“Smile While I Cut Your Throat”: Mass Media, Myth, and the Contested “Harmonization” of the Working Class

Abstract

This article uses the present political economy of communication as a vantage point from which to examine the issue of alternative media, dominant power relations, and the ideological constructs arising from and perpetuated by such relations. An exercise in antilabor public relations, or “scientific strikebreaking,” is examined and juxtaposed with how such messages were received by a working-class community during the 1930s as evidenced in the editorial commentary and reportage of its labor newspaper. A theoretical approach that provides for the consideration of psychic and material domination through myth and discursive resistance to such domination provides a framework within which to examine the dialectical exchange. The contested meaning of “harmony” and similar contradictory themes of the advertising suggests the emergence of a working-class consciousness at a specific historical juncture and points to the importance of alternative media locally and nationally. Furthermore, previous studies of business-sponsored propaganda campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s have not considered to any significant degree how working-class people and their media interpreted and resisted these and similar messages on an immediate level.