In Labor's Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life, Tobias Higbie has tackled an important and understudied topic. Covering the period in which the “labor problem” in American history was at its height—from the Progressive Era through the years of New Deal legislation that institutionalized labor unions in the mainstream of American political and economic life—Higbie reveals the critical importance of workers’ education in the development of the nation's labor movement.

Labor's Mind examines how workers learned about the world, mostly as adults, and how labor activists developed a set of ideas that envisioned greater worker power. The book is divided into two parts: the first, comprised of three chapters, highlights different aspects of workers’ education, while the second (two chapters) examines the representation of workers and their intellectual capacities.

The first chapter, “an ethnography of working-class knowledge gained through experience and reading” (p. 14), brings the reader into the mental world of working people at the dawn of the twentieth century. Higbie shows us that while their formal education was limited, workers read books and newspapers and were clearly interested in learning. Workers of this era, many of whom had immigrated to the US, consciously sought to cultivate their minds, even though the demands of a long and tedious workday made it difficult.

Chapter 2 highlights the development of a radical public sphere in the early twentieth century that nurtured labor activists, some of whom readers will likely know (like Rose Pesotta or Ella Baker) and others many will not (like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's one-time husband, Jack Jones). Like other historical works on public and counterpublic spheres, Higbie walks readers through the physical spaces where ideas circulated—parks, street corners, and nightclubs. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to telling the story of Chicago's radical public sphere, and though the reader might want to learn more about the spaces that nurtured activists elsewhere, Higbie's argument for the significance of “Chicago's central location, its important role in publishing, and its political history” (p. 44) makes the choice to focus on that city both defensible and highly useful.

In the third chapter, Higbie documents the rise of institutions of labor education, such as Brookwood Labor College in New York and the University of Wisconsin School for Workers. Though other scholars have shown the importance of Highlander Folk School, very few have chronicled the impact of these other institutions of labor education on the activists who brought unions to institutional importance in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, Higbie convincingly asserts that “during difficult times of political reaction, trade union retrenchment, and ideological schism [in the 1920s], workers’ education was the glue that held together a divided and often-defeated union movement at the grass roots. Labor colleges forged networks of like-minded militants and distributed the tools that could effectively contest economic inequality” (p. 62).

Ironically, however, the successful institutionalization of unions after World War II (combined with a vicious employer counteroffensive) seriously limited the radicalism of the labor education movement at the same time many workers saw a constant improvement in material conditions from the 1940s to the 1960s. Though Higbie doesn't engage in counterfactuals, one wonders if a more robust labor education system that continued the tradition of the labor colleges built in in the 1920s might have helped workers to better combat the class warfare from above perpetrated by corporations from the 1970s to the present.

Chapters 4 and 5 seek to show us “how workers became visible as thinking people in modern America” (p. 86). The penultimate chapter examines the narratives worker activists employed to speak to intellectuals and suggests that many working people privileged experience in order to seem authentic, while obscuring their own rich intellectual lives. Higbie argues that as workers’ “reading and self-education faded into the background,” professional-class intellectuals reinforced the “widespread cultural prejudice that intellectual habits of mind and working-class life were two very separate domains” (p. 89). Chapter 5 uses a deep reading of Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots (1920) and analysis of visual artifacts from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s to highlight the growing anxieties that technology would turn workers into unthinking machines. Proworker partisans, Higbie argues, attempted to show that workers remained capable of self-education in the face of these changes. His analysis of gender—many of these representations centered on showing that working men could acquire knowledge without being “feminized”—is a real strength of this chapter.

Readers of the History of Education Quarterly will want to pick up a copy of this book, particularly since its capacious view of what counts as education pushes the boundaries of the field. Labor's Mind has one important limitation, however: there is virtually nothing at all in the book about how working people's experience with the public education system (outside of the labor colleges, some of which were supported to some degree by public funds) impacted their pursuit of learning. Indeed, our only window into that relationship is a brief mention that many working people in the early twentieth century believed schools engaged in repressive “ruling-class and ruling-race indoctrination” (p. 69).

This may very well have been the case for some workers, but there was certainly no consensus around this view (and the fact that many working people, as Higbie points out in the first chapter, felt deprived by their lack of education beyond primary school tells us that workers highly valued public education). Even a few paragraphs regarding the history of how working people have sought to shape public education would have been helpful in framing the trajectory of worker education that existed outside the public schools. Since this book is certain to get a wide reading outside of the history of education field, it seems important to familiarize readers with the contours of the debate Michael Katz set off with The Irony of School Reform (1968)—that public schools were created, at least in part, to discipline working people, who sometimes resisted its assumptions—as well as to explain the strong support from many workers at other times to educate their children. By the twentieth century, how did worker activists view public education in the capitalist order? Did they believe it was hopelessly beholden to capital, or would the institution be more democratic if workers had more power?

One way to engage this question could have been to examine teachers who, like many other workers, were organizing unions in the early twentieth century. Indeed, the primary point of contention for some teachers in Chicago (like Margaret Haley), at the very time the radical public sphere developed there, was to defend the promise of public education for working-class children from the efforts of elite reformers. Teachers and their supporters feared that such reforms would create new generations of workers who would end up like the machines later envisioned in Čapek's play. Some mention of organizing teachers and public education would have helped to tell a fuller story of working-class intellectual life during the first half of the twentieth century.

In spite of this limitation, Higbie's carefully crafted, well-researched, and smartly argued book is a valuable contribution for both labor historians and historians of education.