White Labor Research Articles

Black and White Labor Market Outcomes in the 19th Century American South

Modern labor studies consider the relationship between wages and biological markers. A relevant historical question is the relationship between occupational status and biological markers. This study demonstrates that 19th century stature and BMIs were significant in Texas occupation selection; however, stature and BMIs were not significant in the decision to participate in the Southwest’s labor market. In the post-bellum south, labor markets were segregated, and white laborers were at a distinct occupational and social advantage relative to their black counterparts. It is documented here that the probability of being farmers and unskilled workers were comparable by race. However, whites had greater access to white-collar and skilled occupations.

The world voyage of James Keir Hardie: Indian nationalism, Zulu insurgency and the British labour diaspora 1907–1908

In 1907–1908, the British labour leader, James Keir Hardie, made a round-the-world tour, which included visits to India, Australasia and southern Africa. The support for Indian nationalism which he expressed precipitated a major international political controversy, in the course of which Hardie came under severe attack from the Right, both in Britain and in her colonies. In southern Africa, the issue, combined with Hardie’s earlier criticism of the repression of the 1906 Bambatha rising in Natal, sparked rioting against Hardie by British settlers during his visit. This article seeks to show how Hardie’s voyage illuminates the imperial politics of its moment. Hardie’s journey demonstrates how politics in the British colonies of his era took place not within local political boundaries, but in a single field which covered both metropolis and colonies. The article is a case study which helps to illustrate and develop an argument that the white working classes in the pre-First World War British Empire were not composed of nationally discrete entities, but were bound together into an imperial working class which developed a distinct common ideology, White Labourism, fusing elements of racism and xenophobia with worker militancy and anti-capitalism. The current paper refines this analysis of the politics of the imperial working class by situating it in relation to the rising force of Indian nationalism in the same period, and to the changes this development generated in the politics of the settler colonies and the imperial centre. In India, Hardie forged links with the dynamic new political mobilization that had followed on the crisis over the partition of Bengal. In doing so, he entered, as an ally, into the discursive struggle which Indian nationalists were waging for self-government. By taking a pro-Indian position he antagonized the British Right. Labourites in the white settlement colonies wanted to defend Hardie, as a representative figure of British labour, but were embarrassed by the fact that Hardie’s position on India went against the grain of White Labourist ideology. In southern Africa, local leaders of British labour did opt to defend Hardie. But they did so not only at the risk of alienating their members, but also at the price of being forced into direct confrontations with anti-Hardie groupings.

Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (review)

Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World. By Thomas C. Buchanan. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 272. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $32.50.)Thomas C. Buchanan makes a welcome and significant contribution to the history of slavery and African Americans with this interesting and well-researched work. Just as historians have recognized significant variation in the slave experience on land, recent works have explored the presence and occupations of black Americans along the country's waterfronts. Until now, that meant examination of black watermen in Atlantic ports or along the Gulf of Mexico, but Buchanan reminds us of the extensive western steamboat economy sustained by slave and free black labor.Buchanan is especially skillful in using statistical and anecdotal evidence. His years of archival research have turned up many relevant needles from the haystack of census, newspaper, and court records. He discusses the size of the black workforce, their specific occupations or areas of employment, and the significance of river work within the larger economy, and he includes some of the most relevant census data in appendices.Buchanan begins his book by outlining the parameters of this world, including the rapidly growing western river economy and the places of black workers within it, the work culture of steamboats, and the influence of river culture on the institution of slavery in the region. The middle chapters examine how black river culture worked to maintain slave family communication, while contributing to escape networks and expanding the notion of community. At the same time, these chapters explore the varied methods of resistance used by blacks, from becoming river outlaws to work control. The final sections detail how the Civil War and emancipation brought change to the slave culture of the river, and Buchanan describes ways in which workers' lives were both transformed and remained the same during the war and Reconstruction.There was overlap between river and ocean work, literally and figuratively. Steamboat workers might move from river work to ocean trade or back again in New Orleans, and like their deepwater counterparts, river workers experienced similar access to information, escape, and the wider world in general. Slaves who worked the western rivers were frequently hired out by owners in cities and towns along the waterways. Agents placed some slaves on boats, while others were self-hires who negotiated their own terms of work (22). Slave owners and ships' officers faced the usual problems of slaves in maritime employment-gaining necessary labor while restricting access to dangerous ideas and the potential for escape. Unlike that coastal world, however, women had access to employment on the rivers, and the chance to become a chambermaid on a steamboat gave some women a degree of mobility, freedom, and independence rare in the slave world. This did not come without hazard, however, because as Buchanan notes, [c]hambermaids faced the harshest forms of violence (55).Steamboat work in general was dangerous and brutal, but the breadth of the black community employed was greater than in other maritime work. Because porters, barbers, barkeepers, waiters, and chambermaids could find regular work in inland maritime employment, a broader cross-section of the African-American community was tied to the river and steamboats than was the case in deep-sea Atlantic trades (59). White captains and officers controlled the vessels and when staffed by both black and white labor, segregation was the rule. Rivers, like the oceans and coastal waters, were frequent avenues of escape; vigilance by owners and captains-e. …

Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (review)

Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. By Doron Ben-Atar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 304. Cloth, $38.00.)In a series of short chapters, Trade secrets takes the reader on a multidisciplinary tour of the economic ideas and pragmatic policy concerns about the persistent need for labor, skill, and technology in the revolutionary and early national generations. The narrative is grounded in the familiar historiographies about the scarcity and high costs of North American labor, the urgency of establishing American manufactures without the supposed corrupting influences of foreign luxury, the rising pressures on policy makers to satisfy consumer demand, and abiding concerns about American political stability in a contentious Atlantic world. But even as Ben-Atar affirms the general contributions of the large scholarly fields of industrial, market, and consumer revolution studies, and relies on the more recent studies of scholars with related concerns such as David Jeremy and Larry Peskin, his central argument takes early American historians into less familiar terrain about the thorny matter of intellectual property.As long as North Americans remained in the British Empire, BenAtar argues, they enjoyed the relatively free flow of ideas, goods, and technologies, despite efforts of mercantilists to craft patent laws to protect original inventors. Intellectual piracy prevailed, and foremost among its advocates was Benjamin Franklin. Patents and temporary monopolies on machines and processing equipment, argued Franklin, might spur wouldbe inventors, but they had little role in the overall benefits of satisfying the needs and wants of a rapidly expanding people such as the empire boasted. Franklin and others were convinced that the most useful and sought-after intellectual property in the early Atlantic world was related to agricultural, not industrial, invention, which was in turn suited to the character of virtuous Americans. But even in the case of textile manufacturing, talk about republican simplicity was far less important than the desire to secure technology and labor to produce textiles. It seemed to make sense, then, to promote the free flow of skilled artisans and new machines throughout the Atlantic world, whatever other policies mercantilists advocated. Indeed, few early modern writers knew how to define the ownership of ideas and few cared about identifying original inventors.Postrevolutionary expectations about the rise of American manufacturing tested this attitude toward intellectual property, especially as Americans struggled to recover from a debilitating war and dire shortages of skilled white labor. Yet, as Ben-Atar argues compellingly, there was no rapid movement toward restricting the free flow of ideas, people, or technologies, no great swell of nationalist protectionism. Here, Ben-Atar follows the existing historical narratives about international commerce and migration during the first postwar years, from which we have learned that despite the sense of urgency about building a self-sufficient political economy to overcome the turmoil of disrupted networks of goods and credit, American merchants and manufacturers actually returned to British markets with enthusiasm. For years, a number of policy makers, merchants, and publicists would repeat the Franklinian refrain, and for years, they would remain more attached to the export of staples than to initiating ambitious manufactures.An undercurrent of opposition became evident by the late 1780s, embodied in the writings of men such as Tench Coxe, Mathew Carey, Albert Gallatin, and Alexander Hamilton. …

Asian American Food-Scapes

In 1908, Samuel Gompers on the AFL (American Federation of Labor) published his well-known treatise, co-authored with Herman Gutstadt, on the problems affecting the American laboring classes of white men titled, Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood Against Asiatic Cooliehood. Endorsed by the Asiatic Exclusion League, Gompers' dictum anchors its xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiments in a culinary idiom, facilely, but efficaciously applying the language of are what you eat to sharply distinguish between white labor as hearty meat eaters, and Chinese immigrant labor, portrayed as scabs in the American labor force as rice eaters.

The Debate Over Japanese Immigration: The View from France

The story of the Issei — the 100,000 Japanese immigrants who traveled to Hawaii and the United States during the turn of the 20th century — is an epic of survival amid hardship. Through the efforts of labor contractors backed by the Japanese consulate, the majority of the newcomers were recruited to undertake heavy labor on Hawaiian plantations. Others settled on the mainland, predominantly on the nation's Pacific Coast, where they worked as farmers, fishermen, railroad workers, and agricultural laborers. Smaller contingents of students, artists, and professionals also crossed the ocean and scattered through the United States. As the immigrants became established, many brought over “picture bride” wives and started families. Through careful saving of wages and communal self-help, numerous immigrant laborers bought farms and established small businesses, churches, and community institutions. At the same time, they were victimized by widespread racial prejudice and discriminatory legislation. Like other Asian immigrants, they were barred from naturalization by federal law, and therefore from voting, and in many states the Issei were forbidden to marry whites or to practice certain professions. In Hawaii, the white planter class limited educational opportunity and kept Issei in menial labor positions. On the West Coast, white laborers and political leaders, who rigidly excluded Asian workers from unions, organized movements to exclude the Issei from residence on the grounds that they depressed wage scales through their willingness to work for lower pay. Following the “Gentlemen's Agreement” of 1907–8, the entry of Japanese laborers into the country was largely restricted. Shortly thereafter, in response to demands by white farmers enraged by competition from their Issei counterparts, California and neighboring states enacted alien land acts, which forbade all Japanese and other “immigrants ineligible to citizenship” from owning agricultural land. As a result, the Issei were forced to take short-term leases on land or to put their holdings in the names of white colleagues or of their own children, the Nisei (American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry). Exclusionist pressure, founded on nativist opposition to the alleged racial danger posed by the Issei to the American population, flared up again following World War I and climaxed in the Immigration Act of 1924, which outlawed all Japanese immigration to the United States.

The “New Labour Policy” in Nazi Colonial Planning for Africa

The National Socialist planning for a recolonization of Africa was based on a new social and labour policy and focused chiefly on the “labour question”. In designing their schemes, planners strove to mobilize wage labour and circumvent the much-feared “proletarianization” of the workers. The key problem in exploiting the African colonies had two main aspects: a shortage of manpower and migrant labour. Therefore, planners designed complex systems of organized, state-controlled labour recruitment, and formulated rules for labour contracts and compensation. An expanded labour administration was to ensure that the “deployment of labour” ran smoothly and that workers were registered, evaluated, and supervised. Furthermore, “white labour guardians” were to be assigned the responsibility of overseeing the social wellbeing of the African workers. As was evident not only in Germany but in the colonial powers, France and Great Britain, as well, these concepts all fit into the general trend of the times, a trend characterized by the application of scientific methods in solving social issues, by the increased emphasis on state intervention, and by the introduction of sociopolitical measures. Nazi planning was based on Germany's prewar politics but also reflected the changes occurring in German work life after 1933.

"Overrun with Free Negroes": Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest

In March 1863 a Union officer wrote to his hometown newspaper inquiring, “Are there any contrabands wanted in Iowa City, or its vicinity for help this spring? If so, please let me hear from you. I could send a large number to Iowa, if they were wanted, as there are many brought up the river at this time. …” Writing from St. Louis, he noted that many of the former slaves gathered there “prefer going to Iowa [more] than any other place.” But back in Iowa, some of his neighbors had organized a public meeting to oppose “all schemes … to fill our schools and domestic circle with the African race” because of their belief that recently emancipated African Americans, “unaccustomed to our climate, unskilled in our mode of agriculture, undisciplined in habits, and unfit for society,” would “destroy the dignity of white labor” in Johnson County. That Iowans were not all of one mind about the arrival of emancipated slaves was further evidenced in the tone of newspaper coverage when former slaves were brought to a nearby Mississippi River town. As sarcastically noted in the local paper, potential employers were not difficult to find: “When the negroes arrived, there was a great fluttering… for the best ‘take.’ Philanthropy ran very high indeed—provided the services of a good stout negro could be obtained for his victuals and clothes. Visions of retired gentlemen and gentlewomen, with black servants to attend their every want and wish, overcame some … [who] felt as though ‘it were the happiest day of their lives.’”1

The Southern Response to British Abolitionism: The Maturation of Proslavery Apologetics

ON JULY 4, 1833, JAMES HENRY HAMMOND DELIVERED AN ORATION FOR his future constituency in Barnwell, South Carolina. An ambitious young planter who had been a key player in the nullification movement earlier that year, Hammond represented a generation of white southerners who redefined the proslavery ideology that buttressed southerners against northern criticism in the years before secession. Like all Fourth of July orators, Hammond directed blistering criticism toward the British, whose tyranny had justified the American war for independence celebrated on that day. But Hammond went beyond the usual evocations of the distant abuses of 1776, proclaiming that the crimes of oppression to be tallied against the British had not ceased with the independence of the United States or even the War of 1812. Hammond informed his audience that a recent bill passed by the British parliament reduced the people of Ireland to an absolute & unmitigated that undermined British claims to represent freedom. To illuminate the oppression of the Irish, Hammond drew a comparison between the of the Irish and that of southern slaves. Unlike the Irish, southern slaves had the right to respectable courts, and the British enacted curfews, which southern slaveholders had supposedly never done. The British still played the role of imperial oppressor by imposing a tyranny that contrasted sharply with the benevolent governance that Hammond claimed southerners exercised over their slaves. (1) Hammond's portrayal of Britain as the brutal enslaver of the Irish hinted at one of the most important planks of the emerging proslavery argument: the contrast between the oppression imposed upon free white laborers and the alleged ease of life enjoyed by southern slaves. (2) The modern proslavery argument began to evolve when the spread of antislavery thought challenged slavery's moral legitimacy. Important justifications of slavery appeared in the late eighteenth century, and congressional debates on the statehood of Missouri in 1819 combined with the threat of insurrection in Charleston in 1822 to draw forth even sterner defenses of slavery in the 1820s. (3) But the 1830s marked a critical period when southern spokesmen made bold elaborations on the proslavery argument. During this decade the southern position on slavery shifted from defensive rationalizations to bold assertions that slavery had a positive influence upon society. (4) While not yet at the extreme of advocating that other societies adopt slavery as the best mode of ordering labor in a capitalist economy (as George Fitzhugh would recommend in the 1850s), southern theorists nonetheless argued that slavery had a positive value for southern society and that the alternatives of abolition or colonization were simply unthinkable. (5) The catalysts usually posited for this transition to an unflinching proslavery rhetoric are the nullification movement in South Carolina and the emancipation debates in the Virginia legislature that followed Nat Turner's leadership of a slave rebellion in 1831. The Virginia debates broke the seal on southern discussion of the abolition of slavery and resulted in Thomas R. Dew's widely influential Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond, 1832). Nullifiers had claimed that South Carolina could declare federal tariff legislation unconstitutional, but in March 1833 the state legislature compromised with President Andrew Jackson (after Congress approved the Force Bill authorizing Jackson to use the U.S. military against South Carolina). Historians have recognized the nullifiers' challenge to the authority of the federal government as a move to preempt the influence of abolitionists in Congress. (6) But most historians of the South have neglected the critical importance of Britain's abolition of colonial slavery in 1833, an act that emboldened American abolitionists in the North and left the southern states as the last slaveholding region in the Anglo-Atlantic world. …

Middle-Class Asian American Women in a Global Frame: Refiguring the Statue of Liberty in Divakaruni and Minatoya

Introduction In accordance with the combined retrospective/prospective spirit that informs this special issue of MELUS, I would like to consider, through a motif-study of variations on the Statue of Liberty found in two prose narratives, some ways in which issues of gender, class, citizenship, and globalization may be played out in the late twentieth century for middle-class Asian American women. In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's short story A Perfect Life (in her 1995 collection Arranged Marriage) and Lydia Minatoya's 1992 memoir Talking to High Monks in the Snow. An Asian American Odyssey, the protagonists--one fictional, the other autobiographical; (1) one an immigrant from India, the other a US-born Japanese American; one comfortably ensconced on her adopted American soil, the other a globetrotting aspirant to cosmopolitanism share a comfortable middle-class background. Enacting varying degrees and modes of identification with the Statue of Liberty, these women take their national membership and class privilege for granted. Yet in both texts, confrontations with the Third World, (2) at home and abroad, rudely destabilize the protagonists' self-positioning and self-representation as good-enough representatives of the America nation. Statue of Liberty serves as a potent symbol of the American nation in four ways that are relevant to Divakaruni's and Minatoya's texts. First, situated at Island through which the great wave of immigrants from Europe passed during the turn of the last century, she represents the nation's gatekeeper. Secondly, as a female embodiment of the nation, she is the generous nurturer (while her male visual counterpart, Uncle Sam, is most often cast in roles of authority and demand). This benefactor aspect is made clear in the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue. (3) Thirdly, in a more general sense, the Statue is the exemplar of America's self-ideals, its most cherished values, such as freedom, equality, and the opportunity to pursue happiness. Finally, as a highly exportable symbol instantly recognizable by people all over the world, the Statue, in her traveling incarnation, is the emissary of America's promise. In two photographs of the Goddess of Democracy created by Chinese student protestors before the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989, we see a contemporary example of the Statue's transnational influence. In Figure 1, the original Goddess of Democracy is clearly modeled upon the Statue of Liberty. Figure 2 shows a commemorative replica installed on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, alter the failure of the pro-democracy movement. [FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED] Despite the Statue's many positive connotations, those familiar with Asian American history will immediately note the irony in the monument's history. It was dedicated in 1886, four years after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which for the first time in American history prohibited a group's entry on the basis of race and ushered in a series of restrictive laws against the Chinese and other undesirable groups deemed unsuitable for assimilation into the nation (Ancheta, esp. 19-34, 82-104). Figure 3 shows one cartoon from a 1881 issue of Wasp, entitled A Statue for Our Harbor, shows the Statue of Liberty as a pigtailed Chinaman holding aloft an opium pipe, with rays radiating from his head marked Fifth, Immorality, Diseases, and Ruin to White Labor (Choy et al. 97). Between 1910 and 1940, Chinese immigrants who arrived on the Coast were detained for interrogation on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Yet this Ellis Island of the West has been far eclipsed in the public imagination by the heavily mythologized Island. exclusionary policy toward Chinese and other Asians was not to be lifted until 1965. Thus the relationship between Asian Americans and what the Statue stands for has always been a vexed one. …

A Scottish Socialist Reads Carlyle in Johannesburg Prison, June 1900: Reflections on the Literary Culture of the Imperial Working Class

James Thompson Bain, a Scottish-born trade unionist, became one of the most important figures in the white labour movement of early Johannesburg. His career culminated in his leadership of the 1913 general strike in that city, and his deportation by the Botha–Smuts government in the following year. The activities of the union movement led by Bain were crucial to the formation of segregated labour relations in South African industry. Bain's path to the 1913 strike ran through service in the British Army in his teens, conversion to the socialism of William Morris in Edinburgh during the 1880s and intelligence work and combat in the cause of the Boers' Transvaal Republic. The paper seeks to explore Bain's intellectual formation through an investigation of the impact that literary culture, and especially the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Morris, and Robert Blatchford, had on his politics. Carlyle's work quite inadvertently provided late nineteenth century British, and especially Scottish, labour activists with an intellectual bridge between a protestant world view and new secularist and socialist ideas. The anti-industrialism of Carlyle and Morris predisposed Bain to see the Boers' defence of their interests against the Randlords and the British government as compatible with socialist ideology. Carlyle's ideas fed into a vision of working class interests, held by Bain and many of his contemporaries, which stopped at the boundaries of Britishness, and which was therefore compatible with certain forms of colonial politics. The paper argues that the scholarship of Jonathan Rose and other historians has missed the global dimension of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British working class literary culture and the way in which its radicalism was entirely compatible with racial segregationism. The white labourism of men like Bain was not a specifically South African phenomenon, but part of the common politics of the labour movement in Britain and across its Empire.

“Who ain't a slave?”: Moby Dick and the Ideology of Free Labor

In October 1844, on returning to the United States after the four years at sea which became the basis of the majority of his early novels, Herman Melville discovered that his elder brother Gansevoort had become a political orator of national notoriety and a major figure in the Democratic presidential campaign of that year. Gansevoort Melville's political preferences, as widely reported in the newspapers of the day, were for a post-Jacksonian populism which denounced the aristocratic foppery of the Whigs and urged the immediate annexation of Texas in the name of free, white labor. His patriotic invocations of the virtues of salt-of-the-earth republicanism and the American workingman were, that year at least, hardly matched. Described in contemporary reports as “the orator of the human race” and “the great New York orator” he addressed audiences of thousands throughout New York State and at Democratic meetings as far afield as Tennessee and Ohio. He coined the respectful, evocative and adhesive nickname “Young Hickory” for James Polk the Democrat's presidential candidate and in August made a symbolic visit to the ailing Andrew Jackson. According to Hershel Parker, Melville's most recent and most exhaustive biographer, Herman spent the final days of the campaign with his brother probably participating in a huge torchlight procession through Manhattan and listening to his climactic election-night address in Newark, New Jersey.

The chattelization of northern whites: An evolving abolitionist warning

A recurring abolitionist theme was that the failure to destroy southern black slavery would eventuate in the enslavement of northern white laborers. During the 1830s this theme was the particular province of a few evangelical, markedly antimaterialist 'left' abolitionists like William Goodell. More inclined than their cohorts to regard the northern social order as oppressive for increasing numbers of workers, these abolitionists were also more likely to accuse capitalist 'aristocrats' of aspiring to go further and chattelize their workers in emulation of their southern slavocrat allies. Such white-chattelization warnings, which assigned a virtually coequal role in the slave power to malevolent employers and other northern 'aristocrats,' were supplanted in the late antebellum period by ones that instead targeted slavery's mulattoization and the southern slavocracy's proclivity for exploiting this ongoing erosion in racial boundaries. These white-chattelization warnings, which Goodell also notably promoted, acquired greater antislavery support than had the earlier anticapitalist ones. The late-antebellum warnings substantially reflected the ascendance of northern nationalism and the additional legitimacy that it conferred on capital-labor arrangements in the free states.

Baseball and Borders: The Diffusion of Baseball into Mexican and Canadian-American Borderland Regions, 1885-1911

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the John A. Macdonald government in Canada and the regime of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico followed similar development strategies. Both countries encouraged domestic industry, made substantial investments in railways, and extended their state's influence over hinterland territories and aboriginal peoples. In Mexico's case this meant a northward gaze toward the American border; in Canada's it meant looking westward. Modernization brought American investment to both countries, especially in the resource industries. It also facilitated the diffusion of baseball into borderland regions. Despite the similar development strategies employed by the two countries in the years before World War I, however, baseball more readily permeated the Canadian-American boundary than it did the Mexican-American frontier. THE DIFFUSION MODEL In recent years Allen Guttmann, Joseph Arbena, and others have suggested a diffusion model in which sporting culture radiates the more developed nations outward to the rest of the world, entering host cultures at the elite level, before descending through the social order to the working class and urban poor. (1) As a general theory, the diffusion model helps chart the expansion of sporting culture, especially in the nineteenth century. In Mexico, for example, the Diaz regime's interest in modernization brought with it a new interest in fashionable leisure, the bicycle to baseball games, pursuits initially taken up by members of the elite. In Canada the British team sports--cricket, soccer, and rugby--supplanted earlier forms of leisure that were more attached to rural life. Despite the hopes of an Anglo-Saxon elite that British sporting practices would create respectability and a deeper allegiance to the empire, the practices were often resisted, especially in Quebec, and quickly gave way to such No rth American sports as lacrosse, hockey, and baseball. (2) This paper addresses the nature of the diffusion process as it relates to baseball in the Mexican and Canadian borderlands 1880 to 1910. It asks a simple question: how did borders affect the diffusion process? In addressing this question the paper reflects upon how the two borderlands were constructed and imagined, what they shared, and how they differed. Baseball established itself in the southwestern borderlands during the 1880s, at a time when Hispanic and Indian peoples confronted an expanding Anglo culture characterized by commercial agriculture, land speculation, mineral exploitation, railway development, and the veneration of free white labor and private property. With baseball already established as the pastime, its westward expansion symbolized the coming of a new order associated with capitalist enterprise and entrepreneurial values. By the end of the decade the game was being played Brownsville/Matamoros, Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, and El Paso/Juarez on the Texas-Mexican border, to Douglas/Agua Prieto and Bisbee/Cananea on the Arizona/Sonora border, and Tucson and Yuma in Arizona as far west as San Diego/Tijuana. As it came to the region the national pastime remained essentially an Anglo game. It increasingly embodied what David Roediger, Ruth Frankenberg, Valerie Babb, and others describe as whiteness, a white-centric assumption of privilege from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society (3) and which justified driving African Americans out of the ranks of professional baseball all over North America during the 1880s. (4) At the same time, baseball was thriving in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana and across the Canadian border in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. As in the Southwest, this region was being transformed by railway construction and settlement. In addition, the process through which native peoples were being dispossessed and in which whiteness was being privileged was nearing completion. Recently Sheila McManus has analyzed the uneven transition of Blackfoot country into the Alberta-Montana borderlands the 1860s to the 1890s. …

"White Labor" vs. "Coolie Labor": The "Chinese Question" in Pennsylvania in the 1870s

"White Labor" vs. "Coolie Labor": The "Chinese Question" in Pennsylvania in the 1870s

Intermetropolitan Variation in the Labour Force Participation Rates of White and Black Men in the United States

We decompose the variance in black and white male labour force participation rates across US metropolitan areas in 1990 into three effects: that due to variation in labour force participation within labour force categories across metropolitan areas (local labour market effects); that due to variation in the distribution of those categories across metropolitan areas (labour force structure effects); and that due to the covariation between these two effects. Variation in labour force participation rates within labour force categories (local labour market effects) accounts for 56 per cent of the variance in labour force participation rates across metropolitan areas for white men but over 75 per cent for black men. Variation in the frequency of membership in each labour force category is a relatively unimportant factor for both groups. The covariance between labour force effects and local effects is negligible for black men but accounts for 25 per cent of the intermetropolitan variance in white male participation rates. This covariance is a measure of how well adjusted the labour force characteristics of metropolitan areas are to local economic conditions; our results indicate that this adjustment is greater for white men than black men. We also use this decomposition to identify the causes of variation in the difference between black and white labour force participation rates. Black-white differences in response to local labour market effects conditions generate most of this variance. These different local labour market effects are greatest among young single men with less than a high school education.

The influence on the South African economy of the gold mining industry 1925–2000*

The year 1925 was a watershed one for the South African gold mining industry. After the trauma of the Rand Rebellion in 1922, in which the White labour on the mines fought against the desire of the mining houses to promote the advancement of Black workers, there had been a period of uneasy industrial peace. However, in 1924 a National Party/Labour Party coalition under the leadership of General J.M.B. Hertzog and Colonel F.H.P. Creswell, had been elected.

Migration, Material Culture, and Identity in William Attaway's "Blood on the Forge" and Harriette Arnow's "The Dollmaker"

lthough at first glance they might seem like strange companion texts, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker (1954) share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are substantial differences between the two texts. Blood on the Forge follows the lives of three male African American protagonists, brothers Melody, Chinatown, and Big Mat Moss, from a life of sharecropping in Kentucky to a steel-mill town resembling World War I-era Homestead, Pennsylvania. Recruited along with other black migrants as strikebreakers to a community whose largest block of laborers are Slavic immigrants, the Moss brothers soon find themselves pitted against their unionized white fellow workers. In addition to the double bind of marginalization from white labor unions and exploitation by industrial capitalists, the Moss brothers simultaneously must deal with pressing issues of familial and cultural dislocation. As I elaborate in this essay, Attaway marks these dislocations primarily through his accounts of the Moss brothers' encounters with radically new forms of labor and labor technology. Like many social realist novelists of his day, Attaway offers readers no idealized resolution to the Moss brothers' rather bleak dilemma. Rather, the novel's tragic conclusion finds Big Mat slain while work-

New Insights into the Value of Transit: Modeling Inferences from Dade County

Whether transit accessibility influences labor force participation and income of different racial and ethnic groups is examined. The methodology involves the use of two-stage least-squares analysis to control for possible reverse causality in two of the explanatory variables: transit accessibility and auto ownership. Earlier literature on spatial mismatch theory suggests that transit accessibility should make a difference in unemployment rates for African Americans confined to inner city ghettos. In contrast, more recent literature suggests that other variables, such as workplace discrimination, are far more significant explanatory variables. Because all of these studies used measures of transit accessibility that failed to show the ease with which residents of a geographic area could access jobs in the entire region, this study attempts to do so. The transit accessibility measure is first calculated for traffic analysis zones (TAZs) in Dade County, Florida, and it is then used as one of several explanatory variables in models of African American, Hispanic white, and non-Hispanic white labor force participation; median zonal household income; and automobile ownership in TAZs. This research finds that transit accessibility does not explain labor force participation of any of the groups, but it helps explain household income as well as auto ownership. Higher transit accessibility is concluded to either directly or indirectly increase wage rates significantly for autodisadvantaged groups.

American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor.

American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor.