A Short Q&A with the Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power Contributors
Today’s interview is with T.R.C. (Bob) Hutton, Senior Lecturer of History and American Studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Tell us about your essay, “The Appalachian ‘Gunmen of Capitalism.’”
Historians and social scientists have, for quite some time, acknowledged the roles that surveillance and violence play in the maintenance of capitalistic labor relations. Recent exposures of the “carceral state” have highlighted this relationship, although the study of private security enterprises remains a mostly under-studied sector of it. My essay describes the career of William Baldwin, a native Southern mountaineer as a private detective in what Leon Fink has called the “long Gilded Age.” Baldwin built a career controlling, threatening, and killing laborers in the early stages of market development in Appalachia in a manner that fit the needs of recently-arrived capitalistic clients while simultaneously reflecting traditional age-old techniques of labor control in the Old and New South.
What sparked your interest in labor history?
I am an historian of Appalachia, and the study of Appalachia as a discernible region was founded by a community of scholars dedicated to studying and critiquing labor relations and inequality. An Appalachian historian’s intervention with labor history is practically inevitable.
Why do you think that the study of labor history is important today?
Economic inequality in an ostensibly democratic, culturally egalitarian political space remains the most vexing problem in American society. Furthermore, the performance of work is a common theme that crosses boundaries between the disparate sub-fields of race and gender studies.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on an institutional history of the University of Tennessee, paying close attention to the relationship between education and politics, and how the idea of a university as a Commons has developed from the early republic to the “New Gilded Age.”