American Working Class Research Articles

Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s by Natasha Zaretsky

Reviewed by: Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s by Natasha Zaretsky Dolores L. Augustine (bio) Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s By Natasha Zaretsky. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 285. Natasha Zaretsky’s approach to the 1979 nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, is deeply rooted in cultural history, yet also draws on political economy. The big question looming over Radiation Nation, as well as her earlier work, No Direction Home, is “how the New Left revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s transformed American culture and society but failed to halt the nation’s rightward political march” (p. xix). She makes an original contribution to the literature, centered on gender and family. She contends that the upsurge of local protest over this disaster led to a profound realignment of American conservative politics, drawing [End Page 981] on various strands of leftist movements in the 1960s and 1970s such as environmentalism and feminism, while also tapping into religious beliefs and the anti-abortion movement. Zaretsky’s central thesis is that this catastrophic failure of technology brought about what she calls “biotic nationalism,” rooted in the body, specifically an “aggrieved nationalism” based on the idea that “the nation has callously turned its back on the bodies of its own citizens” (p. xvii). White, working-class Americans saw themselves as the nation’s most loyal citizens, she argues, and felt that their government had treated them as disposable in the Vietnam War. According to the author, in 1979, this sense of betrayal initially centered on the callous disregard of how men’s bodies were treated in that conflict. In the wake of Three Mile Island, the female body and its reproductive capacity took center stage. Orders to evacuate pregnant women and preschoolers living within a 5-mile range of the nuclear power plant only added to residents’ anxiety and distrust in the government. Women argued that the release of radioactively contaminated water and gases from the nuclear power plant turned them, the unborn children in their wombs, their children, and their descendants into “guinea pigs” (p. 100). The scientific background was an ongoing debate about the somatic effects of low-level radiation exposure (notably cancer), as well as older concerns about radioactivity’s genetic impact (associated with eugenics). According to the author, it was the associated image of the wounded nation and the wounded fetus that created such a powerful narrative, making abortion a central issue for the burgeoning conservative movement. However, this preoccupation with the body did not carry over into concerns over gun ownership, healthcare, or food insecurity among American conservatives. The Three Mile Island crisis strengthened anti-statist conservatism in the United States, unlike in West Germany, where anti-nuclear power activism ushered in the rise of the leftist Green Party. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission came to be considered a “hostile, distant authority, callous toward residents’ physical suffering and psychological distress” (p. 142). In the final chapter the author moves on to the Second Cold War and the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. She points to parallels with the Three Mile Island protests: the importance of the “imperiled body” as a theme in the movement, concern about genetic damage, the significance of women and maternalist arguments, and appeals to Middle America. The concept of “Nuclear Winter”—a devastation of the planet caused by nuclear war and leading to mass extinction, also of the human race—placed reproduction and the “unborn” at the heart of the anti-nuclear narrative. She is critical of what she sees as the nuclear freeze movement’s failure to embrace the ideals of the New Left, asserting that freeze activists “unwittingly aligned themselves with the new nationalism of the 1980s” (p. 171). Thus, in her reading, the nuclear freeze movement failed to block the rightward [End Page 982] turn in American politics due to the lack of political commitment and apolitical anti-nuke stance. It is worth remembering, however, that some scholars believe that overcoming political divides was key to ending the Cold War. Those who wish to learn more about the Three Mile Island accident...

Austria Made in Hollywood by Jacqueline Vansant

Reviewed by: Austria Made in Hollywood by Jacqueline Vansant Ted Dawson Austria Made in Hollywood. By Jacqueline Vansant. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019. Pp. xii + 196. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1571139450. Do Hollywood films set in Austria tell us more about Austria or about Hollywood? Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer's 1949 essay "National Types as Hollywood Presents Them" and its distinction between portraits and projections on-screen, Jacqueline Vansant comes down decisively on the side of projections (3). While certainly not denying some role to events in Europe and efforts to portray them in shaping filmic depictions of Austria, Vansant argues convincingly that these films are best interpreted in light of their American contexts. She surveys dozens of films, primarily from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, showing how, "Set in an imagined Austria, tied to American fantasies, and shaped by an American reality, the films contain embedded messages on changing American mores and gender relationships" (19). The book's most important contribution is doubtless its encyclopedic review of the surprisingly large number of Hollywood films set in Austria, and especially Vienna, during the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, we find the old imperial capital appearing time and again as the city of waltzes and trysts. The "Red Vienna," which actually existed when these films were produced, is entirely eclipsed by what Kracauer termed the "retrospective utopia" of "Gay Vienna" (4). Then, with the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, Austria became a locus for imagining an alternative to German politics. Viewed from the perspective of European events, the contrast is bizarre, since Austria was under its own fascist regime at the time, but Vansant shows how the imagined Austria provided an opportunity for Hollywood filmmakers to push US entrance into the war without running afoul of isolationists in Congress. Once the US had entered the war, depictions of Austria correspondingly changed and, for the first time, focused primarily on roughly contemporaneous events, with the Anschluss being relitigated on-screen, and not infrequently in ways that portrayed Austria as victim. This is an idea which would persist into the most familiar Hollywood Austria movie, The Sound of Music, and Vansant's command of the history of Austria on-screen allows her to show how this revisionist romanticism had already been rehearsed in scarcely remembered films like 1941's They Dare Not Love (108). While Vansant's focus on the American context occasionally appears little more than a narrative principle under which to organize the dizzying number of readings she carries out, it can also serve to revise older readings. In a chapter on Erich Stroheim, we thus find Vansant reading the Viennese-born filmmaker's two Vienna films, Merry-Go-Round (1923) and The Wedding March (1928), less as reflections of his own complex relationship with Austria—he left the empire in 1909 as the son of Jewish parents and introduced himself to Hollywood as a minor member of that empire's [End Page 200] by then defunct Catholic nobility (Erich von Stroheim)—than as commentaries on contemporary America. It is only by suppressing the dominant readings of Stroheim's work that Vansant is able to find "how the films weigh in on contemporary discussions on marriage, money, sex, and love" (24). At its strongest, Vansant's argument takes on a new historicist verve, revealing striking harmonies between Austrian stories and discourses of the contemporary United States. Stuart Walker's 1932 Evenings for Sale, a film in which a wealthy American widow travels to 1920s Vienna in search of operetta-inspired romance and finds herself connected to an erstwhile Austrian aristocrat now working as a sort of gigolo, becomes for Vansant a commentary on the connection between work and dignity. The fallen Austrian count "proves again and again that a man's value depends on his character and not his position," turning a narrative of European high culture into a palliative for the American working class during the Depression (45). In another particularly strong reading, Vansant shows how Michael Curtiz's 1960 A Breath of Scandal reworks Ferenc Molnárs's play Olympia by tying the discourse around the recently published Kinsey reports...

Puerto Rican Needle Workers and Colonial Migrations: Deindustrialization as Pathways Lost

The dominant narrative of U.S. deindustrialization opens with the Northeast as the definitive starting point for industry followed by a direct linear relocation to the South and then the Global South. In this framework, deindustrialization appears to have a logic, a rational pathway following cheaper and compliant labor. When Puerto Rican needleworkers become visible in the history of the textile and garment industry, however, their colonial migrations complicate deindustrialization, and its linear logic collapses. From the perspective of these colonial women, industrialization of Puerto Rico began at the turn of the twentieth century - the same time factories and mills increased in the South. Thousands of women also migrated to the Northeast mainland, especially from the 1950s to the 1970s, when many white workers were mourning the loss of textile and garment jobs. Puerto Rican women moved to the old factories of the Northeast, which had become outposts for large transnational corporations that did not relocate their manufacturing in a direct geographic path but rather spread their processes over any arrangement that offered the best cost-benefit analysis. For Puerto Rican women, employment in the plants of the Northeast during the 1960s and 1970s offered hope rather than despair, and many took pride in meeting their quotas and providing wages for their families. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration initiated major reforms to financial policies and the practices of leveraged buyouts made closing old plants a better return on investment, Puerto Rican women mourned the loss of jobs in an industry many experts had already declared ‘dead.’ Fragmentation of the archives between Puerto Rican studies and U.S. labor history have allowed for a simplistic narrative of deindustrialization and an erasure of the losses and disappointments of women who left Puerto Rico for the promise of higher wages in the postwar Northeast mainland. When the oral histories and documents related to the migrations of Puerto Rican needleworkers become visible in the larger history of the ‘American working class’, we see deindustrialization as sprawling and contingent rather than as linear and naturalized. Puerto Rican studies scholars have written about needleworkers as part of their field with particular attention to gender as it relates to notions of motherhood, but this article sets the women as American workers into the losses of the textile and garment industry without eliding their specificity as migrating and racialized colonial labor. In addition, the women expressed grief that went beyond losing a specific job - many of these workers lost their place in the U.S. workforce and the promise of financial stability as they became associated with racialized poverty and welfare debates.

Prosthetic Memories in <em>The Sopranos</em>

Prosthetic Memories in <em>The Sopranos</em>

Archaeologies of Working-Class Culture and Collective Action

The nineteenth-century emergence of an American working class is studied by historians as an abstract awareness of shared experiences grounded in material conditions and concrete reality (Oestreicher 1986). Historical archaeology is appropriate to track the rise in class consciousness through: (1) shared material culture in workers’ domestic lives; (2) archaeological or archival evidence for class distinctions and hierarchical dissent; and (3) material evidence, archival and oral histories of working-class efforts to affect change through labor organizing or political action. These markers of class consciousness are compared among historical sites of labor contestation, and used to understand experiences of workers in the company town of Mono Mills, California. Identification of a working-class culture contributes to theorizing how class structures crosscut differences (e.g., ethnic, gendered, and racial) as well as built solidarity in opposition to other tiers of the labor hierarchy.

The march of climate policy

The march of climate policy

The Precarious plight of American WorkingClass Faculty: Causes and Consequences

For working-class Americans, the path of the professor is precarious. The neo-liberalization of higher education and the hegemony of academic elitism have made working-class faculty an endangered, disadvantaged, and invisible minority within the professoriate. On one hand, financing a graduate school career from humble origins is an increasingly risky investment. On the other, working-class Americans who secure a faculty job are often under-matched to low salary, high workload positions and endure classist ostracism and micro-aggressions. This essay is intended to not only trace the tragic trajectory of American working-class faculty but, more importantly, to invite conversations and identify suggestions that lead to our colleges and universities becoming more personally supportive workplaces and professionally empowering platforms for working-class professors.

How the American Working Class Views the “Working Class”

This article reviews the complications in understanding some of the conflicting tenets of American working-class ethos, especially as it unfolds in the college classroom. It asserts that the working class values modesty, straightforwardness, and hard work and has a difficult time accepting an ethos based in formal education. The article also discusses some of the performance aspects of working-class texts and explores the difficulties that outsiders face in trying to analyze/critique working-class experience.

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century by Matilda Rabinowitz, with commentary and original drawings by Robbin Légère Henderson

Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman: A Memoir from the Early Twentieth Century by Matilda Rabinowitz, with commentary and original drawings by Robbin Légère Henderson

Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812–1925 by Brian Roberts

Reviewed by: Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812–1925 by Brian Roberts Christopher J. Smith (bio) Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812–1925. By Brian Roberts. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 384. $90.00 cloth; $30.00 paper; $30.00 ebook) Blackface Nation rests upon Brian Roberts's knowledge of nineteenth-century North American popular song idioms and the ways these repertoires reflect class, race, and geography. The book is an effective, topics-based investigation, solidly grounded in the primary [End Page 110] sources, of how social-justice tropes—most notably but by no means exclusively race-based—entered the soundscapes of the newly genteel urban middle class. Though the title lays claim to a wide investigative range, Roberts's topic is better reflected by the subtitle, "race, reform, and identity," and its primary focus upon the "middle-class moment" of ca. 1833–50 (p. 13). He concentrates on a comparative investigation of the reception of two parallel genres: the early peak of working-class theatrical black minstrelsy, versus the rise of middle-class genteel entertainments, particularly in the performances of the Hutchinson Family Singers. This juxtaposition provides a useful means for analyzing class tensions between different groups of white Americans: specifically, the frontier, immigrant, and working-class groups empowered by extension of the franchise to a wider range of white males, versus the newly-emergent middle-class, who sought to distinguish themselves through their choice of entertainments no less than their domestic politics. Hence, Blackface Nation is not really a study of blackface minstrelsy itself. Instead, like Eric Lott's seminal Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995), Roberts' topic is the semiotics of the idiom, its capacity to "focus the anger of an emerging working class," and its contrasting reception by middle-class audiences (p. 101). Roberts's explication of artisan republicanism is excellent and his command of nineteenth-century social history enriches his discussion of specific songs and performers (p. 80). The book is organized into roughly chronological chapters, which primarily focus upon the working-class origins of blackface minstrels and their audiences, and the emergent middle-class contexts and audiences of the Hutchinson Family Singers—he is especially acute in his analysis of the latter's family mythography. Chapter headings are effective and evocative, referencing as they do both historical moments and relevant social phenomena (e.g., chapter one "Carnival" addresses pre-nineteenth-century Anglo-European print culture as the source of broadsides and other street literature), political epochs (chapter two "The Vulgar Republic" post-1812), and demographics [End Page 111] (chapter three "Jim Crow's Genuine Audience" and chapter six "Love Crimes"). Roberts's strategy of shaping these chapters (particularly chapter four "Black Song" and chapter nine "Black America") through the listening experience of the ex-slave, abolitionist, and essayist Frederick Douglass is engaging and enlightening. Roberts is most insightful in the central chapters (chapter seven "The Middle-Class Moment" and chapter eight "Culture Wars") in which he weaves together a richly-sourced account of the roots of various Antebellum reform movements, including Quaker communitarians, Shaker celibates, Boston Brahmins, and Concord Transcendentalists (p. 13). His foundation is a sophisticated cultural biography of the Hutchinsons, a Maine-based family act whose career and repertoire provides a soundtrack for analysis of the rise, antebellum apotheosis, and post-War twilight of abolitionist reformism and its "legacy . . . of contradictions" (p. 270). Scope and range of coverage are a challenge in tracing the history and social impact of North American popular song: where to begin? Upon what genres to focus? Where—most significantly—to cut off the narrative? Roberts handles the first two questions effectively, but his concluding chapter ten, on the aftermath of minstrelsy ("Musical Without End"), faces a challenge. His address to the period 1870– ca. 1925 undertakes some of the most complicated synthesis of the entire text, tracing blackface aesthetics in urban expressive arts, and the way that "Minstrel-based perceptions would structure the way white people would see these more authentic forms of black music" (p. 284). However, the sheer volume and ubiquity of these manifestations requires conflating too many...

Interpreting Paul Oliver

When the English blues scholar Paul Oliver, who died in 2017 aged 90, was interviewed for a special issue of Popular Music in his honour, on the occasion of his 80th birthday (issue 26/1, January 2007), it was striking how much of the conversation revolved around a recurring flow of ideas for future research, to be undertaken by him or by anyone else who came with credentials appropriate to the enterprise (such as musicology, a discipline that he never considered himself well enough versed in to allow engagement). It didn't enter his mind that he might become a research subject himself. Now, with Christian O'Connell's book, he has; and it is his own methods that are under scrutiny, not, or not directly, the blues that he spent a long adult lifetime investigating (and for which he was such a knowledgeable and, for many who read his books or heard him speak live or on air, inspiring advocate), nor the social and economic life of the African American working class who created the music that continued to fascinate him. What is under the microscope is how he depicted both of those things.

The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class

The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class

Introduction

Introduction

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark Lause

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark Lause

THE KU KLUX KLAN, LABOR, AND THE WHITE WORKING CLASS DURING THE 1920S

Historians usually consider the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s to have been consistently opposed to labor unions and the aspirations of working-class people. The official outlook of the national Klan organization fits this characterization, but the interaction between grassroots Klan groups and pockets of white Protestant working-class Americans was more complex. Some left-wing critics of capitalism singled out the Klan as a legitimate if flawed platform on which to build white working-class unity at a time when unions were weak and other institutions demonstrated indifference to working-class interests. In industrial communities scattered across the Midwest, South, and West, white Protestant workers joined the Klan. In Akron, Ohio, the Klan helped to sustain white working-class community cohesion among alienated rubber workers. In Birmingham, Alabama, the Klan violently repressed mixed-race unions but joined with white Protestant workers in a political movement that enacted reforms beneficial to the white working class. But Klan attention to working-class interests was circumstantial and rigidly restricted by race, religion, and ethnicity. Ku Klux definitions of whiteness excluded from fellowship many immigrant and Catholic workers. Local Klans supported striking white Protestant workers when Catholic, immigrant, or black rivals were present, but acted, sometimes violently, against strikes that destabilized white Protestant communities. Ku Klux sympathies complicated urban socialist politics in the Midwest and disrupted the effectiveness and unity of the United Mine Workers. Lingering Klan sympathies among union workers document the power of reactionary popular movements to undermine working-class identity in favor of restrictive loyalties based on race, religion, and ethnicity.

The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class. Edited by Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. xi + 249 pp. $28.00 paper.

The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class. Edited by Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. xi + 249 pp. $28.00 paper. - Volume 87 Issue 1

A Trump presidency and the prospect for equality and diversity

[Extract] During the 2016 US Presidential election, Republican Candidate (now President) Donald J. Trump made headlines around the world for vitriolic and inflammatory remarks against women, immigrants, Muslims, and other minority groups. Trump promised to build a wall along the Mexican border, ban Muslims from entering the USA, tighten abortion laws, repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and restrict press freedom (Bulman, 2016). His vision to Make America Great Again appealed to many white, working class Americans who were angry at or resentful of immigrants, a lack of opportunities for themselves, ideological-based terrorist attacks, and political correctness (Boag, 2016). Many lesser-educated white voters also felt abandoned by progressives (Vance, 2016). Indeed, a recent study has shown that sexism and racism predicted support for Trump much more than economic dissatisfaction (Schnaffer et al., 2017).

Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide by Lane Windham

Reviewed by: Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divideby Lane Windham Lane Windham Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. By Lane Windham. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. [xiv], 295. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3207-0.) Lane Windham's Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divideadds fuel to labor historians' current debate about the 1970s. On one side stand pessimists who depict the [End Page 1062]1970s as a decade of "working-class backlash and defeat," when complacent union bureaucrats neglected organizing activity and collective class concerns gave way to an individualized "rights consciousness" (pp. 3, 6). On the other side stand optimists such as Windham who declare that the 1970s actually witnessed "a wave of millions of workers who attempted to organize unions in the private sector" (p. 2). This union resurgence was spurred by "a transformed working class," consisting of "men of color, women of all backgrounds, and young baby boomers just entering the workforce" (pp. 3, 2). Furthermore, the rights consciousness that emerged from the civil rights and feminist movements contributed to the labor upsurge through such legislation as Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which allowed women and people of color access to higher-paying union jobs. When coupled with the vast expansion of public-sector unions, the "tremendous organizing efforts" of the 1970s make the decade appear less like a descent into labor's dark age and more like its last golden age (p. 3). The book's title refers to Windham's contention that, for working-class Americans, unions represented the "door" to higher wages and the enhanced social welfare provisions that were available only through collective bargaining contracts. But while an unprecedented number of workers "knocked on labor's door" through participation in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections, many of them failed to gain entry. In the book's first half, Windham shows that the union insurgency was halted in the early 1980s, not by union officials' incompetence or a conservative political culture, but by a cunningly effective employer counteroffensive. Here, Windham deftly synthesizes a wealth of primary and secondary sources to make a compelling case. Faced with global competition and sluggish productivity, employers slashed costs by undercutting unions and lobbying against labor law reforms while hiring union-busting consulting firms that specialized in sophisticated union avoidance strategies. When the dust settled in the late 1980s, union density had dropped by a full 10 percentage points and the number of NLRB elections had plummeted. Organized labor has never recovered from this management offensive, and working-class Americans, lacking union power, now struggle with declining wages and increasing economic precariousness. The book's heart, though, is found in its second half, a series of case studies of union organizing drives, based on Windham's interviews with rank-and-file activists. Windham's implication is that the 1970s union insurgency offers lessons for present-day workers, especially in the retail and service sectors. In Boston, for example, feminists and antiwar activists formed 9to5, a nontraditional "association" of clerical workers that Windham sees as a forerunner of today's "alt-labor" organizations, which may provide the model for successful labor movements in the future (pp. 152, 153). She also shows that even amid the rise of the conservative Sun Belt South, it was women and people of color who stood at the forefront of union drives at industrial workplaces, such as the Newport News, Virginia, shipyards and the Kannapolis, North Carolina, textile mills. On one level, Knocking on Labor's Dooris a conventional work of labor history—no surprise given that Windham is a former union organizer with seventeen years of experience who brings an insider's knowledge to bear on her [End Page 1063]subject. But on a broader level, the book marks yet another superb monograph from a fresh cohort of labor historians who challenge pessimistic narratives of organized labor's decline with inspiring studies...

Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order

Through its ambivalence towards its global security alliances, abrogation of free trade treaties and questioning of globalization, the Trump administration has argued that the United States-led liberal international order is too burdensome. How accurate is this portrayal? Drawing on theories of hegemonic leadership, the paper argues that the US national interest became globalized in the postwar international system and the US-led liberal order has given it enormous positional advantages. These include the capacity to shape the international preferences of other states, externalize domestic economic crises and construct the kind of international economy it wanted. Despite growing international competition, the US still has essentially the same global interests. However, neo-liberal globalization has weakened the domestic consent for American leadership among large sections of the American working class, who have rationally rejected continued US commitment to a system that has deepened economic inequality in the US. Trump has ridden the wave of this discontent, and although US elites may wish to return to the status quo after President Trump, these structural issues will remain. Trump may well do irreparable damage to the liberal order and thus, more broadly, to the West. While imperfect, the liberal order is still the ‘best of a bad bunch’ in terms of forms of systemic order on offer, and if the luxury of choice remains after Trump, a new domestic and international social contract is needed to revive US global leadership.