Communal Commotion: The Complexities of the Shoemakers Conflict in 1910

In the summer of 1910 the Dutch town of Waalwijk, on the river Meuse, in the shoe-producing district of barren central Brabant, flourished. Wages were relatively high, unemployment was negligible, so it was perfectly legitimate for the municipal secretary to show some modest signs of pride in his yearly report to the queen. Social relations appeared to be harmonious, and in a sense Waalwijk stood as a symbol for the better times to come in this backward region. As in all central Brabant municipalities, a Catholic Shoemakers Union existed in this town but, as could be expected in a place where living conditions by any standard were substantially better than in the mainly protoindustrial neighboring villages, it was rather passive. In the hinterland, the earnings of the home-working population were substantially lower, the working day much longer, and, as a consequence of the Truck system, prices of primary products 10 to 20 percent higher. In comparison, workers and factory owners in Waalwijk had established relations of reciprocity and seemed apparently agreed on creating economic and social progress.

Against all expectations, however, this town experienced an explosive labor conflict. In the early morning of 24 August 1910 a strange and severe dispute broke out in the factory of the van Schijndel family. This factory, the largest and most advanced workplace in the Netherlands, was famous locally for its technical and social achievements. It was even permitted to carry a royal predicat. In its stitching department, where some forty-five girls were employed on sewing machines to produce the uppers of high-class ladies' shoes, a young teenage girl asked a friend, who was working next to her, to be so friendly as to pass a glass of water. She was brutally reprimanded by her employer, whereupon the chairwoman of the local girls' branch of the Catholic Shoemakers Union, who happened to work on the same line, intervened, showed herself to be very upset about old van Schijndel's behavior, and judged that social relations in the factory were too bad for them to continue working in it. She demonstratively left the work floor, to be followed immediately by the stitching girls, who were all members of the girls' branch of the union. On hearing what had happened, more than half the male workers in the factory, about fifty men, who in many cases were probably the fathers and brothers of the striking girls, followed suit. Thus a superficially trivial event had occasioned a collective walkout.

For the second time that year, the strikers reported to the committee of the Catholic Shoemakers Union, which met in the nearby village of Kaatsheuvel, that the van Schijndel family refused to recognize the union and used constant minor threats, in the form of fines and restrictions, against its members. In the local and Catholic press the legitimacy of such an irregular and wildcat strike was fiercely disputed, but the committee unanimously stood behind its members, and declared that van Schijndel had waged an underground war against the Catholic workers' organizations. The strike, it maintained, was legitimate, as it was a struggle for union recognition.

Present-day Dutch historians with left-wing and humanist inclinations have reproduced this explanation for the strike at the Royal Steam Shoefactory of van Schijndel. But, as I will try to show, they have thereby reproduced an articulate discourse, mainly in the Catholic press and that of the Catholic Shoemakers Union, that obscured more fundamental causes. This, indeed, alludes to a more general problem of historical research on the working classes. Documentary sources tend to represent dominant meanings, and this in principle is also true of the sources from established labor unions, where divisions between functionaries and workers have developed, and certainly for those unions in continental Europe that embodied cross-class alliances as did the Catholic labor movements in the Netherlands.

Here a claim is made for a very different interpretation, one that is anthropologically stronger and sheds new light on the course and dynamics of Catholic union formation in the Dutch periphery. It will be argued that central Brabant's shoemakers, instead of defending the Catholic union, were actually motivated by deeply felt distresses concerning their place and prospects in the social relationships of shoe production. Such anxieties were totally ignored by this union. The event therefore showed the fracturing of a Catholic union rather than its popularity.

Moreover, I want to take this conflict and the interpretations that have sought to explain it then and now as an opportunity to criticize two main tendencies in contemporary historical sociology and social history. The first tendency, which is associated with the work of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Charles Tilly, stresses the rationality and strategic nature of working Class responses to capitalist development. The second, stemming from the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, among others, maintains that class interests do not just speak for themselves but should be first produced in political languages of class, conflict, and reciprocity. I will argue that both approaches are in need of a more anthropological understanding of participants in hegemonic processes. We must leave the human capacity to experience the materialities of life intact and at the same time recognize the problematic nature of articulate sociopolitical languages. For any analyst of class both the conceptual distinction and problematic relation between articulate languages and practical experiences is of vital importance. A better understanding of participants in hegemonic processes can be developed empirically by paying due attention to the details of routine-breaking events.

CLUES TO CLASS AND CONFLICT

Collective action always produces unfocused and inconclusive messages in the contemporary press, which often, because of their character, are not properly handled by historical researchers who strive to build a coherent narrative. This is certainly true in this case. Thus the persistent denials of the employer that he was trying to tackle the Catholic Shoemakers Union has for all practical purposes been seen as merely a rationalized self-defense. In his...