White Labor Research Articles

John Thelwall in Saint Domingue: Race, Slavery, and Revolution in The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times (1801)

I John Thelwall was a clear opponent of the slave trade and slavery as an institution. Although his political writings have received much scrutiny in recent years, his writings about slavery have received rather scant attention. The most serious current criticism of them is by Marcus Wood who finds that ‘Thelwall was most unusual among radicals in his uncompromising vision of poor white and poor black labour as equally exploited by the nascent forms of capitalism’. Challengingly, Wood argues that British radical hostility to the Evangelical Abolitionist political agenda and its own concern with the domestic poor led to its distancing the movement from abolitionism. Wood claims that, against this trend, Thelwall produces ‘one of the most trenchant pleas for the ideological unification of abolition and reform theory’ and is ‘one who stood out against the Negrophobe orthodoxies of English Radicalism.’ There is some truth in this assertion, although this seriously overestimates Thelwall’s isolation as a reformer from other radical abolitionists, such as William Roscoe, James Currie, and Edward Rushton, a group of Liverpool abolitionists with whom Thelwall was clearly engaged in serious and sustained discussion and committed radical abolitionists, such as Benjamin Flower. Oddly, however, Thelwall’s most powerful engagement with Caribbean slavery and one of his major works is seldom discussed or even noticed. This is the powerful and detailed fictional representation and critique of the Haitian slave revolution (in what was then French Saint Domingue) in his pseudonymously published novel, The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times of 1801. This essay will discuss Thelwall’s engagement with anti-slavery and seek to re-establish the importance, as well as the limitations of this critique by surveying the scope and substance of Thelwall’s only novel.

Confronting White Labourism: Socialism, Syndicalism, and the Role of the Scottish Radical Left in South Africa before 1914

SummaryDominated by the ideas of the “communist school”, the early history of the socialist and revolutionary syndicalist movement in South Africa has (until relatively recently) been largely overlooked by labour historians. From this approach emerged the view that the dominant voice of white workers in South Africa was British, and to a lesser extent Australian, and that their blend of class and racial consciousness resulted in the widespread support for the common ideology of white labourism. Indeed, support for this system of industrial and racial segregation was prevalent across the British Empire, was widely supported by the imperial working class, and in South Africa was never seriously challenged or confronted before 1914. Over recent years, however, South African labour historians have made efforts to rethink their national labour history by examining the early labour movement and the ideology of white labourism in a global context. This article adopts a similar approach and argues that the politics of white labourism was not uniformly embraced by the imperial working class, and that in South Africa there was a vocal and active non-racialist movement which sought to confront racism and segregation, dispute the operation of the “colour bar”, and challenge the white protectionist policies of the labour and trade-union movement. In conclusion, it will be argued that the campaign to confront white labourism was disproportionately influenced by radical left Scottish migrants who adhered firmly to the colour-blind principles of international socialism and revolutionary syndicalism.

Scottish Labour, Race, and Southern African Empire c.1880–1922: A Reply to Kenefick

SummaryIn his article in the current edition of International Review of Social History, the Scottish historian, Billy Kenefick, argues against my thesis that the labour force of the United Kingdom and the settler colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be understood as having constituted a linked “imperial working class” in which an ideology of racialized white labour protectionism predominated. Kenefick believes that in South Africa British socialists challenged white labourism, and that Scottish immigrants played a very prominent role in this anti-racist project. My reply traces the relationship between Scottish national identity, imperialism, and the labour movement. It then examines the evidence on the racial politics of Scottish trade unionists in South Africa and argues that, with a very few individual exceptions, they did buy into the ideas of white labourism. Finally, the article considers Scottish labour attitudes to race in the home country, and demonstrates that there was strong sympathy for the racial labour politics of the settler colonies.

Chinese Ethnicity and the American Heroic Artisan in Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go (1879)

Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go appeared at peak of vitriolic anti-Chinese sentiment that broke out in California in 1870s. (1) This racial drama touched on national debate over the Chinese question and used theatrical performance as persuasive ideological force to advocate exclusion of Chinese immigrants from United States. According to David Roediger, this farce provided a way for men to carouse after at Anti-Coolie Club, white working-class male preserve for communal bonding. (2) Unlike most of nineteenth-century yellow-face performances that distorted Chinese immigrants mainly for comic effect, Grimm's play enunciates rigorous dialectical criticism of Chinese. Drawing upon work of recent scholars such as Yong Chen, James Moy, and Floyd Cheung, who have used Chinese language sources such as newspapers, letters, diaries, diplomatic writings, and Chinese government reports in order to explicate what was done to Chinese and how Chinese reacted to it, this essay examines place of Chinese workers in late nineteenth-century American ethnic/gender hierarchy. (3) I explore issues concerning Chinese immigrants by assuming various perspectives along spectrum from Euro-American to Chinese, arguing from such vantage points that ethnicity and gender play significant role both in reiterating negative stereotypes and in complicating or resisting them. While James Moy claims that Grimm's farce indicates that earlier American construction of deceitful Chinese was required to rationalize strategy that white Americans would later employ in their dealings with Asians, (4) I would suggest that Grimm's melodrama criticizes not only Chinese supporters but anti-Chinese agitators as well. The play's satire on white workers may partially explain why, in fact, there is no record of performance of play at any established theater in San Francisco, (5) while later production at Bird Cage Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, outside California where play is set and characters are satirized, is known to have received thunderous applause. (6) Floyd Cheung maintains that Grimm's play articulates American racial stereotypes that waver between frighteningly feminized and menacingly masculine. He observes that play's depictions of Chinese as threatening reveal an underlying Euro-American anxiety about masculinity. (7) Cheung's reading corrects Dave Williams's assertion that late nineteenth-century American playwrights portrayed Chinese only as effeminate, powerless, and comical, rather than as economically or culturally dangerous. (8) Yet Grimm's play manifests not only an ambiguous gendering of Chinese, but an equivalent contradictory gendering of white workers. While seeming to be masculine in driving off Chinese with violence, for instance, white worker could be regarded as feminized because of his failure to compete legitimately for respectable work. In The Chinese Must Go, contradictory gendering of both Chinese and white laborers stems not only from Euro-American gender anxiety, but from misconceptions of Chinese immigrant experience in United States. I. Feminization of Chinese Laborers Grimm's portrayal of Chinese workers appears to convey populist antagonism against Chinese. The play depicts Blaine family in San Francisco and their reliance on Chinese helpers for their daily housework. William, tailor, and his son Frank blame Chinese labor for their financial tribulations and attempt to justify their ill treatment of Chinese by claiming that they are deserving of punishment. Not coincidentally, their surname--Blaine--is likely to allude to contemporary politician, James Gillespie Blaine (1830-93), Speaker of United States House of Representatives, known to have strongly favored Exclusion Acts against Chinese immigration. (9) The title of play, in fact, was borrowed from slogan of Workingmen's Party of California, white labor union that sought anti-Chinese legislation. …

Between Empire and Revolution: a life of Sidney Bunting 1873-1936 (review)

Reviewed by: Between Empire and Revolution: a life of Sidney Bunting 1873-1936 Bill Freund (bio) Allison Drew (2007/2009) Between Empire and Revolution: a life of Sidney Bunting 1873-1936. Hidden Histories Series. London: Pickering & Chatto; Pretoria: UNISA Press The first white activists to reach out beyond the racially bounded minority and agitate for revolutionary change are legitimately to be seen as key ancestors for some kind of non-racial society, however vaguely defined, in South Africa. One small wave of such activists came from the immigrant British workers already imbued with the ethos of the emerging Labour Party. A second arrived on these shores from the Baltic, Jews associated with anti-Czarist revolutionary formations in the old Russia and thereafter sympathisers with the new Soviet Union. An older wave of writers such as Edward Roux and the Simons memorialised their passions, quarrels and organisational forays. More recently, their memory has been revived by sympathetic historians, notably in Jonathan Hyslop's biography of JT Bain as well as Jeremy Krikler's study of the 1922 Rand revolt. Alison Drew, an American historian based in England, who has written extensively on the early and alternative Left in South Africa, now adds to this a biography of Sidney Bunting, associated particularly with the early days of the Communist Party of South Africa. Bunting does not fit either target group of early white secular dissenters at all even though he supported the Labour Party for a time (remaining friendly with Colonel Frederick Creswell, early champion of white labour and segregation) and although he eventually married Rebecca Notlowitz, an articulate Jewish immigrant from Lithuania trained as a midwife, who believed in Bunting and shared his enthusiasm for the early Communist Party. Bunting himself however came from an upper middle class London family of [End Page 117] Dissenters who interested themselves in diffuse causes, was a good classical musician and a dedicated classics graduate who held a first class degree from Oxford University. Like a number of other family members, he sought his fortune in the empire and partnered a wattle estate in rural Natal, successful in the 1920s, with a first cousin. This became a silent partnership in time, giving Bunting an income in dividends while the cousin became suitably horrified at his relation's political notoriety in white South Africa. Drew writes well, is often fascinated with detail that appears in old documents and she has been so successful in recreating Bunting's bourgeois origins, connection and life from his family papers that they at times threaten to dominate this biography. Of the Communist Party years, there are no remarkable revelations but we do see in some human detail his slogging months of campaigning for parliament unsuccessfully in a caravan through the rural Tembuland constitutency in 1929 and the phase of backbiting and personal rivalry that pulled the little party apart and virtually killed it in the early 1930s. The hostility of the early ANC and the eastern Cape black establishment to radical social ideas is etched more strongly than has generally been done. As is well-known, much of the disputes of the time centred on the slightly eccentric slogan of the Native Republic, imported from Moscow where Bunting twice went as a delegate. Bunting was a kind of figure in the middle, with loose ties to a white labour movement that had very recently appeared willing to take on the South African state very menacingly but increasingly fed up with mainstream white racial values and convinced of the central importance of organising oppressed blacks, especially workers. He always had an uprightness and a certain independence of mind which comes out in observations that were not entirely politically correct and of course the educational credentials that must have made party members from poor backgrounds uncomfortable. The best-known black party pioneers, such as Moses Kotane, James La Guma and Albert Nzula, disliked him but Gana Makabeni, who was at his side as translator and guide through the Tembuland wanderings, remained a loyal friend to the end. The shifts in Bunting's life almost entirely occurred in early middle age during the second decade of the twentieth century and the absence of...

Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845–1880 (review)

Reviewed by: Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845–1880 Aaron W. Marrs (bio) Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845–1880. By Bruce W. Eelman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Pp. xii+313. $42.95. The Civil War is a convenient starting or stopping place for historians of the nineteenth-century United States. Political and moral arguments which grew ever more heated in the 1850s finally found expression in war, and the results were momentous: the end of slavery. In this book, however, Bruce Eelman takes a more unusual tactic and investigates the history of a single county in South Carolina—Spartanburg—from 1845 to 1880. Doing so allows him to measure the impact of a variety of antebellum factors (including slavery and planter ideology) on postbellum life. His technique is effective, although, for readers of this journal, it is worth noting that his insights have far more to do with culture than with technology. Even though technological advancements took place in Spartanburg in the antebellum era and form a component of Eelman’s narrative, technology per se is not his predominant concern. Those seeking detailed information about mills and railroads will have to look elsewhere. But for those with a broader interest in the economy and culture of the nineteenth-century South, Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry will pay dividends. Eelman lays out the development in the 1840s and 1850s of a town-based merchant culture that began to take hold in Spartanburg. Merchants accepted the importance of cotton and slavery but also began to push for industrial and transportation improvements that would enhance Spartanburg’s economic position. To be sure, such improvements never fully matched those of northern states, and Eelman responsibly points out the important links that Spartanburg businessmen made with their northern counterparts. Some of the entrepreneurs pushing development came from New England, just as Spartanburgers relied on northern assistance for the [End Page 929] development of schools. Although South Carolina did not support a system of common schools, Spartanburg did have a system of private schools to fill the gap, and this system relied “at least in part, on northern-trained instructors” (p. 82). In addition to educational change, Spartanburg reformers demanded a shift from extralegal violence to a more rigorous and formal law enforcement as well as a penitentiary that would reform criminals as well as deter crime. Spartanburg also developed an iron industry. Even though it could not withstand competition from Pennsylvania, the existence of this industry did lead to a change in local ideology: Spartanburgers began to “dignify manual labor” and determine how slave labor and white labor could coexist for the greater prosperity of society (p. 49). In the second half of his book Eelman continues to trace developments after the Civil War. Railroads grew out of a combination of “northern money” and “native interest and involvement” (p. 184). The new status of freedmen complicated reform efforts for whites: common schools still struggled for state funding, with the added hurdle of threatened “race mixing” if they were open to all. Local leaders who had supported extralegal violence against blacks following the Civil War found it difficult to then “rid their society of illegal activity” by whites (p. 236). Eelman demonstrates the links of Old and New South through the goals of those who led entrepreneurial and moral reform. Those who believe that the New South owed little to antebellum precedents will probably want to see Eelman’s argument applied to more than a single county in order to be fully convinced. Yet his study deserves to be read with an open mind by all with an interest in the economy and culture of the nineteenth-century South. Our understanding of the antebellum southerners’ view of the economy is changing, and Eelman’s important work contributes much to that understanding by joining antebellum and postbellum worlds in a single analysis. Aaron W. Marrs Dr. Marrs, a historian in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State, is the author of Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (2009). Copyright © 2009 Society for...

From Black Marxism to Industrial Ecosystem: Racial and Ecological Crisis in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge

From Black Marxism to Industrial Ecosystem:Racial and Ecological Crisis in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge John Claborn (bio) Known for its tragic portrayal of the early-twentieth-century Great Migration, William Attaway's 1941 novel Blood on the Forge follows in the naturalist and black Marxist tradition of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). As critic Philip H. Vaughan rightly assesses, one of the novel's central conflicts is the "clash between pastoral and industrial-urban living" (424) as it "becomes an angry repudiation of industrial life as destructive to human values" (422). Employing both naturalism and pastoralism to dramatize this clash, Attaway curiously breaks out of these two representational modes through his use of a relatively minor secondary character named Smothers, a prophetic spokesman for the earth's pain: "[o]ne of the men whispered that Smothers was off his nut. Yet they listened and heard a different sort of tale: 'It's wrong to tear up the ground and melt it up in the furnace. Ground don't like it. It's the hell-and-devil kind of work'" (52–53). His legs dismembered in a brutal steel mill accident, Smothers's shrill prophecies are the product of wisdom gained through suffering, of a heightened sense of what the ground feels as it is mined, smelted, [End Page 566] and made into steel. Because he brings an ecological perspective to the ethical and ontological relations among worker, machine, and earth, his character appears on the literary scene as an enigma not only for the Great Migration narrative, but also, perhaps, all of early-twentieth century African American literature. This article explores this strange anomaly of Smothers and the ecological themes of Blood on the Forge. Literary critics have acknowledged the importance of Smothers for articulating the novel's twin themes of machinic violence performed on worker and land. Edward Margolies goes the furthest in this direction when he conflates Smothers's worldview with Attaway's, arguing that the novel condemns "a kind of greed that manifests itself as a violence to the land, a transgression of Nature" (xiv). Yet no critic has fully explored its ecological themes, nor asked why a novel published in 1941 and set in 1919 should so strongly anticipate the various environmentalist movements that hit mainstream American cultural and political discourse in the 1960s. Perhaps this marginalization is due partly to the novel's critical reception and classification as African American fiction, a category typically perceived as tackling social injustices rather than environmental causes.1 Alan Wald reads the novel within the political context of the late 1930s, calling Attaway a black Marxist "whose exertions were aimed in part at educating the white labor movement about the corrosive costs of continued racial chauvinism" (282). Wald cites Attaway's involvement with the Communist Party as evidence for his strong political commitments, though Blood on the Forge reveals more an analyst of race and capitalism than a propagandist supplying cultural weapons for an American October Revolution. We never see in Blood on the Forge the triumph of racial accommodation and assimilation, or the awakening of class consciousness. Set in 1919, when World War I had cut off migratory flows from Europe and thus depleted the pool of cheap immigrant labor in northern industrial cities, the novel follows the three Moss brothers—Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody—as they migrate from the Jim Crow South to the industrial wasteland of western Pennsylvania. As historian Carole Marks pinpoints in her analysis of the Great Migration, northern steel mill employers saw that if they could maintain the influx of racially diverse labor, they could rely on perpetual conflict to undermine organized labor (15). The narrative ends tragically with one brother dead, another blinded by a mill explosion, and the third with an injured hand that prevents him from "slick[ing] away" his blues on the guitar (1). The two surviving brothers catch a train ride farther north to Pittsburgh proper, each feeling uncertain about his future. Attaway's protest is bleak, even nihilistic, but it does testify [End Page 567] to the singular experience of workers who might otherwise be lost in a Chicago School sociologist...

Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 150 which offers the history of the songs, the story of Byron Arnold, and a detailed “learning guide” for use in classrooms. The guide explores introducing folklore to children through the songs and games on the CD, and includes activities and lesson plans for children in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. Bullfrog Jumped is an excellent resource for musicologists, teachers, and singers—all those “folk” who are still in the business of passing down and preserving our collective past. It would be interesting to see how children respond to this CD. They might have some difficulty in understanding the words, and some of the tunes appear fragmented. A companion recording of modern renditions of these songs would truly make accessible to the current generation not only the music but perhaps a greater understanding of their own history. KATE CAMPBELL Nashville, Tennessee Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War. Edited by Paul A. Cimbala and Barton C. Shaw. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. x, 315 pp. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-8130-3067-8. Making A New South is a book that will be useful to teachers, scholars, laypersons, and all those interested in the evolution of the idea of a “New South.” Its essays, collected by noted historians of the South present and evaluate a variety of leaders, leadership styles, and the clash of communities over race, class, gender, wealth, and place from 1870 to 1970. Making a New South is a study of change, specifically its effects on leaders who made decisions that reshaped the definition of the New South. “Southerners, almost in spite of themselves, were making a New South,” the editors argue, as they confronted change, much of it coming as a result of external forces (pp. ix–10). The eleven essays present change, particularly the “public endeavors of southerners” who made a new South (p. 6). The eleven scholars provide thought-provoking articles on patterns of leadership, the limits of white racial unity, memory and race, economic success and race, reformers in conflict with segregation, the death of segregation and the emergence of a new racism, and African American agency. For example, William D. Carrigan and Bobby Donaldson “demonstrate that racial distinctions were so deeply embedded in southern culture that they shaped collective memories” and even directed the actions of religious denominations A P R I L 2 0 0 9 151 (p. 7). Deborah Beckel and Faye L. Jensen found that “the power of race . . . frustrate[d] efforts of white community leaders who sought political and economic change” (pp. 7–8). Larisa M. Smith and Catherine Fosl “document how community leaders marginalized idealistic reformers whose agendas threatened to disrupt the racial status quo” (pp. 7–8). Douglas L. Fleming, Tony Badger, and Clive Webb explore the “explosive power of race,” its limits, and “the capacity of established white leaders to moderate the politics of race” (p. 9). David C. Carter and Kris Shepard make it clear that the power of the federal government indeed made change possible for grassroots blacks. But there were limits to the power of government, especially when it confronted established white southern power brokers who had years of experience working with congress and federal agencies (p. 10). The themes of race, power, and wealth in the city were evident in Columbus, Georgia, where the white business community committed economic suicide to preserve their antebellum visions of black and white labor. White leadership also failed to exploit an opportunity to modernize by sponsoring a rail line as the era of the steamboat faded. Memory, race, and power defined Reconstruction Atlanta and black use of religion to defend the community while post-emancipation North Carolina white Republicans sacrificed black political support for racial peace, raceneutral policies, and the survival of the party. Memory and race in twentieth -century Waco, Texas, began with a lynching burned permanently in the memory of African Americans who viewed the mid-twentieth-century tornado that destroyed downtown Waco, the site of the lynching, as Godly retribution. Whites, meanwhile, tried to...

Functionalism vs Westphalia: the looking glass of employment policy

Many key ideas in the Lisbon strategy can be traced back to the Delors Commission's 1993 White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment, arguably the EU's first major effort to confront the economic and social realities of globalisation. At the time the White Paper failed to achieve the results it sought. However, the core of the White Paper's labour market issues were taken up by the Amsterdam Treaty which initiated the European Employment Strategy and its innovative methodology, the open method of coordination (OMC). The Lisbon strategy, which followed soon thereafter, broadened this approach into a new mission to enhance the competitiveness of the EU which used the OMC extensively. However, EU Member States, zealous of their prerogatives in economic, labour market and social policies, were unwilling to grant the EU level significant roles for transnational coordination and implementation in these areas. The results have not matched the outpouring of support for Lisbon from progressive intellectuals and centre-left politicians. In the critical policy areas that the 1993 White Paper, the EES and the Lisbon strategy have addressed, contradictions between intergovernmentalism and the need for European coordination have led to suboptimal results.

Black and White Print: Cross-Racial Strategies of Class Solidarity in Mechanics' Free Press and Freedom's Journal

Black and White Print:Cross-Racial Strategies of Class Solidarity in Mechanics' Free Press and Freedom's Journal Timothy Helwig (bio) Exposés of depraved crimes committed under the cover of darkness; lurid descriptions of violent, bone-smashing, brain-splattering murders; titillating accounts of lascivious rakes stalking and deflowering meek, virgin seamstresses: all of these sensational tropes are commonplace devices by which the subversive city-mysteries of the 1840s and 1850s appealed to their mass readership and mounted their artisan republican critique of "upper ten-dom," an appeal to a working-class solidarity that would not materialize until the turn of the century.1 The sensational crime reporting of the penny press was a primary influence on city-mysteries' Gothic excesses, and David S. Reynolds points to the founding of the earliest penny papers as a watershed moment in the development of subversive literature.2 Yet even before cheap dailies of the 1830s challenged the elite six-penny papers that were run by the dominant political parties and that catered to the mercantile class, one of the earliest labor newspapers and the nation's first black newspaper articulated the interests of its respective, disenfranchised readers through class-accented sensationalism. To date, many scholars of antebellum popular print culture have studied early black newspapers and the diffuse products of the penny press separately, coming to a consensus that the working-class sympathies in both sets of newspapers are either disorganized or inconsequential. Yet when we isolate the class-inflected discourses of sensationalism, artisan republicanism, and nativism that appear among prominent labor newspapers and black newspapers, evidence of shared strategies of class protest emerges among the newspapers and attests to the potential of cross-racial sympathy among the multi-racial working classes of the antebellum period. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the cross-racial strategies of class protest complicates the prevailing views that the early black press catered primarily to the [End Page 117] black middle-class and that the popular press espoused largely reactionary racial politics. I will show how early black newspapers expressed pragmatic concern for the rights of working-class free blacks through strategies that resonated with the white labor movement and that sought to impress upon working-class whites the expediency of cross-racial class solidarity. Through the use of subversive sensationalism, direct appeals against chattel slavery, and both artisan republican and nativist rhetoric, the labor paper Mechanics' Free Press and the black paper Freedom's Journal engage in appeals to class solidarity much earlier than has previously been acknowledged. When technological developments such as the steam press and the expansion of a literate public revolutionized the nation's print culture during the antebellum period, cheap penny papers and weekly story papers proliferated. Between the inaugural issue of Benjamin Day's penny paper the New York Sun in 1833 and the year 1840, the number of daily papers in the United States more than doubled from 65 to 138.3 By 1850, New York alone boasted fourteen daily papers with a total circulation of at least 150,000.4 Promoted as "democratic" alternatives to the elite six-penny newspapers under the control of professional political parties, penny papers appealed to their mass readership with sensational crime news, exposés of hidden corruption among "respectable" public officials, and serialized fiction that blended Gothic imagery with artisan republican rhetoric. Developing simultaneously, though haltingly, black newspapers—edited by African Americans and intended primarily for African-American readers—flourished in northeastern cities and in the Midwest during the antebellum period. Todd Vogel estimates there may have been as many as one hundred black newspapers in print between 1827 and 1855.5 Black newspapers engaged social questions specific to their audience, such as the abolition of chattel slavery and voting suffrage; provided inspiration and practical advice for the social and economic uplift of the African-American race; and, challenging the racist caricatures found in the mainstream press, took pride in offering unbiased and realistic representations of free and enslaved blacks. Despite the prevailing critical perception that products of the class-inflected labor and penny presses and early black newspapers had few shared interests and endured a generally antagonistic relationship, these diverse print sources...

Whiteness [In]Visible

This essay examines Eminem's uneasy relationship with race. He has capitalized on a traditionally African-American art form while emphasizing and simultaneously effacing his own racial heritage. Indeed, one must see Eminem as both black and white in order for his public image to be fully coherent. His speech, gestures, friends, colleagues, economic fortunes, and artistic influences are all Hip Hop clichés while his hair and flesh are stark white. He complains about the difficulty of making it as a Rapper because he is white, and thus invokes the traditional complaint of white labor competing with African-Americans in the workforce, and at the same time admits that his whiteness made him an unprecedented success in the Rap music industry. The essay applies the theories of racial construction to Eminem's lyrics as well as to the film 8 Mile, in which the rapper is impeded in his struggle for success by bias within the African-American Hip Hop apparatus. Thus Eminem is cast in the traditional narrative of the underdog who overcomes doubt and discrimination in order to achieve dazzling success, yet ironically this scenario is played out against a power structure that is the tradition target rather than the perpetrator of discrimination.

Michael Chabon's Unhomely Pulp

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The essay continues to hold a central place within the recent history of feminist literary studies. The edition I cite here is from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Among numerous accounts of this transition, David Harvey's analysis stands out for its especially clear discussion of the psychic and sociological dimensions of Fordism. See The Condition of Postmodernity, 121–40. I have also drawn here from Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, cited below. Gallagher writes: “The phrase “white slaves,” which recurred frequently in Cobbett's widely read social criticism, formed a part of his legacy to later writers. Decades after the controversies over the slave trade and colonial slavery had been settled, Victorian social critics continued to use the phrase” (8). See also Carens. On the significance of the term “white slave” in the American context, see Roediger's chapter “White Slaves, Wage Slaves, and Free White Labor” (65–87). On “slaving” see 144–45. This passage was taken as the epigraph for another landmark of feminist theory: Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen's 1997 anthology Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. In using the term “abandonment” to think through the critical problems posed by postmodernism, Chow is drawing from Andrew Ross's work in his 1991 collection Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGordon BigelowGordon Bigelow teaches courses on the English Romantic and Victorian periods and on the literature and culture of modern Ireland. He joined the department of English at Rhodes in 1998, after earning a Ph.D. at the university of California, Santa Cruz. His essays have appeared in publications on English literature and Irish history, and his current research project focuses on the connections between literature and economic thought in the nineteenth century.

1968—Too Little and Too Late? The Communist Party and Race Relations in the Late 1960s1

This article examines a turning point in the relationship between the black communities in Britain and the British labour movement, focusing upon the role of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in this relationship. While 1968 saw a great wave of industrial militancy and cultural radicalism, during which the CPGB was quite influential, this upsurge in radical activist politics did not translate into major gains in the struggle against racism in Britain. 1968 saw the tightening of immigration controls and a Labour government intent on the ‘integration’ of black immigrants, coupled with an increase in racist agitation on the right by Enoch Powell and the fledgling National Front, which caused problems for Britain's black population. The CPGB, one of the largest leftist parties and with a history of anti-colonial and anti-fascist activism, had the potential to be an important agent in the anti-racist movement in the late 1960s, but any appeal to black workers was subsumed by the wider industrial struggles of the period—a phenomenon that was replicated throughout the British labour movement. The inability of the trade unions and the British left to effectively address the grievances of black workers led to autonomous black political organisation, inspired by the ideas of black power and the Marxism of the national liberation struggles. This division between the (primarily white) labour movement and black workers was widened by the events of 1968 and would further consolidate throughout the 1970s. The purpose of this article is to portray how the schism between the traditional organisations of the British working class and the black communities developed, significantly demonstrated by the failure of the heightened radicalism of 1968 to produce tangible benefits for black Britons, and how the potential of the CPGB to undertake an important anti-racist role was diminished by its focus on militant labourism.

Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans. By Jean Pfaelzer. (New York: Random House, 2007. xxx, 400 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4000-6134-1.)

Jean Pfaelzer's Driven Out adds to the rapidly growing field of Asian American studies. The subject of the book is hardly new, yet the author is able to deliver a detailed presentation with captivating narratives. Pfaelzer vividly records forgotten events in American history, telling how lawless citizens and dishonest politicians terrorized dozens of communities with Chinese residents and how the victims resisted and even sometimes triumphed. Pfaelzer details the racial tensions in the gold fields—the conflict between the Chinese and whites, between the Indians of California and the invading gold miners, between Americans and the Latin Americans, including Mexicans, Chileans, and Argentineans, and between northerners and southerners over the issue of slavery. Pfaelzer records the lynching and massacre of Chinese in Los Angeles in 1871. In the Northwest, the Chinese working in orchards or in mills became the targets for white laborers; in Butte County, California, white laborers burned down Chinese properties in 1877. In San Francisco, the 1870 San Francisco Cubic Air Ordinance forced the Chinese to pay a fine that ranged from ten to one hundred dollars for living in spaces smaller than five hundred cubic feet. Pfaelzer also reveals the purge of Chinese women—slave girls, prostitutes, merchants’ wives—through legislation and moral crusades.

From Demand for Asiatic Labor to Importation of Indentured Chinese Labor: Race Identity in the Recruitment of Unskilled Labor for South Africa's Gold Mining Industry, 1903–1910

AbstractDespite international protests against bonded labor, the flow of indentured laborers during the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries was extensive compared to the earlier centuries. The focus of this article is on the particularity of the “Chinese coolies experiment” in South Africa's gold mining industry which commenced in 1904. This 20th-century episode of indentured labor is notable for several reasons, and it serves as a springboard for the discussion of some fundamental issues in capitalist development, labor and identity formation. This article emphasizes the last, examining how a “Chinese” identity was formed through the development of the gold fields and, in turn, how this formation reinforced a nascent white labor aristocracy. It discusses two dimensions of this labor “experiment” in South Africa: (1) the heady debate on the decision to look to China for cheap labor and (2) desertion by the indentured Chinese laborers from various mining compounds in the Witwatersrand.

From Demand for Asiatic Labor to Importation of Indentured Chinese Labor: Race Identity in the Recruitment of Unskilled Labor for South Africa's Gold Mining Industry, 1903–1910

Despite international protests against bonded labor, the flow of indentured laborers during the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries was extensive compared to the earlier centuries. The focus of this article is on the particularity of the "Chinese coolies experiment" in South Africa's gold mining industry which commenced in 1904. This 20th-century episode of indentured labor is notable for several reasons, and it serves as a springboard for the discussion of some fundamental issues in capitalist development, labor and identity formation. This article emphasizes the last, examining how a "Chinese" identity was formed through the development of the gold fields and, in turn, how this formation reinforced a nascent white labor aristocracy. It discusses two dimensions of this labor "experiment" in South Africa: (1) the heady debate on the decision to look to China for cheap labor and (2) desertion by the indentured Chinese laborers from various mining compounds in the Witwatersrand.

Geographies of Hope and Despair: Atlanta's African American, Latino, and White Day Laborers

Geographies of Hope and Despair: Atlanta's African American, Latino, and White Day Laborers

The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904–1934

In this article, I argue that the history of labour and the working class in southern Africa in the first half of the twentieth century cannot be adequately understood within an analytical framework that takes the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. 1 The literature has, with very few exceptions (notably Bond, Miller and Ruiters 2001:4‐5), generally presented the history of labour in the region in this period as a set of discrete national labour histories for Namibia (South West Africa), South Africa, Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Swaziland, and so forth. Each national labour history is presented as taking place within a distinctively national context where organisational and political boundaries correspond with the administrative borders of the state, with labour politics developing inside these boundaries in response to national conditions, culminating in the emergence of national working-class movements. Such approaches project postcolonial borders onto the period of imperial rule, ignoring the way in which international labour markets, regional political economies, and networks of activists and propaganda operated both across, and beyond, the British Empire and southern Africa to create a transnational southern African working class in which activists, ideas and organisational models circulated. Transnational influences played a critical role in shaping working-class movements, which straddled borders and formed sections across the region and beyond it. Furthermore, ideological, ethnic and racial divides within the working class across southern Africa played a more important role in constituting divisions than state borders. This article explores these issues by examining three moments of transnational labour activism in southern Africa in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Firstly, there was the tradition of ‘White Labourism’: rather than being a peculiarly South African phenomenon, it originated in Australia, spread to South Africa in the early 1900s, and subsequently developed into a significant factor in labour politics in the Rhodesias by the 1920s. Secondly, there was the tradition of revolutionary syndicalism, which stressed interracial working-class

Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 Jonathan Daniel Wells Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865. By Frank J. Byrne . ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. 297. Cloth $50.00.) Is there a revival of interest in the nineteenth-century Southern social structure? After more than three decades of the "cultural turn" in the historiography, it seems that scholars are once again turning their attention to the class structure of the South. Importantly, however, this new trend in the study of class does not leave culture out of the picture but instead ties the two historiographical themes together, to the betterment of both. Building upon recent work on the middle class and the master class, historian Frank Byrne has added yet another dimension to scholarly understanding of the ways in which social structure and culture intertwine. Byrne argues that Southern merchants lived in constant tension between their desire to be accepted as legitimate contributors to society and the feeling among these same merchants that they had more in common with their counterparts in the North than they did with Southern planters or yeomen farmers. Like their brethren in the free states, Southern merchants adhered to nineteenth-century middle-class values such as the importance of education for advancement, the ever-present search for profit, and the belief in evangelical religion. Indeed, as others have pointed out, Byrne finds a great deal of interaction between Northern and Southern merchants, including the trips that the latter made each year to the large cities of the North. In contrast to their affinity with Northern merchants, Southern shopkeepers, grocers, and wholesale merchants found acceptance within the South difficult, according to Byrne. Reviled as "Jews" or "Yankees," Southern businessmen often found themselves targeted for their perceived greed. Although clearly in support of slavery, these merchants questioned the more radical political ideology found in the region; Byrne demonstrates convincingly that these Southerners favored the Whig party and were largely Unionists. When the Civil War broke out, however, Southern merchants were forced from the political fence-riding demonstrated by their adherence to the Constitutional Union party in the 1860 election. Although merchants questioned the wisdom of secession, and realized that war would break [End Page 417] vital trading links with the North, they avidly joined the Confederacy after fighting began. As Byrne points out, Southern merchants "tirelessly worked to place their businesses on a war footing" (128). They served as town quartermasters, army recruiters, and commissary agents even while they tried to benefit from the privation caused by the war. Tales of gouging profits, greed, and opportunism (some of which were exaggerated for effect) found ready believers among a people devastated by war. Byrne is at his best in bringing the social and cultural together when he discusses merchant families. Confronted by financial anxiety before the war, these families faced dwindling supplies and accusations of speculation, especially in the harsh final two years of the war. Interestingly, just as the mistress was forced to run the plantation in the absence of her husband, so too did many merchant wives take over the running of stores and businesses when the men left for the battlefield. Byrne's study would have benefited greatly from an expanded discussion of the Southern social structure. If these merchants were part of a "class," and Byrne uses that term frequently, we need more analysis of important issues such as class formation. If there was a middle class, which elements of the social structure might we consider them in between? Do they fit sandwiched between planters and slaves or should we consider merchants part of an emerging urban society in which white laborers, hired slaves, and incipient industrialists made up the top and bottom of a city-bound social structure? These questions Byrne does not consider. Finally, if the merchants were marginalized and scorned as Byrne argues, then why did so many Southern communities trumpet their progress in business and industry? Byrne has provided us with an insightful analysis of a segment of the Southern population. The hope is that scholars will carry on this work and refine our understanding of the complex society that was...

JEREMY KRIKLER. White Rising: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa. New York: Manchester University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 405. $59.95

This book tackles one of the best-known episodes of violence in twentieth-century South African history yet brilliantly succeeds in offering a novel interpretation that changes our understanding of the race-class nexus at the center of South African historiography. Jeremy Krikler's sensitive and penetrating book immediately draws the reader into the lives not only of the main protagonists in the strike but also of black “bystanders” who suffered grievously at the hands of white mobs. The result is a first-rate narrative that honors the ordinary men and women who expired on the barricades as well a subtle analysis that does justice to the complexities of white workers' cause against the powerful gold mining industry in a campaign that dismantled the authority of the state. Krikler wisely forsakes the many, often “structural” debates about the origins of racial segregation in South Africa in favor of an approach that reconstructs the uncertain evolution of forces that culminated in pitched warfare between white miners and General Jan Smuts's pro-mining government. The book employs multiple archival sources to trace the interlocking strategies of white mineworkers, union leaders, mine owners, and state officials and demonstrate how a strike that all parties knew was coming became an explosion marked by two forms of violence. The first, the pitched battle between white “revolutionary” strikers and the state, is familiar but is nevertheless analyzed in such meticulous and lively detail that much of it appears fresh. By contrast, the second episode of violence will strike even seasoned scholars of South African history as a revelation. Because no previous scholar has explored the “racial pogrom” (p. 15) that rampaging white workers inflicted on innocent blacks, Krikler rescues the cold-blooded “racial killing” from oblivion. He also uses the event to illuminate the ambiguities of white workers' racial and class politics. White workers who were fired by increasingly militant socialist rhetoric were also infamously racist. Yet this book convincingly demonstrates that the “racial pogrom” was an accidental event that stemmed from a fortuitous fracas between African mining guards and a passing commando of white workers. Drawing on analyses of the “Red Summer race riots” that rocked several American cities immediately after World War I, Krikler argues that the “pogrom” was sparked by a combination of immediate circumstances and wild rumors. When the “pogrom” ended, militant white workers resumed their focus on their primary antagonist—the police and army forces that were also assembling in the streets of Johannesburg, and who had decisively brought the pogrom to an end. Both the accidental nature of the pogrom as well its subsidence confirms a major argument that runs through this book. Like white workers in the American South, South Africa's militant white workers may have been driven by “the fear of competition” with cheaper black workers, but they were not long distracted by it. Class militancy trumped racial animosity and culminated in the violent strike against the state-supported mining industry. Krikler's conclusion that “black people were not identified as the enemy by plebian whites” (p. xi) therefore invites comparisons with the American South, where “race baiting” frequently overshadowed and diluted white labor militancy.