Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Tennessee State University historian Andrea Ringer neatly situates the twentieth-century decades of the traveling circus within a larger framework of labor and industrial history. A large enterprise comprising as many as one hundred railcars and three hundred horses as it traversed the countryside, the traveling circus, says Ringer, might best be considered a “traveling company town.” Even as a few owners like Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers had generally consolidated control of the industry by the 1930s, their employees—an interracial and mixed-gender assembly of ordinary laborers and skilled specialists including sideshow workers who fought off their popular label as “freaks”—were organizing around wages and working conditions under various AFL actor and teamster unions. The distinctiveness of the circus workscape, defined by tensions between paternalism and class status and tradeoffs of work and leisure time, ultimately succumbed to a combination of mechanization and modernization, which diminished its exotic appeal. In 1956, the last road show folded its tents and joined the transition to indoor arenas.With a microcosmic look at the 1950 American Enka rayon workers’ strike in Morristown, Tennessee, Jennifer Brooks makes us think again about the real impact of the national Taft-Hartley Act, passed two years earlier. While several sections of Taft-Hartley are standard-issue features of labor history lectures documenting a turn away from the union-enabling message of the Wagner Act of 1935—including a ban on secondary boycotts and the permission for states to ban union shops—a lesser-known aspect of the new law, according to Brooks, proved pivotal in Morristown and many other workplaces across the South. When they recruited replacement workers, employers could themselves now file for National Labor Relations Board elections—elections under which the new workers could vote, while still-striking workers could not! Utterly averse to the intended spirit of New Deal – era labor law, the new wrinkle fit well into a changing era of industrial relations.Jeff Schuhrke assembles a revealing roundtable on the social conditions affecting the latest wave of labor journalism. Michelle Chen looks back on a century of the labor beat, highlighting an arena still short on “working-class voices.” Luis Feliz Leon, who struggled as an unpaid intern, laments the media preference for “pundits”—often fresh out of Ivy League universities—over working journalists. Dave Jamieson celebrates recent unionizing success in circles where it sometimes seems “a little strange not to be organized in this field.” Finally, Kim Kelly takes pride in negotiating the challenges of a freelance market where even Teen Vogue finds itself in need of labor coverage.Arts and Media editor Richard Wells usefully reconstructs the mixed reception of auteur filmmaker Mike Leigh's treatment of the Peterloo Massacre, a pivotal event in working-class history that also figures centrally in E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. As Wells relates with citations ranging from film critic A. O. Scott to historian Peter Linebaugh, Peterloo proved something of a Rorschach test for the art and ethics of working-class representation as well as the politics that connects 1819 to 2019.In his review of Nate Holdren's account of workplace accidents and the law in the Progressive Era, Gabriel Winant laments the fracturing of the field into separate vectors defined by working-class agency, the “cultural turn,” and state-and-institutional analysis. In doing so, he salutes Holdren for helping to “bring back” these too-often-separated projects “into conversation.” Fortunately, our reviewers suggest that synthetic and insightful intellectual forays also characterize other studies, including Erin Hatton's treatment of “coercion” as applied to such disparate groups as prisoners, welfare recipients, graduate students, and college athletes; and also the meaning of “disability” in Tracy Kinder's study of wounded Union army veterans. Among several other works worthy of special note, Kim Phillips-Fein calls attention to a Mike Davis/Jon Wiener blockbuster on radical LA youth in the 1960s, Robin Muncy dissects two big anthologies on the legacy of the New Deal, and Donna Haverty-Stacke touts David Witwer and Catherine Rios's insights about the far-reaching impact of the McClellan Committee's largely phony war on union crime in the late 1950s.Finally, having bid a fond adieu to Jim Daniels in the last issue, we welcome Labor's new poetry editor, Susan Eisenberg. In recalling the moment of workplace transition between a retiring staff member and her successor at a union office, “Renee's Bouquet” indicates how much individual gestures of kindness and connection make a difference in our lives.