Interview
Barkin, his egotism aside, is a brilliant man and a prolific writer, having authored hundreds of articles and about a dozen books. He was selected as an interviewee for the TWUA Oral History Project not only because of his long affiliation with the Union, but also because of his intimate knowledge of the textile industry.
I [interviewer James Cavanaugh] interviewed Barkin for a total of seven-and-a-half hours on November 7 and November 9, 1977, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Barkin enjoyed the interview immensely because I permitted him free reign to expound his theories of American industrial relations; he is a severe critic of the John R. Commons School of labor economics. He treated the interview like a lecture before a large class of graduate students. His Gatling-gun speech often makes him difficult to follow; and his habit of clipping off his sentences halfway through, leaving their completion to his listeners, sometimes makes him impossible to follow. Barkin's problem is that his mind is always a paragraph ahead of his mouth, and his enthusiasm does not permit his mouth to catch up. Furthermore, his mind is often working on more than one subject at a time. As a result the interview jumped around quite a bit, and researchers should rely heavily on the index in order not to miss his thoughts on any particular subject. (Also, the researcher should be aware that the second session of the interview begins on Tape 5, Side 1, and the first half hour of that session is devoted largely to filling in and clarifying the discussion on the first four tapes.)
Barkin's greatest value to this Project lies in the fact that he knew Sidney Hillman better than anyone else involved in TWUA, and that he was closer to the situation during TWOC than anyone else who is still alive. He also has some definite opinions on why TWUA failed to organize the industry and why the South has been so difficult to organize. As a critic of the American Labor Movement (see Barkin's The Decline of the American Labor Movement and What Can Be Done About It, published in 1961) and of the American system of industrial relations (read the John R. Commons School), Barkin is thought provoking and should not be discounted, however tempting that might be because of the heavy dose of egotism. Even when intimately involved in the day-to-day operations of the Union, Barkin was always first and foremost an idea man (a less kind observer might simply say “an ivory-tower intellectual”); and, because of this, his interview is very good when dealing with concepts, but rather poor when dealing with events and when interpreting the internal politics and institutional history of the Union.
Abstract
The tapes for this interview have two tracks: a voice track containing the discussion and a time track containing time announcements at intervals of approximately five seconds. The abstract lists, in order of discussion, the topics covered on each tape, and indicates the time-marking at which point the beginning of the particular discussion appears.
Thus, the researcher by using a tape recorder's fast-forward button may find expeditiously and listen to discrete segments without listening to all of the taped discussion. For instance, the user who wishes to listen to the topic on “Higher Education and Early Teaching Experience” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 10:55 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Ten (minutes), fifty-five (seconds)”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “Higher Education and Early Teaching Experience” continues until approximately 15:15 at which point discussion of the next topic (“Job with New York State Commission on Old Age Security, 1929-1933”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “Higher Education and Early Teaching Experience” give further details on what appears on the tape between 10:55 and 15:15.
The abstract is designed to provide only a brief outline of the content of the tapes and cannot serve as a substitute for listening to them. However, the abstract when used with the index will help the researcher easily locate distinct topics and discussions among the many minutes of commentary.
Index
There is a master index for most of the TWUA Oral History Project interviews in the collection-level finding aid.
