cRobert Zieger; March 12, 2004

Note that as of this date, Netscape has decided to scramble the endnotes that appear in the two RAH essays. I'm trying to straighten this out but am not confident.  The ones for the review of Glenn seem to work but not the ones for Bernstein.  To see the notes for the latter, don't click on the numeral link; just scroll to the end of the paper.  Sorry.

You will find the following reviews: 

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (NY: Norton, 2007); Philip M. Dine, State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008)

Paul Moreno,  Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.

Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in-Twentieth Century America. Princeton. Princeton University Press. 2005.

Grace Palladino, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits:  A Century of Building Trades History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Vincent J. Roscigmo and William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). "Social Movements, Protest and Contention," vol. 19.

Irene A. DeVault. United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism. Ithaca and London. Cornell University Press. 2004. xi + 244 pp. Appendices, index.

David E. Bernstein. Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. xiii + 189 pp. Bibliography and index.

A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. By Steven Hahn. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003. viii + 610 pp.

Robert Rogers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (UNC Press, 2003)

Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82 (University of Illinois Press, 2003)

Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America. By Jennifer D. Keene. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001

Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003)

Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001

Robert C. Cottrell. Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union. NY. Columbia University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv + 504.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 2002. x + 306 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index.

Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918. By Byron Farwell. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999. Pp. 336. $27.95.

The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s. Edited by Philip Scranton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 310. $50.00. ISBN 0-8203-2218-0).

Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Pp. ix + 264. ISBN 0-252-06933-1

Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class, by Thaddeus Russell, 2001.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf
pp. xii + 272
 
 

David E. Bernstein. Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. xiii + 189 pp. Bibliography and index.

I've read a thousand books and a million journal articles but I really learned American history from my father, and most of it before I was ten. I learned these things: Teddy Roosevelt was a Boy Scout, Gene Debs a saint, and Walter Reuther a mensch. Jefferson was to be admired, Washington respected, Lincoln revered. Captains of Industry were likely to become Robber Barons unless checked by the George Norrises, Bob La Follettes, and John L. Lewises. The New Deal stole the Socialist program. In my house, it was Robert Ingersoll si, Bishop Sheen no; Darrow over Bryan; the CIO, not the AFL.

Indeed, when it came to labor, heroes and villains were vividly etched. None stood so starkly condemned as the injunction judges who crushed labor's hopes. Almost equally vile were their colleagues who struck down reform legislation. Employers who imposed yellow dog contracts were as bad as slave mongers. And at the bottom of the pile, loathsome to all decent people, was the most degraded and pathetic creature of all, the job-stealing scab.

With these early history lessons in mind, consider the message of David E. Bernstein's challenging new book, Only Once Place of Redress. His account of the motivation for and impact of post-Reconstruction labor law turns the received wisdom on its head. Far from being powerless and victimized, early twentieth-century organized labor was a potent political force. Craft and railroad unions were especially successful in gaining passage of laws that benefitted white workers and strengthened their grip on jobs. The jurists who issued injunctions and overturned protective legislation were benefactors of African American workers. The unions that injunctions crushed were racist organizations; their demise provided black workers with a foothold in industrial work. So-called "Yellow Dog" contracts stopped unions from interfering with the freedom of contract that alone offered minority workers industrial opportunity. African Americans who braved violent picket lines in an effort to provide for their families were risk-taking heroes.

Bernstein rests his rereading of US industrial and labor history on recent work by labor and race historians and by reference to the literature of legal scholarship. With respect to the former, he combs the writings of labor historians, who have amply documented the historic mainstream labor movement's victimization of African American workers. And the case he builds against labor unions and the governmental regulation they sponsored is strong. State and local licensing laws, for example, enacted ostensibly for reasons of public health and safety, served the conscious purpose also of limiting access along racial lines to trades as diverse as barbering, plumbing, and medicine. The 1926 Railroad Labor Act granted de facto job monopolies to racist railroad brotherhoods. Moreover, the federal agencies that it created routinely enforced discriminatory union contracts and work rules. The 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which required that local contractors pay "prevailing" (read: union) wages in federal construction projects, shrank black employment and buttressed the AFL's racist building trades unions.

Little of this is new to labor historians. Even before a spate of recent books detailing the role of organized labor in marginalizing black workers and creating protected job categories for whites, African American critics, advocates of bi-racial unionism, and progressive scholars had provided ample evidence of laborite racism. What is new-at least to most academic students of twentieth century labor history-is Bernstein's sharp focus on the racial intent and consequences of twentieth-century labor law, his enthusiasm of Lochnerian jurisprudence from the same angle of vision, and his positing of free market forces as the friend of racial justice.

In the place of the usual heroes of labor history-striking workers, martyred unionists, eloquent street orators-Bernstein finds an unlikely trio of strikebreakers, cost-reducing employers, and conservative judges. Disdained by organized labor and eager to improve their conditions, black workers exploited the advantages that a racist social order left them with, namely a willingness to work cheap and the courage to defy often-violent white unionists. As prejudiced against blacks as any other Americans, early twentieth-century employers at least had the courage of their free labor market convictions and offered jobs to blacks (and other racial minorities) on the basis of the initially-harsh-but-ultimately-benign law of supply and demand. Relatively unconcerned with racial justice, jurists such as the men who in 1905 struck down New York's effort to regulate the working hours of bakers in the Lochner case nonetheless stuck to their freedom-of-contract principles. Repeatedly, they disallowed legislation designed to create protected enclaves for categories of workers who happened to have the political clout to gain its passage, although, alas, eventually the regime of Lochner was overturned in the 1930s.

Acknowledging the influence of law and economics scholars such as Federal Judge Richard Posner, Bernstein holds that regulatory law is a direct reflection of political power. During the period covered by the book African Americans had little political power. Thus it follows that labor regulations supported by white unionists to license occupations, compel union recognition, or fix wage rates would necessarily protect their perceived interests and, by both intent and implication, operate against the interests of excluded parties, notably African Americans. In giving this theme specificity, Bernstein first examines a group not likely to gain the sympathies of liberals and labor advocates, southern planters intent on preventing ill-paid black farm laborers from abandoning Dixie in favor of economic opportunities elsewhere. Thus, he provides an account of often-effective southern state legislative curbs on the activities of labor agents and brokers who recruited black labor in the pre-World War I years. Nor would most labor historians blanch at Bernstein's indictment of Progressive Era plumbers, barbers, and physicians, who used their political influence to stifle competition from minority tradesmen and doctors. Similarly, Bernstein's accounts of black victimization at the hands of the railroad brotherhoods, the AFL craft unions, and their political allies, as evidenced in the Railroad Labor and Davis-Bacon acts, ring true and target appropriate villains.

But was the answer to discriminatory regulation no regulation? It is one thing to castigate physicians who used certification requirements to cripple black medical education but quite another to imply that any regulation of medical practice victimizes the weak by distorting legitimate market arrangements. Even legislation that promoted collective bargaining on the basis of union recognition, such as the Railroad Labor Act, or that regulated wage rates, such as Davis-Bacon, did not only privilege discriminatory unions at the expense of black railroaders and construction workers. These laws promoted other goals as well, goals that reflected workers' conceptions of political economy in terms of wages, conditions, and work place representation not necessarily inferior to the opposing conceptions that employers, free market advocates, and Lochnerian jurists advanced. Moreover, it was racial discrimination itself that distorted labor markets, making them in this sense unfree, and providing employers with incentive to hire black workers. The answer to discriminatory regulation, then, would be non-discriminatory legislation, not no regulation. Indeed, the prevailing pre-New Deal ideology of racial disadvantage that private parties shared almost universally might lend weight to the need for more, not less, governmental involvement along the lines of affirmative action. Here the labor movement's ideology of equality-however little honored in practice-is more appealing than employers' eagerness to exploit the opportunities for cheap labor that prevailing racism offered.

When Bernstein gets to the New Deal itself, his critique of discriminatory labor legislation becomes entangled in tricky questions of moral economy. In considering wages provisions under the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the terms of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 he sometimes appears to be arguing for discrimination against black workers, at least given the determination of administrators and legislators to legislate wage rates. Bernstein believes that these measures, while facially non-discriminatory, deepened unemployment among blacks, whose chief advantage in job markets-lower wages-was eliminated. The position that there is an inalienable right to work at substandard wages does have a certain logic. Recall the response of the African American New Yorker who befriends Robin Williams's character, Vladimir, a defecting Soviet saxophonist, in the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson. Slavery, Vladimir says to his new African American friend Witherspoon, what a terrible ordeal for blacks. Yes, replies Witherspoon with heavy irony, but "at least the work was steady."

African American trade unionists and racial spokespersons rejected separate wage rates for blacks, even though they knew it would cost black jobs in the short run. To do otherwise would be to consign blacks permanently to inferior and secondary status with respect to wages-and no doubt other aspects of working conditions. In the view of leaders such as the Sleeping Car Porters' A. Philip Randolph and that of most white leaders in the new CIO, the fact of discrimination called for greater governmental regulation of the bourgeois political economy, this time in behalf of anti-discrimination and equal pay laws, against which employers and southern elites fought bitterly.

Indeed, it was white southern legislators who promoted what would seem to be Bernstein's retrospective agenda by insisting on de facto exclusion of black workers from coverage under the New Deal's premier labor legislation, the Wagner, Social Security, and Fair Labor Standards Acts. They had learned well the lesson of World War I, when soldiers' allotments, paid to wives regardless of race, removed many African American women from the low-wage agricultural and domestic service labor markets.⁽⁴⁾ By excluding agricultural and domestic workers from New Deal labor law coverage, white southern senators and congressmen sought to preserve the South as a low-wage enclave, thus reinforcing racial subordination and promoting the South's distinctive moral economy of race, which in this case, following Bernstein's logic, coincided with the dictates of capitalist political economy and freedom from market regulation. In his brief discussion of the World War II Fair Employment Practices Committee-the first federal effort ever to inject racially egalitarian principles into the private economy-Bernstein is dismissive, regarding the FEPC as tokenistic and ineffectual. But in treating FEPC Bernstein becomes selective in his resort to the work of historians, neatly bypassing the relatively favorable assessment of its contribution by its leading historian, Merl E. Reed, in favor of more dubious negative judgments.

Bernstein's treatment of the Wagner Act itself and of the related rise of industrial unionism also runs into trouble. He quite rightly points out that efforts to deny resort to the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) services to discriminatory unions fell victim to AFL lobbying. On the other hand, he seems uninterested in the actual operations of the Board, whose egalitarian staff insisted on the rights of black workers in bargaining unit determinations and representation elections. Indeed, the latter, in which thousands of black workers in the South voted freely even as they were barred from participation in electoral politics, constituted a significant advance for racial democracy and had repercussions far beyond the labor relations arena. Bernstein does acknowledge CIO leaders' embrace of bi-racial unionism and their support for fair employment practices only quickly to dismiss the CIO's actual practice as flawed and insincere. Here his selective reliance on recent writings by labor historians leads him astray, as he seems not to understand that critical assessments of the CIO's behavior-including remarks in my own book, The CIO-have exhibited disappointment with the limitations of the governmental alliance with industrial unionism in behalf of racial justice, not a repudiation of that agenda. Bernstein is hard pressed to explain why African American workers responded so enthusiastically to the CIO's appeal, or indeed why hundreds of thousands of black workers remained loyal even to the AFL during the New Deal-World War II era.

Only One Place of Redress provides a stimulating overview of the relationships among organized labor, African Americans, and the US legal system for the period 1877-1945. It usefully defamiliarizes the past and uses a briskly presented law and economics perspective to force a rereading of the of the traditional script of labor history. While Bernstein's analysis may in the end be more provocative than convincing, in placing race at the center of US labor history it joins a rich stream of recent scholarship. For my part, I had long since added A. Philip Randolph to my father's pantheon-though I still remain chary of the Captains of Industry.

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

1. The views of John H. Zieger (1898-1977) are vividly expressed in an editorial titled "On Strikes and Picketing," that he wrote for our hometown newspaper, the Denville Herald, May, 1948 (copy in Robert H. Zieger's possession). See also Robert H. Zieger, "Books That Didn't Influence Me," Labor History 40:2 (1999): 177-88.

2. For example, during the past year alone, the following books have been published: Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (2000); Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (2001); and Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001). See also Sanford M. Lyman, "The 'Chinese Question' and American Labor Historiography," New Politics 7: 4 (Winter 2000): 113-48, and Herbert Hill, "Race, Ethnicity and Organized Labor: The Opposition to Affirmative Action," New Politics 1:2 (Winter 1987): 31-82.

3. See "Sex, Economics, and Other Legal Matters: Judge and Scholar Richard A. Posner Speaks Out on the Clinton Impeachment, the Microsoft Case, and Nude Dancing" (Interview by Steve Kurtz), Reason, April 2001; Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law (2d ed.; 1977); and Richard A. Epstein, "A Common Law for Labor Relations: A Critique of the New Deal Labor Legislation," Yale Law Journal 92: 8 (July 1983): 1357-1414.

4. See K. Walter Hickel, "War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen's Dependents in the South, 1917-1921," Journal of American History 87:4 (March 2001): 1362-91.

5. Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946 (1991), 345-57. See also Andrew Edmund Keisten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-1946 (2000), 1-7, and William J. Collins, "Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets," American Economic Review 91: 1 (March 2001): 272-86.

6. Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (1995).
 

Robert H. Zieger is Distinguished Professor of History, University of Florida. His most recent book is America's Great War: The American Experience in World War I (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). He is a member of United Faculties of Florida (NEA; AFL-CIO) and is a delegate to the North Central Florida Central Labor Council.

3-22-01; The Historian

Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918. By Byron Farwell. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999. Pp. 336. $27.95.

Over There is a lively and engaging account of the military participation of the United States in World War I. Relying heavily on the memoirs and other recollections of soldiers, Farwell has produced an informative book, rich in anecdotal material. Such subjects as air and naval warfare, venereal disease, African Americans' and Native Americans' military role, and the Russian interventions are treated in separate chapters. Appendices cover several topics, such as the "Hello Girls," French-speaking American women recruited as overseas telephone operators for the Army, the exploits of Sergeant Alvin York, and the story of the "Lost Battalion." Included too as an appendix is a useful glossary of World War I slang.

Over There lacks documentation, although a short bibliography contains a sampling of memoir and more recent academic writing about the US military effort. Farwell's chapters on major engagements featuring American troops are lively and informative but suffer from singularly unhelpful maps. The highlights of a selection of poorly reproduced photographs include a picture of General John J. Pershing's woman friend (and subsequent wife), artist Micheline Resco, and one of Cher Ami, the pigeon whose heroics helped to save the "Lost Battalion."

Farwell devotes little attention to the period before 1917 and none to the war's diplomatic aftermath. A short chapter on the home front is steadfastly anecdotal, focusing as it does on popular culture and social life. Civil liberties, economic developments, labor relations, and taxation merit only brief reference. As an indication of the book's scattershot treatment of these matters, it is worth noting significant personages such as Samuel Gompers, Bernard Baruch, and Randolph Bourne make no appearance in the text.

Farwell's central concern is the US army and its battle performance in France. He endorses General Pershing's insistence on maintaining a separate US military presence, although the absence of David Trask's work on the relationship between military policy and wartime diplomacy suggests his disinclination to explore in depth this controversial subject. Similarly, his account of the US role in Allied intervention in Russia presents a vivid narrative, with generous testimony from the soldiers who had to undertake these misbegotten missions, while remaining noncommital on the broad political questions that these incursions continue to raise. Likewise, Farwell devotes little attention to US military doctrine, tactical ambitions, or logistical problems. He duly notes Allied criticisms of the army's wobbly command and control and movingly recounts the horrendous casualties that machine-gun charging soldiers and marines suffered without probing the limitations of Pershing's conception of warfare in the 20^th century.

Over There is a good read and a reasonably reliable guide to the battlefield role of US troops in World War I. It will tell military historians nothing they do not already know and will disappoint those looking for an integrated account of impact of the Great War on America. Nonetheless, Farwell's ability to identify and relate telling vignettes and his taste for vivid quotations do capture important aspects of America's great venture "over there."
 

University of Florida Robert H. Zieger

Georgia Historical Q., 2001 or 2002 (written November, 2001)

The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s. Edited by Philip Scranton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 310. $50.00. ISBN 0-8203-2218-0).

The Second Wave consists of an Introduction by editor Philip Scranton, nine essays dealing with various aspects of industrial life in the post-World War II South, and an Afterword by Gavin Wright. The essays are revised versions of papers originally presented at a conference held in Atlanta in 1998 under the auspices of Georgia Tech's Center for the Study of Southern Industrialization. Scranton's opening remarks identify central themes in postwar southern economic history. Wright places the subject in national and international context and calls attention to the political trends that have both shaped and resulted from two generations of industrial expansion. Wright also suggests subjects for future research, notably the economic implications of the civil rights movement, continuing rural-urban disparities in southern economic life, and regional differentiation within the South.

The essays constitute a series of vignettes rather than a sustained examination of the Second Wave of southern industrial development. The themes that Scranton's opening remarks identifies provide only a loose guide to the contents of the book. He highlights "labor market and training dilemmas" associated with industrial expansion; "issues of corporate cost consciousness"; political and racial tensions; rural-urban disparities; problems of local-vs-outside investment; and problems of developing local supply networks for "final product manufacturers." "Beyond the usual realms of business and politics," he adds, have lurked "the diverse challenges to southern culture and southern ways that the Second Wave brought in its train." (xi-xii)

The contribution broadest in scope is Gregory Hooks's paper on "The Federal Contribution to Manufacturing Growth, 1940-1990." Using econometric tools, Hooks shows that the South has not received a disproportionate share of federal largess. The placement of large numbers of military bases in the South has not encouraged technologically advanced or high-wage economic growth. Nor, apart from the atypical case of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has the South benefitted inordinately from federally promoted airframe and aircraft production. In certain sectors, notably medical research and space exploration, however, federal facilities have generated important spin-off effects, promoting small manufacturing and educational development.

Three of the essays focus on the establishment and subsequent history of the Bell Aircraft Corporation's plant in Marietta, Georgia. Thomas A. Scott stresses the collaboration of local business and political elites and federal authorities, civilian and military, in bringing the large plant to rural Cobb County during World War II. Richard S. Combes's essay focuses on the postwar period, with Lockheed taking over and expanding the plant in the late 1940s. Like Scott, Coombes explores the theme of local-federal cooperation while noting as well the Kennedy administration's efforts to use this important facility as "a pilot plant in the South" for promoting racial integration and equal employment opportunity. (36)

Karen Ferguson's insightful paper on "The Politics of Exclusion" also involves Bell Aircraft. Her interest, however, is in the politics of civil rights mobilization during World War II. The Atlanta Urban League (AUL), eager to demonstrate the capacity of black workers for high-wage, industrial employment, worked closely with Bell managers and federal agencies to open some of the plant's 15,000 jobs to African Americans. Ferguson credits the AUL with raising issues of job discrimination in a hostile environment and with gaining black workers a foothold in what was then high tech industry. At the same time, however, she shows that by buying into stereotypes about the problematic employability of the members of the black underclass, AUL programs legitimated the tokenism that Bell and the federal agencies promoted. She sees adverse long-term political and economic effects of the failure of middle class black leadership of the World War II era to establish sympathetic liaison with large segments of Atlanta's black population.

Two essays touch on the quintessential twentieth-century industry, textiles. Randall Patton reprises his excellent study of the tufted carpet industry of northern Georgia, Carpet Capital: The Rise of a New South Industry (1999; written with David B. Parker), to highlight a southern industry that grew from local roots, relied during its formative years on local capital, and spawned its own networks of marketing and small manufacturing facilities. In "Dismantling the South's Cotton Mill Village System," Toby Moore uses rare realty company records to good effect in tracing the textile industry's postwar transition from paternalism to worker home ownership. Moore shows how workers' new concerns about property values and mortgage payments weakened class solidarity and imposed indirect social control even as more overt managerial intrusiveness into workers' lives receded. On balance, however, he acknowledges the beneficial nature of the change.

The other essays highlight the diverse challenges and opportunities facing promoters of postwar economic development. Craig E. Colten, in a paper dealing with problems of water quality associated with the petrochemical industry in immediate postwar Texas, focuses on collaborative efforts to curb pollution on the part of industry and government. William Boyd's paper emphasizes the theme of "collective regional learning" in the transformation of timber into "an industrial crop." (201) Since the 1930s, he demonstrates, pulp and paper companies, state economic development agencies, university-based scientists, and private owners of woodlands have turned the South's rag-tag, exhausted forests into the world's most productive and best managed timberlands, although he warns that problems of biodiversity pose new challenges. Karsten Hulsemann examines the recent movement of automobile assembly facilities to Tennessee and other southern states. Local elites, political leaders, and corporate executives, both US and international, she shows, have with considerable success attempted to achieve and sustain the benefits of job creation, economic growth, and managerial efficiency without provoking the kinds of labor activism and wage growth normally associated with large scale industrial development.

These papers reflect a broadly optimistic picture of recent southern history, one that Wright's concluding remarks endorse. Apart from the papers by Ferguson and Moore, the focus is on the technical and public policy aspects of postwar southern industrial development. There is little mention of labor organization or indeed of labor standards or industrial relation. Absent too, again with the exception of Ferguson's paper, is any sustained discussion of the race. But several of the essays, notably those by Patton, Colten, Boyd, Hulsemann, and Hooks ably illuminate important features of the region's changing economic life. Noting that the American South has neither retreated into regional isolation nor fallen into protracted ethnic conflict, Wright declares that "the South has followed [instead] the American road of boosterism." He adds that, "on the whole we can be grateful for that." (299)

Robert H. Zieger

Distinguished Professor of History

University of Florida

Latest book: America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
 

*****
International Review of Social History. May 15, 2002

Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Pp. ix + 264. ISBN 0-252-06933-1

Brian Kelly argues that those primarily responsible for the promulgation and exploitation of racial antagonism in the labor relations of the Alabama coal fields during the first two decades of the twentieth century were the mine operators and other business interests, along with civic and political elites, both white and black. White miners and trade unionists, he readily acknowledges, embraced white supremacy and segregation. But when miners sought through the agency of the United Mine Workers (UMW) to improve their material conditions and free themselves from arbitrary social control in the coal camps, common class interests trumped racial antagonism. While neither the white rank and file nor the national UMW leadership abandoned white supremacy, Kelly believes that "nowhere in the early twentieth-century South were the traditions of racial protocol challenged more forcefully than in the Alabama coalfields." (188)

Based on resourceful and exhaustive research in corporate, governmental, and labor materials, Kelly's account of race and labor in the Alabama coalfields joins Daniel Letwin's The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (1998) in chronicling the struggle for union in the modern South. Letwin's book, however, concentrates on the period culminating in the UMW's 1908 strike defeat whereas Kelley focuses attention on the post-strike efforts of employers to create a stable, union-free environment. Race, Class, and Power provides rich detail on the efforts of leading Birmingham-area firms, notably Tennessee Coal and Iron, to create and maintain a labor force that was at once skilled, efficient, and docile. While black mine workers were considered inferior in intelligence and productivity, racial discrimination and the repression ubiquitous in the turn-of-the-century South enabled operators to keep wage rates low, a crucial consideration in a region whose coal veins required labor intensive exploitation. Even as they recruited black workers and exploited racial antagonisms to keep miners in line and their wages low, TCI and other leading operators attempted to stabilize the coal camps through programs of welfare capitalism, sponsoring churches, schools, and medical services designed to provide a better deal for black miners than was available in the cotton fields or in the urban trades. These programs, in which members of the Birmingham area's small black middle class were prominent, invariably encouraged dependence on the coal operators and discouraged dissent, union sentiment, or overly ambitious hopes of individual advance. Both the chronic repression and the welfare programs rested upon and sought to sustain the prevailing white supremacist racial order.

The culmination of Kelly's book is the revival of the UMW during World War I and the great 1921 Alabama coalfields strike, another brutal defeat for the union. Fully cognizant of the limitations in the union's conception of interracial organization, Kelly nonetheless stresses the uniqueness of the UMW's efforts. The very logic of race-based exploitation impelled at least a minority of white workers to attempt to revive the South's sporadic, but by no means insubstantial, traditions of class-based, interracial social protest. To him, it seems perverse to single out a beleaguered labor organization for reflecting attitudes and adopting policies that often short-changed black members. What other agency or institution in the progressive era South even contemplated interracial activism-the churches? The business community? The press? Academia? Moreover, in Kelly's rendering, white miners and UMW organizers were capable on occasion of transcending narrow calculations of self-interest in their recruitment of and collaboration with black miners.

Race, Class, and Power joins in the debate over the relationship between organized labor and African Americans in modern America. In his extensive notes in particular, Kelly takes issue with the "wage of whiteness" school of analysis, as well as with the related perspective of union critic Herbert Hill. For all the UMW's limitations, Kelly believes, the miners'union helped keep alive a sense of class-based interracial struggle that, despite the defeats in 1908 and 1921, bore fruit in the CIO upheaval of the 1930s. In his stress on employers' responsibility for promoting and sustaining a subordinative social order he also challenges those who see in "free market" capitalism a profit-seeking logic that benefitted black workers. Progressive-era unions, as Kelly's scathing account of the racial politics of Birmingham's craft unions unflinchingly demonstrates, all too often reflected and endorsed the era's racism. But in the end, at least in the Alabama coalfields, it was so-called "enlightened" employers who both defended and exploited the structures of racial subordination, and the UMW alone that provided an outlet for black activism and a glimpse, however fleeting, of genuine bi-racial progress.
 

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida
 

15 May 2002

******

For Labor History. Submitted c. May 1, 2002

_Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class_

Thaddeus Russell, 2001

New York: Alfred A. Knopf

pp. xii + 272 [Price not indicated]
 

_Out of the Jungle_ is less a biography of Teamster leader James Hoffa than a cautionary tale for militant unionists. After a brief discussion of Hoffa's hard-scrabble early years, the book concentrates on outlining and explaining the reasons for Hoffa's success in winning impressive material gains for union members. While duly noting the violent and even criminal tactics that Hoffa and his associates used, Russell stresses the critical role of union competition and Hoffa's ability to exploit it, in securing good contracts for workers. He is less troubled by Hoffa's methods than by the activities of union leaders he labels as "corporatists"--notably Walter Reuther, Philip Murray, and Sidney Hillman--who attempted to build a "responsible" labor movement in collaboration with governmental and political elites.

According to Russell, confrontations between rival unions seeking to organize or represent workers were (and still are) salutary. Faced with aggressive competition, union leaders are forced to outbid their rivals for the support of an aroused rank and file. Inter-union competition translates into better contracts for ordinary workers, who are little concerned with the methods that organizers employ. Russell returns repeatedly to this essential point, and to its converse, the view that lack of competition breeds bureaucracy and complacency. Thus, for example, Michigan workers of the 1930s and 1940s profited from IBT-CIO rivalry in Detroit's food processing, bottling, warehousing, and retail trades, just as United Parcel Workers benefitted in 1997 when then-IBT president Ron Carey was forced to fight aggressively in an eventually futile effort to stave off the challenge posed by James P. Hoffa.

The most intriguing section of the book is Russell's detailed account of the elder Hoffa's rise to power in Michigan in the 1930s and 1940s. Students of the UAW and the rise of the CIO have paid little attention to the parallel growth of the IBT in these years, treating the two narratives of labor's resurgence as separate stories. In contrast, Russell sees the struggle for control of the trucking, service, processing, and construction trades in the Motor City as the fulcrum of modern U.S. labor history. In the author's rendering, militants in the early CIO sought to build upon early successes in mass production industries to challenge stodgy AFL unions in the building trades and in goods handling, retail, and transport. Through such vehicles as John L. Lewis's United Construction Workers Organizing Committee (UCWOC) and small affiliates such as the Wholesale and Retail Workers, CIO activists brought often-violent internecine industrial warfare to the city. These aggressive forays compelled the AFL to respond, with the surging Teamsters union serving as the spearhead. Hoffa's ruthlessness, tactical brilliance, and keen understanding of rank-and-file desires thrust him to the center of the fray and provided the impetus for his subsequent climb to power in the IBT.

Russell's narrative of IBT-CIO rivalry in the Motor City is open to question on several fronts. For example, he treats Lewis's Construction Workers' initiative as a serious challenge to the entrenched building trades, citing the UMW chief's appointment of his brother Dennie as its head and his funneling of large amounts of cash to this new organization as evidence. But the skimpy available records on the Construction Workers project suggest rather that it was intended as a gesture of retaliation for the AFL's chartering of a rival miners' union in Illinois and as a means of reclaiming for the UMW some of the money Lewis had expended in launching the CIO. By the time of the founding of the UCWOC in 1940 [Julie--I need to check this date and can't do it here], Lewis was already detaching himself from the CIO, a process that culminated in 1942, leaving the industrial union federation virtually bankrupt. Appointment of Dennie, a man of limited intelligence and no independent initiative, to head a campaign against the powerful building trades seemed to contemporary observers a clear indication of the marginality-indeed, the fecklessness-of the construction workers' initiative.

Russell paints a vivid picture of IBT-CIO conflict on the streets of wartime Detroit for rights to organize retail and goods-handling workers as well. It is true that the enthusiastic organizing drives of the early CIO did sweep large numbers of miscellaneous workers into the CIO. Local activists, working with the UAW and the Detroit Industrial Union Council, built an effective dairy workers union, whose president John Gibson went on to become Assistant Secretary of Labor under Harry Truman. In general, however, the CIO affiliates with theoretical jurisdiction in retail and related areas were weak, underfunded, and riven with factional rivalries. What Russell at times depicts as a struggle for the soul of the labor movement was in reality a minor side show to the main event in the Motor City, the building of the UAW.

Russell's pungent reinterpretation of wartime events in Detroit does offer an arresting alternative perspective to both the older industrial relations and more recent new left versions of early CIO history. In contrast, his treatment of the period of the heyday of Hoffa's power and influence is familiar and unexceptional, apart from the implicit approval that he bestows on the behavior of the Teamster leader. Russell never tires of comparing Hoffa's approach to union affairs to the so-called corporatist approach attributed to Reuther, who, along with racket-busting Robert Kennedy, becomes the foil for Russell's claims. There is no effort here actually to compare and contrast IBT and UAW contracts, nor is there sustained analysis of the putative advantages of union rivalry and its impact on workers' standards and union performance. Meanwhile, Russell's treatment of the corruption and embezzling that riddled the Hoffa-led Teamsters is perfunctory and incurious. Indeed, in Russell's way of thinking, Hoffa and his associates seem to bear little responsibility for the decline in public support for organized labor that followed revelations of these pathologies.

Indeed, the last third of the book is doubly disappointing. Despite the subtitle, there is nothing here about "the remaking of the American working class." The internal dynamics of the IBT receives little attention. Nowhere, for example, is Hoffa critic and progressive Teamster regional leader Harold Gibbons mentioned, nor is there any discussion of the changing ethnic and occupational composition of the post-1957 Teamsters. Charges that fat contracts in over-the-road trucking masked weak and ill-administered contracts in the expanding service, manufacturing, and processing sectors are not mentioned, let alone addressed. A reader would never know from this book what a substantial role the 1935 Motor Carriers Act played in permitting lucrative truckers' contracts, nor how devastating the new Carter-Reagan deregulation initiatives have been in eroding them.

Labor historians are not immune from the attractions of power and ruthlessness. The single-mindedness and lack of scruples of men such as Hoffa and John L. Lewis can seem refreshing when contrasted with the more nuanced and politically sophisticated perspectives of the Reuthers and Murrays. Russell seems to have settled in his own mind the question of whether a labor movement should aspire to ideals of honesty and public service, and the related one of whether those aspirations are compatible with improving workers' material standards. Flawed as it is, _Out of the Jungle_ asks readers to re-examine their own understandings of these important matters.

Robert H. Zieger

Distinguished Professor of History

University of Florida

***** LH, Summer, 02

Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001.
 

Heather Cox Richardson believes that historians have neglected the class-labor dimension of the retreat from Reconstruction. Leading Republicans initially saw the freedmen as exemplars of the free labor ideology that undergirded their notions of political economy, which rested on a belief in the harmony of interests of social classes. Released from the bonds of slavery, black men would readily adapt to the demands of a market economy by becoming diligent, provident, and ambitious workers, seeking the self-improvement that was possible only in a free labor regime. They would serve as examples to both indolent southerners and fractious northern white workers. Governmental intervention in their behalf would be brief, for the only protection that the sturdy republican worker, black or white, needed was the ballot.

Alas for these expectations, as the Reconstruction era unfolded Republicans grew increasingly disillusioned. Northern observers all too often validated southern whites' complaints that the freedmen were feckless, irresponsible, and vindictive. Even worse was the former slaves' demand that the federal government continue to intervene in southern political, economic, and social life to protect them and provide opportunities for the politically ambitious among them. For growing numbers of Republican editors, social observers, and politicians, the former slaves were proving in their own way as dangerous as were the obstreperous labor unionists and striking workers whose protests called class harmony into question. Republicans were disappointed in both restive laborites and ungrateful blacks, coming to regard both separately as dangerous challengers to the free labor world view that they believed had been vindicated in the Civil War.

An increasingly marginalized band of Stalwart Republicans continued to champion the rights of southern blacks, but the party's center of gravity shifted decisively toward sympathy with gentlemanly southern elites. One critical episode was the fight over public finance in South Carolina in the early 1870s, wherein white leaders persuaded many northerners that the Republican legislature was advancing confiscatory tax plans so as to exact revenge against former slaveholders and as a means of support for wild-eyed schemes of public provision designed to benefit black politicians and their work-shirking supporters. The fight over the 1875 Civil Rights bill was another milestone, as more and more Republican editors and politicians attacked federal legislative protection for blacks as special interest legislation. Southern blacks, these men believed, would gain access to the region's educational and economic opportunities, and would gain the personal respect they craved, when, and only when, they foreswore claims to special treatment, ignored demagogues who waved the bloody shirt, and buckled down to honest labor. By 1889-90 when Congress debated and defeated the Federal Elections Bill, proposed by a die-hard cadre of Stalwarts in the wake of wide-spread voting irregularities and terroristic attacks on black voters, most Republicans were content to let the white South conduct racial affairs in their own way, free of oppressive federal oversight. Alarmed by the labor unrest of the 1870s and 1880s, Republicans had come to see the South's black masses as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution.

Richardson's method is old-fashioned. She charts the shifting views of Republicans largely through intense examination of newspaper articles and editorials, as supplemented with politicians' speeches and debates. She makes a strong case that the vigorous partisan press of the late 19^th century constitutes a reliable register of shifting public ideology. The Death of Reconstruction also exhibits an impressive grasp of the diverse historiography of the post-bellum period and its notes provide a useful running commentary on key interpretive perspectives.

Although Richardson stresses that the economic changes and labor activism that punctuated the Gilded Age strongly influenced Republican views on the freedmen, these developments are off stage in The Death of Reconstruction. Nowhere does the author attempt to link black demands for racial justice, on the one hand, directly with the rising clamor of industrial workers for social justice, on the other. One of the tragedies of the Reconstruction and late nineteenth century period was the failure of white laborites to join hands with oppressed black workers and farmers, but discussion of this failure is not part of Richardson's agenda. She does briefly consider episodes of inter-racial agrarian activism but the book is mostly about the attitudes of Republican leaders toward blacks, not about the theme of joint worker-freedman dissent itself. Largely absent are the voices of the southern black workers and farmers about whom her public figures wrote and spoke so copiously.

The Death of Reconstruction is effective in charting the postbellum course of free labor ideology. It persuasively establishes the links that Republican leaders made between the turbulent politics of the Reconstruction-era south and the increasingly disputatious labor problem. On the other hand, Richardson is not persuasive in advancing the largely unstated notion that class concerns trumped racial considerations in shaping Republican ideology and policies. If it was true that editorialists and politicians turned against the freedmen because of their alleged deviation from free labor dicta, it seems clear even in these pages that deeply racist assumptions powerfully shaped the Republican elites' perceptions of events in the South and caused them to privilege the views of their erstwhile enemies over those of their putative allies in assessing developments in the former Confederacy.

One of The Death of Reconstruction's virtues is its able exposition of the views of those members of the black elite who largely agreed with critics of the mass politics of black Reconstruction. Richardson closes with a thoughtful examination of Booker T. Washington as a spokesman for black free labor views. Washington's speeches and writings, notably Up from Slavery, she holds, were aimed at northern white elites. They endorsed class harmony and aligned Washington and his cohorts as successful practitioners of free labor with those who were turning away from civil rights measures. In his own version of the "talented tenth," Washington looked to the small cadre of successful black entrepreneurs, professional men, and publicists for race leadership, thus in effect endorsing both the increasingly conservative views of Republican leaders and, by default, the southern white attack on black suffrage and political pretensions.

The Death of Reconstruction is a thoughtful and clearly written account of an important ideological shift that took place in the late nineteenth century. Interpreting Republican racial policies and politics through the lens of free labor ideology provides a valuable perspective on these familiar events. While it will not supplant David Montgomery's Beyond Equality (1965) as an examination of the class-labor nexus of the Reconstruction era, Richardson's book is a valuable addition to the literature.
 

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

***** American Communist History. Written September 2002.

Robert C. Cottrell. Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union. NY. Columbia University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv + 504.

Roger Nash Baldwin is a thoughtful biographical study of the long-term leader of the American Civil Liberties Union. It is based on extensive research in the Baldwin Papers, ACLU historical files, oral history interviews, and relevant secondary sources. While focusing on Baldwin's long and diverse public career, it also treats his intriguing personal and familial life. It is a good guide to civil liberties controversies during the period 1917-1981 while also providing a revealing look at the life styles of the almost-rich-and-famous among the legal liberal left during this period.

Robert C. Cottrell stresses the contradictory nature of Roger Baldwin's personality. A fierce defender of individual rights, he was a harsh and often arbitrary employer as ACLU executive director. A First Amendment champion, he often made public statements that put claims of social justice and redistribution of wealth over those of free speech. He was an ardent advocate of the downtrodden while at the same time reveling in the affluent style of life his family background, Harvard education, and marriage to Evelyn Preston, a woman of considerable means, provided. A sharp critic of assaults on civil liberties, he nonetheless cultivated close personal relations with the nation's top law enforcement authorities.

After beginning his public life as a social worker in St. Louis, Baldwin came to New York City in the spring of 1917 to assume the secretaryship of the American Union Against Militarism. I n July, he took on the directorship of the its Civil Liberties Bureau and subsequently of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which in turn became in 1920 the ACLU. From then until 1950, he served as ACLU executive director. After his retirement, he remained active in the Union's affairs, representing the ACLU in a variety of international human rights organizations and forums. He remained a vigorous outdoorsman and public figure almost until his death at age 97 in 1981.

Baldwin seems to have been little afflicted with self-doubt. His upbringing, education, and disposition led him to expect to be treated both seriously and generously, and so he usually was. Thus, although during World War I he spent seven months in county jails in New Jersey as a draft resister, jailors showed him remarkable kindness and leniency. Indeed, in contrast to the horrific experiences of fellow draft resisters incarcerated in military prisons, Baldwin's jail time was almost idyllic. He spent his days reading, corresponding, gardening, and organizing fellow inmates into dramatic troupes and discussion groups. Throughout his career, even though federal authorities kept regular files on his activities, he cultivated high-ranking officials and often carried on cordial relations with the very men who were in charge of harassing or investigating him.

Baldwin's political duality was particularly evident in the inter-war period. His public statements sometimes relegated freedom of speech, assembly, and the like to subordinate roles in what he sometimes saw as the central drama of the modern world, namely the supplanting of capitalism by some form of socialist or cooperative economic organization. At the same time, however, the ACLU actually functioned as an essentially civil libertarian body, defending Klansmen and other authoritarians as well as labor organizers, Communists, and other left-dissenters.

Baldwin's relationship to Communism in the interwar period was particularly perplexing. Like many on the World War I-era left, he hoped that the Russian Revolution would lead to social transformation throughout the West. Although well-informed by Emma Goldman, among others, of the new Soviet regime's repressive character, Baldwin continued to cut the Soviet Union a good deal of slack. He acknowledged the regime's violations of human rights but feared giving aid and comfort to critics on the right. At least until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939, Baldwin continued to believe that the Soviet regime's expressed commitment to egalitarianism and social control of economic activity entitled it to sympathetic treatment of its human rights record.

Cottrell does not explain why it was the Pact-and not, for example, the Stalin purges-that effectively disillusioned Baldwin. But he does make clear that once Baldwin had decided that the USSR was no longer potentially a positive force, he embraced anti-Communism with the same insouciant enthusiasm he had earlier displayed in exculpation of Soviet pathologies. To be sure, he continued to defend the rights of Communists and others caught in the toils of the Cold War era's legislative and administrative repressive apparatus. But he played a key role in the ACLU board's ouster in 1940 of Communist Party member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. He approved of the anti-Communist orientation of US foreign policy, serving for a time a critical, but sympathetic, observer of its nation-building efforts in South Vietnam in the late 1950s. As was the case early in his civil liberties career, Baldwin continued to rely on his social standing, Harvard background, and wide network of contacts to cultivate direct access to public authorities such as General Douglas MacArthur (in his capacity as Supreme Commander in post-war Japan) and FBI director Hoover, believing that knotty questions involving civil liberties could best be worked out through gentlemanly agreements.

Cottrell's civil libertarian values are clear and his criticism of some of Baldwin's compromises and illusions are sharp, but he is never less than fair in his judgments. While the prose is generally clear and accessible, at times (for example, in his discussion of Baldwin's involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti and Scottsboro cases) Cottrell takes the reader through the details of lengthy exchanges of correspondence when a more focused discussion would better serve. There are factual slips that, individually minor, collectively cast doubt on the author's familiarity with the pre-World War II liberal-labor-left milieu. Thus, the IWW becomes the "International Workers of the World" (p. 66); socialist Juliet Poyntz is Juliet "Payntz" (p. 145); Amos R. E. Pinchot is confused with brother Gifford (p. 242); and Sidney Hillman becomes "a leading labor lawyer and top figure in the Socialist Party" (130). Despite these infelicities, however, Roger Nash Baldwin is a significant addition to the literature on civil liberties and on the American left in the twentieth century. Material on how the well-heeled left lived adds to the value of this worthy book.
 

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

*****

Written March, 2003, for Reviews in American History; published September 2003.
c. Robert H. Zieger, April 3, 2003

Confronting the "Tough Stuff" in American History⁽¹⁾

Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 2002. x + 306 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. [I don't' know the price].

From the beginning of the republic, and even before, elite-generated ideas about race and gender decisively shaped definitions of American citizenship and labor. Through the 19^th century and into the 20^th, statesmen, legal experts, and cultural authorities influenced other whites to embrace these definitions and the institutions that embodied them, offering in exchange a share in the privileged status that whiteness and maleness brought. Even so, the actual practice of citizenship and the workings of labor market were far from uniform throughout the country. Thus, in the period 1870 to1930, ethnic Mexicans experienced civic marginalization and economic exploitation in different ways in the Southwest than did African Americans in the Confederate South. Meanwhile, in Hawaii still another regime of subordination and resistance emerged from the interaction of Anglos and Japanese migrants there. In each of these areas, local circumstances, differing applications of supposedly universal legal doctrines and cultural understandings, and the everyday behavior of ordinary people operated to create diverse, though always subordinative, race-gender-labor-citizenship regimes.

Unequal Freedom offers a fluent, thoughtful, and engaging account of the ways in which racialized and genderized labor markets and citizenship patterns functioned in these three areas. Readers will likely be most familiar with the story of racial subordination in the South during the era of Jim Crow and least with that of Japanese and other Asian migrants in Hawaii. All, however, will profit from Glenn's careful accounts of all three regions, based as they are on her extensive reading in the historical, anthropological, and sociological literature as well as in published documentary sources

Glenn emphasizes three themes common in all of these cases. She highlights the repressive and subordinative policies and practices that implemented racial and gender hierarchies; the distinctive local and regional character of the institutions and practices, in education, law enforcement, and the use of public space, that implemented racial and gender subordination; and the determination of victimized groups to resist dominant groups' claims of superiority and to create organs of protest and community advancement. Thus, Unequal Freedom is both an indictment of America's historic mistreatment of those defined as ineligible for citizenship and an edifying story of human agency and activism.

Glenn lays the groundwork for her three case studies in two broad chapters outlining American approaches to both citizenship and labor during the country's first century. Through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, liberal doctrines of citizenship excluded women and, increasingly, blacks. Political and cultural leaders "constructed a fundamental opposition between independence and dependence," reserving only for those they deemed economically and morally independent the benefits of citizenship. (21) Thus they excluded women and blacks, the former because of their putatively dependent domestic circumstances, the latter of course because of their enslavement. Indeed, by the 1850s, legal doctrine and everyday practice were stripping even "free" blacks of citizenship claims, as new state constitutions narrowed eligibility for voting along racial lines. The relationship between citizenship, or lack thereof, and labor was reciprocal-since blacks and women were not worthy of citizenship, their work, no matter how necessary, could not be regarded as dignified or independent. And since by definition they performed no autonomous and independence-gaining labor, they were unworthy of citizenship.

The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the onset of large scale capitalist industrialism reshuffled the deck but did not change the rules. Indeed, at one point Glenn makes the seemingly startling claim that "blacks actually lost ground in the nineteenth century" (32), although it would appear that she means the first sixty-two years of the century, since later she acknowledges that "blacks probably had more genuine political influence during Reconstruction than at any time before or after" until the 1960s. (37) And she also notes that "Between 1865 and 1885 fourteen states passed civil rights laws that banned discrimination in public accommodations." (37)

Just as political and constitutional changes would appear to have provided the legal basis for improvement in the lot of African Americans, in theory expanding capitalism's demand for efficient allocation of resources should have freed labor markets of racial and gender barriers.⁽²⁾ But in fact industrial capitalists found much of benefit in the maintenance of divisions among the working class. Thus the ideology of free labor, in both its political and economic aspects, quickly came to buttress exploitative labor systems that flourished in the wake of the Civil War. Indeed, liberal jurists found ways in which to justify even openly coercive regimes of debt peonage, contract labor, and share cropping.

By the turn of the 20^th century, if anything racist doctrines were stronger than ever. The continued subordination of African Americans provided a template that employers, "white" workers, and the politicians, editorialists, lawyers, and jurists who spoke for them applied to other victims of subordination. This was so as it related to the status of ethnic Mexicans in the emerging political economy of the Southwest as well as to the growing use of Asian, and especially Japanese, migrant labor in Hawaii. Indeed, in a theme only touched on in Unequal Freedom, racialized doctrines of citizenship, with their collateral implications for labor usage, bore sharply as well on new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, even as they had a half-century before on their predecessors from Ireland.

A strength of Unequal Freedom is that Glenn is not content with outlining the formal rules, doctrines, and strictures that undergirded the race-and-gender based system of exploitation. Her examinations of the South, the Southwest, and Hawaii identify the various permutations on the common theme peculiar to each area and to various chronological phases of the story. Thus, for example, in the Southwest, Anglo elites had a difficult time defining precisely who was to be subordinated, since there were many different subcategories of Spanish-speaking residents, some with property and civil rights guaranteed under the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo. Moreover, long term nuevomexicanos identified themselves as the descendants of hardy pioneer stock, entitled to full rights of citizenship and public recognition. These Spanish-speaking elites joined Anglos in denigrating recent migrants from Mexico, people of mixed Spanish-Native American heritage, and the ranch hands, miners, and sugar beet workers who performed so much of the work necessary for the Southwest's entry into the modern capitalist economy.⁽³⁾

The story of racial subordination in Hawaii also had its distinctive features. Division within the Japanese community, between Okinawans and people from the Japanese home islands for example, created internal fissures even as Japanese laborers built an impressive infrastructure of Buddhist temples and Japanese language schools. Large scale strikes in 1909 and again in 1920 asserted economic and cultural claims as the Japanese forged an increasingly articulate and effective political presence in the Islands, simultaneously claiming full citizenship and labor rights on the one hand, and the right to sustain their Japanese cultural identity on the other.

Gender is central to her analysis in all three regions. The labor of black, Mexican, and Japanese women in the fields, residences, and workshops of white elites was critical in the exploitative political economy of the South, the Southwest, and Hawaii. Moreover, women in all three areas played key roles in building and sustaining community institutions, furthering job actions and protests, and resisting elite cultural authority. Meanwhile, women had to combat Anglo policies and attitudes that made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation while at the same time coping with the efforts of males within the ethnic community to drive them to the margins of public life in emulation of or conformity to Anglo gender roles.

Female activism facilitated the subordinated groups' rejection of the harsh individualism of mainstream American liberalism. Southern blacks, ethnic Mexicans, and Hawaiian Japanese found reliance on community and mutualistic activity a necessary antidote to exploitative white values and practices. Communal and solidaristic efforts to cope with the rigors of discrimination and exploitation in turn validated female activism and leadership. At the same time, however, within each subordinated group debates raged between those who saw advancement as most productively pursued through emulation of elite-generated rules and values and those who urged resistance and cultural autonomy. Glenn's tracing of these internal conflicts is both astute and suggestive.

The three core chapters on the South, Southwest, and Hawaii are succinct, thoughtful, and well-crafted. In other places, however, Glenn allows abstract formulations and their ally, the passive voice, to take over. This is especially evident in her chapter on citizenship and labor after the Civil War. Here the powerful men whose legendary ruthlessness built the foundations of modern industrialism disappear behind subjectless prose. Thus, women "were excluded from the category of free labor" (56-57) and "the capitalist labor market that emerged was fundamentally organized by race and gender." (72) Even the agents she does identify are abstractions rather than people or organizations. Thus: "The dominant culture calculated . . ." (75); "This model helped reconcile. . ." (74); "A new prescribed division of labor by gender arose. . . ." (74) Glenn's writing here, coupled with her celebration of the agency of subordinated groups, has the curious effect of making the powerful appear passive and, by implication, free of responsibility while endowing only their victims with agency.

Unequal Freedom exhibits a key intellectual and ethical ambiguity. In her sharp critique of America's liberal values and ideologies, Glenn at times seems to suggest that there is something inherent in America's public ideology that requires subordination of "others" along racial and gender lines. Thus, for example, she is sharply critical of Tocqueville (and by extension his recent celebrants), for failing to understand that "inequality [was]. . . central to the American political system." She also takes Gunnar Myrdal to task for believing that "widespread racial segregation and discrimination. . .[were] contradictory to Americans' professed beliefs" (48-49), seemingly endorsing the views of Marxist and feminist critics who see racial and gender subordination as intrinsic to American liberalism's justification and perpetuation of "material inequality" and who hold that "exclusion of women is inherent in liberal assumptions." (50)

Yet she also appears to agree with "many feminist critics [who] have acknowledged that classic liberal contract theory. . . has the potential for challenging all forms of hierarchical authority" and have concluded "that classic liberal contract theory. . . has the potential for challenging all forms of hierarchical authority. . . ." (50) The section in Unequal Freedom on the successful use by the Japanese in Hawaii of familiar liberal tropes and egalitarian rhetoric would seem to support the more optimistic reading of the evidence, as would Glenn's peroration near the end of the book where she invokes, seemingly unironically, notions of "fundamental American ideals. . . American concepts of justice and freedom. . . the American language of rights." (262) Here indeed she comes close to saying what practically all public commentators ritualistically say nowadays, namely that America's promise of freedom and equality is a vibrant, although unfortunately unfulfilled, aspiration.

That a book dealing with the "tough stuff" in American history might reflect a certain ambiguity on this point is not surprising. Many years ago Robert Frost captured this American dilemma in his poem "The Black Cottage":

That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's.

What did he mean? Of course the easy way

Is to decide it simply isn't true.

It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.

But never mind, the Welshman got it planted

Where it will trouble us a thousand years.

Each age will have to reconsider it.⁽⁴⁾
 
 

Notes

1. The title is taken from James Horton, "Dealing with the 'Tough Stuff' in American History," lecture, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, March 18, 2002.

2. Indeed, David Bernstein argues that freedom of contract doctrines associated with entrepreneurial capitalism did tend to have these effects when not compromised by liberal-labor interventions in labor markets. See David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (2001).

3. See Charles Montgomery, The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande (2002).

4. Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage," as quoted by Henry Wriston, "The Individual," Goals for Americans: The Report of the President's Commission on National Goals (1960), 38.
 

Robert H. Zieger is Distinguished Professor of History, University of Florida. His most recent publication is "The Paradox of Plenty: The Advertising Council and the Post-Sputnik Crisis," forthcoming in Advertising and Society Review, an on-line journal available at: http://www.aef.com/content/journal/

*****

Review for Labor History, written May, 2003
 

Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980

KENNETH D. DURR, 2003

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

pp. 304, [price not indicated]
 

In Behind the Backlash, Kenneth Durr argues that racism is an insufficient explanation for the conservative political behavior of Baltimore's white blue collar workers in the 1960s and 1970s. He believes that the cautious values and aspirations that underlay white working-class political attitudes and behavior in Baltimore remained constant during the period 1940 to 1980. The steel workers, garment workers, chemical workers, auto workers, and other blue collarites who populated industrial sections of the city sought steady employment, a modest governmentally provided safety net, home ownership in ethnically and socially stable communities, and churches, schools, and public services rooted in their neighborhoods and responsive to local people. Whether they were long-term Baltimoreans, second or third-generation immigrants, or migrants from Appalachia, Baltimore's white workers were suspicious of economic and political elites and showed little interest in upward mobility. So long as the labor movement and the Democratic party appeared to further these modest ambitions, white working class Baltimoreans remained loyal to the New Deal coalition. But when it seemed, as it had come to by the mid-1960s, that liberals, labor leaders, and policy elites were privileging the claims of African Americans and rewarding even violent and destructive methods of protest, they proved dramatically responsive to the law-and-order appeals of Governor George Wallace and, later, Ronald Reagan.

To be sure, from the start of Durr's story during World War II, evidences of white working-class prejudice were not hard to find. On the job and in the neighborhoods, white workers and their families assumed the privileges of whiteness as a matter of course. They resented and resisted the egalitarianism of CIO activists and civil rights crusaders and protested, sometimes with brief flurries of localized violence, the incursion of blacks into formerly all-white neighborhoods. But Baltimore experienced no racial pogroms such as those that rocked Tulsa, Detroit, Chicago, Omaha, and other cities in the first half of the century. Race-baiting demagogues surfaced now and then, but by and large white Baltimoreans exhibited little of the virulent racism that afflicted other cities, South and North, in the post-World War II period.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, even conflict over school desegregation and housing did not trigger intransigent hostility. True, white Baltimoreans defended the concept of neighborhood schools but they accepted the entry of black students into previously all-white schools. Despite occasional violent episodes, they were more likely to blame predatory realtors for blockbusting than to attack incoming blacks. They voiced no particular ideology of racial superiority. They may have reaped the material wages of whiteness but did not require the putative psychological benefits of racial subordination; these were people who did not require a negative "other" for the propagation or maintenance of their identity.

In Durr's telling, blue collar electoral support for Wallace, first evidenced in the 1964 Maryland Democratic primary, grew more out of neighborhood struggles over highway construction, urban renewal, rising crime rates, and taxes than it did out of racial antagonism as such. Civic action groups emerged in the struggles against community-destroying freeways and redevelopment projects that threatened traditional neighborhoods. These grass-roots coalitions used the previous generation's union-organizing experience and employed traditional notions of democratic rights. To be sure, local activists sometimes expressed concerns over housing values and rising crime rates were in racial terms. Politicians such as George Mahoney (a Democrat whom the relatively liberal Spiro Agnew defeated in the 1966 gubernatorial election) and Wallace exploited on implicit racial appeals in their successful efforts to win blue collar votes. But Durr is critical of contemporary politicians and civic elites, and of historians, whose focus on the (illegitimate) racial dimension of white workers' civic activism has obscured their (legitimate) efforts to defend their neighborhoods and cultural identities. In his view, the working-class Reagan Democrat, who surfaced with a vengeance in 1980 and 1984, was no sudden phenomenon but rather the product of decades of the neglect of and skewed social priorities of white workers' erstwhile partners in the New Deal coalition.

Durr points to the career of Barbara Mikulski, currently one of Maryland's United States senators, as embodying the positive values of white working-class protest politics. Mikulski's rise began in the late 1960s in the Southeast Community Organization (SECO), one of a number of civic organizations that combined defense of neighborhoods against the city planners and road builders with prideful rediscovery of citizens' ethnic identities. Her sensitivity to the concerns of her white blue collar constituents has enabled her to retain working-class support for her broadly liberal public agenda. Mikulski, however, remains an exception, as Democrats remain unable to find a politically effective balance between the imperatives of race and class.

Behind the Backlash is more about communities and neighborhoods than it is about work places. Indeed, Durr's treatment of the aftermath of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in Baltimore's steel industry (184-86), while suggestive of the legitimate bases of white workers' anger and frustration, is truncated and confusing. He does a better job with his other brief example of the post-1964 job-site racial fallout, longshoring (186-90). The point that he does drive home in both examples is that in promoting programs of racial restitution through drastic changes in the seniority system and job access, "Liberal policymakers were . . . unwilling and unable to challenge wealthy and even middle-class Americans" but were all "too content to let working-class individuals discharge the debt." (191) Surprisingly, Judith Stein's outstanding examination of the steel industry's racial dilemmas, Running Steel, Running America (1997), which illuminates these issues in considerable detail and in broad macro-economic context, does not appear in Durr's otherwise-extensive bibliography.

Behind the Backlash is implicitly a critique of the "wages of whiteness" approach to white working-class history. If at times Durr seems to minimize or lose sight of the rage and frustration of Baltimore's black citizens, his book restores agency to white ethnics and helps to rescue them from the default obloquy to which race-conscious liberals and historians have too often consigned them. Stronger on neighborhood and political issues than on work-related themes, the book gives white workers and their families, suffering from the city's industrial decline and its social deterioration, a vigorous voice. Though Durr does not announce any overt political agenda himself-and indeed seems pessimistic about the possibilities of reforging a version of the black-labor coalition of yesterday-Behind the Backlash can encourage progressives to work harder to identify the common ground that class and race sometimes occupy in the political economy of post-industrial America.
 
 
 

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida
 
 

*****
For Labor; submitted August 29, 2003

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82
NAJIA AARIM-HERIOT, 2003
Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press
pp.  xiv + 289, $39.95 (cloth)

    Najia Aarim-Heriot argues that the roots of the discrimination and subordination inflicted Chinese immigrants in the 19th century lay not in fears of economic competition but rather in widely held, free-standing racist and racialist ideas among political and cultural elites, as well as among the voting public.  She further contends that governmental policies and public discourse relating to the Chinese played a major role in undermining the egalitarian possibilities created by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.  Chinese Immigrants. . . bristles with excerpts from all sorts of racist diatribes appearing in the public prints, congressional debates and hearings, court decisions, and presidential speeches, the sources that the author uses most extensively.  It provides a useful guide to the various municipal, state, and federal measures designed to curb or terminate Chinese immigration, although in the end the direct connection she posits between the rise of anti-Chinese legislation and the abortion of Reconstruction remains unconvincing.
 Concerned as she primarily is with public discourse and legislative debate, Aarim-Heriot pays little attention to the lived experience of either Chinese or African Americans.  Nor does she dwell on episodes of physical violence, such as the Rock Springs massacre of 1885.  While duly noting the pernicious activities of California’s Workingman’s Party and alluding to rising anti-black violence in the post-Reconstruction South, she is mainly concerned with the politicians who turned their back on the egalitarian possibilities of the successful struggle against slavery and, in the end, re-racialized American citizenship.  Repeatedly, she stresses that economic arguments against the importation of Chinese labor were hollow and usually insincere, serving as a convenient mask for the underlying racism that animated both local anti-Asian activists on the West Coast and policymakers and legislators in Sacramento and Washington.

    Implicitly, the Reconstruction Amendments and related civil rights legislation offered an opportunity for Americans to abandon the racist foundations of citizenship and to usher in a new egalitarian civic order.  For all their limitations, they posited the possibility of a non-racialized conception of citizenship.  In debate over revision in the Nationalization Act in 1870, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner sought to advance this expansive and generous position, introducing amendments that would have eliminated the word white from the 1790 statute that formed the basis of US nationalization law.  In Sumner’s view, such a move was a direct extension of the redefinition of American-ness that the Civil War and the abolition of slavery had brought and in Aarim-Heriot’s view, Sumner’s eloquent stand held out the possibility of national redemption from the flawed conception of citizenship she ably outlines in her first chapter.

    Defeat of Sumner’s proposals, however, marked the beginning of the end, not only of a more expansive definition of citizenship generally but of meaningful Republican efforts to advance the rights of freedpeople.  Votes over Sumner’s proposals exposed deep fissures in the ranks of the GOP, with many Republicans in effect repudiating the egalitarian implications of their anti-slavery and unionist commitments.  This key debate not only showed the limits of Republicans’ commitment to equality; it paved the way for the reinscription of the Negro as being in effect, if not in legal theory, outside the circle of citizenship.  Sumner, argues Aarim-Heriot, had tried repeatedly to “lay the blueprint for a real social revolution” but most fellow Republicans (to say nothing, of course of the frankly racist Democrats) voted “to keep the foundational whiteness of American identity,” as indicated not only by their failure to support Sumner’s pro-Chinese measures but also increasingly by “their vacillating policy toward black Americans.  The intentional exclusion of the Chinese from the purview of the new naturalization statute,” she contends, “constituted a critical retreat.”  As a handful of genuine radicals warned, “this measure would pave the way for a reconsideration of the status of African Americans.  In that process, rather than the Negroization of the Chinese question, it would be the Negro question that would be ‘Asianized.’” (155)

    Although the specific connection between the “Chinese question” and the “Negro question” is central to Aarim-Heriot, it remains elusive and even problematic at times.  There is little doubt, of course, that racial prejudice North and South, East and West undergirded the simultaneous subordination of Chinese and African Americans in Gilded Age America.  And Aarim-Heriot is persuasive in showing how anti-Chinese sentiment expressed in congressional debate served as a surrogate for anti-black feeling.  The turn in Congress in the 1870s toward ever harsher treatment of the Chinese was often coupled, even in speeches by Republican legislators, with references to the “failure” of the experiment in granting degraded blacks the rights of citizenship.  Still, at times critics of the Chinese were careful to distinguish their case from that of African Americans.  The latter, after all, were long-term residents of the United States.  They were Christians.  They had fought in the country’s wars, most notably the Civil War itself.  There was no necessary reason why measures to curtail Chinese entry into the country, even if based on explicitly racial grounds, would compromise the status or rights of African Americans.

    Of course, in the end, victimization of the two groups proceeded apace, although largely along parallel lines.  The national commitment to equality of the Civil War era–always tenuous and instrumental in any event–was woefully unequal to the task of civic empowerment of the freedpeople.  Likewise, the occasional judicial decisions and congressional criticisms of mistreatment of Chinese immigrants were almost never couched in terms of abstract egalitarianism but rather centered on practical objections to discrimination and restriction.  At times the two streams of racist sentiment overlapped and in the 1870s virtually universal sentiment against the Chinese did serve to further weaken increasingly feeble legislative efforts to defend southern blacks faced with “redemption.”  But while Aarim-Heriot is successful in demonstrating the common roots of anti-black and anti-Asiatic racism in Gilded Age America, her claims for the central importance of the latter in shaping public attitudes and policies with respect to African Americans remain more suggestive than convincing.

Robert H. Zieger
University of Florida

*****
For the Georgia Historical Quarterly; written January, 2004
 

Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South. By Robert Rodgers Korstad. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 556. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. ISBN 0-8078-2781-9 cloth. ISBN 0-8078-5454-9 paper.)
 

Based on a remarkable array of sources, including dozens of oral histories, Civil Rights Unionism is an important addition to the literature on the 20^th century black working class. Robert Korstad chronicles the rise and fall of organized labor in Winston-Salem's tobacco factories and points to the destruction of Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural Workers (FTA) Local 22 in the late 1940s as a turning point in the history of civil rights in the post-war South. Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, owners and managers of the R. J. Reynolds plants in the city relied on racial division, fierce anti-unionism, and episodic paternalism to retain control both of the work place and civic life. In the 1940s, however, a potent local union, born of militant activism on the part of low-wage African Americans, effective leadership on the part of the FTA, and the positive influence of the federal government through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), emerged to challenge the white power structure in the factories and in the community. Developments in Winston-Salem, Korstad believes, illustrate the operations of the "Southern Front," his term for the broad coalition of race and class liberals and radicals, who, with the aid of new instruments of federal power, sought decisive change in the New Deal-era South. Bi-racial and ardently democratic, Local 22 was a victim of reactionary local elites, who took full advantage of early Cold War hysteria to root out this effort to bring racial equality and class justice to the North Carolina city.

Korstad is particularly successful in the first third of the book in describing and analyzing both the contours of corporate, white supremicist power and the growth of autonomous black religious and civic institutions. His chapter on "Social Learning,"stresses the role of the black churches, whose congregations and, in many cases, clergy, were drawn from the ranks of tobacco workers, in providing the social experience that later fueled union development and civil rights advance. At the same time, the efforts of Winston-Salem's small professional and business elite to wrest concessions from white politicians and business leaders inadvertently legitimized the basic structures of racial subordination.

Successful unionization among low-wage African American workers in the Reynolds plants and in closely related leaf houses depended heavily on rank-and-file workers. The NLRB, whose election machinery facilitated the establishment of Local 22 and promoted eventual, if grudging, recognition from Reynolds, also played a key role. Less clearly explicated in Korstad's account is contribution of the FTA and its Communist leadership

Korstad finds Party influence in Winston-Salem to have been overwhelmingly beneficial. "Through precept and example," Korstad writes, "the Party . . . offered a reason to hope that workers could be the generative force in a broad-based radical movement and that . . . black and white together could some day overcome." (275) However, he calls attention as well to some of the Party's missteps, pointing to "the recklessness of some Party leaders and the undemocratic ways in which a Party dedicated to 'democratic centralism' sometimes behaved." (270) Party members' efforts to have the local endorse a wide range of pro-Soviet resolutions, he acknowledges, "lent substance to the charge that the union was slavishly following the Party line." (272)

Here Korstad misses an opportunity to lift Civil Rights Unionism above the by-now sterile debate over the role of Communists in the New Deal-era labor movement. If there was in fact "substance" to critics' views that "the union was slavishly following the Party line," Korsad's acknowledgment seems to clash with much of the rest of the narrative concerning the relationship between the local and the Party. Who exactly brought forth these resolutions? We know from other sources that New York-and Moscow-Party functionaries could be extremely insistent that local Party members press Party positions, regardless of local consequences. Korstad documents the efforts of Local 22 activists in behalf of the Party-supported Wallace campaign in 1948, a campaign that tended to isolate pro-Soviet elements from other progressives, but the actual dynamics of Party influence remain unexplored.

Korstad's reflexive antagonism toward the conduct of US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in the immediate post-World War II period colors the narrative. As Korstad well knows, questions of responsibility for the onset of the Cold War, the militarization of East-West tensions, and the implications of the pathologies of the Stalin regime for international relations generally remain highly contested matters. Yet Korstad repeatedly gives the CP a pass, endorsing with little critical analysis revisionist positions on these subjects. But in fact many liberals, civil rights advocates, and trade unionists were convinced that those who followed uncritically the pro-Soviet line could not be trustworthy partners in progressive politics.

Also questionable is Korstad's assessment of the "Southern Front." Nowhere does he provide convincing evidence for his belief that there existed a cohesive, "left"-led coalition, not least because the largest and most influential labor and civil rights organizations were, for better or worse, steadfastly anti-Communist. Confidence in the author's judgment on this point is further eroded when Korstad wildly overstates both overall southern union membership and African American union membership in the immediate wake of World War II. (276)

Despite these objections, Civil Rights Unionism is a considerable achievement. It contains one of the best detailed discussions of the lives of African American working people in the Jim Crow South extant. Its analysis of the tenacity of white elites is sobering and its discussion of the union-building process combines eloquent personal detail with a good grasp of the economic and governmental factors that enabled Winston-Salem's workers to create, however briefly, a strong and effective union. In a postscript Acknowledgments section, Robert Korstad pays homage to his activist parents and writes revealingly about personal experiences in the Jim Crow South that led him to this subject. A moving document in its own right, it constitutes an informative record of one historian's personal and professional journey.
 

Robert H. Zieger is Distinguished Professor of History, University of Florida. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Race and Labor in Modern America."

*****

Reviewed for The Historian; written Fall 2003
Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America. By Jennifer D. Keene. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 294. $38.00.)

"The Great War generation," Jennifer D. Keene argues, "shaped the contours of the modern American military and was responsible for the most sweeping piece of social welfare legislation in American history, the GI Bill."(x) This is a large claim that the author only partially validates. Keene addresses three central themes: the ways in which conscripted citizen soldiers influenced army life and military practice during World War I; the ways in which veterans sought to influence public policies in the two decades after the Armistice; and the relationship of the doughboys' quest for veterans' benefits to the GI Bill. Keene brings fresh perspectives to the first two themes and presents a challenging, but problematic, treatment of the third.

Conscripts comprised seventy-two percent of the US Army's personnel in the Great War . These men quickly evinced a highly contractual understanding of what their service meant. Officers soon learned that concessions to the men's prejudices and preferences were more effective than was resort to draconian punishment. Keene's account of racial matters in the Great War army is particularly revealing. Subordination of black conscripts provided a rare example of the dovetailing of the prejudices and predilections of army authorities and new white conscripts. At the same time, the resistance of black soldiers to demeaning treatment reinforces her overall stress on soldiers' agency.

The army's hopes that four million doughboys would constitute a reliable source of support for enhanced military budgets quickly proved misplaced. Instead, veterans' organizations focused on gaining benefits for their members, eventually settling on "adjusted compensation" as the vehicle. When the Great Depression produced high levels of unemployment among veterans, the drive for immediate payment-the veterans' bonus-gathered strength. Was the 1936 bonus legislation that Congress eventually passed over Roosevelt's veto an example of pernicious special interest legislation, as FDR charged? Or was it, as Keene here suggests--though without amplifying the point--both an example of and a spur to the broader social provision that was the hallmark of the New Deal?

A brief concluding chapter on the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act (the GI Bill), carries a lot of interpretive freight. "It is," she says, "hard to exaggerate the importance of the GI Bill in twentieth-century American history." (212) By providing generous benefits, the GI Bill decisively shaped the postwar political economy. This law's origins as a response to the contentious inter-war struggles, Keene maintains, clear evidence of the doughboys' ongoing influence in modern American life.

Yet Keene also acknowledges that the GI Bill was as unique as it was significant. Vietnam War veterans did not fare so well, with the result that "military service once again became time lost for veterans rather than the path to increased occupational and educational opportunities." (213) Keene links the GI Bill to the New Deal (212) but in fact its generous provisions contrast sharply with the parsimony of other New Deal programs. This contrast encourages the view that the GI Bill really was a one-off sop to a particular constituency. Keene establishes that the doughboys' long struggle for adjusted compensation did have important long-rage repercussions. Their influence, however, did not extend to the reshaping of social provision in the US, which has not followed the GI Bill's precedent even with regard to subsequent veterans' benefits.

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida
 

*****
For Labor History; submitted 3/11/04

A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. By Steven Hahn. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003. viii + 610 pp.

A Nation under Our Feet is an important and inspiring book. Discussion of specifically labor issues is limited to scattered treatments of such well-known affairs as the relatively successful post-Reconstruction struggles of Carolina rice plantation workers and the bloody massacres of Louisiana sugar workers in the strikes of the mid-1880s. But Hahn's's powerful theme of the self-mobilization of ordinary people, tenaciously sustaining a commitment to democratic politics amid the most harrowing and discouraging of times, will resonate among labor historians. Moreover, A Nation under Our Feet, saturated as it is with the fascinating details of rural black social organization and political mobilization, serves as a poignant reminder that the American struggle for democracy has always been a people's struggle and that forces of repression and denial have always been powerful.

Between at least the mid-nineteenth century and until at least the post-World War II southern Civil Rights movement, rural blacks developed and sustained a powerful and effective political presence. Bondsmen and women created thick familial and associational networks. They held clandestine religious services, established subterranean communication networks, used the "weapons of the weak" to resist exploitation and abuse, and organized escapes. Indeed, rural slaves were often remarkably successful in asserting their human identities and limiting the demands of their owners. Shrewd and enterprising, slaves followed closely the escalating national divisions of the 1850s. When war broke out, their mutualistic organs of community and family life enabled them to participate directly in the struggle for freedom.

During the Civil War and Reconstruction, and indeed down to the 1890s, now-free rural blacks deepened and expanded these embryonic institutions and practices. Particularly impressive and even moving was the mass mobilization of ordinary, often illiterate rural blacks-male and female-and their insistence on exercising the political opportunities in the wake of war. Freedmen and women erected churches, built schools, published newspapers, and established a wide variety of civic and fraternal organizations. Whether recruiting soldiers for the Union army, fighting the Black Codes, forming Union League chapters, mobilizing voters, or struggling to sustain hard-won rights in the face of savage repression, rural southern blacks built on the experiences of slavery to maintain a continuous political presence in the South.

Nor did white southerners' efforts to strip African Americans of formal political rights, which culminated successfully in the 1890s, destroy the political structures that rural blacks had built in the South. The networks and institutions that had sustained electoral politics remained, now fostering clear understanding of the limits of a political process imbued with racism and dependent on uncertain alliances with whites. Although Booker T. Washington and other would-be race leaders called for an end to political agitation, the grassroots networks through which southern rural blacks had conducted electoral politics endured, encouraging dissent from the emerging Jim Crow consensus and keeping alive in the internal affairs of black congregations and sodalities habits of self-government.

Even before Jim Crow descended in full force, preachers, reformers, and social entrepreneurs were promoting various plans of migration, either to putatively more benign parts of the United States or to Africa. And, Hahn writes, "emigrationism . . . helped to widen and transform, as well as to sustain, political activism." (361) Promoters of migration such as Louisiana's Henry Adams and publications such as the American Colonization Society's African Repository helped to sharpen rural blacks' understanding of the threats to their political and personal aspirations in the post-Reconstruction South while simultaneously promoting the powerful idea that African Americans deserved a freer and more bountiful life. While in the end few American blacks actually joined these planned treks, on hundreds of plantations and scores of hamlets and villages, rural blacks, literate and unschooled alike, encountered emigrationist ideas and debated the movement's possibilities. It is no accident that in the waning years of the 19^th century, the trickle of southern blacks heading North began to swell, suggesting that the politics of migration was a significant force in southern life even before the Great Migration itself began. Patterns of southern rural self-mobilization and oppositional perspective recurred repeatedly in the 20^th century South, and were integral to the broad appeal of Garveyism and the mutualistic ethic of the post-World War II civil rights movement

A Nation under Our Feet is both a significant scholarly contribution and a book of remarkable contemporary relevance. It rests securely on impressive research in archival and other primary sources and command of the sprawling literature of black history, civil rights, and the Gilded Age-Populist era. Grassroots black resistance and political mobilization, which Hahn conveys through detailed accounts of innumerable local campaigns and debates, constitute the heart of the book. At the same time, Hahn's accounts of the obstacles to political expression that self-taught farmers and workers faced over a century ago seem startlingly contemporary in the light of the widespread disfranchisement, polling place intimidation, undercounting, and selective purges of voting rolls that characterized the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

Robert H. Zieger

<>University of Florida
 *****

For Labour/Le Travail, January, 2005

Vincent J. Roscigmo and William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). "Social Movements, Protest and Contention," vol. 19.

In The Voice of Southern Labor, Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher seek to make a contribution both to social movement theory and labor historiography. With respect to the former, they regard theoretical approaches to collective activism that stress only "issues of grievance, union influence, or strike success and failure" (p. xx) as of limited use in explaining the timing and character of social protest mobilization. Noting the highly dispersed character of the textile industry, they explore "the question of how processes relevant to social movement formation are manifested across space." They conclude that it was the confluence of indigenous culture, rapid technological development, and changes in national politics that help significantly to explain the militancy and solidarity that textile workers exhibited in the great 1934 strike. It was only in the brief period of the early 1930s that popular access to radio in the South meshed with decentralized ownership of broadcasting to provide opportunities for local musicians, many of whom had roots in the textile industry and whose songs often called attention to the plight of workers. At the same time, Franklin D. Roosevelt's radio-borne fireside chats conveyed a strong sense of entitlement to workers everywhere, nowhere more so than in the impoverished Piedmont villages.

The authors' examination of the relationship between radio and mill culture as primarily reflected in music constitutes their main contribution to labor historiography. Why was there such an explosion of broad-based worker-generated activism in 1934 and not before? Since mill workers' grievances long predated the great strike of that year, the explanation cannot lie in the simple facts of workplace mistreatment. To be sure, southern mill workers had earlier waged significant strikes, most notably in 1919-20 and at Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina, in 1929. But before the massive, Piedmont-wide 1934 uprising, strikes had been local affairs. Now, however, a quarter million or more southern mill workers walked out, exhibiting fierce militancy and region-wide solidarity in the face of harsh repression.

According to the authors, central to explaining the great textile strike are three overlapping themes that differentiate it from earlier job actions. The coincident expansion of radio broadcasting (and listening) throughout the upland South, the vigorous emergence of indigenous protest music, and the new presence in Washington of a president seen as a genuine friend of working people gave shape and cohesion to mill worker activism. To demonstrate this point, the authors carefully plot out the geography of rapid radio expansion in the late 1920s and early 1930s, showing a close correlation between the existence of outlets and the nodes of worker activism. Station owners and managers relied heavily on local talent, just as a gifted corps of mill-worker performers became available to fill air time. Since many of the most popular singers and musicians were mill workers or closely connected to family and friends who toiled in the mills, their music resonated immediately and powerfully in the textile towns and villages. Moreover, a high proportion of the most popular songs, such as David McCarn's "Cotton Mill Colic" and the Dixon Brothers' "Weave Room Blues," spoke of workers' grievances, singled out employers for criticism, and endorsed collective response. The sense that a new regime in Washington, as personified by the charismatic FDR, provided government support for mill worker empowerment complemented this techno-cultural thrust to create a powerful, cohesive mass movement that triggered the mass strike.

In a spirited conclusion, the authors argue persuasively for the importance of cultural resources in the shaping of workers' responses to working and living conditions. Fellow sociologists will be able to judge whether this somewhat fortuitous joining of cultural, political, and technological forces constitutes a significant contribution to the development of mass movement theory. Social movement theory, they sensibly argue, must include consideration of workers' cultural resources. And they are persuasive in holding that the combination of indigenous music and new technology helped to create a climate of cohesion and militancy in the early 1930s. This point, however, raises implicit questions as to how other configurations of popular culture and technological development might contribute, as seems to be the case today, to conservative patterns of political and social activism.

For historians, the authors' discussion of radio dispersion and its linkage with grass-roots musical expression constitutes their main contribution. The basic story of textile labor relations and especially of the 1934 strike is familiar, as are the limitations of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the National Industrial Recovery Act insofar as protecting workers' rights is concerned. Also well established in the historical literature is the rank-and-file character of the textile strikes, the ineptitude of the leadership of the United Textile Workers, and the harshness and efficacy of employer and state-conducted repression. Moreover, the authors do not inspire confidence when they confuse Section 7 (a) of the NIRA with the provisions of the NRA's Textile Industry Code (102, 133). But their careful examination of radio's role in unifying otherwise-parochial textile worker militancy adds an important element to the story of the great strike.

The University of Minnesota Press has not served these authors well. This book suffers from careless writing and copy editing. The authors' addiction to the passive voice sometimes threatens to rob mill workers of the agency that they otherwise herald. Lengthy block quotes drawn largely from mill workers' oral histories at the Southern Workers Project at the University of North Carolina do provide first-hand testimony but are not well integrated into the narrative. Misplaced modifiers and vague pronoun references abound. On two occasions, the authors remark that the importance of certain developments "cannot be underestimated," when in fact they mean the opposite (64, 103). Firm copy editing should have caught these errors, thus permitting readers to contemplate the authors' contributions free from distracting gaucheries.

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

*****

For Business History Review, January, 2005

Irene A. DeVault. United Apart: Gender and the Rise of Craft Unionism. Ithaca and London. Cornell University Press. 2004. xi + 244 pp. Appendices, index.

United Apart is an ambitious attempt to analyze the institutional dynamics of the American emerging labor movement at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a valuable complement to the work of historians of labor during this period such as Herbert Gutman, Patricia Cooper, and Gwendolyn Mink. Irene A. DeVault has selected forty "cross-gender" strikes in the tobacco, textile, shoe, and garment industries for detailed analysis. Invoking Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of the "series" as a means of thinking "about the complexities of . . . workers' identities," DeVault examines the roles of race, ethnicity, geography, concepts of family, and gender in the conduct of these strikes. Her aim is to understand the relationship between each of these factors, as they played out in local strikes, to the emerging institutional and ideological character of the broader US labor movement, notably the American Federation of Labor. She concludes that race, ethnicity, industrial sector, and applications of moral economy were variable from situation to situation, encouraging mutuality and solidarity here, proving divisive and contributing to strike failure there. But two factors-gender and the physical location of the plant undergoing a strike-proved to be constant and thus were critical factors in shaping the character of the twentieth-century labor movement.

United Apart is not an easy read. The book is organized neither chronologically nor thematically. In the introduction DeVault observes that "The serial nature of the historical narrative-the fact that one event follows another-is. . . crucial in this book." She further explains that her "examination of the narrative seriality of the case studies provides a sort of standpoint epistemology version of historical narration: the point at which actors stand in the narrative determines both their reactions to events and the unfolding of these events."(8) The result is a presentation that combines comparative case-study analysis and direct expository narration featuring extensive quotations from newspapers and other contemporary sources.

Employing this format, DeVault guides the reader through the book's complex agenda. Thus, the first chapter provides introductions to the four industries through vignettes of strikes. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the Knights of Labor and the AFL, respectively, through detailed discussions of selected strikes. Chapter 4 investigates the roles that race and ethnicity played in various cross-gender strikes, while chapter 5 examines strikes occurring outside of the nation's central industrial core. Chapter 6 "explores the various roles family ties might play in different strikes," and chapter 7 returns to the AFL to explore its efforts to adapt its craft union orientation to the changing technological, organizational, and demographic character of work. The conclusion examines the origins and early development of the Women's Trade Union League as the AFL's main means of addressing the gender aspects of the changing work environment. Throughout, DeVault makes heavy demands on her readers, as they repeatedly are asked to review strikes discussed elsewhere in the book through the various lenses that she employs.

Despite the awkwardness of the book's structure and exposition, DeVault's conclusions are sensible and well-stated. An examination of forty cross-gender strikes clustered around the turn of the twentieth century in four industries in a variety of geographical locales indicates that established labor leaders failed to make effective us of the energy and skills that women workers brought to labor struggles. While they were capable of using craft, ethnic, and even racial categories to conduct successful strikes and build enduring craft unions, "skilled male workers. . . . could reach [i.e., usually reached] the end of strikes with the same levels of scorn for their female co-workers with which they had begun the strikes." Male leaders "learned" that women, whom they usually ignored, denigrated, or marginalized during strikes, could not be good union material. Meanwhile, women workers also "learned" that, in view of their treatment by the craft unionists who tended to dominate cross-gender strike situations, there might be "little reason. . . to continue or begin paying union dues." (220-21) Meanwhile, strikes on the industrial periphery, where local protests often created ad hoc labor organizations unrelated to national organizations, often exhibited real cross-gender solidarity. The struggles of textile workers in Colorado. Indiana, and Oregon, and tobacco workers in rural Wisconsin and Florida yielded examples of de facto industrial unionism built on this solidarity. In dismissing or ignoring these strikes in "marginal" places, AFL leaders lost an opportunity to learn lessons about the possibilities of industrial unionism even as their own half-hearted efforts to adapt the federation's archaic structure and dated ideology to the emerging twentieth-century economy fizzled .

United Apart brings to light dozens of otherwise-forgotten turn-of-the-century labor struggles. It gives historical voice to local women labor activists by their contemporaries and ignored by other historians. DeVault's appendices reflect her prodigious research into turn-of-the-century workers' lives, values, and protests. They also provide useful numerical material drawn from the Census of 1900 on the communities in which the strikes took place, as well as a valuable guide to the primary sources she has mined. Her findings about the role of gender in labor struggles and the distinctive nature of labor activism in smaller communities add significantly to our understanding of the emerging institutional character of the AFL.

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

<>*****
For Labor History; written April 2005

Grace Palladino, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits: A Century of Building Trades History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)

Skilled Hands, Strong Sprits is an admirable book, although one with a slightly misleading title. It is actually a history of the AFL's and AFL-CIO's Building Trades Department (BTD) and Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD). As such, it provides rich documentation, conveyed in fluent and engaging prose, on a subject largely neglected by labor historians. The notes alone, occupying 33 pages of text, make the book a must for every student of labor history. Especially for those labor historians schooled in the once "new" labor history or attracted by the IWW, the CIO, or other examples of social unionism, Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits serves as an essential primer on a number of subjects. Thus, Palladino underlines the importance of jurisdictional issues, the building trades' distinctive approach to recruitment and organizing, and the edgy relationships among the various construction unions and between them individually and their chronically disputatious locals. All of these subjects are as important to the character and dynamics of the building trades-and to the labor movement generally--today as they were a century ago.

The central theme in the history of the BCTD and its precursor organizations has been the tension between centralized direction and the highly localized character of the construction industry and the particularlistic-not to say parochial-perspectives of its international and local unions . From the time of the founding of the Structural Building Trades Alliance in 1903 and the BTD of the AFL five years later, leaders of the fifteen or so international unions claiming jurisdiction in the industry have sought ways to square orderly resolution of jurisdictional problems and advancing the general interests of building tradesmen, on the one hand, with the distinctive and often conflicting interests of individual unions and local workers, on the other. Efforts on the part rival unionists, such as the CIO's short-lived United Construction Workers Organizing Committee, to "industrialize" construction work by obliterating craft lines and promoting cross training and a multi-craft work culture went nowhere. Nor has the post-1970 employer onslaught against the construction unions solved the problem of how to insure the local supply of skilled and experienced workers that the unions' apprenticing programs provided during the post-World War II heyday of collective bargaining.

The main body of Skilled Hands, Strong Spirits chronicles the rocky course of the BTD and BTCD in its attempts to resolve these dilemmas. Much of Palladino's text is taken up with the making and breaking of inter-union jurisdictional dispute resolution agreements and with the efforts of BTD and BTCD leaders to forge and sustain positive relationships with the contractors associations and federal government officials whose endorsement of collective bargaining and whose large-scale construction projects were crucial to the health of unionism in the building trades. The narrative is particularly strong in chronicling the BTCD's success during World War II, when "prevailing union wage rates had set the standard for defense construction, and the basic rules of building trades unionism-the closed shop, the union hiring hall, and collectively bargained agreements-had been the keys to meeting wartime production demands." (139)

Palladino also traces the Department's initially successful efforts to blunt the effect of the Taft-Hartley Act and a 1951 Supreme Court's ruling, which together outlawed or seriously compromised these key elements in the unions' success. While the BTCD did not achieve repeal of or significant amendment to Taft-Hartley's damaging union security and secondary boycott provisions, labor lobbyists were successful in defending the prevailing wage provisions of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act and in gaining their application in the massive interstate highway construction launched in 1956.

Indeed, through the 1950s and 1960s, construction workers and their unions prospered, despite mounting contractor resistance and legislative and judicial setbacks. While non-union labor prevailed in residential and light commercial construction, union workers comprised over three-quarters of those employed in road building and heavy construction. Building tradesmen shared in the general blue collar prosperity and with the Bronx plumber, George Meany, presiding over the AFL and, a