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Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands Katherine Benton-Cohen

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 367 pp., $29.95 (cloth) “Are you an American, or are you not?” (1) — this was the question Sheriff Harry Wheeler asked in 1917 as he and his deputies rounded up nearly two thousand workers in the southeastern Arizona copper town of Bisbee before hauling some twelve hundred of them in boxcars to the desert near Columbus, New Mexico. Katherine Benton-Cohen explores the question’s racial logic and historical context in her book, Borderline Americans. Although a number of scholars have examined the Bisbee deportation, Benton-Cohen offers a fresh, insightful perspective by placing it within the story of racial formation in Cochise County as a whole. She presents a rich social history of the county’s rural areas and mining towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and offers a timely contribution to our understanding of the history of race in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. As the title suggests, the book is partly about labor conflict, but its thematic scope is much broader. In fact, only chapter 7 focuses on the “labor war” in Bisbee. The other chapters examine the social structure, economy, politics, and development of racial categories among people of Mexican and European descent (including Mormons) in rural areas such as the San Pedro Valley, the silver mining town of Tombstone, and the planned “model suburb” of Warren (120). By taking a countywide perspective, Benton-Cohen reveals a diverse array of social relationships and racial ideologies that coexisted within a few dozen miles of each other until the 1930s, when an Anglo/Mexican dichotomy replaced a much more complex racial patchwork, with eastern and southern Europeans gaining entry into the circle of whiteness. The book begins with the rural community of Tres Alamos, in which ethnic Mexicans and European Americans lived and operated ranches and farms side by side, defending themselves against Apaches. “Fluidity of racial status” persisted for several decades for a variety of reasons (20). Regardless of ethnic status, ranchers and farmers intermarried, shared a culture of land ownership, and negotiated access to water sources. Most saliently, they shared an interest in defending themselves against Apaches until the latter’s final defeat in the 1880s. Benton-Cohen does a superb job uncovering this shared social world. At the same time, she avoids an overly idyllic depiction by revealing underlying tensions over land and water and an emergent sense of racial difference. Next, Benton-Cohen turns to the silver mining boom in Cochise County, which preceded the copper boom in Bisbee by more than a decade. She challenges previous histories of Tombstone that tended to reduce complex tensions to conflicts between lawmen and criminals. Ethnic Mexicans had only a small presence in the community, so opposition between Mexicans and Anglos was largely irrelevant. Instead, she reveals nascent tensions between the allies of government-supported industrial capitalism and their oppoLabor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 7, Issue 3 © 2010 by Labor and Working-Class History Association

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nents. Once again, shared opposition to Apaches provided motivation for cooperation even between these groups, but it did not prevent infamous explosions of violence such as that between the Earps and the “cowboys” at the OK Corral. The only shortcoming is Benton-Cohen’s discussion of the Apaches themselves. She discusses them primarily as a foil that spurred cooperation across ethnic and class lines rather than providing the same careful analysis of their motivations and social world that she provides for the county’s nonindigenous inhabitants. Because Chiricahua Apaches were such a significant presence in Cochise County in this period, a deeper understanding of their role in the region, including their interactions (not solely their conflicts) with ethnic Mexicans and European Americans — along with a more complex examination of their racialization — is warranted. This criticism aside, the author’s discussions of Tombstone and the San Pedro Valley provide the perfect backdrop for a pivotal transition that took place in Bisbee. Here she demonstrates that a new, more explicitly racial class system first developed. It reinforced — and was reinforced by — the town’s social structure, geography, politics, patronage, and Anglo women’s maternalism. American workers of mostly English, Cornish, and Irish descent targeted Chinese inhabitants first, excluding them from certain areas and from entering town at night through a “district code” (81 – 82). They also argued that they deserved a “family wage” that supposedly itinerant Mexican and southern and eastern European workers did not (89 – 90). In the mid-1880s, as Bisbee boomed through better rail connections and new demands for copper, the Phelps Dodge company adopted the workers’ “white man’s camp” code, embracing it as a means to prevent workers’ cooperation across ethnic lines (80, 237). In the decades that followed, a three-tier hierarchy (American/ foreigner/Mexican) became entrenched in Bisbee. Benton-Cohen then turns to the nearby company town of Warren. First, she describes the Calumet and Arizona (C&A) mining company’s attempt to create a model workingmen’s town. Unlike in Bisbee, where several mining companies coexisted in a haphazardly structured town, in Warren the C&A had a monopoly and hoped to create an orderly community of landowning, independent citizen-miners with patriarchal households — characteristics that the company felt Mexican workers lacked (146). Aware of a violent strike and its suppression in Cananea, Mexico, in 1906, C&A officials wanted to ensure that they had a content, efficient workforce whose independence would prevent them from joining unions or striking. However, what began as a progressive attempt to create a democratic haven for independent workers ultimately failed. Instead, the company abandoned progressivism’s more democratic ideals in favor of its conservative principles of efficiency and order — in essence, creating a hierarchical, racially segregated company town with “corporate patriotism” replacing any real civic participation (141 – 42). Racial segmentation remained incomplete in the rural areas longer, although it made inroads where homesteading — thought to foster independence, morality, and good citizenship — was coded as “white.” Benton-Cohen returns to the San Pedro Valley to offer a counternarrative to the common historical generalization that an Anglo/Mexican dichotomy was in place by the 1880s. She richly describes a social world in towns such as Benson and in nearby ranching and homesteading communities where Mexican Americans continued to own and operate farms and ranches, working with Anglos to run community irrigation systems while maintaining their own fraternal lodges and other institutions. Still, ethnic Mexicans’ use of the self-identifier “Spanish” signaled an increasing defensiveness in protecting their status as white. More ominously, in the Sulphur Springs and San Simon


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valleys, European American newcomers who had little experience with ethnic Mexicans ignored their similarities as homesteaders, defining Mexican agriculture as backward and inefficient. White women played a leading role in redefining Anglo homesteading as a form of “homemaking” that fostered “loyalty, patriotism, and nationalism,” thus replicating the rhetoric of Bisbee’s “white man’s camp” (196). Only in chapter 7 does Benton-Cohen examine the “labor war” of her title. World War I, the Mexican Revolution, and Arizona’s new, progressive constitution temporarily helped to radicalize the labor movement. In Bisbee, Slavs, Finns, Italians, and especially Mexicans forced Anglo union members either to support them or miss an opportunity to increase their own power and influence. Anglos who were associated with several unions intrinsically challenged the gendered and racial presuppositions behind the white man’s camp ideology by deciding to support Mexicans and eastern and southern Europeans in their fight for equal treatment. In reaction, the Phelps Dodge company ironically became the most ardent defender of the workers’ old white man’s camp code as a means to control its workforce. With the help of Sheriff Wheeler, the company managed to crush the strike and deport its presumed perpetrators. In the aftermath, conservative unionists excluded ethnic Mexicans and worked with the company to institutionalize the white man’s camp for decades to come. The final chapter, “Once County, Two Races,” covers two decades of history, from progressive women’s efforts to Americanize ethnic Mexicans in the late 1910s to New Deal policies in the 1930s that left relief distribution in the hands of discriminatory private interests (such as Phelps Dodge), therefore institutionalizing an Anglo/Mexican binary. By attempting to cover so much in a single chapter, however, Benton-Cohen gives short shrift to some essential changes that occurred in the 1920s — particularly the development of a national quota system that dramatically reduced immigration from eastern and southern Europe and the simultaneous exemptions that encouraged, until late in the decade, thousands of Mexicans to enter the United States. She skims over this important decade, when, especially after the National Origins Act of 1924, people of eastern and southern European descent largely solidified their status as white while Mexicans faced increasing calls for their exclusion and/or separation. Overall, Borderline Americans substantially enriches our understanding of racial formation and labor in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. It is an important and inspired contribution to a growing body of historical research on interethnic relationships and racial formation in Arizona (see Linda Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn, and Eric V. Meeks’s Border Citizens) that complicates a simple story of steady and inevitable domination by Anglos over Mexicans, revealing a much more complex process of multiple, shifting racial categories and evolving boundaries of whiteness and citizenship. Eric V. Meeks, Northern Arizona University DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-011


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Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust Richard J. Callahan Jr.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009 xviii + 259 pp., $34.95 (cloth) In this engaging study of the native white coal miners of eastern Kentucky in the early twentieth century, religious scholar Richard J. Callahan illuminates the working lives of the men and their families who made the transition from rural subsistence farming to industrial labor. Callahan offers neither a comprehensive history of coal mining nor a labor history of Appalachian coal miners. Rather, he attempts to recover how people understood the transition in their working lives through religion. His imaginative use of sources such as songs, folklore, and oral history reveals how miners drew upon religion as a cultural resource that enabled them to respond to the industrialization of coal. By integrating labor and religious history, Callahan challenges labor historians who see religion merely as a function of the material world as well as religious scholars who ignore the important questions of work so central to the lives of ordinary Americans. His focus on the working men and women who practiced religion reminds us that “religion is lived in and through daily life” and that religious history constitutes far more than institutions, worship styles, and the theologies and doctrines preached by clergy (9). Callahan draws upon the growing field of sensory history to explore this relationship between religion and everyday life. Paying attention to “the role of the body and the senses in the process of mediating the world as experienced,” Callahan probes what he calls the language of the body to explain how miners expressed the sensations of the hard life of coal through the “new, intensified social forms of religious performance” that emerged in the industrializing mountains of eastern Kentucky (9, 128). Although Callahan opens his study by ably sorting out the various denominations of Protestant Christianity that flourished in the Kentucky mountains, his emphasis is on the centrality of work to the region’s religious culture before the advent of industrialization. Oral histories and regional folk stories underscore a connection between work and life. For the mountaineers of eastern Kentucky, “to work was to be human, and to be human was to work” (42). Not only did they consider work an obligation and an activity critical to survival on mountain farms, they accepted work, and the seemingly endlessness of it, as their Christian duty. Work situated individuals in time and place, taught them about the world they inhabited, and produced a sense of self-worth and identity, yet mountaineers expressed ambivalence about work. Even as they accepted work as God’s punishment for man’s fall from grace in the garden of Eden, they also embraced work’s creative possibilities. Rather than merely toil in the world, mountain people embraced their power to transform their environment and their place within it. Callahan relates the story of John C. Mayo, a white native of the mountains who earned degrees in geology and the law and bought thousands of acres and mineral rights from mountain farmers on the cheap that he later sold to coal operators. Even as this native millionaire believed his work would benefit the region and uplift its inhabitants, his emphasis on work for worldly reward introduced into the mountains new values about labor, duty, and community that threatened the social order of mountain farming. Callahan portrays the transition to mining as replete with this kind of tension. Although a rural orientation toward work drew mountain farmers by the thousands into wage work in the growing industrial economy of Appalachia in the late nineteenth and


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early twentieth centuries, the promise of a life “unattainable through farming” threatened cherished values, and this posed moral dilemmas for miners and their families (70). Mining enabled mountaineers to make good money, but the work itself was inherently dangerous and placed them at “the mercy of an industry” that regarded them “as little more than beasts of burden” (113). Miners welcomed the convenience of a company store stocked with fresh meat and vegetables and embraced it as the center of social life even as it plunged them into debt and stood as a “concrete sign” of the commodification of human labor (73 – 74). Company houses reflected the tension between hope and limitation that structured life in mining towns. Unlike the log houses of the mountains, company houses were framed with porches, heated by coal-burning stoves, and electrified. However, the houses were limited in design, crowded into unattractive rows, covered in coal dust, and most importantly, owned by coal companies that gave operators unlimited control over their occupants. As town life freed children from the daily chores of farms, it bred fear among parents that they would no longer be able to teach the value of work. The visible landscape of company towns made social and economic distinctions among its inhabitants visible and inescapable, underscoring that mountain people had entered a world that “measured the value and reward of work through the logic of the marketplace” (80). Although Callahan describes in vivid detail the extremes of coal town life and the dangers of industrial labor, he is most interested in conveying how miners and their families made sense of their new working environment in religious terms. Here, Callahan emphasizes “the role of the body and the senses” (9). One way that miners knew the hard life of this industry was through bodily sensations — heightened nerves, relentless toil, domestic tensions, falling dust, and hunger — but the body was also a source of knowledge about the spirit and the soul. “Through feelings in the body,” miners knew of conviction of sin, temptation, and even healing (128). By “thinking through the body,” miners expressed their shared somatic sensations of coal town life into the new intensified worship practice of Holiness Pentecostalism (128). Although rooted in the religious traditions of the southern mountains, Holiness Pentecostalism adapted them and energized them for the industrial environment. Holiness practitioners engaged, rather than escaped, the new material conditions of rural industrialization, whether drawn by its promise of physical healing of bodies broken by mining; its emphasis on a strict code of morality that promised a sense of order amid the complexity, diversity, and anxiety of mining; its incorporation of the rhythms and styles of commercial recordings into its music; its rejection of a social order that measured human value in economic terms; or its challenge to worldly authority. Holiness thus emerged in eastern Kentucky not as a throwback to an old-time religion of the mountains but as a “thoroughly modern” product of industrial life (15). In the 1930s, the labor movement emerged as a second institution that enabled these white miners to mediate the changes in their working lives. By thinking of the labor movement as a form of “religious expression,” Callahan reveals how miners had a religious orientation that labor organizers — and later labor historians — have failed to appreciate (2). In 1931 and 1932, the communist-backed National Miners’ Union (NMU) attracted miners by crystallizing many of their material and spiritual concerns. Miners had little knowledge of the union’s communist ties and experienced the organization as a locally controlled organization that provided critical relief, food, and clothing amid the Great Depression. Although they provided immediate material relief, union organizers understood that labor conditions went beyond the workplace. Framed in terms of kinship, health, and family well-being, the union’s message resonated with miners’ religious orientation and drew women into the


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union as activists in both the soup kitchens and on the picket lines. Preacher-organizers such as Aunt Molly Jackson and Finley Donaldson delivered pro-union sermons that drew on lessons from the Book of James and its promise that God would reward the poor and the patient. They preached to miners about the “power of human agency to correct injustices” and to redeem a world of order and justice in the mountains (181). The union’s strength thus rested on its ability to address the core religious questions of power, justice, suffering, and above all the meaning and value of human labor that practitioners of Holiness religion confronted. But when local organizers discovered the union’s uncompromising stand on atheism and interracialism, the NMU organizing drive in eastern Kentucky unraveled. Nonetheless, the NMU campaign paved the way for more successful efforts by the United Mine Workers later in the decade, aided by the continuing effort among miner-preachers who understood the union “as the worldly counterpart to the church” (194). Labor historians will learn much from Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields. Callahan’s use of sensory history suggests how historians might broaden their understanding of how workers developed a sense of shared experience and perceived their place in the emerging rural industrial order. He demonstrates (though not as often as he might have) how historians can make women visible and integral to working environments that are too often misread as exclusively male. Finally, his understanding of work as something that encompassed far more than just daily tasks at the point of employment but as a concept that “linked self, society, and the world” underscores the limitations of workplace-centered labor history (194). Callahan’s insights are often more suggestive than conclusive and rest on a rather narrow evidentiary base. Nevertheless, he demonstrates that the questions of a religious historian can help labor historians think about workers and their world. Steven A. Reich, James Madison University DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-012

AGITATE! EDUCATE! ORGANIZE! American Labor Posters Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009 205 pp., $24.95 (paper) This inspiring, educational, and beautifully produced book provides a richly illustrated analysis of the dramatic intersection of North American visual art and labor culture manifested in labor posters from the late nineteenth century until the present. Page after page of colorful, idealistic, political, and pointedly exhortational images document the contributions that visual artists have made to U.S. and Canadian labor history as well as reveal the diverse currents of labor agitation that have shaped that history and the labor movement itself. As authors Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher note, these images offered visual means for working people to present their values and ideals, articulating “nuanced and sometimes contradictory expressions of strategies, priorities, tactics, and analysis” (1). The authors have collaborated to produce a very important study of these developments. Starting in 2003 with a grant to develop a database of American labor graphic art, they have created both this book, with its more than 250 full-color illustrations and informative


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text, and an even larger online archive accessible at www.docspopuli.org. However, this text goes well beyond merely reproducing an interesting array of images. In the accompanying chapter discussions, the authors effectively analyze the visual construction that makes each work more or less effective in communicating its meanings, as well as setting each image into its socially and politically complex historical contexts. As Cushing and Drescher note, labor movement posters are not collected in any single, easily accessible archive. They were difficult to track down, requiring research in various special collections in which they were rarely fully cataloged. As a librarian at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Industrial Relations and an artist himself, Cushing was particularly well situated to undertake this task, and Drescher’s expertise as a mural historian adds a strong analytical dimension to the text that make it both a valuable research source and an excellent teaching tool. The authors also emphasize the highly collaborative nature of these posters. Rather than being designed anonymously like corporate advertising art, these works depend on an empathetic, politically astute network of client organizations, artists, and printers/producers, including the artists themselves, copywriters, offset or silkscreen printers, and distributors. In some cases, one or two people filled all these functions, whereas in others, artists were part of larger cooperatives, such as the Northland Poster Collective, the JustSeeds Artists’ Cooperative, or the special Bread and Roses Project of the Service Employees International Union Local 1199 (2). Union movement print shops were also important in poster production, allowing artists to create assertively powerful imagery that might otherwise have been deemed subversive and unacceptable. The thematic focus on idealistic labor values that characterizes the entire book is heralded by a poster illustrating the table of contents pages that depicts an abstracted woman’s face with the text “All of Us or None” repeated four times under the phrase “No Buy Offs, Sellouts, or Tradeoffs.” As with every image in the study, the author is credited (if known): in this case Doug Minkler, who self-published this poster in 1983. Each of the eleven chapters has a full-page poster detail as its frontispiece, with numerous full-page or partial-page color illustrations following. After an introductory section titled “Brief History of Activist Graphic Media,” the chapters turn to a litany of thematic tropes: dignity and exploitation; health and safety; women; race and civil rights; war, peace, and internationalism; solidarity and organizing; strikes and boycotts; democracy, voting, and patriotism; history, heroes, and martyrs; and culture. Undoubtedly, the authors chose this thematic arrangement as a way to give greater coherence to their analyses than would be possible in a strictly chronological accounting of such diverse topics. However, the dynamic visual power of the poster reproductions is also enhanced by explanations of the important changes in style and modes of address to the viewer that are evidenced in each thematic area. This study is truly excellent because it is not simply an illustrated catalog of images nor a historical account of their development. Instead, the authors have effectively interwoven two types of discussion: what makes each image visually successful and intriguing in its technical and iconographic strategies and the details of its conception and production as part of a particular movement or campaign at a particular moment in American labor history. The authors also point out how certain familiar designs, such as the iconic “We Can Do It!” Rosie the Riveter image, originally created by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse Corporation in 1942 during World War II, have been appropriated for both union and commercial purposes, warning viewers to think carefully about the intended meanings of repeatedly repurposed visual forms.


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In each chapter, the authors address significant labor movement issues. They point out in chapter 2 (“Dignity and Exploitation”) that “more posters have been produced about employees not being given their fair share and suffering loss of dignity than any other category except the theme of strikes and other labor actions” (13). These images range from didactic to provocative; one of the most agitational images in this section is by a leading contemporary graphic artist, Ricardo Levins-Morales. Above and below three rows of increasingly large cartoonish rabbits marching toward the viewer with linked arms are the words “Bosses Beware” and “When we’re screwed, we multiply!” This full-page image was produced by the Northland Poster Collective in 1994 (28). It is intriguingly placed across from another full-page reproduction of a 1901 poster in a completely different style, showing a highly realistic male worker in red shirt and leather apron, rolling up his sleeves, with the text “The Bone and Sinew of America.” This was created for the Henry J. Burck Company in Buffalo, New York, by artist Urquhart Wilcox (29). Few historians will have heard of this artist, making it evident that the world of commercial art production, as well as labor union imagery, was and is far larger than the more elitist circles defined as “fine art.” The text takes readers to a further understanding of the significance of this image, pointing out that an additional line on the poster reads “makers of ‘Union Label’ clothing,” and the authors remind us that in 1901, this meant that Chinese workers could not be employed in these shops because the union refused to allow it (21). The historically complex struggle against racial and gender bias within union organizing is a very important aspect of Cushing and Drescher’s analysis, which runs through the entire book, not only the chapters that specifically address diversity of race and gender. Similarly the authors have included works that represent a range of union organizations and labor protest groups, choosing posters in Spanish, English, Chinese, and other languages spoken by Americans and images that vary technically and stylistically from crudely designed linocuts to complex silkscreened illustrations to highly sophisticated digital photography. Some of the posters are intended to shock, such as a large black and white photograph of a man on crutches whose leg has been amputated, standing against a cloudy sky above industrial infrastructure, with the text “You can lose 30 pounds instantly (so stay alert),” which was produced by the Workmen’s Compensation Board of British Columbia circa 1980 (38). Others are more pictorially engaging, such as a colorful offset print of a busy African American waitress by Varnette P. Honeywood, created for the U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau in 1995 (54). Photographic posters were frequently created in the 1990s, but this decade also saw production of diverse forms of graphic art imagery ranging from pictorially detailed to expressively abstract. This emphasis on diversity of approach, visually and iconographically, in technique and in political positioning is one of the most engaging and important aspects of Cushing and Drescher’s study. The reader is struck again and again by the imaginative, powerful, and dramatic qualities of this insufficiently recognized and continually evolving tradition of labor art. In recent art historical writing, the term public art typically has been used to refer to large and at times obstructionist sculptures or installation works situated in public venues such as parks or government plazas and underwritten by funding from the federal Art in Architecture Program or private developers. Many workers find these public projects irrelevant to their lives and their communities, if not offensive in their disregard for more pressing issues of social and political consequence. By contrast, the powerful, meaningful, and intriguing posters reproduced in this excellent book speak in many voices and raise a diversity of issues that resonate for all working people. As the authors state in their conclu-


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sion, these posters inspire, inform, and call on viewers to join in social activism for common goals. Cushing and Drescher, along with the librarians, archivists, and activists who helped to preserve these vital images, have done important work in making this living tradition visible to a wider public. Helen Langa, American University DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-013

Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008 144 pp., $60.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper) Hazel Dickens, it seems, has a voice made for labor films. In 1976, she debuted on the soundtrack of Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning Harlan County, U.S.A., the landmark documentary of a United Mine Workers (UMW) strike in eastern Kentucky. Dickens provided the aural backdrop to the film’s most poignant scenes with her chilling, “Black Lung,” inspired by her own brother’s death from the disease, and her voice blared behind the film’s closing credits with her working-class call to arms, “They’ll Never Keep Us Down.” Three years later, Dickens delivered a rollicking rewrite of “The Rebel Girl” at the end of director Lorraine Gray’s With Babies and Banners, an account of women’s crucial role during the 1936 – 37 Flint sit-down strike. In Elizabeth Barret’s 1984 documentary film, Coalmining Women, Dickens wrote and sang the title track, an admonishment to those men who undercut blue-collar solidarity by opposing women’s participation in industrial work. “If you can’t stand by me,” Dickens warned in the song’s most famous line, “don’t stand in my way.” Then, in Matewan (1987), John Sayles’s fictional depiction of the early 1920s West Virginia coal-mining wars, Dickens not only provided a wistful a cappella rendition of the hymn “Beautiful Hills of Galilee” over the film’s closing credits but was featured in its most stirring scene as a graveside singer who delivers a mournful elegy as a murdered miner is laid to rest amid the natural splendor of central Appalachia. So convincing was her portrayal that uninitiated viewers may have assumed that Sayles had plucked Dickens out of some isolated coal community and then gave her bus fare back home once the filming was over. Yet, by that time, Dickens had already carved out an estimable career in the fields of bluegrass and acoustic country music. Dickens’s career began in the mid-1950s with informal gigs in the bars and country music parks of the Baltimore area. Her breakthrough came in the mid-1960s as one-half of the pioneering bluegrass duo Hazel and Alice, which attracted a new audience of feminists to modern folk music while inspiring a new generation of female bluegrass and country music singers. After Hazel and Alice split up in 1976, Dickens fashioned an impressive solo career, releasing a trio of classic LPs for Rounder Records in the late 1970s and 1980s, touring the globe to universal acclaim, and garnering numerous awards from every major bluegrass and folk music association and the nation’s most prestigious cultural institutions. Fittingly, Dickens was herself the subject of director Mimi Pickering’s documentary film,


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It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song (2001), which featured archival footage, candid interviews, and contemporary live performances. Working Girl Blues marks an important addition to the ongoing effort to document the life and career of this remarkable singer and songwriter. Divided into two sections, the book contains an overview of Dickens’s life by Bill C. Malone, the doyen of country music historians, and commentary by Dickens herself on forty of her own compositions. The book also includes a comprehensive discography that details her most popular commercial recordings as well as the various and sometimes obscure collections on which she has appeared. As a songwriter, Dickens has consistently probed three motifs: songs about working women and the problems they encounter in the workplace (“Working Girl Blues”) and in their personal relationships (“Scraps from Your Table”); songs about coal miners and their struggles against corporate greed, industrial disease, and a corrupt leadership (“Mannington Mine Disaster,” “The Yablonski Murder,” “Clay County Miner”); and autobiographical songs that express her deep longing for rural Appalachia (“West Virginia My Home,” “Hills of Home,” “Mama’s Hand”). These “homesick” songs demonstrate Dickens’s ability to convey an emotional connection to a specific place, but it would be a mistake to associate Dickens with a nostalgic celebration of her mountain origins. If anything, her work serves as a cautionary example for those scholars and fans who confuse art with actual experience. Dickens was not so much a product of Appalachia but of the white southern migration and, more specifically, of a cross-class urban community that validated her musical aspirations. Dickens was born the eighth of eleven children on June 1, 1935, in Mercer County, West Virginia, the heart of Appalachian coal country, and although her father eked out a living as an independent timber hauler, several of her brothers made their living below ground. By Dickens’s own admission, her early years in Appalachia left deep emotional scars. A frail and sickly girl, she found little succor in her family and its oppressive gender relations. As she recalls, her father was a “very dominant man” who lorded over her “very shy” and submissive mother (32). Religion failed to provide young Hazel with much comfort. She recoiled from the austere fatalism of the Primitive Baptist church where her father preached and eventually rejected all organized religion except for a humanist concern for the poor and powerless. Lacking any formal schooling past the seventh grade, her only outlet for personal gratification came from music, which she studied with a craft-like precision, copying down lyrics from song magazines, singing in church or at home, and listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. But a career as a professional singer-songwriter lay well beyond her imagination. As Malone writes, Dickens lived a “largely isolated life, had developed few skills of interpersonal communication, and had been discouraged from expressing herself freely” (6 – 7). No wonder she made a break for the city as soon as she could. Beginning in the mid-1940s, like so many other Appalachians, members of the Dickens family began moving to Baltimore, where Hazel joined them in 1954. While working a series of service and factory jobs, she remembers her intense alienation, made worse by the hostility that native-born Baltimoreans aimed at “hillbillies” like herself. Baltimore offered few choices for a shy, single woman — hopelessly unsocialized, as Dickens put it in one interview. She retreated into the “hillbilly ghetto,” to the relatively safe confines of her family — and that is where she would have remained had she not encountered a series of middle-class mentors, beginning with Alyse Taubman, a social worker with the “cultural tastes of the local bohemian community.” Taubman’s home, Malone observes,


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“became one of the popular forums in the city where country and urban people met and shared their experiences.” When later reflecting on Taubman’s influence on her life, Dickens noted, “music saved me, but she did a lot to make me a different person too” (7). The musical turning point of her life, as Dickens puts it, came when she encountered middle-class folk revivalists. “I began to meet new friends who were as passionate about the music as I was,” she recalls, “and who also appreciated what I was doing with the music” (36). The most important of these musical mentors was Mike Seeger, Pete Seeger’s half-brother, a skillful musician and dedicated student of old-time music in his own right. Mike Seeger joined with Dickens and her brothers in her first professional band and together their “picking parties” created a small but flourishing local music scene. With Seeger’s help, Dickens widened her circle of acquaintances to include middle-class folk revivalists in the Washington, D.C., area, where, by the early 1960s, the urban folk revival was in full swing. Dickens’s collaboration with various middle-class music enthusiasts stirred her latent class consciousness. She may have grown up in the heart of United Mine Workers (UMW) country, but, as Dickens later confided to filmmaker Mimi Pickering, she knew nothing about unions until after she moved to Baltimore and worked in a unionized canning factory. The crucial period in her political awakening came in the late 1960s and early 1970s when she and her singing partner, Alice Gerrard, toured the South with Bernice Johnson Reagon and Anne Romaine’s Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, which, for the first time, put her before a rural southern audience. “The experience,” Malone notes, “was liberating for Hazel because it permitted her to sing songs that expressed her social concern” (15). Attendance at Ralph Rinzler’s symposium on coal-mining songs at the 1969 Smithsonian Folklife Festival further encouraged her to write what Malone terms more “overtly political material” (15). The next year, Dickens embarked on her “dawning mission to sing the songs of struggling working class folk” with a performance before miners at Clay County, Kentucky, organized by the grassroots Mountain People’s Rights association and widely reported in the national media (16). A 1972 workshop at the Highlander Folk Center produced the landmark LP Come All You Coal Miners, which included four of Dickens’s coal-mining songs and sealed her reputation as the foremost labor troubadour in the United States. Dickens’s vocal style, with its rich Appalachian twang and its compelling mixture of anger and pathos, conjures up a vision of pristine rural authenticity. But as this book shows, Dickens stands as living proof of the importance of cross-class cultural alliances, and it reminds us that they were not only fruitful in the past but are sorely needed today, when so many people are hard hit by hard times. David M. Anderson, Louisiana Tech University DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-014


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Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household Thavolia Glymph

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 xiv + 279 pp., $17.95 (paper) In this highly anticipated and long-awaited work, Thavolia Glymph examines relations between white plantation mistresses and female household (or domestic) slaves — and later freedwomen — from the late antebellum period through emancipation and into the latter nineteenth century. Although always alert to complexities and ambiguities, Glymph argues unequivocally that these relations were characterized by immutable class and racial conflicts and no small measure of violence. Glymph is intent on countering interpretations of white women of the antebellum South that, to varying degrees, accentuate their subordinate position to — and even oppression at the hands of — their husbands as the patriarchal heads of plantation households and that maintain that this subordination caused them to sympathize with the slaves and even to call into question both the gendered and racial dimensions of the patriarchal household. Glymph will have none of this. White plantation mistresses, she argues, though subordinate to male authority, occupied positions of privilege and power within the antebellum South, and they frequently and indeed routinely resorted to violence to uphold their status. This commitment to slavery was further borne out by emancipation. During the transition to free labor, white women strove to reassert their former power and authority. Black women, for their part, struggled during slavery to resist white women’s authority, as demonstrated by white women’s proclivity for violence. With the abolition of slavery, they continued that struggle by advancing a conception of freedom that included the personal autonomy, self-determination, and control over their own lives and labor that enslavement had denied them. There was nothing even remotely resembling a sisterhood between white and black women of the antebellum and nineteenth-century South. Instead, for Glymph, the relations between them are best understood as attempts at imposing and resisting racial and class domination. One hesitates to resort to clichés, yet it is nonetheless true that a relatively short review cannot possibly do justice to the subtlety and complexity of Glymph’s overall argument or to the many particular issues that Glymph addresses throughout this work. The book is simply replete with brilliant observations on matters both general and particular. Glymph exposes the supposedly hidden or intimate elements of the private side of the plantation household, demonstrating that the private realm was as central to understanding life and labor in the plantation South, both during and after slavery, as were the ostensibly public and male-centered spheres of fieldwork or politics. In interpreting white plantation mistresses, Glymph decouples the issue of women’s historical agency from that of their supposed role as dissenters within the slave system, thus challenging those previous scholars who have equated white women’s agency with the threat these women are said to have posed to patriarchal authority. For Glymph, white women exercised agency, but they did so in defense of the slave system and their privileged position within it. Not only do black women’s voices occupy a central place in Glymph’s analysis, but Glymph also maintains that previous scholars have too quickly dismissed the reliability of such sources as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives in telling the stories of both black and white women, especially on the matter of violence. Black women, enslaved and free, knew


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more about the actual work that went into running the household than did most white women, knowledge they employed to advantage. The abolition of slavery also allowed most female household workers for the first time to gain access to the wider world, where they used, among other strategies, their geographical mobility, the power of gossip (and other methods of disseminating information about employers), and the ability to create mutual aid associations to shape the meaning of freedom. Among this book’s many virtues is its organizational and analytical framework. This work is not primarily a study of the antebellum South with a coda on emancipation tacked on at the end, nor is it a study of emancipation and the transition to free labor that provides a brief overview of the antebellum South as a point of departure. Instead, Glymph systematically examines the relations between white and black women in both the slave South and postemancipation South, analytically bridging the gap between the antebellum and postbellum periods. Chapters 1 through 3 explore various aspects of black and white women’s relations before the Civil War; chapter 4 and part of chapter 5 examine the war years and the destruction of slavery; and the remainder of chapter 5 and chapters 6 and 7 explore the challenges black and white women faced in constructing new working arrangements in the years after emancipation, taking the story up to approximately the 1880s. Glymph uses a short epilogue to speculate on the implications of her findings for the construction of the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth century and for the emergence and development of a full-fledged domestic service industry in the South during the early twentieth century. This organizational structure allows Glymph to trace both the continuities and discontinuities of black and white women’s relations more effectively than she would have done by focusing on either the prewar or postwar periods. That being said, it is also the case that Glymph’s analysis does not conform to a strict chronological framework: this enables her to make important connections, but it also results in occasional temporal imprecision and in a certain degree of repetition. Likewise, although Glymph is aware of regional variation, she is less interested in documenting internal diversity than in identifying common themes that apply to the South as a whole. Some readers might wonder whether Glymph has a tendency to rely too much on certain individuals who figure prominently throughout her work, yet others might see her wide scope and willingness to make broad generalizations as the book’s main strengths. If there is one analytical area that Glymph might have explored more fully in this study, it is perhaps the role of men, both white and black, in helping to shape relations among women. To be sure, Glymph does not entirely neglect this topic, and at times she makes some intriguing observations on it. For instance, she notes how white women’s loss of status and power after emancipation frequently caused tension and conflict with their husbands. Nonetheless, even taking into account the fact that this book is dealing with the domestic realm of the plantation household and with women’s experiences, the men, black men especially, often seem oddly absent. A dialectical approach to gender would suggest that the relations between white women and black women both influenced and were influenced by the relations between white men and white women as well as by the relations between black men and black women. Again, Glymph does not ignore these issues, and she makes it quite clear that her topic is the relations between white and black women. It may well be that evidence of this sort is hard to come by. Yet given Glymph’s ability to tease meaning out of the evidence pertaining specifically to white and black women, one wonders if perhaps she might have speculated a bit further on the role that white and black men played, even indirectly, in the transformation of the plantation household.


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As most readers of this journal know, Thavolia Glymph is the author, editor, and coeditor of numerous influential essays, journal articles, and edited collections, and her name has been familiar to students and scholars of the nineteenth-century South since at least the mid-1980s. For those of us who have been reading her work for our entire professional lives, it seems almost incomprehensible that this is her first monographic study. It was certainly worth the wait. Anyone familiar with Thavolia Glymph’s previous scholarship will not be surprised in the least by the brilliance of the analysis in this work, by the grace and accessibility of its prose, or by the author’s ability to balance scholarly rigor with what is sometimes referred to as a “useable” or “relevant” past. John C. Rodrigue, Stonehill College DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-015

America’s Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867 – 1960 Donna T. Haverty-Stacke

New York: New York University Press, 2009 x + 303 pp., $45.00 (cloth) When more than a million immigrant workers gathered on May 1, 2006, in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities across the country to protest pending anti-immigrant legislation, the press seldom mentioned that they were reenacting a ritual seen in American cities throughout the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. With roots in ancient custom, the modern May Day demonstration was created by workers around the world, although the meaning of the holiday has often been contested. Some clearly saw it as a commemoration of Chicago’s “Haymarket martyrs” and a rededication to the goal of working-class liberation, whereas others saw it as a demonstration of trade union strength and a demand for the eight-hour day. Readers of the Cold War generation will remember it as the “communist holiday” and recall ranks of missiles and tanks parading through Red Square, but large May Day demonstrations occurred in many American cities until shortly after World War II. Haverty-Stacke’s book is a fascinating study of the phenomenon, from its infancy in the nineteenth-century labor reform movement to its death amid the political repression of the McCarthy era. Haverty-Stacke organizes her narrative chronologically, but it is fundamentally a cultural study. She stresses the broad support for the holiday from its first celebration in Chicago in 1867 and the increasing contention over its meaning, both among left-wing groups and between these groups and the increasingly conservative trade unions, who by the turn of the century came to see the holiday as subversive. Focusing mainly on Chicago and New York, where the largest marches generally took place, the author examines the symbolism and discourse surrounding the holiday and how they helped form group identity among anarchists, socialists, communists, and union radicals of other stripes. HavertyStacke’s discussion of the changing place of the red and American flags in the celebration of the holiday is especially compelling. Ironically, Sam Gompers was instrumental in turning May Day into an international socialist event by appealing to European socialist groups to lend support to the Amer-


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ican Federation of Labor’s drive for the eight-hour day. Although the American unions saw May Day as an event properly addressed to employers, the Second International viewed it in political terms as a demand addressed to the state. The Second International declared May Day as a worldwide workers’ holiday in 1889, and from that point on, radicals in the United States and throughout the world celebrated it as such. As the connotations of May Day became increasingly political and radical during the 1890s, American unions increasingly celebrated Labor Day instead. Haverty-Stacke contrasts the changing meanings of May Day and Labor Day and the ways in which these holidays were employed by labor and socialist groups. A persistent theme here, symbolized by the place of the American and red flags in the celebrations, is the tension between an evolving American radicalism and the ideal of proletarian internationalism, which remained for most of the holiday’s history. First the Socialist Labor Party and later the Socialist Party often insisted on the inclusion of the American flag, which was often carried along with the red flag (when it was not banned by local government and labor officials) and union banners in May Day demonstrations. The American flag stressed the American roots of their radicalism. Anarchists eschewed the national flag for the black and the red flags in the name of a radical international identity. Emerging from its ultrarevolutionary phase in the twenties and early thirties, the Communist Party (CPUSA) embraced the American flag in its Popular Front pursuit of “Communism as Twentieth Century Americanism” (165) and its efforts to root its ideology in a notion of progressive American nationalism. Haverty-Stacke argues that a hybrid radicalism emerged that mixed American radical ideals with a progressive internationalism that came quite naturally to many first-and second-generation immigrant workers and their families. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin shared May Day floats with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln; and the CPUSA held the May Day franchise from the early thirties until the holiday’s repression during the postwar era. Its Popular Front approach resulted in the largest May Day demonstrations in U.S. history — an estimated seven hundred thousand in New York during the late thirties — but also in a close association of the holiday with Stalinism, a connection that contributed to the holiday’s demise in the 1950s. The CPUSA suspended May Day celebrations during World War II; when the communists attempted to resurrect the ritual in the postwar era, they ran headlong into the increasing conservatism of the Cold War. Haverty-Stacke also stresses the vital importance of youth organizations in the twentieth-century celebrations as the radicals sought to assure themselves and assert to the world that their struggles would continue. Socialist and communist youth marched, often in uniform, and provided much of the entertainment through song and dance. Because of the prominence of ethnic radical subcultures, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a phenomenon the author notes, material from the foreign language labor and radical press would likely have increased the depth of this study. The Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, now available in searchable digitized form through the University of Illinois library, opens a range of these publications to researchers. Even at its height, May Day was the target of patriotic and conservative groups, who launched a series of competing events for May first — Loyalty Day, I Am an American Day, and Union Square, USA — in their efforts to displace the radical spectacle. These efforts reached a high point during the political repression of the Cold War, when the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and Catholic and Jewish veterans’ groups mobi-


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lized huge Loyalty Day demonstrations that dwarfed the CPUSA’s marches and sometimes drove the radicals from the streets of New York, Chicago, and other cities. By the sixties, May Day had been largely abandoned and almost forgotten by most American workers. However, as Haverty-Stacke concludes, the class inequality that provided a context for the celebration of May Day remains. Demonstrations such as those by immigrant workers in 2006 bring to mind the history of the holiday and the movements surrounding it, even as the marchers’ complexions change along with the new issues confronting American radicals. James R. Barrett, University of Illinois, Urbana DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-016

Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History Rebecca N. Hill

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008 x + 414 pp., $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) Langston Hughes’s 1923 poem “Justice” is an indictment of American law whose power is matched only by its brevity. “That Justice is a blind goddess / Is a thing to which we black are wise: / Her bandage hides two festering sores / That once perhaps were eyes” (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1995, 31). In the face of ever-mounting, mostly black and latino prison populations that are — Bernie Madoff excepted — almost universally poor, scholars are peeling back that bandage to reveal criminal justice as a cornerstone of America’s class and race rule. Given the ongoing crisis of mass incarceration, which follows a decade of political repression, Rebecca N. Hill’s Men, Mobs, and Law is a timely contribution. Hill draws on the records generated by radical defense and antilynching movements, from John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry to Jonathan Jackson’s 1970 raid on the Marin County Courthouse, to reclaim the history of the radical Left. Under attack by the capitalist state or forces of racial terror — or both — activists fought to protect radicals’ dignity, save their lives, and further their shared political commitments. These trials, Hill argues, became sites through which “radicals most directly attack[ed] the power of the state and the representative claims of the mass media” (16). The book’s most innovative contribution is how it weaves together the histories of radical labor and antilynching movements. Hill argues that they should be understood in dialogue because both were “organized to defend and resuscitate people who [had] come to symbolize their communities in the mass media and to criticize the moral systems of the law and the media” (15). The courtroom was one battleground, public opinion was another, and both required activists’ tactical use of language. Hill analyzes how the movements constructed meanings and reconfigured dominant literary modes in courts, in newspapers, and in memoirs. This literary grounding helps Hill unpack how defense activists wrote counterhistories of radicalism and enables her to demonstrate how gender affected their struggle. At different times and in different forms, activists drew on tragic narratives, but more often they penned stories of masculine heroes confronting greater forces. Threads of manliness and masculine heroism, of romantic and revolutionary love, weave through each chapter.


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Although there are (literally) uncounted martyrs to state and mob violence, Hill’s chapters center on famous trials. Readers will be familiar with the contours of each case, but Hill’s insistence on placing each in a tradition of radical defense activism yields new understanding. The first chapter describes John Brown as the Great Man of the Left, the rare white who advocated armed black rebellion and sought to make it happen. Yet for Brown to be remembered as an American hero by the white Left in the late nineteenth century, when African Americans’ political rights were being systematically dismantled, his memory had to be reformed to stress his whiteness and heroic status as savior of helpless victims. The effect was to turn abolitionism into a story of white heroic nationalism, thereby eliding the history of African American resistance to white rule (withdrawal of labor, escape, armed defense, political organization), during the Civil War and after. The second chapter is a close reading of the Haymarket anarchists’ political philosophies, enlivened by telling detail of the movement that emerged to save their lives. Hill analyzes the tensions and strategic alignments among anarchists, social democrats, the Knights of Labor, and the American Federation of Labor in the effort to protect workers’ rights while proclaiming both the defendants’ innocence and the justice of their cause. Hill argues that the Chicago anarchists’ theory of protest was grounded in a concept of natural law. Convinced that the state was irredeemably capitalist, they believed that the only counter to the corrupt statute law was the righteous “enraged fury of the passionate mob,” driven by “natural manhood” (107, 110). However, this position aligned with that of Southern lynchers. Hill argues convincingly that this prevented these anarchists from connecting their own struggles to those faced by African Americans in the South. Moreover, it alienated black activists from their cause. While the Haymarket defendants were stymied by natural law theory and a tendency to confuse the inherent goodness of popular protest with actual democracy, black activists such as Ida B. Wells could afford no such confusion. As Hill argues in the third chapter, the mobs that terrorized southern blacks claimed to be enforcing popular justice and protecting white women from black men when the state could not. This was, of course, nonsense. Lynch mobs operated alongside a highly developed and brutal legal system that enthusiastically sentenced black defendants on meager evidence. Northern white liberals saw the lynchers as the unruly poor, akin to anarchists, who needed to be controlled by rational state force, and believed that the state was well-suited to condemn black rapists. However, Wells avoided that double bind, which would have simply propelled black defendants into an unjust legal system. Instead, Wells, and later W. E. B. Du Bois, identified how legal and extralegal violence interwove to form what Hill identifies as a policemob continuum. Despite Wells’s “proto-revolutionary” (118) critique of American law, she was no anarchist. Her commitment to creating a just state enabled an alliance with liberal whites, which would eventually prove effective in limiting, or, one might argue, transforming, white violence. The Industrial Workers of the World, like the Haymarket defenders, initially hewed to a natural law stance that equated white manhood with direct action, but in the wake of their own attacks by mobs in the American West, the Wobblies eventually approached the understanding long held by black activists about such vigilantism. In short, Hill argues, they took a page from Ida Wells’s book (157). Hill then moves on to the Sacco and Vanzetti defense. Splits over tactics and ideology, exacerbated by Soviet crackdowns on anarchists, the rise of fascism, and the Palmer raids, led to the fracture of left coalitions. Many eschewed direct revolutionary violence, whereas others, including Sacco and Vanzetti, espoused a “romantic concept of spontane-


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ous mass uprising fueled by acts of individual [masculine] heroism” (172). Infighting and a change in legal representation eventually diluted the anticapitalist aspects of their defense. It turned, instead, toward a critique of American nativism. The fifth chapter is a history of the Communist International Labor Defense (ILD), from its defense of Scottsboro “boys” on trumped up rape charges to the Rosenbergs, tried and executed as Soviet agents. Hill argues that the impetus to take on the Scottsboro case expanded the ILD’s reach beyond strict labor cases and brought race and class issues together for the Communist Party in crucial ways. However, in the thick of the Cold War, the ILD’s Rosenberg defense lost its class edge, adopting accommodationist strategies that attacked “fascism” rather than America’s liberal capitalism. The defense team portrayed the Rosenbergs as victimized innocents, Jews suffering from hysterical anti-Semitism, rather than “martyrs of communism and class struggle” (253). In so doing, the communists had become much like the liberals of a generation before. The final chapter turns to the Black Panthers, who had no small experience with political repression. Whereas the Haymarket anarchists identified the prison as the pinnacle of capitalist control, the Panthers located both the prison and the ghetto in an imperialist framework with historical links to slave plantations and contemporary connections to global colonialism. The Panthers cast the ghetto as America’s internal colony, and George Jackson, arrested as an ordinary criminal but radicalized behind bars, became the foremost theorist of the prison. If the Panthers’ defense differed from previous generations of radical defense movements by having black leadership and radical class analysis, its masculinism remained consistent. Media focused on the great male heroes such as Jackson and Huey Newton, whereas women and defense committee supporters were placed in subordinate, feminine roles, despite their centrality in reproducing social struggle. The grim results of their trials, however, echoed the lethal violence previous generations of radicals faced. Jackson was shot down by prison guards before what would have been a widely watched trial; many dozens of Panthers were harassed, imprisoned, or killed. Nevertheless, Hill argues that it is a mistake to remember the Panthers as innocent victims. They were hardly romantic innocents, and they could never be considered as passive as victims. The Panthers rarely portrayed themselves as either. Men, Mobs, and Law is thick with new insight into established topics, but organization within chapters makes for choppy reading. Paragraphs commonly contained numerous ideas, the most important of which are hard to discern, and transitions between paragraphs are at times absent and puzzling. The flow of argument and logic of the organization are disrupted by some chapter subsections of less than a page, but some much longer subsections span a number of different issues and would have benefited from additional divisions. At times the welter of detail — Hill leaves few contradictions unexamined — hides the broader arguments and lessons. Nevertheless, the lessons remain. If past experiences can serve as models for today’s social movements — as Hill intends — the contradictions are as important as consistencies. These martyrs of the American Left, fighting against the “Justice” described by Hughes and for a more egalitarian world, deserve to be remembered, criticized, and even celebrated, but never sacralized. Ethan Blue, University of Western Australia DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-017


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Lydia’s Open Door: Inside Mexico’s Most Modern Brothel Patty Kelly

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008 xxii + 270 pp., $55.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) In Lydia’s Open Door, Patty Kelly situates the Zona Galáctica, a government-run brothel in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, Mexico, within local, national, and global modernization processes and scholarly conversations about sex work. “This is a book about women’s sexual labor in neoliberal Mexico,” she writes, before boldly inserting herself into well-worn debates about whether sex work always results from coercion or whether women (and workers of other genders, although Kelly focuses almost exclusively on women) choose such labor from a limited array of options (2). She explicitly rejects “the false dichotomy of exploitation/liberation” (27). What is unique about sex work, she claims, is not gender-or class-based exploitation, which is “found in all forms of work that poor women throughout the world must perform,” but rather the “stigmatization that is especially damaging to the human spirit” (2 – 3). Moreover, the Zona Galáctica is “a local example of . . . global neoliberal capitalist expansion and modernization” and an instance of “structural violence” (4 – 5). Throughout the text, she demonstrates these premises by weaving interviews with sex workers and government officials with analytically astute descriptions of her observations at the Zona, in meetings with authorities, and in day-to-day experiences in the city. Mexico has a long history of legalized prostitution. Currently thirteen of thirty-one states oversee legal, regulated sex work. Although Mexico has a high tolerance for legal sex work, sex workers themselves are still viewed as immoral. The men who seek sex with prostitutes generally hide their exploits from their wives, although paying money for sex is not itself stigmatized. Narrow understandings of gender paint men as needing access to sex and women as needing their sexuality controlled, yet male domination of women and the stigmatization of women’s sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage cannot account for the stigmatization of the women who sell sex at the Zona. “Struggles over sexuality are frequently not simply struggles over sexuality but are also, as in Tuxtla, struggles over class and expressions of power and powerlessness,” Kelly explains (114 – 15). Working in the outskirts of the capital of an impoverished state with a high indigenous population, the “women of the Zona Galáctica are reputed to offer the least expensive sexual services in Chiapas and southern Mexico” (159). Tuxtla Gutiérrez, which is the focus of the modernization process in Chiapas, stands in marked contrast to rural areas that have been the site of well-known radical militancy and state repression in recent years. “Unlike the whole of Chiapas, where some 60 percent of the economically active population is engaged in primary-sector activities such as agriculture, fishing, or cattle-raising, nearly 75 percent of Tuxtlecos earn their living in commercial or service sectors” (36). Many rural peasants migrate to Tuxtla Gutiérrez because of the same economic policies that led to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) uprising in the hills above the city. The land the brothel occupies is the focus of a dispute between the government and an ejido, or communal landowning cooperative, in which the landlords, who rent rooms to the workers, and workers themselves both have stakes. The Zona reflects this mix of the modern and traditional, the urban and the rural. Kelly’s descriptions of the physical space where sex work takes place emphasize the bureau-


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cracy, the well-lit passages between buildings, and the convenient yet constraining presence of medical facilities, classrooms, and jail cells for detaining out of control workers and clients, what she refers to as “a Foucauldian nightmare, a strange trio of disciplinary institutions: a brothel, a prison, a school, all in one” (45). Many of the sex workers are from rural areas, and between 30 and 60 percent of them (the population shifts frequently) are immigrants, often undocumented workers from Central America. Many of the food vendors within the Zona are gay, and there is a strict division between the administrative and medical staff, on the one hand, and the sex workers and other “unskilled” laborers, on the other. Another boundary exists between those who sell sex in the Zona Galáctica and those who work the streets. Street workers make more money but face greater risk of violence and police harassment. Kelly links the regulation of sex workers outside of the brothel to the containment of the women within the Zona. This “spatial regulation of prostitution” keeps these two groups from identifying with a common struggle (63). Neither group is organized because of the stigmatization of the work they do; however, in 1996, the Zona workers went on strike, temporarily demonstrating solidarity with each other, yet explicitly separating themselves from the unregulated sex workers. They demanded that ticket prices for clients be lowered, streets paved, lighting installed, the price for a sanitary control card (through which workers’ sexual health is regulated) be decreased, other sex workers currently working in the city center be moved to the Zona, and respect for workers and their rights. A few of these demands were met; however, the biggest success was “the fulfillment of the workers’ demand that they receive condoms directly” from the venereal disease control office “rather than having them distributed to the clients” (98). This seemingly minor change gave the women more power over their working conditions. Despite their gains, no collective action has occurred since, something Kelly attributes to the neoliberal cultural and economic conditions. In addition to divisions between street and brothel workers, Mexicans generally set themselves apart from immigrants. The border between Chiapas and Guatemala is the entry point into Mexico for many migrants, including some who plan to reach the United States. As part of the many people displaced by global capitalism, these immigrants often find themselves facing hostility in Mexico. “Among many Mexican [Zona] workers, there is a decidedly anti-immigrant sentiment, fueled in part by a competitive work environment,” Kelly claims (141). Immigration status thus adds additional layers of stigma and danger to some women’s lives. Violence in many forms is central to the life stories of all the women working in the Zona, especially those who crossed borders to arrive there. Some entered sex work to escape an abusive partner. For others, performing sex work was itself part of the violence of an interpersonal relationship with a pimp. Women’s reluctance to share their line of work with family and neighbors is itself a form of brutality, made clear in the shame they experience and the physical and emotional violence that sometimes accompanies revelations of the stigmatized labor they perform. Despite these experiences, the Zona is not simply a site of exploitation. Sex work offers more money than other forms of work available to poor women and some amount of self-sufficiency. Not all women in the Zona perform the same services. Not all women are willing to completely disrobe during sex. Nonetheless, social hierarchies based on age and immigration status affect what women are able to charge and how willing they are to refuse to perform acts viewed as unacceptable. In addition, “the liberties found in the


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[Zona] are diminished by the stigma of working there, which affects the women’s home lives and effectively controls and separates the women, inhibiting them from engaging in collective activity as prostitutes outside the Galactic Zone” (203). If you are looking for solutions, you will not find them here. Nonetheless, Kelly’s well-written analysis of the confluence of neoliberal economics with Mexican sex and gender norms is complex yet accessible. Deploying thick description at its best, she shows us the Zona Galáctica through detailed and contextualized accounts of social interactions among sex workers, clients, bureaucrats, the police, and herself. Useful for scholars and teachers addressing gender, labor, sexuality, and transnational interactions, this book is also an excellent example of ethnographic methodology. Elizabeth G. Currans, The College of William and Mary DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-018

The Unemployed People’s Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929 – 1941 James J. Lorence

Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009 xiv + 307 pp., $44.95 (cloth) If it is in the nature of industrial capitalism to produce a reserve of unemployed workers, swelling periodically in times of economic crisis, then the historian of the working class must be as ready to write the history of not working as they are to write the history of labor itself. In The Unemployed People’s Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929 –1941, James J. Lorence has done just that for one of the states hardest hit during the Great Depression. Lorence’s book joins what is now no longer a mere handful but at least a growing shelf’s worth of studies that insist that we cannot understand the politics and the labor movement of the South in the interwar period without taking seriously the commitments many southerners, white and black, had to the Left and particularly to the Communist Party. The work most tightly connected to Lorence’s is Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe (1990); the experience of Alabama’s communists frequently intersects with and provides a comparative context for their Georgia comrades. More recent work by Robert Rod gers Korstad and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore also shows that communists in the South in this period often drove the debate over workers’ rights and civil rights on their own terms, not those of Moscow. This book also fits nicely with works that emphasize the role of liberals, epitomized by John Egerton’s Speak Now against the Day (1995). Finally, Lorence’s careful attention to labor relations and disputes, especially in the textile industry, puts it in dialogue with other studies of Georgia labor history in this period by Clifford Kuhn, Douglas Flamming, and Gary B. Fink. Lorence begins by sketching out the crisis of unemployment at the beginning of the Great Depression. Unsurprisingly, unemployment hit urban populations harder than rural ones, and African Americans harder than whites. Throughout the book, in fact, we are reminded that Atlanta was a world unto itself, with both pressures and opportunities very different from the rest of the state. Inadequate official responses set the stage for more radi-


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cal alternatives. Georgia’s unemployed might have remained unorganized had it not been for the militancy of a small cohort of communists who saw an opportunity to both help workers and expand the ranks of the Communist Party. Communists gained some biracial support in Atlanta and planned a protest over unemployment for March 1930. This communist-led unemployed movement faced strong and relentless pressure from Georgia authorities. Although much is usually made of Atlanta’s openly fascist Black Shirts, Lorence argues that they were short-lived and relatively unimportant. Far more threatening to Georgia radicals was the courthouse. Armed with archaic statutes designed to put down servile insurrections, Atlanta’s assistant solicitor general, John H. Hudson, and his allies hounded organizers just at the point when their biracial efforts were beginning to pay off and arrested Angelo Herndon for insurrection in July 1932. This was just the situation the International Labor Defense was created for, and, in league with liberals and socialists, it waged a legal and public relations campaign against Herndon’s imprisonment. By the time he was eventually freed in late 1935, Don West, Ben Davis, and Clyde Johnson had all been forced underground and then out of state. The New Deal and section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) initiated organizing and conflict, especially in the textile industry, that eventually exacerbated the problem of unemployment. Lorence’s account of the 1934 General Textile Strike covers ground made familiar in the past two decades by a number of good studies. Although this study does not necessarily tell us much new about the strike as a whole, the focus on Georgia is worthwhile in itself, and Lorence’s book serves as contextualization for the 1934 strike in a way not generally found in other accounts. The response to the strike included blacklisting, which is familiar, but also attacks on sympathetic academics and an attempt to pass strong anticommunist legislation. Though perhaps not as dramatic as the clashes over communist organizing, the development of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) may have been more important for the deep changes it brought about in people’s attitudes and expectations: for the first time, citizens began to believe the federal government had some responsibility for their employment and well-being. However, Georgia’s workers did not simply accept WPA largesse passively. The Georgia Federation of Labor (GFL), led by L. Steve Nance, insisted that WPA work-relief wages should not depress the prevailing wage for skilled craftsmen and even threatened a strike of GFL members on WPA projects in late 1935. For African Americans, on the other hand, the WPA wage marked a tremendous improvement, and rural employers predictably tried to manipulate the eligibility of their workers for WPA assistance to keep a lid on wages and maintain a supply of tractable labor. The increasing importance of the WPA came at the same time that communists dropped their opposition to cooperating with other groups, and the Popular Front managed to exert considerable influence on WPA policies by 1936, with the formation of the Workers Alliance of America, an amalgamation of earlier unemployed groups. In the countryside, further progress was frequently stymied by that stubborn and wily socialist leader of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, H. L. Mitchell. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League also monitored WPA activities, calling them to account when they colluded with businessmen and planters. The increased security the WPA provided for jobless Georgians emboldened labor to work for other goals beyond just employment; worker education and organizing, in the form of the Textile Workers Organizing Committee, both got a boost in 1937 and 1938. Eventually, the Workers Alliance’s place became more secure, and it effectively carried out the routine functions of a labor union for those with no jobs.


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The final years of the Great Depression and World War II brought the unemployed people’s movement in Georgia to a close. Factional conflicts within the Workers Alliance and national anticommunist pressures put the organization in decline by the end of 1938. The House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hitler-Stalin pact crushed the Popular Front, and the easing of economic pressures as textile mills, military bases, and new plants offered jobs to many who had been part of the unemployed movement eliminated much of the mass support for the Workers Alliance. By the beginning of the 1940s, the Workers Alliance represented only the hardcore “unemployables,” and the unemployed movement in Georgia ground to a halt. Lorence has done a very good job in tracking down sources, using a wide range of oral histories and memoirs from key players but also ransacking the records and publications of the federal government to fill in the details of his story. He has also made good use of a wide range of newspapers, particularly the radical press, which tended to cover the organizations he writes about. The writing is excellent throughout, and tables effectively convey some of the changes in employment patterns he discusses. Minor problems really have everything to do with wanting more of what Lorence already gives us. He claims several times that the activism of the 1930s influenced the civil rights period later, but it would have been helpful to see some of those connections drawn more explicitly. Also, because there are a number of individuals who recur throughout the book, it might have been nice to have a bit more biographical detail on them when they were first introduced, particularly as it seems likely that these figures might appear peripherally in other related stories. The Unemployed People’s Movement makes an important contribution to several different historiographies and will be of great use to all of us interested in any of these areas. Bruce E. Baker, Royal Holloway, University of London DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-019

L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement Ruth Milkman

Russell Sage Foundation, 2006 xiii + 224 pp., $24.95 (paper) In L.A. Story, Ruth Milkman begins with a fascinating question: is Los Angeles an anomaly or a replicable model for the future of unions? To answer this question, Milkman provides a careful analysis of Los Angeles’s exceptional labor history, leading to the conclusion that Los Angeles emerged as a “rare bright spot” for unionization in the 1990s. Given that this era was a heyday of neoliberal policies that prompted intense privatization, falling wages, and greater inequality, this conclusion came much to the surprise of everyone, including the author. In the first half of the book, Milkman explains this turn of events with meticulous detail. She makes three central claims. First, Los Angeles’s unique regional labor history allowed for innovative organizing strategies. Los Angeles had long been a stronghold of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its affiliates rather than the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). This is surprising, given the AFL’s reputation as conser-


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vative and hostile to the interests of people of color and women. The region’s unionization efforts were slow to unfold and modest in scope because powerful private and public entities intensely defended Los Angeles’s reputation as an open-shop city. Unions did not make real inroads until the late 1930s, but the distance from organized labor’s largely East Coast old guard provided the necessary space to experiment with workers traditionally deemed unorganizable. By the 1990s, the AFL led a labor resurgence of Latino immigrant workers in Los Angeles. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in particular demonstrated great imagination in their work with the L.A. Janitors’ campaign. Milkman’s second claim is that major labor market transformations came sooner and were more extreme in Los Angeles than elsewhere in the United States. Its location in southern California and its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border amplified the effects of economic restructuring, including privatization of public goods and services, explosive growth in service-sector jobs, workforce casualization, and greater demand for cheap, immigrant labor. However, the AFL’s occupationally based unionism coincided with the increasingly unstable workplace conditions of a postindustrial age. For instance, AFL unions developed strategies to take wages out of competition in unregulated, highly competitive labor markets, which exemplify today’s post-mass-production manufacturing economy. Milkman writes, “As the L.A. janitors’ campaign and other recent organizing successes illustrate, this traditional AFL repertoire is highly adaptable to contemporary economic conditions, which in many ways resemble those of the pre – New Deal era” (5). In addition, the AFL’s historic concentration in expanding sectors of the economy such as transportation, construction, and building/janitorial services gave that union an advantage. To their credit, key union leaders saw the possibilities of mobilizing immigrant workers in these service sectors and renouncing their previous stance against women and people of color. In 2000, the AFL-CIO officially changed its position on immigration. Milkman writes, “Now, led by its once-marginal southern California branch, organized labor suddenly emerged as a leading advocate of amnesty for the undocumented and as a defender of immigrant rights more generally” (117). Third, Milkman argues that Los Angeles’s position as the premier destination for recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America provided access to a vast working class that was predisposed to collective action. Here, she makes one of her most important contributions by clearly discrediting the widely held notion that immigrants are “unorganizable” and a threat to established labor standards as “vulnerable, docile workers willing to work for low, even substandard wages, fearful of any confrontation with authority, and thus highly unlikely to actively seek unionization” (130). Instead, “low-wage Latino immigrants, some of them veterans of intense collective political struggles at home and most of them far less individualistic in orientation than their native-born counterparts, turned out to be unusually receptive to unionism” (9). Milkman argues convincingly that these labor dynamics have now spread throughout the country, making Los Angeles an important model for understanding both the successes and failures of organized labor movements today and the possibilities for the future. There is, however, a fourth condition that is given too little attention by the author: Los Angeles’s central role in the broader immigrant-led political mobilizations beginning in the 1990s. Milkman notes, “In Los Angeles the street protests against the [Proposition 187] initiative were larger than any since the antiwar demonstrations of the Vietnam War era” (131). It is unclear that the unionization efforts would have existed in the first place without these kinds of political demonstrations.


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Milkman punctures other myths. Most important, she contradicts “the claims of some commentators that the influx of impoverished immigrants precipitated the deterioration of wages, benefits, and working conditions in blue-collar jobs” (9). “The timing,” she writes, “suggests that the causality runs in the opposite direction: immigrants were hired mainly after the jobs in question had been degraded by deunionization and restructuring” (9). Milkman makes clear that during this era of economic restructuring, native-born unionized workers moved into other high-wage positions rather than fighting for their disappearing jobs. Consequently, construction workers migrated from the residential sector of the industry into the rapidly growing commercial sector; truckers moved from local, shortdistance jobs to long-haul work where conditions were better; and janitors moved from the private to the still-unionized public sector. When these native-born workers abandoned their formerly unionized jobs, employers replaced them with new immigrants from Mexico and Central America. In the garment industry, where immigrants have always been a large part of the labor force, immigrants were now completely dominant. The author writes that “unionism was effectively destroyed, generating a precipitous decline in wages, fringe benefits, and job security — which in turn sparked an exodus of native-born workers. Latino immigrants eagerly filled the void even as employment arrangements rapidly devolved” (81). The second half of the book centers on four case studies of local unionization campaigns in the 1990s, two of which succeeded and two of which failed: Justice for Janitors (SEIU), the Drywallers (Carpenters’ Union), garment workers at Guess (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union / UNITE), and the port truckers (Communications Workers of America, CWA). The cases are organized by whether their mobilization campaign was initially a top-down or bottom-up effort. She defines top-down as a traditional AFL organizing strategy involving union leaders pressuring employers directly. Bottomup strategies involve rank-and-file mobilization historically associated with the CIO. The two successful cases were Justice for Janitors, which began as a top-down effort, and Drywallers, which began as a bottom-up campaign. Milkman argues that these campaigns were successful because they incorporated both the AFL and CIO strategies. On the other hand, efforts to organize the garment workers at Guess failed when union leaders did not devote adequate resources to rank-and-file mobilization, and in the case of the port truckers, the CWA, which lacked previous experience and understanding of the industry, failed to take advantage of overwhelming support by the rank-and-file workers. This campaign was a heartbreaking example of inadequate top-down strategies. Given the current tenuous state of organized labor, Milkman contends that unionization requires an imaginative combination of both traditions. Whether successful or not, each case is compelling and raises a host of further questions. In fact, each case could merit its own full-length manuscript. I wanted to know more about the regional labor history of these immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Their transnational story of labor activism seems critical for devising future mobilization efforts. Also, what difference did gender make? What role, if any, did gender segregation or concentration play in these collective mobilization efforts? And, finally, I reiterate my earlier question regarding the relationship of the broader immigrant political movement(s) and immigrant labor mobilization. Which came first? Are they in fact separate? Milkman concludes her case studies in a pragmatic but perhaps disheartening manner: “The challenge of reproducing such successes on a larger scale, whether in Los Angeles or in the nation as a whole, remains formidable — even for the former AFL unions (such as


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the SEIU and the Carpenters) that are relatively well positioned to undertake such a project” (186). Surprisingly, after reading her book, I have a more positive assessment. The key points Milkman makes so persuasively are that immigrant workers are open and ready to pursue collective action and that unions are finally beginning to support them. Migration is fundamentally about work, and the massive protests for immigrant rights in the spring of 2006 were fundamentally about work and labor conditions. A million people marched in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006, in concert with half a million in Chicago on March 10 and hundreds of thousands of others in cities and towns across the country. A major population is ready to organize a mass grassroots political movement. The question is whether labor is as well. Lisa Sun-Hee Park, University of Minnesota DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-020

Florida’s Working-Class Past: Current Perspectives on Labor, Race, and Gender from Spanish Florida to the New Immigration Edited by Robert Cassanello and Melanie Shell-Weiss

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009 xii + 286 pp., $69.95 (cloth) Florida labor history — it reads like an oxymoron. Florida conjures up images of sun and surf and Disney World, whereas labor history is stereotypically associated with factory workers toiling in the heavy industries of the Rust Belt. Yet if you dig a bit deeper, the history of the Sunshine State has always been associated with varieties of work, from agriculture to factory labor to service employment. Building upon that understanding, Robert Cassanello and Melanie Shell-Weiss have edited a book of wide-ranging essays that force the reader to confront the issue of work in Florida history. Taken together, the pieces not only provide insights into the state’s history but allow for a new interpretation of that history, one that places issues of labor, work, and capitalism up front. In a short but comprehensive introduction that places Florida labor studies into the historiography of American labor history, Cassanello and Shell-Weiss conclude that the subject “remains one of the most diverse and dynamic fields of scholarly inquiry” (10). They hold that “increasing interest in transnationalism, internationally comparative history, frontiers, and borderlands make Florida an ideal climate for new scholarship” (11). The nine essays that follow this introduction certainly prove the editors’ assertions by both examining old subjects in new ways and developing alternative strategies for exploring Florida history. By placing work in the center of their analytical framework, they use the vaunted triptych of race, class, and gender to ask provocative questions about how Florida society evolved in conjunction with the broader theme of a changing capitalist economy. The essays look at the entire span of Florida history from the Spanish contact period until the present day. This broad temporal range gives the book a coverage not usually seen in edited collections. Tamara Spike starts off with a provocative new take on the relationship between Spanish missionaries and soldiers and their Apalachee Indian subjects. She concludes that agricultural work provided the key element in the colony’s sur-


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vival and that “Spanish Florida could not have functioned, or even existed, without Indian laborers” (17). An unending need for corn fueled the repartimiento (or tribute) labor system that fed the Spaniards while destroying Indian society. With the cession of Florida to the United States in 1821, the territory became part of the American South, a region whose economy was based on African American slave labor. Though slavery had existed as a system of labor and racial control in both Spanish and English Florida, the transition to an American territory marked a profound change in the importance of that system. Edward Baptist’s essay focuses on slavery as a labor-management program and follows Peter Wood’s nomenclature by defining the productive enterprises not as plantations but as slave labor camps. By examining the cotton belt of mid-Florida (surrounding Tallahassee), Baptist concludes that white entrepreneurs in these frontier areas were “more efficient at extracting large quantities of labor from . . . enslaved laborers” (56). While enslaved African Americans toiled under this “pushing system” (31) of chattel slavery, runaway slaves lived very different lives as black Seminoles. In his article, Brent Weisman examines the lives of these runaways as they lived among Seminole Indians in the early nineteenth century. In a different take on the complicated relations of black Seminoles with Indian allies (and sometimes kin), Weisman determines that the labor of both males and females provided “some measure of power and control” (81) for these black Seminoles. War profoundly changed the labor dynamics of nineteenth-century Florida. The Second Seminole War saw the removal of all but a few of the Seminole Indians and their black allies. The Civil War marked the end of slavery, but in spite of those conflicts, powerful Floridians still needed a ready and compliant source of cheap labor to participate in agriculture and extractive industries if the state was to grow economically. The book’s next three essays deal with this transition period, marking Florida’s development as part of both a Jim Crow South and a colonial appendage to northern capital. Mark Long examines how postbellum entrepreneurs such as Henry Sanford searched for sources of stable labor, even going so far as to import Swedish laborers to tend his groves. Long ties this need for labor to broader changes in Florida’s political economy, especially the movement toward the convict lease system. Whereas Long analyzes capitalists and their attempts to control labor, Robert Cassanello looks at the emerging union movement in Florida in the first twenty years of the twentieth century and its relationship to both race and gender. Using a sophisticated analysis of the relationship of masculinity to these constructs, he concludes that workers in different fields such as telephone operators, streetcar drivers, and cigar makers used divergent strategies to try to obtain better wages and workplace control. By looking at Florida as a segregated society, Thomas Castillo examines the relationship among work, race, government policy, and emerging technology as he analyzes the politics of race in the chauffeur business in Miami. White drivers pushed to prevent blacks from participating in their business, whereas upper-class whites argued for the right to have blacks work in an occupation that verified black inferiority. Castillo concludes that Miami’s white leaders, “by conceding to black demands and protecting black men’s right to drive . . . ensured that the lines of segregation in Miami would remain sharp, if somewhat redrawn” (161). The final three essays examine Florida’s labor issues in the changing context of the middle and late twentieth century. Alex Lichtenstein’s piece analyzes Miami’s labor movement and its relationship to the Communist Party organization in the 1930s and 1940s. Using the energetic figure of labor organizer Charles Smolikoff as the centerpiece of his essay, Lichtenstein notes that government intervention during World War II was crucial to


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labor success. He also recognizes that labor issues remained closely tied to other issues of social justice, especially voting rights for black workers. Examining workers in shipyards, cigar factories, and citrus groves, he concludes that the responses of owners and managers played out very differently in varying fields of work. Cindy Hahamovitch analyzes the increasing dependence on imported temporary labor to harvest Florida’s agricultural products. She focuses on an experiment, the introduction of Jamaican “guest worker” laborers during World War II, and how it became institutionalized in the postwar years under a program known as H-2. Run tightly under the control of large growers, the program allowed these entrepreneurs to use a large supply of inexpensive, pliant workers with government acquiescence. Melanie Shell-Weiss completes the book with her examination of both management strategy and union policy in the lingerie industry in Florida and the Caribbean. As early as the 1950s, Florida’s labor markets and patterns were tied to those of the Caribbean region and intertwined with “federal policies that lowered the cost of doing business in some of the nation’s most vulnerable areas” (248). The book ends with a short piece by the editors on how labor activism is faring in contemporary Florida. Rejecting the negative beliefs that the labor movement is moribund in the Sunshine State (and by implication, nationwide), they examine successful programs among farm workers in Immokalee, custodians in Miami, and service workers at Disney World. Tying labor struggles to academics, they conclude that “today, Florida is a center of labor activism not only because of the will of its working classes but also because of the growing appreciation that labor is a community concern” (270). This is an important book because Florida is an important state. By tying issues of labor, activism, and government policy to the broader structures of Florida history, these essays go a long way toward restoring working people to a central place in Florida history. Well written, well researched, and well thought out, these pieces provide a model for local labor history that speaks to broader national and even international issues. Steven Noll, University of Florida DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-021

On the Ground: Labor Struggle in the American Airline Industry Liesl Miller Orenic

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009 ix + 281 pp., $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper) Orville and Wilbur Wright, Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker, and now America’s airline workers join the list of the subjects that form part of the colorful history of flight. On the Ground by Liesl Miller Orenic delivers an interesting and detailed examination of airline workers, a group long ignored by aviation historians. Like the works of Kathleen Barry, Sandra Albrecht, and Jacob Vander Meulen, Orenic’s study marks a continued maturation of the field of aviation history, with the scholarship shifting from the traditional hagiographies lionizing the industry’s early pioneers to more critical and balanced accounts exploring topics such as gender, politics, workers, and labor relations. However, Orenic’s study is far more than just another addition to an emergent body of aviation literature. The


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book offers readers an important glimpse into a vibrant and often militant labor movement crafted by unskilled airline service workers in the post – World War II era. Orenic explores labor relations in the airline industry from the earliest days of commercial aviation through the “eve of deregulation” (1). With baggage handlers as her primary focus, she looks at the development of unionization and collective bargaining at four legacy airlines (Pan American Airways, American Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and National Airlines). In doing so, Orenic argues that, contrary to the dominant historical narrative, airline workers succeeded in forging a flourishing and aggressive union movement in the years after World War II. For Orenic, the workers’ success stemmed from the ability of their unions to create alliances that crossed skill boundaries. This “cross-skill industrial unionism” brought together unskilled baggage handlers and skilled airline mechanics and allowed their organizations to establish collective bargaining rights and win significant economic improvements in the postwar era (223). According to Orenic, rather than the post – World War II era being one of decline, ground workers “made tremendous gains in wages and working conditions through rapid unionization and nearly constant bargaining” (1 – 2). Drawing on union and company records, as well as oral interviews with former workers, Orenic begins by tracing the early formation of the commercial airline industry prior to World War II. According to Orenic, the involvement of the federal government was vital to the industry’s success. Through the U.S. Postal Service’s airmail contracts and the establishment of regulatory agencies such as the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the federal government subsidized the industry in its infancy and built the infrastructure necessary for air travel. In the process, it created a positive image of air travel. By the end of the 1930s, what was once the domain of barnstormers and daredevils became a safe mode of transportation for travelers and profitable venture for businessmen. Still, from a workers’ standpoint, the industry continued to remain largely undeveloped in terms of formalized work routines, occupations, and labor policy. Not until World War II, Orenic claims, did occupations on the ground begin to become clearly defined, with the profession of “baggage handler” emerging, though the actual job title and work duties continued to vary across different airlines until the postwar era. Wartime also witnessed the emergence of a distinct work culture that helped baggage handlers deal with their poor work conditions and ultimately proved to be the basis for later organization. According to Orenic, this culture centered “around their youth, their masculinity, their ability to control the pace of work, the noise and potential physical danger of the ramp as a workplace, and the informal specialized knowledge that they gained on the job” (49). Unionization only emerged for ground workers in the immediate postwar period, though as Orenic points out the roots of it began to be laid in the 1930s. Unlike most industrial workers, the struggle during 1945 – 49 centered on securing union recognition and establishing collective bargaining rights among an industry hostile to organization. Complicating the situation for labor were the obstacles presented by worker indifference, racial divisions among the workforce, and the federal government’s decision to apply the Railway Labor Act of 1926 to airline workers. The Railway Labor Act, according to Orenic, blurred the jurisdictional lines between craft and class when it came to defining bargaining units, exacerbating the intraunion competition between the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and independent unions. Still, by 1949, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) succeeded in gaining representation for the majority of ground workers in a growing airline industry.


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During the 1950s, airline officials tried to cultivate corporate loyalty among its labor force through such means as company-sponsored athletic activities, family picnics, and of course travel benefits for workers and families. According to Orenic, the rationale stemmed from the recognition that the flying public attached importance to the highly visible work of the baggage handlers. Through these corporate welfare programs, company officials hoped to enhance the self-worth of the so-called ramp rats, build loyalty to their job and the company, and ultimately improve brand loyalty among passengers as they watched clean, well-dressed baggage handlers contently and efficiently carrying out their duties (136 – 43). However, as Orenic convincingly demonstrates, the loyalty programs did not translate into improved labor relations. Quite the opposite occurred during the 1950s. In what is without question the most interesting discussion of the book, Orenic shows the very militant labor movement that emerged in the 1950s. The IAM and the TWU, by effectively using the strategy of “whipsawing,” succeeded in attaining significant contractual gains for their members (143 – 54). Essentially, with airlines refusing to engage in multicarrier bargaining, the unions turned to a system of pattern bargaining and worker militancy that benefitted from a labor relations structure that preferred to negotiate brief, annual contracts. This environment produced seemingly constant labor strife throughout the 1950s. According to Orenic, between 1947 and 1957, thirty-five strikes occurred on the commercial lines, most of which came from the ranks of ground workers (146). Finally, by 1959, the airlines, looking to regain the upper hand, joined forces and established the Mutual Aid Pact. The pact served as a form of “strike insurance policy,” enabling companies to recoup profits lost during strikes. Under the plan, nonstriking member firms agreed to reimburse lost profits to striking airlines from the added revenue gained by increased passenger traffic on their lines brought by the walkouts. Responding to the agreement, the industry’s various labor organizations established the Association of Air Transport Union for the purpose of offering “moral and financial support” to any striking union and to counter the effects of the Mutual Aid Pact. Ultimately, Orenic contends, this heightened system of labor relations contributed to the Strike of 1966, a forty-three-day nationwide walkout at five airlines that at its peak involved thirty-five thousand workers and shut down 60 percent of commercial airline industry. When the dispute finally ended, the workers emerged victorious, and a period of higher wages and improved benefits ensued. However, as Orenic suggests, the strike also played a part in the push to deregulate the industry in the 1970s, a move that brought significant economic concessions on the part of airline workers. Orenic’s study is a fascinating account of post – World War II labor. Unquestionably, the strength of this book is her ability to present a strong and coherent interpretation that explores the vitality of the postwar labor movement. Furthermore, On the Ground shows the possibilities created by drawing together disparate groups. However, Orenic’s work is not without its shortcomings. The writing style is overburdened with long, tedious block quotes (nearly forty) that interrupt the flow of the narrative. The chronological organization appears out of place at points, as in the case when she examines the effects of anticommunism on the airline unions, then shifts back to discuss the impact of the 1945 – 46 strike wave. Most notable is the limited treatment Orenic offers with respect to the airline workers. This is a little curious because she claims at the onset that one of the central purposes of the study is to explore this unique, postwar working class. On the Ground is more of an institutional study of labor relations. The examination of the workers, though interesting, is far from satisfying. For example, Orenic references the fact that theft on the ramp reached epic proportions in the 1960s, yet she fails to delve into the subject in any meaningful man-


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ner. Was theft a form of worker resistance? Does it speak to the changing economic and work conditions within the industry? Or perhaps is it simply a growing case of greed? For a group that supposedly prided itself on work and embraced the romantic images conjured up by aviation, the workers’ actions in the 1960s seemingly fly counter to that interpretation. This apparent contradiction is never adequately explored by Orenic. Instead, at times, it is almost as if she falls prey to the pitfall of aviation historiography, overglorifying the subject matter. Overall, these criticisms are minor and in no way diminish from what is a fine study of post – World War II labor relations. John Olszowka, Mercyhurst College DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-022

Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor David Witwer

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009 vii + 336 pp., $30.00 (paper) With Shadow of the Racketeer, David Witwer continues his excellent work on corruption and reform in the American labor movement. Witwer’s well-researched, smoothly written book documents the history of syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler’s 1941 exposés of criminal activity in two unions — the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU) and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes (IATSE). He explains how these scandals damaged the reputation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and encouraged the passage of the devastating Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and other restrictive statutes. Witwer’s central character is the reactionary journalist Westbrook Pegler. The son of a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American, Pegler was a child witness to the ferocious struggle between workers and employers in the Progressive Era Midwest. Ignoring his father’s pleas to choose another career, Pegler entered the newspaper business after high school, becoming a foreign correspondent during World War I and then a sportswriter known for his distinctively cranky, mocking style. Though initially a liberal supporter of the New Deal, Pegler grew more conservative as his popularity, salary, and income taxes rose. By 1938, Pegler had become — like his boss, Scripps-Howard newspaper chain owner Roy Howard — a vicious critic of President Franklin Roosevelt and the labor movement. This shift set the stage for his seminal 1941 series of columns on union corruption that won him a Pulitzer Prize and inscribed the unfortunate stereotype of labor leaders as mobbed-up, self-serving hypocrites. Shadow of the Racketeer explores the objects of Pegler’s vitriol, BSEIU president George Scalise, IATSE president George Browne, and Browne’s representative in Hollywood, Willie Bioff. By the late 1930s, the Wagner Act had not only fueled the growth of the labor movement but also empowered union officials in industries with strong traditions of collusion, corruption, and violence, such as building maintenance and entertainment. In these trades, leadership positions fell increasingly to venal unionists such as Browne, not to


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mention criminals from outside the movement such as Bioff and Scalise (both of them former pimps). Taking bribes from employers to forestall strikes, these men enriched themselves and their backers in the New York mafia and the Chicago “outfit,” who were looking to replace the alcohol revenue lost to the end of Prohibition. By offering new research into these trades, Witwer shows that the main beneficiaries of this corruption were the employers. Hollywood producers such as Twentieth Century-Fox chairman Joseph Schenck found it cheaper to pay Willie Bioff than to give his employees higher wages or risk IATSE assisting the unionization of unorganized crafts. For this reason, responsible AFL officials such as Screen Actors’ Guild president Robert Montgomery called for Bioff’s ouster and prosecution in 1937, years before his activities attracted national attention. Witwer documents Pegler’s 1941 crusade against Scalise, Browne, and Bioff, which made union corruption a national issue. The columnist attacked not only these disgraced officials but also their unions and the AFL itself. Federation president William Green, Pegler alleged, was guilty of permitting men like Scalise to rule. Styling himself the muckraking defender of the “forgotten man,” the average citizen crushed by the power of labor and the state, Pegler turned popular class resentment against the institutions devised to ameliorate the worker’s condition. Pegler argued that unions benefited only their officials, who blackmailed employers, mulcted members, and bullied the public. In these exposés, Witwer sees the origins of a new critique of labor, feeding a conservative resurgence that slowly eroded popular support for unions and led to restrictive legislation such as the Smith-Connolly Antistrike Act of 1943 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, not to mention the long-term decline of the movement itself. Labor leaders attempted to defend themselves against Pegler’s smears but found their efforts stymied not only by a hostile media that preferred sensational accusations to boring realities but also by their own inadequate public relations. As a result, the popular narrative blamed workers rather than employers for corruption, and new laws served to weaken unions rather than protect their members against gangsters and strengthen the reform impulse within the labor movement. Though the book is impressive overall, some of Witwer’s points are debatable. Pegler’s critique was far less innovative than Shadow of the Racketeer suggests. Rather, it was cribbed from the literature of the early-twentieth-century open-shop movement, which patented not only his pseudoprogressive style but also the main features of his argument: the portrayal of labor leaders as tyrannical extortionists, the emphasis on individual rights, and the celebration of the nonunion worker. For instance, Pegler did not originate the expression “the forgotten man,” as Witwer implies. Laissez-faire economist William Graham Sumner conceived it in 1883 to refer to the ordinary citizens hurt by strikes. Many others, including President William Howard Taft and Gordon Hostetter, the inventor of the word “racketeering,” subsequently used the phrase to justify the suppression of strikes, only to see Franklin Roosevelt appropriate and redefine it as the “man at the bottom of the pyramid” in 1932. By employing the “forgotten man” rhetoric, Pegler did little more than resuscitate Sumner, Taft, and Hostetter’s earlier anti-union ideas for an emerging conservative audience. Furthermore, Witwer’s colorful depiction of industrial conditions is sometimes too neat in its assumption of rank-and-file innocence. He generally portrays the workers as victims of organized criminals interested only in the money they could steal. In fact, gunmen


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such as William C. Pomeroy, Cornelius Shea, and James Ragen had long controlled local and national unions, and their well-worn relationships with politicians, workers, and businessmen were more subtle and varied than the popular “mob domination” model represents. The disturbing reality is that in the turbulent, often lawless, world of early-twentiethcentury industrial relations, many workers freely engaged in violence, willingly colluded with employers, and even sought the protection of criminals. Pegler erred not only because he blamed unionism in principle for Scalise, Browne, and Bioff’s crimes but also because he failed to understand a major cause of racketeering itself, namely the workers’ desire for an authority and security the law failed to provide. Andrew Wender Cohen, Syracuse University DOI 10.1215/15476715-2010-023
