UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation seeks to provide a biography of the cultural worker in modern American thought. The primary modality employed is that of intellectual history, guided by methodologies borrowed from legal, labor, and economic history, Black Studies, literary studies, critical theory, and interdisciplinary cultural studies. Following an extensive introduction that attempts to adequately set the historiographical table, we commence with a detailed examination of nineteenth-century debates regarding the productivity of cultural work, focusing in on the legal intellectuals Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Eaton Drone, the publisher George Haven Putnam, and the political economist John Bates Clark. Reading these writings closely, we argue that the idea of artistic and intellectual production as forms of productive labor is not as new as is sometimes alleged, and that modern understandings of cultural labor were shaped within the crucible of an emergent corporate capitalism, in which new conceptualizations of intellectual property drove a new discourse on cultural work. We next turn our focus to the African American intellectual James Weldon Johnson, whose writings provide a window into the world of turn-of-the-century African American cultural work and the intersection of cultural work and politics in the years between the end of Reconstruction and World War I. An examination of Joseph Freeman’s An American Testament reveals a forgotten itinerary of left writings on cultural work in the nineteen teens and twenties. A careful study of Freeman allows us to reconsider the intellectual history of the Communist left in the United States in the early Soviet era, and to attend to the special significance of cultural work to the young radicals of that moment. In the dissertation’s second half, we investigate several attempts to organize cultural workers in labor organizations in the 1930s: Heywood Broun’s American Newspaper Guild, John Howard Lawson’s Screen Writers Guild, and a variety of endeavors by musicians to fight technological unemployment. Inspired by the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to draft codes of fair competition to govern each industry, cultural workers seized the moment and articulated a variety of novel political projects that might reverse exploitative conditions in white collar industries. While not always successful in the short run, these initiatives are worth studying for the wealth of information they provide regarding the changing status of the cultural worker, the influence of left-wing theory on the mainstream labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and for the tensions regarding cultural workers’ allegiances to white-collar managerial workers, on the one hand, and to blue-collar proletarians, on the other. The final section of the dissertation looks at some of the sources of the containment of cultural workers’ politics in the 1940s and 1950s. Focusing on legal intellectuals like Zechariah Chafee, Jr., we observe that the Cold War increasingly framed cultural workers’ quest for autonomy as both a potential security threat and a fetter on national productivity. In our conclusion, we look at various mutations of the idea of cultural worker in the 1960s and up to the struggles of today’s digital laborers and content creators.