Michigan Governor Research Articles

The Making of Working-Class Religion by Matthew Pehl

Reviewed by: The Making of Working-Class Religion by Matthew Pehl Joseph A. McCartin The Making of Working-Class Religion. By Matthew Pehl. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 264pp. $30.00. Matthew Pehl has written a gem of a book. In recent years, labor and working-class historians have devoted increasing attention to the role that religion has played in the lives of workers, while religious historians have begun to focus more on the class character of religious traditions. Pehl’s deeply researched, carefully constructed, and beautifully written volume brilliantly illustrates the rich potential of this welcome scholarly convergence. Although the book appears in the University of Illinois Press’s long-running series “The Working Class in American History,” it is every bit as much a work of religious history as one of labor history. Indeed, it melds these approaches seamlessly to produce a work of rare insight. [End Page 86] Pehl offers a religious history of Detroit’s working class during the period from 1910 to 1970, years of enormous social, political, and spiritual change. One could scarcely imagine a better setting for a case study of working-class religious dynamics. Detroit served as a crossroads where immigrant Catholics, white Appalachian evangelicals, and black Baptists, Methodists, and Muslims converged. Home to such influential religious leaders as Charles Coughlin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Reverend C. L. Franklin, and Elijah Muhammad, it was also ground zero of industrial unionism and headquarters for the United Automobile Workers (UAW), a union that appealed to its members’ religious commitments. Pehl argues that the Depression-era Motor City produced a phenomenon he calls “worker religion,” in which “powerful ideas and idioms regarding the social meaning of work reshaped the religious practices of many Catholic, African American, and southern white evangelical workers” (79). During the booming 1920s, he explains, Detroit’s churches tended to be insular and often relied on corporate funding. Although they were meaning-giving institutions, they rarely bucked the city’s power structure or fostered connections beyond the boundaries of their faith, sect, or ethno-racial group. But, in the 1930s, “workers’ political and religious consciousness shifted, broadened, and intertwined as Detroiters responded to the travails of the Great Depression” (67). Figures such as the devoutly Catholic Detroit mayor, Frank Murphy, who went on to serve as Michigan governor and Supreme Court justice, labor priests like Father Clement Kern, who were steeped in Catholic social teaching, independent black preachers like Horace White, who embraced the UAW, and white evangelicals like Lloyd T. Jones, who preached in a Ford-funded church before taking charge of his union local together created “a new political imaginary for working-class congregations, who increasingly came to fuse their religious identities with their civil identities as ‘makers’ of the New Deal” (70). Worker religion was complex, ephemeral, and embattled, Pehl explains. Each tradition harbored conservative tendencies that resisted worker religion, such as the right-wing fundamentalism of Reverend J. Frank Norris, who led a crusade to rid the city of influences like the radical preacher Reverend Claude Williams. And no sooner had worker religion emerged than the experiences of World War II and the Cold War weakened it. As African Americans arrived seeking war jobs, racial tensions rose and a bloody race riot erupted in 1943. By 1947, resurgent anticommunism put worker religion on the defensive. What ultimately undermined worker religion, however, was the declining salience of the labor question amid 1950s prosperity [End Page 87] accompanied by the rising salience of race as white workers escaped to suburbs while blacks contended with a process of automation that disproportionately eliminated their jobs. “Race-conscious religion transformed worker religion” (185), Pehl argues, and some advocates of worker religion, like Father Kern, shifted seamlessly into racial justice work. But the shared struggles that had created common idioms for whites and blacks, Catholics and Protestants in the 1930s no longer drew them together. “Over the course of the 1960s, worker religion seemed increasingly incapable of addressing the problems of racism, sexism, poverty, and urban decline that marked the era” (209). As it lost coherence, no unifying replacement took its place. This is a poignant and profoundly significant story, told with skill and sensitivity...

Flint’s water woes lingered

Just five days into 2016, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency in Genesee County in response to high lead levels in the city of Flint’s drinking water. This declaration followed months of work by scientists and activists to alert government officials that something was wrong with Flint’s water. The city’s water woes started back in 2014 when it stopped taking treated water from the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department and instead began treating water from the nearby Flint River. The city’s treatment plant didn’t effectively optimize this new source of water to prevent it from corroding pipes in the city’s distribution system. This corrosion leeched lead into the drinking water. The entire crisis might have been avoided if the city had added an orthophosphate corrosion inhibitor to the water, says Marc A. Edwards, a Virginia Tech environmental engineer who led a team that studied Flint’s water problems.

Detroit: Part 2 — The grandest bargain

Founded in 1701 as a French fur-trading post, Detroit, Michigan, evolved from a port in the 18th century to a major manufacturing centre at the end of the 19th century. At the dawn of the 20th century, the city turned from making wagons and train cars to churning out automobiles and perfecting assembly line production. Detroit became the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ during World War II and reinvented itself as Motown after the war. But starting in the mid-1950s, after two and a half centuries of continuous expansion, Detroit’s economy was decimated in a mere 65 years by racial tensions and ‘white flight’; loss of jobs, population, tax base and reputation; and municipal leadership unable to recognise and manage a tsunami of debt. And while the private sector began reinvesting in downtown in the late 1990s, the absence of competent public-sector leadership allowed the debt to bloom into insolvency. US law — unlike that of other industrialised nations — allows municipalities to declare bankruptcy to wipe out most debt. Although there are many financially distressed American cities, few have declared bankruptcy. Detroit’s is the largest to date and was made more complicated by the involvement of an ‘emergency manager’ — an intervener appointed by the Governor of Michigan and granted extra-governmental powers. The first article provided historical background, described public-sector bankruptcy, and introduced the most important players in the bankruptcy drama. This second part outlines the legal process of municipal bankruptcy; introduces the creditors who fought to preserve their financial position; discusses the threat to the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection; and describes the ‘Grand Bargain’ without which the bankruptcy would have descended into the mire of endless lawsuits. The final article will lay out the aftermath of this titanic drama — the effect on reinvestment, and the ‘lessons learned’ by the cast of players and the community as a whole — and describe the substantial obstacles that remain to creating a robust and sustainable future for Detroit in the 21st century and beyond.

The Everyday Emergency

In the last several years, the governor of Michigan has placed seven cities under the control of emergency managers (EMs), who have the authority to make drastic cuts and rearrangements of public processes and services. I investigate what happens to planning processes under these circumstances, and how EMs use planning to accomplish their goals. I find that many of the cities devote renewed attention to planning, and that the planning process may function as an alternative public participation process, given that the normal democratic process had been disrupted. I also find that the implementation of the plans is likely to be problematic because of staffing cuts, and that planning in itself cannot solve the structural problems that led to these cities’ financial distress.

Springtime in Flintown: Disappointment, Affront, and Failure

Abstract Looking back, the beginning of the Flint water crisis seems surreal. Through a series of wrongheadedly antidemocratic and uncritical economic belt-tightening policies, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, along with the Flint city manager (and some city officials) decided to switch the water supply from Lake Huron—through Detroit—to the Flint River. For those of us living, working, or studying in Flint, we knew such a decision seemed odd, for we knew that the Flint River was, at best, dirty, and more realistically, dangerous. Nevertheless, in the Spring of 2013, governmental officials decided that changing the water supply made the most sense financially. Almost immediately, residents complained of skin irritation, body aches and pains, the bad smell and taste of the water, and so on. City officials told residents that despite the telling signs to the contrary, the water was safe to drink. Finally, a year after the decision was made, the new mayor declared a state of emergency. The truth of the situati...

Editor's Introduction: The Politics of Urban Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870–1920

Editor's Introduction: The Politics of Urban Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870–1920

Brief of Tri Valley Law as Amicus Curiae in Support of Respondents in Same Sex Marriage Cases Nos. 14-556, 14-562, 14-571 and 14-574

Supreme Court brief of Tri Valley Law as Amicus Curiae in support of respondents in the same sex marriage cases below. This Amicus brief was filed with the United States Supreme Court on April 2, 2015. Nos. 14-556, 14-562, 14-571 and 14-574: James Obergefell, et al., Petitioners, v. Richard Hodges, Director, Ohio Department of Health, et al., Respondents. Valeria Tanco, et al., Petitioners, v. William Edward Bill Haslam, Governor of Tennessee, et al., Respondents. April DeBoer, et al., Petitioners, v. Rick Snyder, Governor of Michigan, et al., Respondents. Gregory Bourke, et al., Petitioners, v. Steve Beshear, Governor of Kentucky, et al., Respondents.An argument from this brief was further developed into a paper on the impact of the Obergefell decision on Second Amendment rights. That paper is available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2652536 and will be published in spring 2016 in a law journal.

Vetoes and Venues: Economic Crisis and the Roads to Recovery in Michigan and Ontario

AbstractThis article examines executive responses to economic decline in Ontario and Michigan from 2003 to 2012, when the two governments struggled to adjust to a severe manufacturing crisis which greatly worsened during the Great Recession in 2008–2009. Sharing an international border, these cases offer control over an unusually large number of economic, social and political factors, permitting a focused analysis of the impact of divided government and fiscal decentralization on executive policy making. The research finds that greater fiscal decentralization in Canada and unified government in Ontario allowed the province to develop a more rapid and more robust response to the economic crisis in comparison to the State of Michigan. Budgetary constraints and a partisan veto at the state level forced Michigan's governor to redirect her efforts to the federal venue.

“They feel the beams resting upon their necks”: George W. Crockett and the Development of Equal Justice Under Law, 1948–1969

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 39:2 (Fall 2013): 51-75.©2013 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. “They feel the beams resting upon their necks”: George W. Crockett and the Development of Equal Justice Under Law, 1948-1969 by Ruth Martin Can anyone imagine the police invading an all-white church and rounding up everyone in sight and bussing them to a wholesale lockup in a police garage? Can anyone imagine a group of white people being held incommunicado for six or seven hours, and white women and children being locked up all night when there wasn’t the slightest evidence they’d been involved in any crime? (George W. Crockett, 1969)1 Despite his importance as a pioneering leader of progressive bar associations, George W. Crockett’s legal career remains neglected by historians. His controversial decisions as a Detroit judge during the height of racial tensions in the late 1960s merited the attention of urban historians B. J. Widick in Detroit: City of Class and Race Violence, and the more recent study by Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.2 The deep roots of his commitment to challenging police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct were a reaction to his early legal career in the 1950s and early 1960s, as he worked to expose and refute inherent prejudice within the American justice system. Two major periods in his life informed his judicial 1 Charles L. Sanders, “Detroit’s Rebel Judge Crockett: Champion of Justice for Blacks Spark Mini-revolution in Court,” Ebony, August 1969, 114-24, 116. 2 B. J. Widick, Detroit: City of Class and Race Violence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 52 The Michigan Historical Review opinions. First, he defended suspected Communists and radicals in Detroit and New York during the Second Red Scare. His refusal to yield to the persuasive and pervasive pressures of guilt-by-association led to his imprisonment, contributing to an intimate knowledge of the barriers to equal justice for unpopular or marginalized defendants. Second, his leadership of a southern justice initiative in the early 1960s led him to develop a sophisticated critique of the failings of the US criminal justice system, particularly when racism is entrenched in the workings of the courtroom. As the civil rights movement moved into a new phase, and as he once again returned to Detroit, he worked to combat police brutality and racism. His presence at the nexus of the defense of the rights of labor and of Communists and ethnic minorities was revealed through his central role in shaping an alternative judicial response to the clash of Law and Order politics and ethnic minority discontent. As an African American and political radical, he remained a double outsider whose judicial decisions in Detroit were regarded with suspicion. Those who believe that as an African American he would allow sympathy for the Republic of New Africa’s (RNA) aims to shape his judicial response reveal their willingness to assign bias to an ethnic minority, in contrast to their unquestioning acceptance of what they consider to be the normative decisions of white judges. Although controversial, his decisions during the 1967 riot and the 1969 New Bethel incident reflected his deep-rooted political philosophy of developing the agency and rights of African Americans while working within a whitedominated judicial system. During the summer of 1969, fifty-nine year old Detroit Judge George W. Crockett became the center of state media attention as critics charged that his decision-making process on the bench was unduly biased by his race and his radical politics. The Detroit Police Officers Association was at the forefront of the campaign to pressure him off the bench, and they picketed Crockett’s Detroit courthouse, charging that his actions provided dangerous support for extra-legal black paramilitary groups.3 Michigan Governor William Milliken responded by calling for a legislative probe of Crockett’s fitness to remain on the bench, as “Sock it to Crockett” and “Impeach Crockett” signs proliferated across Detroit. Crockett’s supporters lauded him...

Wounded Warrior: The Rise and Fall of Michigan Governor John Swainson by Lawrence M. Glazer (review)

Wounded Warrior: The Rise and Fall of Michigan Governor John Swainson by Lawrence M. Glazer (review)

Review

Book Reviews 107 Lawrence M. Glazer. Wounded Warrior: The Rise and Fall of Michigan Governor John Swainson. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. Pp. 322. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $39.95. It is difficult to think of a subject who lends himself more to a thoughtful, analytical biography, or a thorough analysis from a legal scholar, than does the troubled 42nd governor of Michigan, John Burley Swainson. Lawrence Glazer—formerly an assistant attorney general in Michigan, the chief legal adviser to Michigan governor James Blanchard, and a state circuit court judge—offers us his interpretation of Swainson’s life in Wounded Warrior. Unfortunately, Glazer’s analysis is decidedly uneven and the book is ultimately disappointing. After a perfunctory look at his subject’s early years, Glazer quickly takes readers to the seminal event in Swainson’s life. While he was on a reconnaissance mission on November 15, 1944, Swainson lost both of his legs below the knee, and for the rest of his life would wear a pair of artificial legs that were often painful. In an interview Swainson gave in his later years, he said that this injury drove him into politics. Interestingly enough, Glazer quotes one of Swainson’s associates, who claimed the future governor told him that he entered politics because practicing law would be too strenuous for his damaged body. Regardless of the reason, Swainson lost little time after he graduated from law school (University of North Carolina, 1951) before he entered politics. After presenting a synopsis of the rise of the postwar Democratic Party in Michigan, Glazer describes Swainson’s meteoric rise in state politics. He was elected to the state senate in 1955, lieutenant governor in 1959, and governor in 1960, becoming a bona fide national political superstar. In telling the story of Swainson’s success, Glazer introduces readers to several Michigan political leaders—Neil Staebler, G. Mennen Williams, Frank Murphy, Martha Griffiths, and many others—as well as John F. Kennedy, to whom Glazer compares the youthful (he was thirty-five when he was elected governor), philandering Swainson. Glazer also notes Kennedy’s role in Swainson’s 1960 victory. This was the end of Swainson’s rise in politics. Although Glazer strains not to make it so, it is clear from the evidence he presents that Swainson’s career—nay, his life—was in a consistent free fall from his election as governor until his death in 1994. Swainson’s two years as governor were a disaster: faced with an opposition legislature, his 108 The Michigan Historical Review entire 1961 legislative package was defeated; in 1962 he lost the governorship to Republican George Romney. Subsequently, Swainson begged Kennedy for a job in the federal government, but the wily president refused to intervene in internal Michigan politics. In 1965 Swainson was finally elected to the Third Judicial Circuit of Michigan, and in 1970 he was elected to the Michigan Supreme Court, where it was expected he would quietly serve out the rest of his career. Up to this point, readers are treated to a fairly straightforward political biography, one that subordinates an understanding of the man to an understanding of his role in the politics of his time. Specifically Glazer offers only a five-page chapter on Swainson’s life prior to World War II, his wife Alice never becomes more than a footnote to the story, his womanizing is only hinted at and hardly proven, and his children do not appear until page 108. The early political story, furthermore, is unevenly told. The tale of Swainson’s rise to power— battling his handicap with courage and guile—is the best part of the book, and the account of the growth and development of the Democratic Party in Michigan adds heft and context. However, Glazer gives us virtually no information about Swainson’s experiences as a circuit court judge, and the discussion of his time on the Michigan Supreme Court is limited to a brief summary of three cases in which he participated. The second part of the book, which relates the most well-known part of Swainson’s life, is decidedly a disappointment. In a melodramatic tone—one that does...

Who Influences Whom? The Agenda-Building Relationship Between Political Candidates and the Media in the 2002 Michigan Governor's Race

Building on previous research in the field of agenda-building by examining the relationships between candidates and the media, this study used content analysis to examine how the 2002 Michigan candidates for governor presented election issues in press releases, and the subsequent media coverage of the issues in Michigan newspapers. The analysis revealed positive cross-lagged correlations between candidate and media issue agendas at certain times of the campaign. While the current study suggests that certain news sources can have an influence on the subsequent media agenda, results indicated a reciprocal effect, indicating that candidates also run the risk of being influenced by the same media they are attempting to influence.

Beauty Queens and Unruly Women in the Year of the Woman Governor: Jennifer Granholm and the Visibility of Leadership

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm capitalized on the most viable resources of the unruly woman during her 2002 campaign: direct language, action-oriented responses, public dissemination of policy plans, and strategic use of visibility. The result complicated the beauty queen narrative that framed her campaign. This study underscores the potency of the beauty queen narrative in our political culture and ways to confront it; Granholm's case has explanatory power for others seeking to empower women public officials.

Michigan Governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, Proclaims the Week of July 25, 2009 as Physics Education Week

Michigan Governor, Jennifer M. Granholm, Proclaims the Week of July 25, 2009 as Physics Education Week

“Something Good This Way Comes”?

A mid all of the controversy related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, I flip-flop between being haunted by the 1960s Peggy Lee tune, Is That All There Is? and the recent song from Jakob Dylan, Something Good This Way Comes. All of the anticipation, expectations (high or low), the waiting, the votes, and finally, finally--the signature. But then arrives the dilemma, Is that all there is? Well, take a step back, hold an index finger up to the wind, and scan for some ideas that have been cruising under the national radar during the first part of the year. Economy: Still No. 1 Not surprisingly, nearly every governor addressed the need to improve state economies. Idaho Governor Butch Otter's Project 60 involves almost every element of state policy--from and work-force development to quality of life and recruiting foreign investment and trade. It is designed to strengthen both rural and urban communities. Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle wants to increase the state's food self-sufficiency. Replacing 10% of the food Hawaii currently imports, she says, would create more than $300 million in economic activity, generate $6 million in taxes, and create 2,300 new jobs. She is asking state agencies such as schools, prisons, and hospitals to buy locally grown fruits, vegetables, poultry, eggs, and meat. Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas wants to establish more community college centers that will concentrate on attracting investment, job growth, and business development to rural areas. Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe's belief that education and economic development are intertwined and inseparable, and one cannot fully succeed without the was typical across the states. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm will continue to support the No Worker Left Behind initiative that provides free college tuition, up to $5,000 per year for two years, to train workers for skilled jobs available in Michigan. She also wants to create Promise Zones (the promise of free college tuition) in 10 Michigan communities struggling with high rates of poverty. Proposals Could Pay Off for Schools Granholm also wants to create the Michigan Energy Corps to put thousands of unemployed citizens to work weatherizing homes, schools, and other public buildings and installing renewable energy technology. She is proposing to require cities, counties, school districts, colleges, and universities to adopt their own Buy Michigan First policies. By 2015, Governor David A. Paterson wants New York to meet 45% of its electricity needs through improved energy efficiency and clean renewable energy (45 by 15 program). A clearinghouse would be a single point of access for information on energy efficiency programs for schools, hospitals, and local governments. Virginia Governor Tim Kaine wants all state and local government buildings to meet either LEED or Green Globes standards for efficiency. South Dakota Governor M. Michael Rounds has proposed a low-interest revolving loan fund--when the money comes back, it would be loaned again and again to schools, cities, counties, universities, tech schools, and state agencies that saved tax dollars by becoming more energy efficient. Community Colleges and Economic Development Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is pinning some of his hopes on higher education, especially community colleges. He is providing $35 million in funds to restore grant cuts and another $15 million increase to allow 10,000 more students to receive grants to study at community colleges next fall. He will introduce a bill to provide tuition assistance to families earning less than $100,000 a year. All students who qualify and seek to attend public or community colleges would pay what they can afford (at least $1,000 per year). …

I've got a home in glory land: a lost tale of the Underground Railroad

It was the day before Independence Day, 1833. As his bride, Lucie, was about to be sold down the river, Thornton Blackburn planned a daring and successful daylight escape from their Louisville masters. Pursued to Michigan, the couple was captured and sentenced to return to Kentucky in chains. But Detroit's black community rallied to their cause in the Blackburn Riots of 1833, the first racial uprising in the city's history. Thornton and Lucie were spirited across the river to Canada, but their safety proved illusory when Michigan's governor demanded their extradition. Canada's defence of the Blackburns set the tone for all future diplomatic relations with the United States over the thorny issue of the fugitive slave, and confirmed the British colony as the main terminus of the Underground Railroad. The Blackburns settled in Toronto, where they founded the city's first taxi business, but they never forgot the millions who still suffered in slavery. Working with prominent abolitionists, Thornton and Lucie made their home a haven for runaways. When they died in the 1890s with no descendants to pass on their fascinating tale, it was lost to history. Lost, that is, until archaeologists brought the story of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn again to light.

The Media in the 2006 Israeli Elections: Who's Manufacturing Consent? Framing the Spin-Doctors

The 2006 elections were different from earlier elections in more ways than one. It was an intriguing campaign, full of events and shifts, with a genuine agenda and new heroes. Throughout the campaign—which started with Amir Peretz’s victory over Shimon Peres in the Labour party leadership elections—voters watched the media covering the implosion of the Likud and its ensuing electoral debacle, the shrinking of Labour, Sharon’s descent from stage, the creation of Kadima. Although parties were born, split, shrivelled and withered away, the public did not notice major differences between the main parties’ platforms. In light of their ideological weakness the parties sought to brand themselves by concentrating on their prime ministerial candidate’s image and building a differentiated political agenda. Those tasks were outsourced, handed over to PR specialists. As a result, leadership grooming and platform composing were replaced by the use of vague catchphrases, well-designed sound bites, misleading examples, and the use and abuse of statistics under the spin-doctors’ guidance. The latter had to decide, among other things, whether to emphasize the issue of security, regarded traditionally as the primary focus of Israeli politics, and to discuss the Intifada, the disengagement plan and Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian elections—or to emphasize socioeconomic issues, reflecting the unprecedented number of citizens living below the poverty threshold, massive education, health and welfare budget cuts, state workers fired and salary payment delays, and pensioners condemned to hunger. Socioeconomic issues, denied centre-stage for years on the pretext of a national emergency, received greater attention and had more impact

The Perils of Marriage as Transcendent Ontology: National Pride at Work v. Governor of Michigan

National Pride at Work v. Governor of Michigan provides a unique opportunity to watch as courts struggle to define marriage. This is not a suit seeking recognition of same-sex marriages. It presents the question of whether an amendment to the Michigan state constitution prohibiting recognition of same-sex marriages or any union that is similar to also prohibits public employers in the state from conferring benefits on the same-sex partners of their employees. The trial and appeals courts came to exactly opposite conclusions, and their respective positions nicely demarcate the options in what promises to be an ongoing debate in the many states that now have statutes or constitutional amendments prohibiting recognition of same-sex marriages. This article demonstrates how the trial court adhered strictly to the amendment itself and state statutes, while the appeals court covertly imported an ontological definition of marriage that relies more on the judges' personal philosophies than on the relevant law.

Soapy: A Biography of G. Mennen Williams by Thomas J. Noer

Book Reviews 155 Leidenberger deftly shows the importance of organized labor in the politics of reform in Chicago. However, one wonders whether the CFL is properly caUed a trade union. By backing sympathy strikes, entering politics, preaching solidarity across trades, and including women and minorities, the CFL's trade unionism either evolved toward or became something more revolutionary. Given the proposed statist solution to the streetcar issue, the influence of socialistic people in the movement (e.g., Henry Demarest Lloyd, Clarence Darrow, and Upton Sinclair), and the city's strong socialist movement (which was downplayed in this book), perhaps a "socia?st moment" better describes the coalescence and fragmentation of forces in Progressive Era Chicago. Whatever one caUs it, popular democracy gripped Chicago irrespective of class just as in Hazen Pingree's progressive Detroit and Victor Berger's socia?st Milwaukee. Thomas F. Jorsch Ferris State University Thomas J. Noer. Soapy:A Biography ofG. Mennen Williams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 419. BibHography. IUustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $35.00. G. Mennen "Soapy" WiUiams was the Democratic governor of Michigan from 1948 to 1960, head of the State Department's African Bureau from 1961 to 1966, ambassador to the PhUippines in 1968, and a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court from 1970 to 1986. Despite such an impressive r?sum?, Thomas Noer's Soapy is the first ftdl-length biography of a man who was one of the Hons of twentieth-century Michigan poHtical history. Soapy WiUiams was a comp?cated figure. He was an unabashed ?beral who openly espoused Christian principles. He was an outspoken champion of racial equa?ty when such a position was far from the norm. His down-to-earth campaign style, complete with his trademark green and-white bow tie and folksy demeanor, masked an aggressive poHtical infighter with a sometimes inflated sense of his own correctness. As Noer puts it, Soapy "claimed he could say 'heUo' in seventeen languages. He had a hard time saying, Tm wrong' in any" (p. 9). Soapy's career offered both remarkable successes and stinging setbacks. As governor of Michigan, WiUiams arranged for construction 156 Michigan Historical Review of the Mackinac Bridge and helped to prevent racial discrimination in employment, but he is often remembered most for his squabbles with the RepubHcan-controUed legislature that led Michigan to declare bankruptcy in 1959. He earned national attention for shouting down the otherwise unanimous selection of Lyndon Johnson as John Kennedy's running mate in 1960 due to Johnson's purportedly tepid support for civ? rights. According to Noer, Soapy's inabUity to compromise his ideals for poHtical gain Hkely destroyed his hopes for a shot at the presidency in 1960. Noer isn't shy about criticizing WiUiams for the poHtical cost this stubbornness exacted in terms of his personal ambitions, but he does find his intransigence honorable: "It is his very refusal to compromise, modify, or moderate his positions that makes him admirable. The very traits that doomed his poHtical career are those that are most deserving of praise" (p. 355). Noer is not afraid to stray from the conventions of poHtical biography either; he adds touching flourishes that include love letters from Williams to his wife, as well as excerpts from the thousands of testimonials that poured in from Michigan citizens upon Soapy's death in 1988. Displaying a solid grasp of the nuances of mid-century poHtics, international diplomacy, and Soapy's own character, Noer turns WilHams's Hfe into an engrossing story of power, idealism, and a passionate struggle for social justice. Soapy may be the first biography of WiUiams, but given the impressive nature of Noer's work itmay be the only one we need. John R. Thiel Kirtland Community CoUege Janet Sjaarda Sheeres. Son of Secession: Douwe J. Vander Werp. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006. Pp. 231. Appendix. BibHography. IUustrations. Index. Paper, $25.00. The Reverend Douwe J. Vander Werp (1811-1876) was one of the people who helped sustain the Dutch-American colony Albertus C. Van Raalte founded in west Michigan in 1846. From the moment he arrived in 1864 to pastor a church near HoUand, Vander Werp began to influence...

Calm or Conflicted? Labor-Management Relations on Michigan's Iron Ranges in the Nineteenth Century

Source: Charles K. Hyde, The Upper Peninsula of Michigan: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office/Historic American Engineering Record, 1978), xvi. Upper Peninsula Mining Districts Calm or Conflicted? Labor-Management Relations on Michigan's Iron Ranges in the Nineteenth Century by Terry S. Reynolds On Tuesday, July 11, 1865, Frank Mills, superintendent of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, cowered in his office near the company's mining pits outside the Upper Peninsula village of Ishpeming, scribbling a panicked, disorganized, rambling letter to J. C. Morse, the company's agent in the nearby port city of Marquette. Mills described himself as "not in a proper frame of mind," for the company's men had gone on strike and the "state of things is frightful. They are just passing the office & all have a club (I should judge 150 men) on their way to the New York Mine."1 Nearly thirty years later on July 3, 1894, at Ironwood, Michigan, the Norrie Mining Company, represented by fifteen nonstriking workers who were protected by fifteen deputies, attempted to use steam shovels to load iron ore from a company stockpile, only to be surrounded by a mob of around fifteen hundred striking miners. A mining captain, seeking to determine if there was an escape route, was hit by a rock. He rolled down an embankment and was fired upon as he lay at the bottom, which caused both sides to begin shooting. No one was killed, but six men were wounded; one man had part of his ear shot off, and another had a bullet furrow across his forehead. Within five minutes, deputies I would like to thank both Marcus Robyns and the staff at Northern Michigan University Archives for their assistance in the opening stages of research for this article and the referees who read the manuscript in its early stages. In addition, portions of my research were undertaken with the assistance of a Faculty Scholarship Committee Grant from Michigan Technological University, a Grace H. Magnaghi Visiting Research Fellowship Grant from Northern Michigan University Archives, and a Visiting Research Fellowship Grant from the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I thank these institutions for their support. Finally, Iwould like to thank John Beck for reviewing an earlier version of this article. 1F. P. Mills to J. C. Morse, July 11, 1865, item 2770, MS 86-100, Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Mining Company Papers, Archives of Michigan regional depository (hereafter AM NMU), Northern Michigan University, Marquette. Michigan Historical Review 33:2 (Fall 2007): 1-45 ?2007 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 2 Michigan Historical Review il ait Conflict on Michigan }s IronRanges 3 and nonstriking workmen were "obliged to fly for their lives." The miners then marched to downtown Ironwood, threatening to hang both the people who had attempted to operate the steam shovels and the hastily deputized officers who had tried to protect them. These events prompted Gogebic County's sheriff to ask Michigan's governor to send militia companies from outside the area to restore law and order. When the militiamen arrived on July 4, they were met at the station by strikers whom the soldiers had to force back with fixed bayonets.2 These images of labor-management conflict in the iron mines of Michigan's Upper Peninsula certainly fit the general picture painted by most historians of growing levels of labor violence in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 However, a number of commentators from that era paint amuch different picture of labor-management relations on Michigan's iron ranges. In 1894, a few months before the Ironwood strike, Charles H. Morse, Michigan's Commissioner of Labor Statistics, declared that no mining region in the United States "was more prosperous or contented" than Michigan's kon-ore-mining region. He noted "the almost entire absence of strikes or labor dissensions" as "conclusive proof that the relation between employer and employe [sic]was agreeable even unto cordiality."4 A decade later Horace Stevens, a special agent for the state Bureau of Labor who was investigating Michigan's Upper Peninsula mining regions, asserted...