Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Like Appalachian coal mining, the Northwest logging industry has not gone down without a fight. Again, somewhat akin to the politics of mineworking communities in West Virginia, the protagonists in ensuing bitter fights over jobs versus environmental protectionism have skewed traditional class alliances and threatened long-standing regional progressive traditions. As Steven Beda makes clear in his assessment of a still-smoldering controversy that upended ambitious cap-and-trade legislation to stem logging in 2020, environmental regulation combined with a more long-term sectoral economic decline have fueled a decidedly right-wing version of populism across the region since the early 1970s. In this thoughtful assessment of Oregon's internally conflicted Timber Unity rank and file—a movement based on marginal, independent timber contractor-producers and small sawmill operators who draw variously on old-Wobbly and antiregulatory rhetoric redirected at “elitist” protectors of the spotted owl and a recreation-oriented middle class—Beda discovers a microcosm of a larger rural shift away from radical working-class identities (see A. Brooke Boulton's accompanying Common Verse poem) toward the defensiveness of populist backlash.Francis Ryan tracks an important but little-noticed component of the post–World War II labor force: school crossing guards. Born of the Baby Boom expansion of school-age children combined with a population of mothers eager for rewarding part-time work, official, uniformed crossing guards—taking the place of otherwise overworked police officers—became a fixture at urban intersections beginning in the early 1950s. Although initially linked in the public mind to the “voluntary” sector associated with “PTA women” and others, Ryan convincingly connects them to a labor feminist tradition centered on an emergent public sector workforce. By the 1960s, the guards’ economic demands encompassed both benefits and wages, and their formalized associations began to affiliate with established unions like AFSCME and the SEIU. Not surprisingly, the urban fiscal crises of the 1970s also directly touched the interracial guard associations, who fought back against massive job cuts. Yet the real threat—and seeming denouement—to this once-classic urban occupation, suggests Ryan, came with a decline of collective, public protection of street corners by the guards, replaced by the hyper-individualized vigilance over children by their own parents.In the course of a larger biographical study of civil rights and labor icon, A. Philip Randolph, Eric Arnesen pauses here to zero in on Randolph's relation to what might be considered the ultimate expression of late 1930s Popular Front radicalism: the National Negro Congress. With a spirited assault on both racial and economic exploitation—critiquing the inadequacies of the New Deal, supporting interracial trade unionism, combating segregation , and opposing fascism—the NNC temporarily repaired a breach between Communist Party–linked militants led by Ben Davis Jr. and the heretofore vociferously anticommunist socialist, Randolph. Just how responsible (despite their public attempts to submerge their identity) was the party cadre for the NNC's direction and initial strategic success defines a sustained research quest. Against the “reassessment” of many recent historians in the service of a more broad-based, “grassroots” understanding of Popular Front initiatives like the NNC, Arnesen insists that the centrality of the party's role must be reckoned with.As is frequently the case, the books under review cover the labor map, touching down on a rich historical mix of geography and chronology. Subjects covered include at least three that our readers are not likely to have encountered before: turtle harvesters in the Caribbean, women working in the production of British cinema, and Mozambican migrants passing across the “night trains” to and from apartheid South Africa. Among generally positive and respectful treatment of their charges, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer tweaks Michael Kazin's history of Democratic Party successes for forgetting that given the flawed structure of American democracy, the party itself is “not enough to win and govern.” Similarly, Benjamin Goldfrank faults John French's otherwise “excellent” biography of Brazilian leader Lula for underplaying its hero's collaboration with a culture of “clientelism” that (at least temporarily) reversed his and his movement's fortunes. Less positive yet is Joseph Viteritti's treatment of Benjamin Holtzman's study of neoliberalism and New York City's fiscal crisis: curious readers will likely want to consult the original before making up their own minds.