Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920

by Roy Rosenzweig

In the first comprehensive study of American working-class recreation, Professor Rosenzweig takes us to the saloons, the ethnic and church picnics, the parks and playgrounds, the amusement parks, and the movie houses where industrial workers spent their leisure hours. Focusing on the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, he describes the profound changes that popular leisure underwent. Explaining what these pastimes and amusements tell us about the nature of working-class culture and class relations in this era, he demonstrates that in order fully to understand the working class experience it is necessary to explore the realm of leisure. For what workers did in the corner saloon, the neighbourhood park, the fraternal lodge hall, the amusement park, and the nickelodeon had a good deal of bearing on what happened inside the factories, the union halls, and the voting booths of America's industrial communities.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Labor, American History

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Courtney]

Saloons, fireworks, playgrounds, oh my! It's amazing that anything got done with the amount of alcohol Americans consumed during Industrialization. Though Rosenzweig explores a few different areas of leisure, each leads nicely into the other and is majorly affected by the Temperance movement. Among the working-class peoples surveyed throughout, the author focuses on Worcester's immigrant population (of course ethnicity is closely tied to class) and how they navigated leisure as the work day changed over 50 years.
I found myself laughing at some of the activities or rather how much alcohol was consumed. The fact that a crowd of 20,000 people just stood there and watched a "spectacular fire." Safety was certainly an issue with the 4th of July. No matter what subject is covered, alcohol is present. The upper and middle-class' want for social control is repeatedly thwarted by the working-class population.

Our class read this along with Dennings' piece on American Exceptionalism. An interesting perspective to read beforehand.

I liked the section on the rise of movie theaters quite a bit. It highlights the shift towards mass media and commercial leisure. A beer costs the same as a trip to the theater, I'd go with that investment too.

The only voices that seem to be missing are Worcester's Afro-American population, which is briefly acknowledged as being 2% of the population. Most of the immigrants talked about are what we now call "white;" Swedes, Irish, Poles, etc.

SECOND READING:
Clearly written. Just as good the second time.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rosenzweig looks to Worcester Massacheusetts, where he examines its labor history through the lense of leisure theory, which argues that what people do with their free time, conscious time away from work, is just as important to understanding labor struggles as workplace organizing. In Worcester in the later 19th and early 20th century, while there was little union activity to speak of because of militant employer resistance, instead labor organizing took place in fights for immigrant social space such as saloons and churches, more days off for holidays, picnics, sports, and participation in parades like the 4th of July. Immigrant groups such as Irish and Poles organized separate events from employers based on catholic identity, while Swedes tended to more closely align with their WASP factory owners and managers through church life. Later, movie theaters began to move recreation towards a more centralized commercial approach, which in the 1920s led the ethnic groups to more closely align and the children of the immigrants became Americanized. This text is key in understand the social lives of working class people and why the left has traditionally been slow in engaging with non-workplace struggles.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful study of working-class life. Rosenzweig demonstrates that workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, created distinctive leisure spaces for themselves in the years between 1870 and 1920. Their saloons, July Fourth celebrations, and public playgrounds served both to Americanize the largely immigrant workers and to set them apart from each others' ethnic enclaves. Thus, in Rosenzweig's understanding of Worcester life, leisure activities no less than employment status -- indeed, perhaps more than employment status -- defined the identity of a worker or a member of a working-class family.

This sort of identity allowed for an alternative to white middle-class American culture rather than for a direct challenge to it. Ethnic Worcester workers struggled to avoid bourgeois social control by, for example, quietly ignoring laws that prohibited "kitchen barrooms," or turning public parks into ethnic playgrounds under the noses of progressive reformers, who had other ideas about healthy social interaction. Their success was mixed; lacking a unified political party, workers managed by adapting to the conditions that the city's business elite and political reformers created. At the same time, however, workers shaped the conditions that the American middle class lived in. Saloons and movie theaters, originally frowned upon by "respectable" society, gradually entered the mainstream of commerce; they drew the children of immigrants into the middle class, and at the same time, they drew the middle class into less disciplined forms of socialization.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if they like it, though. You'd have to ask them.