Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of
the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as
stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers
toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and
robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations,
cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant
subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses
diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a
range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the
working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class
learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a
shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape,
this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive
politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new
unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind
reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while
mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and
digitally enabled self-study.
