Students and Labor in the 20th Century

• In Event: New Perspectives on the History of Being a College Student

Abstract

Student protest has been a part of American higher education since the early bread and butter riots of colonial colleges but took on new significance in the twentieth century, including during the mass uprisings of the 1930s and 1960s.  When most people think and write about the history of campus-based activism, they focus on Civil Rights, anti-war, and anti-parietal rule protests, often emphasizing the highly publicized events of the 1960s.  As the labor actions at numerous campuses across the country in the past year demonstrate, however, student activists have long been interested in other issues and continue to be so today.  At times these broader issues intersect with other student concerns and, at times, they dominate campus activism.  The objectives of this paper are to consider this longer history of college students’ interactions with organized labor and what they can tell us about changing student populations, students’ views on political and economic issues, and the diversity of student perspectives about crucial societal issues.  Especially important are considerations of how students often enacted class and identity through labor activity but, at times, crossed or bridged larger social and economic divides through it.   Also implicated are the ways in which labor viewed, used, and, at times, distrusted students in their campaigns for broader societal change.
 
This paper considers the broader trends—anti-union strikebreaking in the 1910s and 1920s giving way to student labor strikes in the 1930s, for example—before emphasizing three key examples in an effort to tell the larger story of student’s labor activism: students organizing their own campus-based unions, typified by the Student Workers’ Federation at the University of Michigan in the 1930s; student-worker alliances such as the silent vigil in support of African American workers’ unionization at Duke University in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination; and the reinvigoration of campus labor activism at the end of the 20th century.  To do so, it draws from limited secondary considerations in the higher education historiography (e.g., Cohen, 1993; Norwood, 1994), histories of student and youth organizations (e.g., Barber, 2008; Setran, 2007), mentions of students in labor literature (e.g., Kurtz, 2000; Ladd-Taylor, 1985), and primary source materials on specific campus situations.  This paper does not argue that labor issues were the primary focus of student activism in the 20th century but does claim that they were important considerations that implicated students’ political and social lives, class backgrounds, and racial identities.  As such, explicit scholarly examination of the interactions of two substantial constituent groups over the course of the 20th century is long overdue. This paper provides the first such consideration.

Author

• Timothy Reese Cain, University of Georgia - Athens