Today’s interview is with Deborah Beckel: Independent scholar living in Wilkes County, NC.
Tell us about your essay, “Southern Labor and the Lure of Populism: Workers and Power in North Carolina.”
Using letters written by local Knights of Labor (KOL) leaders in North Carolina, Deborah Beckel reassesses this late 19th-century labor union as being more resilient, complex, and connected than historians previously thought. With a fresh perspective, Beckel illuminates the class, race, and gender dynamics in the cross-class, biracial, mixed gender organization. Determined to improve abysmal economic, political, and social conditions, the state KOL in the 1890s facilitated cooperation between the farmer-labor movements and participated in Republican-Populist resistance to Democratic Party policies. Unlike the rest of the South, North Carolina Republicans and Populists won two stunning electoral victories and passed reforms that benefited non-elite citizens, but exploitative labor laws persisted as Democrats seized power through terrorism and racist politics in 1898.
What sparked your interest in labor history?
When I read The Making of the English Working Class in graduate school, I found E.P. Thompson’s framing of class as “a relationship,” not “a thing” to be compelling. I sought to apply his idea in exploring the fluid relationships of North Carolina activists and reformers in ways that reflected race, class, and gender interactions as they changed over time.
Why do you think that the study of labor history is important today?
In my work as a public service librarian in an economically disadvantaged North Carolina county, I listen to people talk about work. They often tell of back-breaking labor that is fast-paced, routinized, sometimes sickening, and not infrequently dangerous. Wages are low and benefits are nonexistent or inadequate. Housing, food, transportation, and medical costs are expensive. Unequal pay for equal work is not unusual. Unexpected illnesses and accidents can decimate a family’s economic footing, and workers’ compensation difficult to obtain. Most people live near poverty or a paycheck away from poverty. The 19th-century Knights of Labor would be outraged about the extremes of wealth and poverty, corporate power, and the plight of workers in the United States today. They would ask: Why don’t you organize?