Refocusing Old Lenses: Lore in the Longshore Hall

Western Folklore, Winter 2006 by Harrison, Phyllis

Folklorists, as well as historians, anthropologists, cultural geographers and other professional observers of culture, dedicate their professional lives to the presentation of human groups. The contexts of these presentations range from university classrooms, publications, museum exhibits, and festival stages to broader arenas of medicine, education, cultural conservation and community development. At the same time, cultural workers answer to a variety of constituencies: peers, professors, administrators, funding agencies and, of course, to the members of the groups studied who comprise our primary constituency. All constituencies make demands and set boundaries, yet a significant portion of our task, particularly in the field of public sector research, involves recognizing, and prioritizing those contexts and constituencies to tell-or perhaps to translate-a fair and honest tale. In the material that follows, I will evaluate my experience in one such cultural project.

My observations flow from my work with maritime cultures in the Puget Sound region of Washington State, specifically with the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) Local 23 (Tacoma) and Local 19 (Seattle), in 1990 and 1991. My concerns reflect the specific application of the same concerns that surface repeatedly in cultural research: the identification of a particular community-in this case, longshoremen-as a legitimate arena for study (as viewed by funding agencies), and the process through which such study is conducted and made available for public consumption. My experience began by visiting workers both on and off of the job, recording their responses to my questions and organizing this material thematically-classical field research. The presentation of these research results followed a familiar pattern for public sector programming: a touring exhibit accompanied by an invitation to workers to participate in the first-hand demonstration of their culture. This research relationship ended with a major shift in venue and perspective: the longshoremen's presentation of their work culture through the conversion of the union hall into a museum/stage/festival. (Harrison 1990)

Many Americans know longshoremen through Elia Kazan's 1954 film, On the Waterfront, starring Marion Brando. Students of American literature might be familiar with Bud Shulberg's novel which inspired the movie. Labor historians, radical historians and red-diaper babies (as they are often described by Archie Green to refer to children raised in radical families) are familiar with longshoremen's union leader Harry Bridges, and many still revere his memory and his name. Yet neither the fictionalized drama nor labor icon tell the worker's story. Like Ellison's invisible man, longshoremen and most American workers remain invisible in the communities their work helps to support. (Richer 1972; Magden 1982, 1991; Green 1993:154-61)

In the nineteen seventies, Archie Green's Industrial Lore raised matters still relevant today. He noted the early interest of folksong collectors in work songs and the simmering interest of folklorists in such recognizably traditional occupations as seafaring, logging, and riding the range. He further broached the distinction, articulated by Tristram Potter Coffin and Hennig Cohen in their 1973 anthology Folklore from the Working Folk of America, between such folk occupations as those named above and semi-folk occupations such as auto-workers. (Green 1978; Coffin and Cohen 1973) Grounded as we have been in the past on familiar genres and a notion of process that relies on community-based, person-to-person communication, early students of contemporary work have difficulty dealing within an urban occupational group composed of individuals who draw their identities from a variety of sources and whose occupation changes regularly as a result of changing technology. As Green observed,

It does seem easier after graduate school to ask a Blue Ridge fiddler on his cabin porch for Sourwood Mountain than it is to ask a Bell telephone cablesplicer in his manhole for a linguistic symbol or construct. Obviously, we are taught to identify the fiddler as folk, but are still uncertain about the splicer's status (Green 1978:81)

More recent research by Robert McCarl, Paula Johnson and David Taylor, has avoided definitional confusion over the folk the concept of tradition by approaching the study of work from a more ethnographic perspective. (McCarl 1988, 1994; Johnson 1988; Taylor 1994) From a personal perspective, I can say without hesitation that my own excursions into the field were much easier when I ventured out to southern Indiana auctions or Old Order Amish schools than when I climbed aboard my first purse-seine fishing boat or into my first union hiring hall. Ultimately all of these contexts provided a reconceptualization on my part away from a focus on the folk, to an appreciation of the variety of ways in which members of work groups create dynamic and symbolically framed cultural contexts that defy academic compartmentalization.