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ABSTRACT
This essay recovers the communication pedagogy that the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) developed as part of their outreach to immigrant men in the industries in the early-20th-century U.S.A. It brings into focus how the YMCA's teaching techniques negotiated the relation between labor and labor power by configuring sound, speech, and class subjectivity in a way that put in motion a form of productive affect. From this material history, the essay prompts reflection on the ways that sound continues to configure ever-shifting modes of productivity and exploitation, inviting scholars to critically consider the role of communication pedagogy in the evolving contexts of capitalism.
Notes
1 “Something Worth Tackling,” 1910, Industrial and Immigration Pamphlets: Box 2, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
2 “Among Industrial Workers: A Handbook for Young Men's Christian's Associations in Industrial Fields,” 1919, 16, Industrial Department of the International Committee of the YMCA: Box 7, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
3 The YMCA Secretary was a professional employee who often functioned as a field agent and whose role evolved alongside the organization itself. As the focus of the YMCA had largely shifted from religious proselytization to character development by the turn of the 20th century, the Y Secretaries carried out tasks such as record keeping, organizing and delivering programing at various locations, and so on. Some would advance to various leadership positions in the organization, as Roberts did.
4 This essay may appear slippery in deploying terms such as “speech” and “communication.” However, as the material I am excavating here precedes disciplinary developments that would render these concepts distinct, I try to follow the uses that appear in situ within the archive itself. Even as I acknowledge the fortitude with which conceptual demarcations have since set in, I am persuaded by Joshua Gunn's argument that
the titular displacement of “speech” suggests only a displacement of scholarly attention in word, for if we listen more closely to conversations about communication technologies, we discover that the object of speech continues to haunt like a ghostly present, murmuring for theoretical engagement (“Speech Is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 [2008]: 343–44).
5 Walter S. Gershon and Peter Appelbaum, “Resounding Education: Sonic Instigations, Reverberating Foundations,” Educational Studies 54, no. 4 (2018): 357.
6 See Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.
7 For careful consideration of ways notions of (dis)ability haunt both the fields of critical communication pedagogy and critical intercultural communication, see Deanna L. Fassett and Dana L. Morella, “Remaking (the) Discipline: Marking the Performative Accomplishment of (Dis)Ability,” Text and Performance Quarterly 28, nos. 1–2 (2008): 139–56; Deanna L. Fassett, “Critical Reflections on a Pedagogy of Ability,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 461–71.
8 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 327. Greene identifies a larger repertoire of strategies for pursuing the entanglements of rhetoric and capitalism than what is represented in this essay.
9 Kent A. Ono, “Critical: A Finer Edge,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 95.
10 Judith N. Martin and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Communication as Raced,” in Communication as ... Perspectives on Theory, ed. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 75–83.
11 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
12 Matthew S. May, “Spinoza and Class Struggle,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 204.
13 Beverly Skeggs, “Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘The Self,’” The Sociological Review 52, no. 2 suppl. (2004): 75.
14 Michael J. Thompson, “Review: Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order,” Contemporary Political Theory 17, no. 4 (2019): 284–89.
15 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 232, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
16 Ronald Walter Greene and Kristin Swenson, “Precarious Cooperation: Soft Skills and the Governing of Labor Power,” in Precarious Rhetorics, ed. Wendy S. Hesford, Adela C. Licona, and Christa Teston (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2008), 234.
17 On the concept of attunement, see Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 445–53; Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015); Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Zornitsa Keremidchieva and Vera Sidlova, “Political Argument and the Affective Relations of Democracy: Recovering Vaclav Havel's Theory of Associated Living,” in Proceedings of the Eighth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, ed. Bart J. Garssen, David Godden, Gordon Mitchell, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans (Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 2015), 722–29. The concept of affective attunement is also well developed in fields such as musicology, psychology, social work, and disability studies.
18 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 62.
19 I appreciate Joshua Gunn, Greg Goodale, Mirko M. Hall, and Rosa A. Eberly's effort to put such concerns with meaning in perspective in the context of the emergent field of sound studies. Their essay is useful for demonstrating how “prima facie, the key difference between ‘rhetorical studies’ and ‘sound studies’ is that sound persists whether or not it has taken on meaning (i.e., whether or not the sonic has been delivered to, by, or with language)” (“Auscultating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 5 [2013]: 476). However, I would argue that the modes of sounding language still matter, thus we may need to press a little further to consider when and how speech becomes rhetorical.
20 Ben Anderson, Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 9.
21 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
22 Craig R. Littler, “Understanding Taylorism,” British Journal of Sociology 29, no. 2 (1978): 185–202.
23 For such trends more broadly, see Wayne Au, “Teaching under the New Taylorism: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of the 21st Century Curriculum,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 43, no. 1 (2011): 25–45.
24 See Leslie A. Hahner, To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017); Zornitsa Keremidchieva, “From International to National Engagement and Back: The YWCA's Communicative Techniques of Americanisation in the Aftermath of WWI,” Women's History Review 26, no. 2 (2017): 280–95.
25 Peter Roberts, English for Coming Americans: A Rational System for Teaching English to Foreigners, 1909, 20, New York: YMCA, Immigration Work: Box 9, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota.
26 Charles R. Towson. “Some Principles and Policies, Dangers, and Actual Conditions of the Association's Work in Industrial Fields,” Internal Report to the International Committee of the YMCA (ca. 1920), Program Records: Industrial Files on Immigration Work: Box 7, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota. This report marks a shift in Towson's assessment of the industrial problem. A few years earlier, he had suggested that industrial strife was due primarily to the immigrant workers’ ignorance of American principles. See Charles R. Towson, “Italians in an American Community: Personal and Confidential Report to Mr. I. B. Hodge,” 1908, 5, Immigration Work: Box 9, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
27 Roberts, English for Coming Americans.
28 At the time, the field of teaching English as a second language was still emergent and unregulated, thus resulting in a vast variety of approaches that can hardly be captured in the scope of this essay. See Steven G. Darian, English as a Foreign Language: History, Development, and Methods of Teaching (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); Tim William Machan, What Is English? And Why Should We Care? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Amy Dayton-Wood, “Teaching English for ‘A Better America,’” Rhetoric Review 27, no. 4 (2008): 397–414.
29 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 29.
30 Towson, “Some Principles and Policies, Dangers, and Actual Conditions of the Association's Work in Industrial Fields.”
31 C. Howard Hopkins, History of the YMCA in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951).
32 See Gerd Korman, “Americanization at the Factory Gate,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 18, no. 3 (1965): 396–419.
33 Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg with Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 169.
34 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 13.
35 Ibid., 74.
36 Ibid., 12.
37 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1991), 177.
38 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 8.
39 Ibid., 17.
40 Ibid., 24.
41 Ibid., 33.
42 Ibid., 39.
43 Ibid., 63.
44 Fred H. Rindge Jr., “Uncle Sam's Adopted Nephews,” Harper's Magazine 137, no. 818 (July 1918): 281–89.
45 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Curtis Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 33.
46 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 67.
47 Ibid., 18.
48 Ibid., 10.
49 The YMCA had experience using the phonograph during various forms of outreach work.
50 Gilbert L. Skillman, “Marxian Value Theory and the Labor–Labor Power Distinction,” Science & Society 60, no. 4 (1996/1997): 447.
51 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 43.
52 Justin Eckstein, “The Acoustics of Argumentation and Advocacy,” Argumentation and Advocacy 54, no. 4 (2018): 355.
53 Towson, “Italians in an American Community,” 4.
54 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 14.
55 Ibid., 14.
56 Ibid., 25.
57 Ronald Walter Greene, “Lessons from the YMCA: The Material Rhetoric of Criticism, Rhetorical Interpretation, and Pastoral Power,” in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, ed. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Croftswiler (London: Routledge, 2012), 219–30; “Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 20–36.
58 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 11.
59 Ibid., 10.
60 Ibid., 24.
61 Ibid., 25.
62 Ibid., 26.
63 Ibid., 5.
64 Ibid., 29.
65 Ibid., 18.
66 “Among Industrial Workers: A Handbook for Young Men's Christian's Associations in Industrial Fields,” 1919, 15, Industrial Department of the International Committee of the YMCA: Box 7, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.
67 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 22.
68 Ibid., 6.
69 Ibid., 29.
70 Towson, “Italians in an American Community,” 10.
71 Mayer N. Zald and Patricia Denton, “From Evangelism to General Service: The Transformation of the YMCA,” Administrative Science Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1963): 225.
72 Roberts, English for Coming Americans, 22.
73 Ibid., 13.
74 Rindge, “Uncle Sam's Adopted Nephews,” 9.
75 Scholars of visual culture have pointed to similar mechanisms by which various pedagogies would cultivate modes of seeing some images as transcendent. See Brenton J. Malin, “Looking White and Middle-Class: Stereoscopic Imagery and Technology in the Early Twentieth-Century United States,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (2007): 403–24; Nathan Stormer, “Addressing the Sublime: Space, Mass Representation, and the Unpresentable,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 21, no. 3 (2004): 212–40. In the context of the Americanization campaigns, Leslie A. Hahner draws attention to how various rhetorical tropes organized the ways immigrants could see and be seen (To Become an American).
76 Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
77 Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles, “Structure and Practice in the Labor Theory of Value,” The Review of Radical Political Economics 12, no. 4 (1981): 4.
78 Jonathan Sterne, “Hearing,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 74.
79 Herbert Gintis, “The Nature of Labor Exchange and the Theory of Capitalist Production,” The Review of Radical Political Economics 8, no. 2 (1976): 37.
80 Karin Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Anna Harris and Melissa Van Drie, “Sharing Sound: Teaching, Learning, and Researching Sonic Skills,” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 91–117.
81 Greene and Swenson, “Precarious Cooperation,” 236.
82 Labor economists have long recognized that wage structures exceed the logics of commodity exchange, their valuation emerging though complex sociocultural processes. Along with others, U.S. labor historians have offered a wealth of fine-grained evidence in that vein, including with regard to the (im)mobilities of social identities at the turn of the 20th century. Especially relevant to this study is prior attention to how English-language skills served as barriers or facilitators of worker organizing such as in Thomas Mackaman, New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor, 1914–1924 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). See also Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” The American Historical Review 78, no. 3 (1973): 531–88; James R. Barrett, “Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago's South Side, 1900–1922,” Journal of Social History 18, no. 1 (1984): 37–55; Neil Betten, “Polish American Steelworkers: Americanization through Industry and Labor,” Polish American Studies 33, no. 2 (1976): 31–42; Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds., The Immigrant Left in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Peter Rachleff, “The Dynamics of ‘Americanization’: The Croatian Fraternal Union between the Wars, 1920s–30s,” in Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience, ed. Eric Arnesen, Julie Green, and Bruce Laurie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 340–62.