essay, “Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919,” in which Gutman argued for a new conceptualization of the long nineteenth-century arc of US historical development.

Gutman taught these new historical methodologies and conceptual approaches between 1956 and 1971 at Fairleigh Dickinson Univesity, the University of Buffalo (SUNY), and the University of Rochester. He moved in 1972 to the City College of New York (CUNY), and finally, in 1979 to the CUNY Graduate Center, where he was appointed a distinguished professor. Gutman’s focus on working-class agency inspired a large cadre of graduate students and young academic admirers, drawn from the ranks of New Left political activists across the country. These New Left historians--including Eric Foner, Roy Rosenzweig, Leon Fink, Nelson Lichtenstein, Susan Levine, Bruce Levine, Eric Perkins, Joshua Freeman, Joshua Brown, and Stephen Brier--reshaped and extended labor and social history scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. Their scholarly and public history work, along with that of other students trained by fellow labor historians David Montgomery, David Brody, and Alice Kessler Harris, helped to fundamentally transform the larger historical profession in the United States in these years.

Gutman refused, however, to remain narrowly defined by labor history. His commitment to revealing what was unknown in America’s past and the dramatic impact of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s led Gutman to turn his attention to the history and legacy of the nation’s two and half century embrace of racial slavery. His most important work in this area, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976), was Gutman's response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's controversial 1965 report "The Negro Family in America: the Case for National Action." Moynihan had argued that slavery destroyed the two-parent black family, resulting in a "tangle of pathology" in African American communities that continued to the present day. Gutman marshaled a wide range of documentary evidence to demonstrate to the contrary that enslaved African Americans went to great lengths and with measured success to create and sustain family bonds and build religious and educational institutions under the dire threat of racist violence, heroic efforts that continued after emancipation and into the Reconstruction era.

In the final decade of his life, Gutman increasingly turned his attention to communicating the fruits of the new labor, social, African American, and women’s history to a broader public audience. In 1977 he launched a four-year project to teach the new labor and social history to ordinary working people via summer seminars for labor leaders, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Out of those NEH seminars came a multi-decade project, the American Social History Project (ASHP), led initially by Gutman and Stephen Brier at the CUNY Graduate Center and staffed by more than a dozen younger scholars, artists, and media producers. ASHP’s efforts, supported by federal grants and private philanthropy and which continue into the twenty-first century at CUNY, focused on creating an innovative and award-winning multimedia curriculum in U.S. history, entitled Who Built America?, that included a two-volume textbook, a 10-part documentary video series, and accompanying CD-ROMs and websites. ASHP’s multimedia materials helped reshape the ways US history was taught in high schools and colleges as well as adult and worker education programs across the country over the last three decades.

Gutman was deeply engaged with collaborative work with the ASHP and with his colleague Ira Berlin when he suffered a heart attack and died in New York City in July 1985 at the age of 57. Herbert Gutman’s research, writing and teaching profoundly shaped subsequent historical scholarship and left a legacy of engaged and innovative historical understanding that subsequent generations of scholars and activists have deepened and extended into new areas of academic inquiry.

Gutman, Herbert. Power & Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, Ira Berlin, ed., New York: Pantheon, 1987.

_________. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Random House, 1976.

_________. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. New York: Pantheon, 1976).

_________ and the American Social History Project, Who Built America?, 2 vols.(New York: Pantheon, 1989/1992).

American Social History Project website: https://ashp.cuny.edu.

Herbert George Gutman Papers, New York Public Library: https://browse.nypl.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb11343712__Sherbert gutman papers.