Working-class Hero Research Articles

Book Review: Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero

Book Review: Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero

Archie Green: The Making of a Working‐Class HeroSeanBurns. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

Archie Green: The Making of a Working‐Class HeroSeanBurns. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

Joe Hill and the Rhetoric of Radicalism

When Joe Hill was arrested for murder in Salt Lake City in 1914, he was known by fellow members of the Industrial of the World (IWW) as the author of popular contributions to their but outside the IWW he was as known as any other itinerant laborer. In more than a year, Hill's erratic but courageous actions during his murder trial turned the obscure songsmith into a labor martyr. Hill often made decisions that hurt his chances for acquittal, yet enhanced his image as a working-class hero. He refused to provide an alibi, stubbornly insisting that the American legal system live up to its claim that all defendants are presumed innocent and entitled to a fair trial based on evidence and the rule of law. Nor would he explain the gunshot wound he suffered on the night of the murders, the main piece of circumstantial evidence against him, claiming that he needed to remain silent to protect a woman's honor. In the middle of the trial, Hill angrily dismissed his court-appointed attorneys, accusing them of working with the prosecution, and insisted on defending himself. Although the prosecutor presented only circumstantial evidence connecting Hill to the murders, and witnesses changed their stories to implicate Hill, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Thousands signed petitions supporting Joe Hill, and President Woodrow Wilson twice appealed to the Governor of Utah to grant a new trial.1By this time, Hill was no longer an anonymous migrant worker. He had become the IWW incarnate, the quintessential Wobbly, as members of the IWW were called. The image of Hill as a thief and cold-blooded murderer epitomized the capitalist propaganda about traitorous, bombthrowing radicals, and right-wing newspapers denounced Hill as typical of the IWW menace. Meanwhile, the left idolized Hill as a workingclass poet incapable of murder, who was being railroaded by a crooked legal system intent on silencing the Wobbly bard. While in prison, Hill continued to write songs, including the wellknown anthem Workers of the World Awaken. Hill's letters, widely reprinted in the left-wing press, argued for his innocence but at the same time expressed his determination to use his case to expose injustices in the legal system. His final telegram commanded - Don't mourn for me - organize! - and these words remain a rallying cry for radicals. When Hill was executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City in November 1915, his status as a labor martyr was assured.This article explores how Joe Hill's martyr image was created and how it has been perpetuated in opposition to the hegemonic narratives of capitalism. It does not address the question of Hill's guilt or innocence, which has preoccupied many scholars; instead it examines Hill's songs and prison letters, as well as the rhetorical battles over Hill's image, to reveal how radical social movements appropriate and revise powerful aspects of the dominant discourse to persuade others to fight for social change. The first part of the article examines Joe Hill's songs in their historical performance context to better understand the role they played in radicalizing workers. Clearly the most popular contributions to the IWW's little red songbook, Hill's songs, taken together, constitute a singable synopsis of the Wobblies' philosophy of class struggle.2 Hill's habit of writing new words for familiar tunes, his ironic humor, and his knack for turning abstract IWW philosophy into memorable human dramas in song all contributed to the popularity and lasting appeal of his work. Often rewriting Christian rhetoric to point out the hypocrisy of religion's close collaboration with capitalism's mistreatment of workers, Hill's songs create an alternative vision of a worker's paradise on earth. This battle for the rhetorical high ground, which Hill waged in his songs, intensified with his arrest on charges of murder. The second section considers how Joe Hill created a martyr image for himself during his trail and subsequent appeals. …

Mau Mau in Harlem?: the U.S. and the liberation of Kenya

Into Africa A British Colony? A Dangerous Neighborhood Catastrophe Looms Race War? Colonialism Confronted Mau Mau Looms State of Emergency 'Mau Mau' The U.S. Arms the Settlers? 'Mau Mau' - to Little Rock Labor Will Rule? Working Class Hero? A New Frontier - in Africa? Colonialism Retreating? Liberation Looms Mau Mau in Harlem

A working-class hero is something to be: the American Musicians’ Union's attempt to ban the Beatles, 1964

AbstractThis article examines the historical and cultural significance of the attempted ban on the Beatles’ concerts in the US by the American Federation of Musicians and the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States government in 1964. While there has been much attention given to the court case against John Lennon waged by the INS and the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, much less is known about the earlier case brought against the Beatles by the INS and the Department of Labor on behalf of the AFM, which became a national scandal in 1964, pitting fans of the Beatles against the AFM and the INS. Fans framed the controversy over the Beatles as a cultural conflict between generations, while the AFM framed the problem as a labour market issue. My examination of the incident reveals the way in which a submerged cultural problem embedded in a putatively economic discourse rose to the surface through conflicts over the discursive framing of the Beatles controversy. This case is important not only in terms of expanding our empirical knowledge of the internal history of the Beatles and rock and roll music, but also more generally as an episode that foreshadowed the cultural conflict between the American labour union bureaucracy and the counter-culture that emerged in the late 1960s. This essay analyses heretofore-unexamined documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration.

Enigmatic and Dynamic

Enigmatic and Dynamic Edward R. Schmidtke Stanley Baker: A Life in Film. Robert Shail. University of Wales Press, 2008. 160 pages; $35.00. Books and documentaries that treat the careers of actors without offering intimate glimpses into their personal lives often run the risk of becoming stale and dimensionally tame. Not so for the latest literary effort of Robert Shail, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wales, who has managed to neatly and captivatingly distill the essence of the enigmatic and dynamic actor Stanley Baker in this, his second book. Tightly packed within 147 lively and well-written pages, Stanley Baker: A Life in Film offers a critical examination of the actor's substantial contributions to popular culture via the large and small screens. In a career that began in childhood and spanned three-plus decades, Baker—who was knighted in 1976 just prior to his death from lung cancer—struck out on his own in 1959, taking charge of his destiny as an actor rather than suffering the vagaries of production studios in finding interesting and financially rewarding projects, both of which, according to Shail, were Baker's personal criteria for accepting screen work. A swaggering, working class hero who drew himself out of what most would consider an impoverished upbringing while eschewing a career similar to that of his disabled mine laborer father, Baker never lost sight of his Welsh roots, returning often to his childhood home in the Rhondda valley to reconnect with "his people." It is from within this social context that Baker's trademark bold and unassuming demeanor, both off and on the screen, was forged. Baker's absence of affectations and disarming straightforwardness resonated with Americans in the 1960s, but, as Shail aptly comments, "he was also able to suggest a vulnerability and complexity which made [his] masculinity more compelling and revealing." Paving the way forward for actors such as Sean Connery and Michael Cain, Baker used his status as an outsider to garner the critical acclaim of the movie going public in the U.K., especially those from the working class, who viewed Baker as their filmic hero and, undoubtedly, saw a little bit of themselves in his on-screen personas. [End Page 82] Stanley Baker started his film career at the tender age of 15, during a chance meeting with director Sergei Nolbandov, who was scouting locations in Wales for a remote village in which to shoot Undercover, a 1943 war film. Though his schoolmates found their career in the local mines, Baker became an actor after several auditions, having been hired for the film by Michael Balcon's Ealing production company. Traveling to London by train and living in a hotel during filming, Baker fell asleep to the sonorous sounds of the blitz storming just outside his room. Though Undercover played to chilly reviews, Baker's career nonetheless took flight. Following a two and a half year stint in military service, he was selected for the role of Lieutenant Bennett in The Cruel Sea (1953) allowing Baker to apply his wartime experience to his craft. Several films were followed in quick succession, most notably The Tell-Tale Heart, (1953) Hell Below Zero, (1954) and his villainous role in Helen of Troy (1956). Shail lends his acute sense of detail to critical analyses of Baker's diverse talents, noting his early typecasting as a tough, merciless, and driven character, an image cultivated by the popular press that would ultimately provide him with the means to support "a wife, twins, a large house in Wimbledon, and a Jaguar" according to a vintage interview with Baker from the London Evening Standard. An in-depth treatment of the historic challenges issued to the movie industry by the relatively new medium of television offers a nod to the introduction of Warnercolor and Cinemascope, two format changes made by the cinema industry to enhance the movie going public's experience while simultaneously attempting to stave off the negative effects that television brought to bear on box office receipts, a real concern to all in the film industry during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Baker's critical transition from actor to producer/actor is thoroughly...

The Cell and the Ward: Imprisonment, Servitude and Nationalist Identity in Two Novels by Abdalkarīm Ghallāb

This article addresses issues of nationalist activity against the French protectorate by the central characters in two novels by Moroccan editor and author Abdalkarīm Ghallāb: Dafannā al-Māī (1966) and al-Muallim Alī (1971). Both central characters in these two very similar novels are sent to prison for their nationalist activity; their time in prison encourages them to bond with other nationalists and to become more effective activists rather than discouraging them from further activity. In Dafannā al-Māī, the central character's freedom to engage in nationalist activity is dependent upon the labour of household servants who are themselves imprisoned in his family home. These women are effectively voiceless, not only in the text of the novel itself but also in the most comprehensive scholarly criticism of the work. Hamid Lahmadani's detailed analysis of the text completely erases the servants in order to foreground the central character's development. Al-Muallim Alī rewrites essentially the same story, but by making its protagonist a working-class hero, it creates a more believable transition from worker to activist without making this dependent on mute, imprisoned women.

Sweet William: the life of Billy Conn

An Irish working-class hero of Pittsburgh, Billy Conn captured the hearts of his contemporaries through his ebullient personality, stellar boxing record, and good looks. A light-heavyweight boxing champion, Conn had defeated nine current or former champions in three weight divisions by the time he was twenty one. Best remembered for his sensational near-defeat of heavyweight champion Joe Louis in 1941, Conn is still regarded as one of the greatest fighters of all time. Inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1965, Billy Conn was one of the most popular athletes of his era. “The Pittsburgh Kid” captured the public’s imagination with his boxing, Hollywood, and army careers, which Andrew O’Toole chronicles by drawing from fascinating interviews with Conn’s family, newspaper accounts, and Billy’s personal scrapbooks. Presenting an intimate look inside the champion’s relationship with his girlfriend, manager, and rivals, O’Toole captures the personal life of a public icon and the pageantry of sports during the 1930s and ‘40s.

Revolution in a Comic Strip: Gasparazzo and the Identity of Southern Migrants in Turin, 1969–1975

Between 1969 and 1975, in Turin, a social movement with migrants from southern Italy as its protagonists addressed the issues of working conditions in the automobile plants, and housing and living standards in the city's overcrowded working-class neighbourhoods. Southern migrants, from different regions and speaking sometimes mutually incomprehensible dialects, forged a collective identity as Meridionali – “southerners” – and claimed recognition as fully fledged citizens of Turin's industrial society. This identity-building was captured in the making through the satirical cartoons featuring Gasparazzo, the character of a southern worker at FIAT who struggled daily with the alienation of work, the arrogance of supervisors, the repression enforced by the police, and, back in the south, the backwardness of the social system. Although the publication of Gasparazzo ended abruptly in 1972 the qualities of the cartoon character continued to resonate in succeeding years. As militancy waned and the social movement started to crumble, Gasparazzo came to symbolize the nostalgic model of a working-class hero rather than any actual southerner in the plant.

Alan Lomax: The Long Journey

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This essay was presented as an address in January 2006 at a conference titled Lomax Legacy: Folklore in a Globalizing Century, sponsored by the American Forklife Center and the Association for Cultural Equity, New York, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. How can we wrap our arms around Alan Lomax? He was a force of nature who appeared superhuman. I thought of Alan as a Minotaur--half man, half supernatural--who defied life as we know it. His very walk seemed to defy gravity as he slid gracefully with his distinctive gait. Sally Yerkovich recalls seeing Alan one day at the National Endowment for the Arts as he and his sister Bess walked side by down the hall, each holding reading glasses in their extended right hand. They moved with that familiar Lomax stride that covered great distances and led them both to people and places that we celebrate today. No two institutions have shaped my life more deeply than Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress, and their worlds are inextricably linked. We should reflect on the appropriate symmetry of the Library of Congress's acquisition of Thomas Jefferson's library of 6,487 books in 1815 and of Alan Lomax's library of 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, 2,450 videotapes, 2,000 scholarly books and journals, hundreds of photographic prints and negatives, and over 120 linear feet of manuscripts. Standing two centuries apart, Thomas Jefferson and Alan Lomax are both icons of American culture, and their legacy is intimately tied to this great library. Their respective collections are intellectual bookends that ground us both in our nation's past and in its future. Thomas Jefferson and Alan Lomax chronicled written and oral traditions that together constitute our cultural birthright as Americans. Mr. Jefferson would be proud to know that his library has grown to over 29 million books, and Alan must be wryly smiling to see old friends and colleagues gathered to honor his legacy. Alan Lomax's passion for folk music is part of an American tradition that historian Bryan Garman links with Walt Whitman's celebration of the working-class hero. In Leaves of Grass Whitman dreamed of a race of singers who would celebrate the working class as the heart of American democracy. Garman argues that Whitman inspired musicians such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen, each of whom chronicles American song. Like these singers, Lomax had deep ties with twentieth-century American folksingers. There is an impulsive and romantic streak in my nature that I find difficult to control when I go song hunting, Alan Lomax confessed. His love for music and for poets like Carl Sandburg is reflected in the prose style of his writings on music and dance. Scorning what he called chair-bound scholars, he pursued an unending journey in search of the truth and beauty that he found in folksong and dance. The Library of Congress was a second home for both Alan Lomax and his father, Lomax. They worked at the Library's Archive of Folk Song for many years, and each deposited thousands of recordings there. Their recordings of songs like Rock Island Line, Good Night, Irene, and John Henry are as familiar to Americans as our national anthem. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As a teenager Alan traveled with his father to prisons, lumber camps, and black communities throughout the South. After Lomax's death on January 26, 1948, Alan continued his father's work as he recorded, filmed, and studied folk music throughout the South and around the world. Alan clearly saw this work as a monument to his father's life. The father and son shared a tough love that was forged by the worlds that shaped them in Texas. The intimate relationship Alan shared with his father is paralleled by that of Pete Seeger and his father, Charles Seeger. The Lomaxes and Seegers are considered the first families of American folk music. …

Working Class Hero

Linux and open source software represent a force that long predates the computer era: the notion of contributing to the common good.

The 1953 FA Cup Final: Modernity and Tradition in British Culture

The 1953 FA Cup final was more than just a memorable game of football. It was the first cup final to reach a mass television audience. It was a match where a national hero, Stanley Matthews, finally won a winner's medal for a competition that itself was a national institution. It was also a match that was intertwined with the ideas of modernity and tradition that ran through British culture in the early 1950s. The new Queen, present at the game, represented optimism in the future, an optimism closely linked with a technological progress that was epitomised by television. The celebrations of both the cup final and the coronation fed a sense of consensus and unity in the nation. Yet, as the loyalty towards the monarchy and the celebration of a respectable working-class hero like Matthews showed, British culture also remained profoundly attached to older traditions. Such discourses were mediated and actively promoted, although in varying fashions, by the local and national press. The game is thus a guide to the importance of historians understanding the press, not just as a repository of the past but also as an agent that helped to shape that past.

Pages from the past: history and memory in American magazines

Chapter 1. How We Lived: Summing Up the Twentieth Century Chapter 2. A Working-Class Hero Is Something to Be: The Lasting Story of September 11th Chapter 3. A News of Feeling as well as Fact: Public Mourning for the Dead Celebrity Chapter 4. The Voices of the Past Speak to Us, Calling Us by Name: Counter-Memory and Living History in Magazines for African Americans Chapter 5. The Celebrated Tribe: Generational Memory and the Reinterpretation of Youth Chapter 6. Once Upon a Time in America: Nostalgia Magazines and Reader Recollections Chapter 7. Snapshots in a Family Album: Anniversary Celebrations of a Shared Past Epilogue: The Present and Future of Media Memory.

Frank Anstey: From Heroic Persona to Embattled Identity

Frank Anstey's political career in the Victorian and Commonwealth parliaments (1902-34) centred around his reputation as a working-class hero and harbinger of revolution in the 1917-21 'red dawn'. The volatile energy that drove his indefatigable organising, passionate oratory and dramatic writing was such that the public persona it fuelled gradually suffused his private identity. But when political Labour surrendered to the strictures of orthodox economics and the people acquiesced in the wretched compromises of 1930-31, his public persona collapsed into an embittered cynicism and, as death approached, his personal identity retreated in time to a smaller, private world through a romantic reconstruction of childhood.

On Bryan K. Carman's A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen

On Bryan K. Carman's A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen

A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen

A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen

A race of singers: Whitman's working-class hero from Guthrie to Springsteen

When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he dreamed of inspiring race of who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy. By examining how singers such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springstein both embraced and reconfigured Whitman's vision, Bryan Garman shows that Whitman succeeded. In doing so, Garman celebrates the triumphs yet also exposes the limitations of Whitman's legacy. While Whitman's verse propounded notions of sexual freedom and renounced the competitiveness of capitalism, it also safeguarded the interests of the white workingman, often at the expense of women and people of colour. Garman describes how each of Whitman's successors adopted the mantle of the working-class hero while adapting the role to his own generation's concerns: Guthrie condemned racism in the 1930s, Dylan addressed race and war in the 1960s and Springstein explored sexism, racism and homophobia in the 1980s and 1990s. But as Garman points out, even the Boss, like his forebears, tends to represent solidarity in terms of white male bonding and homosocial allegiance. We can hear America singing in the voices of these artists, Garman says, but it is still the song of a white, male America.

Garman, Brian K. A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen [review

Garman, Brian K. A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen [review

Bruce Lee's Fictional Models of Masculinity

As the body of research on masculinities continues to develop, the glaring lack of a theoretical framework to address the construction of Asian American masculinities is magnified. Although scholars have consistently acknowledged that men of color are marginalized from dominant models of masculinity, it is clear that the complexity of Asian American masculinities has not been recognized or questioned. This article seeks to articulate a critique of the construction of masculinities based on Bruce Lee and the characters he portrays. By analyzing Bruce Lee's films, the author intends to explore the ambivalent relationship between homosexuality and heterosexuality, the ironic role of the working-class hero, and the possibilities and limitations of rejuvenating a Chinese American manhood.

“Every man for himself, and god for us all!” Mrs Oliphant, self-help, and industrial success literature in John Drayton and the melvilles

This article examines two of Oliphant's early novels, John Drayton; Being a History of the Early Life and Development of a Liverpool Engineer and The Melvilles in the context of other “industrial fiction” of the 1850s. The article also considers the impact of popular non-fiction, such as that produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and Samuel Smiles's best-sellers, such as Self-Help, on the fiction of the mid-century, and suggests that both fiction and non-fiction of the period use similar narrative conventions. The article then asks why Oliphant's Liverpool novels do not conform to an orthodox industrial narrative in which the humble working-class hero is extravagantly rewarded for his industry in the closing chapters. It is suggested that one possible reason for Oliphant's resistance to narrative orthodoxy was her own Scottish nonconformist religious upbringing and her early support of the theologian, Thomas Chalmers, a key figure in the Disruption of the Scottish Church of 1843. Chalmers, about whom Oliphant later wrote a sympathetic biography, fiercely opposed state intervention in social affairs and developed his own “local system” to alleviate the poverty and misery of areas of Glasgow. This article examines the ways in which Oliphant's intellectual debt to Chalmers, and her particularly Scottish ethical and religious background, prevented her from giving an easy assent to the prevailing rhetoric of social and industrial progress in metropolitan England in the 1850s. Oliphant's own reactions to other writers of industrial fiction, such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, are also briefly examined, and attention is given to the comparatively unconventional endings of her novels. The article concludes by arguing that Oliphant's political position is not as simple as it may at first appear, and that her fiction reveals a more complex and reflective attitude to industrialisation than has previously been recognised.