American Working Class Research Articles

Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class by Aimee Loiselle (review)

Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class by Aimee Loiselle (review)

What's Love Got to Do with It?": A Roundtable on the Cultural Legacy of Eric W. Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class on Its Thirtieth Anniversary

What's Love Got to Do with It?": A Roundtable on the Cultural Legacy of Eric W. Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class on Its Thirtieth Anniversary

Media Frames in an Era of the Local

ABSTRACT: This article offers an analysis of contemporary American politics exploring white working-class Americans’ support for Donald Trump. The article draws on a definition of media organizations as people’s organizations or civil society groups and organizations from democratic populism’s political variant. The definition highlights the significant role that media organizations play in shaping political and social outcomes through choices media organizations make about how to present or frame information. The article contrasts political democratic populism as a general approach to the study of politics and the media with the approach from cultural studies drawing broadly on Marx. Michael Denning’s masterful account of the history of cultural studies provides the basis for discussion of the treatment of the media in cultural studies.

Class Root of Police Brutality: The Missing Gap in the Black Lives Matter Movement

ABSTRACT This paper explores the activism of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and argues that the missing link in the movement is the class question, which has impacted on its tactics, strategies, and modus operandi. Since its emergence, the BLM movement has won some concessions in police reforms, defunding of police, policy changes in use of body camera and greater transparency in policing, yet the problems of racism, police brutality, over-policing, and police killings persist. What seems to be problematic is the narrow understanding of the problems and the cosmetic nature of police reforms that have failed to address the capitalist root of the problem. By sidestepping the class question, the movement has failed to understand that racism, police brutality, and police killings are essential tools used by the ruling class and the state in the American capitalist system to sustain its rules, domination, and control. By taking the class question off the agenda, the engagement of the BLM movement has been reduced to the race question and race consciousness, which led to a failure to unpack racism and policing as class questions and draw the tactics of the movement around the class question. The solution to this impasse is to understand black struggle as a subset of class struggle and prioritise the radicalisation of the black working class as a social base to connect with the black underclass and American working class in general and externalise the issues as generic problems facing Americans. The paper concludes that it is the unity of the American working class that can confront the capitalist underpinning of the problems of racism, police brutality, and extra-judicial police killings in American society.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 by John Hennen

Reviewed by: A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 by John Hennen O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199. By John Hennen. West Virginia and Appalachia. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 260. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-952271-24-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-952271-23-6.) A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 is an important contribution to the scholarship that examines the complexities of labor organizing. Utilizing both local and national lenses, John Hennen traces the evolution of Local 1199 from its early days as a union for pharmacists and drugstore employees founded in Depression-era New York City through the merger that joined it with the Service Employees International Union in 1989. Hennen positions the members of Local 1199’s chapters in Appalachia as some of the twentieth century’s [End Page 398] most notable organizers of healthcare workers, and he explores their radicalism and local activism. Labor scholars continue to do the work of expanding the discourse and exploring the complex nature of a history that has yet to be fully uncovered. The radical roots and contested origins of both Local 1199 and its early leaders provide a backdrop for its progress as a militant organization. It is important to note that the union’s radicalism was multifaceted. Hennen discusses the communist backgrounds of early Local 1199 leaders. Historically, the interests of communism and unionization have intersected; however, Hennen argues that this association became an obstacle that members of Local 1199 had to strategically overcome. Building on its communist roots, Local 1199 radicalized labor organizing by focusing on the plight of New York hospital workers during the 1950s and 1960s. Hennen asserts that Local 1199 organized hospital workers during a time when it was not customary to do so. According to the author, hospital workers were considered “forgotten workers” by midcentury organizers, and Local 1199 broke down barriers when they began the work of organizing this particular group (p. 18). Hennen positions the student-led activism of the 1960s and 1970s and the civil rights movement as the backdrop to Local 1199’s efforts to organize Appalachian healthcare workers. He chronicles the influence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), “the most visible, vocal, publicized, and chastised student mass movement on the political left” of the period, and describes how its initial leftist stance on inclusion, equality, and accountability in American government later expanded to include grievances of the American working class (p. 40). SDS and Local 1199 formed new alliances in the mid-to-late 1960s around a shared concern for the plight of working Americans. Hennen also highlights the inextricable links between the labor and civil rights movements by examining Local 1199’s “Union Power, Soul Power” campaign (p. 49). The 1969 Charleston, South Carolina, hospital workers strike, the union’s first attempt at organizing in the South under this banner, and its subsequent efforts to eradicate the ills that plagued the experiences of African American healthcare workers drew criticism for the union’s attention to issues of race. Hennen argues that, despite these attacks, Local 1199 utilized its connections to student-led organizations and the civil rights movement along with the skills, tactics, and ideals ultimately born from those relationships to build successful campaigns for Appalachian workers. Critiques of this project are minimal. Hennen’s work to shed light on Local 1199 from both national and local perspectives is commendable. The author uses a wide range of sources to weave together a narrative about the complexities of local labor organizing in tandem with other broad-based movements of that era. Positioning Appalachian healthcare workers at the intersection of Local 1199’s organizing, student-led activism, and the civil rights movement offers an opportunity to examine the most critical aspects of America’s protest tradition. A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers is an important contribution to the scholarship. [End Page 399] O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight Winthrop University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Review: “Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960, by Allen Lowe

Book Review| March 01 2023 Review: “Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960, by Allen Lowe Allen Lowe. “Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960, vols. 1 & 2. Hamden, CT: Constant Sorrow Press, 2020/ 2021. x + 352 pages, 397 pages, 30 CDs. Eric Lott Eric Lott The Graduate Center, CUNY Eric Lott teaches American studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford UP, 1993; 20th Anniversary ed., 2013), The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006), and Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Harvard UP, 2017). He is finishing a book called If Hooks Could Kill: Sonic Situations and Postwar Problems. Email: elott@gc.cuny.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Email: elott@gc.cuny.edu Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (1): 139–144. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.1.139 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eric Lott; Review: “Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960, by Allen Lowe. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 March 2023; 35 (1): 139–144. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.1.139 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search If you too have been waiting for a magisterial study of popular music animated by traditional racism and religiosity, victims of irony, dynamics of resistance, Christian warfare, God’s militia, the Confederacy in absentia, crimes of sentiment, country folk’s synchronized swim, praying for good sex, proletarian orchestras (in church), worldly cluelessness, the rhythm method (“a more subtle kind of resistance”), plant-based courtship (I’ll poke it through the window), love and booty, white moments of feeling, Death Be Not Barefoot, out of the mouths of white people, victims of style, and the Hawaiian version of the Baja marimba band, the wait is over. Allen Lowe’s “Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960 is here. The foregoing names only the first half of its table of contents more or less (vol. 1), but volume 2 follows suit (e.g., the minstrel wound, hillbillies with 401k’s, gospel... You do not currently have access to this content.

Fierce Loves and Faithless Wars: Bruce, Byron and the Man of Feeling

Lord Byron’s epic poems, and more pointedly his parliamentary record as exhibited by his speeches, express a rare communion with the plight of the working man and a singular opposition to unjust war. These sentiments, hilariously and cuttingly explored in Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, set him apart from the archetypal, systemically controlled male of his time. His work shares intriguing connections with the songs and expostulations of Bruce Springsteen, whose musical efforts against the Vietnam war, including Born in the USA and Your Hometown, are marked by outright tragedy and winking irony as well as the kind of subversive rhetorical melodies found in Byron’s work.&#x0D; Additionally, Springsteen’s vast library of songs espousing the real, abstract and enduring challenges of working-class Americans (particularly men) parallels Byron’s open parliamentary support for the society of Luddites. Drawing from Ildiko Csengei’s essay The Fever of Vain Longing, which posits that Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage sees the transformation of the Byronic Hero into The Man of Feeling, I argue that while the unstirred Byronic Hero often stands in opulent contrast to the socially isolated, margin dwelling male trope that peppers Springsteen’s songs, this transformation aligns the two poets’ transgressive archetypes.

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

Toward a Theory of Super-Exploitation: The Subproletariat, Harold “Hal” Baron, and the Crisis of the Political Economy of Black Labor

This article argues that the African American working class can be conceptualized as a subproletariat: a subsection of the working class generally restricted to unstable, unskilled, low-wage, non-union, and “dirty” labor. The restructuring of capital during various periods in the U.S. history always strategically positioned the vast majority of Black people in subproletarian labor. Under the current crisis in the political economy of Black labor, uneven development and economic dislocation have deepened the lack of stable, skilled, living wage jobs in poor Black regions of the USA. This article expands on the earlier work of Joe Trotter and Harold “Hal” Baron to build a framework to understand this phenomenon. This paper proposes that Black labor and the Black working class provide the most succinct starting points to understanding the complexities of contemporary forms of anti-Black racial oppression.

Mimicking the Mode: The Fashionable Dress of Working-Class San Franciscans, 1880–95

In the late nineteenth century, the fashionable garments of women in the United States drew inspiration from the abundance of contemporary sources available to them, ranging from fashion plates in women’s periodicals to sewing patterns and ready-to-wear clothing. As Joan Severa details in her seminal book Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840–1900 (1995), studio photographs from the time demonstrate precisely how high fashion was reinterpreted by working-class Americans in terms of materials, fit, and wear to suit their particular needs and lifestyles. One portrait album recently discovered at an estate sale illustrates Severa’s thesis, and this article offers a close examination of the album in tandem with contemporary fashion coverage in newspapers and elsewhere, social history, and demographics specific to working-class San Francisco. A focused regional case study, it offers insight into dress codes at a particular place and time that have to date been little studied by fashion scholars.

THE INJUSTICE OF UNDER-POLICING IN AMERICA

THE INJUSTICE OF UNDER-POLICING IN AMERICA

Harnessing Potential: The Role of Public and Land-Grant Universities’ Commitment to Engagement

While many articles have been written about land-grant universities (LGUs) and their tripartite mission, the objective of this article is to place that mission within a broad historical overview of the role of engagement within LGUs, to familiarize readers with the influence of engagement on higher education, and to discuss the important role of Cooperative Extension as the LGUs’ key mode of connection with stakeholder communities. With the passage of the Morrill Act of 1862, Congress created a national system of LGUs that made public higher education available and affordable to the American working class, with a focus on agriculture, mechanical arts, and military science. Subsequent congressional legislation firmly established LGUs’ tripartite mission of teaching, research, and extension. Later, Extension was included in the broader engagement missions of LGUs. However, the characterizations of this broader notion of university engagement were often obscure and lacked clarity, with no agreed-upon framework for assessment. Reports from the Kellogg Commission in 1999 and subsequently the Carnegie Foundation in 2005 helped to define, clarify, and socialize meaningful university engagement. With common criteria established, it became obvious that LGU leaders must align their engagement resources toward the common goal of deepening engagement to address important societal issues. It also became evident that for Cooperative Extension to be recognized as an engaged organization within the university mission, it must constantly evolve to stay current with the scholarship of engagement, embrace transdisciplinary practices, and focus on the public value created when universities and their community partners find common ground on what matters to academics, practitioners, administrators, elected officials, and community members. The benefits of an aligned set of engagement resources can only be realized if strategy, investment, and incentives reinforce a commitment to engagement.

A Heterotopia Divided: Spaces of Labor in Louisa May Alcott’s 'Little Women'

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the development of industrialization and the surging waves of immigration had drastic effects on the condition of the American working class. Coinciding with the Civil War and the following Reconstruction era, this period saw a stronger and more determined labor movement in organizing trade unions and resolving several work-related problems. Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868) in such a social and economic climate. This essay will explore the novel’s spatial configuration of the existing labor conditions as two different heterotopias by turning to how Louisa May Alcott organized characters and space in Little Women. Drawing from Foucault and Harvey’s approaches to space, the essay will argue that the March family home functions as a labor heterotopia, and Jo March founds a counter-heterotopia against it. In other words, while the March house depicts, confronts and reverses the conditions of American labor in the Civil War era, Jo March attempts to follow the same procedure so as to counteract the order in her family home. Jo’s counteraction is determined by her act of writing, which gives her an individual and independent voice. Yet, more importantly, her authorship that lets her develop her own working conditions has effects beyond the garret she uses for writing. The purpose of this essay is to re-read Jo March’s character in terms of her function in both heterotopias, and to show that she constantly negotiates between these domestic and intellectual labor heterotopias in an attempt to empower her sisters.

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Rise of American Liberalism

The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Rise of American Liberalism

The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics

Texas is usually at the center of United States history. Whether it was as one of the causes for the Mexican–American War or the setting for the landmark ruling of Roe vs. Wade, which legalized abortion, the state has played and continues to play a significant role in the shaping of the nation. As Perry Como's 1942 hit tune begins, “The stars at night are big and bright (fast clap 4 times) deep in the heart of Texas!” In Frank Andre Guridy's book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics, the sports stars were indeed big and bright. Add the emergence of the commercialization of sport, the economic investments, and the pioneering visionaries in Texas in the 1960s and 1970s, and the result is the creation of today's modern sports industrial complex.Guridy's purpose is to explain the “consequences of [the] legal and political transformations vividly played out in sports” during the “Second Reconstruction” in Texas (4). The state was at the forefront of the convergence of social, political, and economic changes that manifested as the sports revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The book begins with a snapshot of sports in Texas during the Jim Crow era, including the success of African American teams like the track team at Texas Southern University and the Mexican American basketball team at Lanier High School in San Antonio. He also notes, in 1969, the Texas Longhorns were the last all-white football team to win an NCAA championship in the sport. Guridy then transitions into the factors that led to the evolution of sports in Texas: wealthy businessmen looking to cash in, the booming energy sector, and the securing of state-of-the-art stadiums.Houston and Dallas are at the center of this volume. In the 1960s, the Black community in Houston threw its support behind a proposal for a domed stadium. The promise was that the seating, teams, and jobs would be desegregated. The AstroDome was the first indoor stadium in the nation, bragging a host of architectural firsts that others would copy, including the injury-prone astroturf. The “Phi Slama Jama” era of basketball at the University of Houston demonstrated that dunks drew TV ratings. In addition, Black players like Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler had a significant impact on the college game and later the NBA.Inspiration (or envy) struck the Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison Jr. after the opening of the AstroDome. Tired of the decaying Cotton Bowl, he built Texas Stadium in Irving. Guridy explains how the construction of these two pathbreaking sports venues changed the landscape not only in Texas but nationwide, as other cities carbon-copied the Texas blueprint for success and profitability.The next chapters deal with the integration of the Southwest Conference and the subsequent race to acquire the best African American football players, inevitably resulting in NCAA violations. Guridy also explains how the Texas Rangers moved from Washington, DC. The common thread was how “commercialized sport catalyzed social change by unhinging the historical hierarchies of the Jim Crow era” (79). The San Antonio Spurs and the impact of the Mexican American working-class fan base also has a dedicated chapter.Guridy's best chapters address how Texas served as the background for two significant events during the sexual revolution: the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match and the formation of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. The tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, held in the Houston Astrodome, was a turning point for feminism. Millions of television viewers witnessed King's victory, resulting in the development of the women's pro tennis tour.The author's chapter on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC) “exposed some of the contradictions of the sexual revolution,” including their woeful pay to the hypersexualized way they were used to sell tickets and garner television ratings (213). African American cheerleaders were members. Television producers and directors helped fuel the DCC's popularity by scanning the sidelines frequently during games.Since this is a book about Texas sports, there is no shortage of newspaper articles to choose from; however, most of the sources are secondary, taken from a wide array of sport history books. Guridy aptly shows, albeit grudgingly, how sports in Texas desegregated certain areas of the social and cultural scene. My one structural complaint is that there is no bibliography, only a notes section.The volume offers fans the genesis of big-time sports and how events in Texas fundamentally altered sports for the better. Guridy's book adds value to the historiography of sports history through the lens of civil rights, feminism, and the sexual revolution. Women's studies scholars and Texas historians would benefit greatly by adding this book to their list.

“We Never Get Ahead but We Have Enough”

Country music has cultural and narrative roots in the American working class. As such, themes of class are integral to the mythos of country music, informing the musicians and shaping the genre’s audience. Researchers have studied the origins of class narratives in American country music, but less analysis has been given to the specific ways that these themes are expressed rhetorically. The purpose of this study was to analyze how class-based narratives are expressed in country music. Through a content analysis of the lyrics of popular country songs between 1950 and 2009, three overarching themes emerged. First, the emphasis of emotional over material experiences: emotional consequences related to working-class material conditions were the focus of songs’ rhetoric, rather than underlying material issues. Second, escapism and sentimentality: class-based issues were expressed as sentimental or nostalgic as a means of escaping material struggle or downplaying their severity. Finally, parasocial commiseration: the building of a one-sided connection between artists and their audience based on their perceived shared class identity. These themes provide insight into emotional rhetoric that affects working-class politics in the US, as well as broader race, class, and political issues.