Labor Museums

LABOR MUSEUMS Labor museums across the United States often focus on sites of conflict or organization but also highlight individual leaders. Most are small and located outside major metropolitan areas. The phenomenon of heritage tourism includes treatment of working people in an effort to boost locales hit hard by deindustrialization.

The American Labor Museum occupies the 1908 Botto House, a National Historic Landmark in Haledon, New Jersey, which borders on Paterson, the site of a 1913 strike organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The house was built for and owned by Italian immigrant silk mill worker Pietro Botto and his wife Maria. Mass meetings were prohibited during the strike. Hence, IWW organizers addressed as many as 20,000 workers striking for the eight-hour day from the balcony of the house. In 1983, the museum opened to the public with a commitment to teaching about the history and contemporary concerns of workers with special emphasis on the ethnicity of working people.

The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum is housed in a former hardware store in Matewan, West Virginia, that has bullet holes as stark testimony to the armed conflict that engulfed this region. Mine workers who sought to organize faced constant violence from mine operators and their private “gun thugs” as the workers termed them as well as the power of the state. This little town witnessed a showdown on May 19, 1920. The police chief Sid Hatfield and his deputies drew national attention when they gunned down seven agents of the Badlwin-Felts Detective Agency who had just thrown scores of workers out of their homes. In August, 1921, a three day battle, the Battle of Blair Mountain, unfolded involving thousands of combatants. An insurgent army of workers faced off against deputies, volunteers, and infantrymen. No other strike in U.S. labor history produced an armed uprising on the scale of the miners’ march in 1921 and no other strike generated a crisis that so closely resembled a civil war. The Mine Wars Museum preserves and interprets artifacts and historical records of the impacted local communities. It includes exhibits about coal camp life, the Matewan Massacre, and the Battle of Blair Mountain and houses the largest exhibited collection of Mine Wars era artifacts, oral histories, digitized film reels, maps, and historic photos.

The Eugene V. Debs Museum is the former home of the labor organizer and socialist Eugene V. Debs and Katherine Metzel Debs in Terre Haute, Indiana. A group of local residents who admired Debs and his place in history purchased the house in 1962 and converted it into a historic house museum. The Debs Foundation owns and operates the house as a free museum. The interior features many artifacts original to Debs and other relevant materials from his lifetime including books and newspapers.

In 2012, President Barack Obama designated the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument to commemorate the life and work of Chavez, interpret the struggles and achievements of the farm worker movement, and protect historic resources. Located in Keene, California, the United Farm Workers (UFW) acquired the Nuestra Senora Reina de La Paz (Our Lady Queen of Peace) or La Paz property for use as the UFW national headquarters. La Paz has remained in continuous use by the UFW since the 1970s and contains the memorial garden where Chavez is buried. The monument is managed collaboratively by the National Park Service (NPS) and the National Chavez Center. The UFW continues to use La Paz as its national headquarters. Areas currently open to visitors include a visitor center and the memorial garden.

Italian immigrants built the Socialist Labor Party Hall, also known as the“Old Labor Hall,” in 1900 in Barre, Vermont where they had immigrated to work in the granite sheds. The Hall served as a venue for agitation, education, entertainment, and even shopping. The basement featured the Union Cooperative Store as well as a bakery and laundry. In 1913 the Co-op built a separate bakery building. Labor organizations consistently used the Hall for regular and mass meetings, contract and strike votes, and fundraisers. Political activity was a regular feature of the venue involving the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Party, and the Industrial Workers of the World. The Hall played an important role in the Bread and Roses strike of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Barre workers, like those in much larger cities, hosted children of strikers for the duration of the strike. May Day, commemorating the 1886 Haymarket episode in Chicago, or Primo Maggio was the highlight of the year and combined festive and serious aspects. In 1936, the Depression forced the Hall and Co-op to go out of business. After several decades of use as a produce warehouse, the Barre Historical Society purchased the Hall in 1994 and held a grand reopening in 2000. The Labor Hall continues the traditions of serving as a center for community activities, education, and entertainment. The Barre Historical Society promotes public awareness of the Hall, the history of the granite workers, and the vision of social justice of the Hall’s builders. The Hall is a designated National Historic Landmark.

As industrial America declined due to disinvestment and moving production out of the country to low wage, non-union workplaces, there has been a movement to promote industrial/labor heritage. One example is the Massachusetts Urban Heritage State Park system established by the state legislature in 1980 after the first such park opened in 1976. The system included Gardner, Holyoke, Lynn, Fall River, and other economically hard hit communities. In part, the idea was to stimulate heritage tourism to revitalize local economies. Other states, including New York and Pennsylvania, followed the lead of Massachusetts. Most of these projects failed to meet the lofty goals of planners and many of the parks in Massachusetts have either closed or been scaled back. One park that remains, in Lawrence, addresses the Bread and Roses Strike. At the federal level, Congress established Lowell National Historical Park in 1978 to preserve and interpret the city’s role in the Industrial Revolution but also to serve as a catalyst to revitalize the city’s economy. The park has met with some success in this regard but large parts of the city do not benefit from its presence. Also, the park dilutes its treatment of working people by addressing several key themes with equal attention, including capital, innovation, and waterpower.

Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Revised and Expanded. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.

Green, James. The Devil Is Here in These Hills – West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015.

National Park Service Theme Study in American Labor History. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1994.