From the beginning, the relationship between democracy and capitalism in the United States has been uneasy. Volatile race relations, labor disputes, and religious traditions have all left their mark on the evolving political and economic landscape. It’s a messy, complicated history, and one that Nick Salvatore, Labor Relations, Law and History, has spent decades studying. He has written a series of biographies, using the lives of his subjects as the lenses through which to examine these recurring issues.
“I am trained as an historian,” explains Salvatore, “but I’ve actually been a biographer in my first three major books. I’ve been drawn to the people I wrote about, to be sure, but I’ve also been intrigued by the larger social issues each of those individuals were engaged with.”
How Technology Transforms the Nature of Work
Each of Salvatore’s biographies have taken seven to eight years to complete—essentially one a decade. His first book, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, 1982), took a new look at the American socialist leader at the turn of the twentieth century. Salvatore gave historical context to Debs’ actions in light of the great upheaval in the American workplace, happening around him. “Debs really grappled with questions of the relationship between capitalism and our democratic ethos,” Salvatore says. “He looked at the inequality that was evident in his time and asked, ‘how can we allow this?’”
Debs was born as a long artisan tradition of production declined, says Salvatore. In Debs’ lifetime, America experienced an industrial revolution and the rise of a corporate economy emphasizing new technology that transformed the nature of work, making the skill sets of many working people obsolete. “Debs was trying to make sense of the America he came from and this new industrial world,” says Salvatore. “I looked at his life, but I also stayed focused on the complexity of that social and workplace transformation and the various ways different people responded to it.”
From the Shop Floor—Work and Race Relations
In keeping with his interest in the African American experience, Salvatore’s next book, We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (Crown, 1996), continued to explore the role of the workplace and the changing political situation but added the lens of race. Webber was an African American Civil War veteran and leader in the black communities of Philadelphia and Worcester, Massachusetts. Unlike Debs, he was not famous. He was completely unknown to modern audiences. Salvatore stumbled across him while researching the history of work relations on the shop floor in the mid-1800s. By chance, he found a series of nine ledger books full of Webber’s observations on his life and times. “In those ledgers he talked at great length about race in America as he experienced it, or as he read about it in newspapers,” Salvatore says. “It was an incredible story.”
“I knew I was too close to the ’60s to write about them, but with Debs I was able to look more carefully at the history of the dissenting tradition in America.”
Writing Webber’s story was also special to Salvatore because it allowed him to fulfill a major aim of historians. “We always talk about writing about the experiences of the unknown person, the common person,” says Salvatore. “I was deeply pleased to be able to do that with Amos Webber.”
Race, Religion, and Class in Industrial Detroit
Salvatore followed the book on Webber with another biography exploring the African American experience, Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (Little, Brown and Company, 2005), which looked at the life of the noted minister and civil rights activist, who was a close friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. Studying C. L. Franklin’s life gave Salvatore the chance to focus on race, religion, and class in the twentieth century and to frame those themes against the industrial backdrop of Detroit.
Franklin was legendary for his moving sermons, and he was also deeply involved in African American politics. “He pushed on issues of police brutality, integration of schools, and integration of the workplace,” Salvatore says. “Many of the leaders of the Black Caucus in the United Auto Workers [UAW] were members of his church, and they proudly wore their UAW badges along with their church badges every Sunday.”
Capitalism and the Changing Definitions of Democracy—a Lens on New York City
Salvatore is currently working on a new book. “I’m moving back to the period between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and focusing on New York City,” he says. “I want to look at the interplay of capitalism as an emerging economic system and the changing definitions of democracy in America as the meaning of capitalism becomes sharper and clearer.”
This book will also look at race. “It comes up over and over,” Salvatore says. “Race and the enormous growth in the number of immigrants in New York at that time are important dimensions. And there’s the larger sense that this is taking place in an international economy; New York City is the center of financing and trans-shipping for the American cotton industry. You can’t frame the question of slavery, which is central to this era, unless you put slavery in a global economy, which is exactly what was happening.”
Experiencing Dissenting Traditions in America
Salvatore initially chose to study the past because he wanted to make sense of his own experiences in the 1960s as a member of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements. As a graduate student, he was drawn to Debs, who was a vocal dissenter against the socio-economic and political situations of his time. “I had come through the 1960s, and I had my own understanding and confusion about that experience,” Salvatore says. “I knew I was too close to the ’60s to write about them, but with Debs I was able to look more carefully at the history of the dissenting tradition in America.”
The experiences of people like Debs, Webber, and Franklin have relevancy to modern people, Salvatore suggests. “What we’re going through now in society and in the economy is not new. We’re not the first human beings to have to deal with these issues. For instance, if you look at the period in which Debs was most active, the turn of the twentieth century, you will see familiar things. Our circumstances have changed; we are in a different place, but the confusion and anger people are feeling today echo exactly the feelings of the people who got left in the lurch back in the 1890s. That is what we get from history; it can show us issues from the past and how people reacted to them. From that, we can learn something about what we ourselves would or would not do in a similar situation.”