Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 (U. of Michigan)
by Erik Gellman, History, Roosevelt University
In Grassroots at the Gateway, Clarence Lang has written a remarkable study that puts class back into the history of black urban workers. St. Louis, a “northern city with a southern exposure,”(12) represents an ideal in-between climate for Lang to analyze how a black working-class agenda has shaped social movement activity, both within the black community and within the labor movement.
Lang’s account of St. Louis spans from the New Deal of the late 1930s to the New Right in the early 1970s. This narrative sweep matters because it shows how a labor-based consciousness among black workers grew in the 1930s, expanded during World War II, and became somewhat shunted by the Cold War climate of the 1950s, only to emerge again in the 1960s as civil rights liberalism and then Black Power. Blacks visibly fueled the CIO through groups like the National Negro Congress during the New Deal era, fought for economic justice in the 1960s with assistance from the local Teamsters union, and attacked institutional racism with Black Power formations like ACTION. At each stage, Lang carefully parses out the class tensions and intergenerational activity, noting how many leaders from earlier civil rights unionism remained to influence as well as contest a new generation of activists in the later years. The cumulative effect of this narrative exposes the strong if uneven institutional moorings of black workers, defying the misplaced assumptions and popular memory of the black urban experience as one of declension and disorganization.
Lang succeeds in examining this long historical arc by paying careful attention to shifts in class and racial identities. After the first successful interracial industrial union movement in American history, the CIO embraced a “Cold War consensus” in the years following the Second World War, which made it hard for black workers to use their unions as vehicles for civil rights goals. This led workers to flood into the St. Louis chapters of the NAACP and later into a revived Congress of Racial Equality. Deindustrialization in the 1960s, Lang explains, created great urgency for “mere survival,” and black workers sought to unify to fight for economic access, reigniting the boycott and sit-in movements in St. Louis that had been present during the war. Black workers engaged in acts of public confrontation like literally chaining themselves to the city’s famous Arch, while the Teamsters’ local black leadership launched a trade union war on the slums. Black residents also engaged in rent strikes, attacked lily-white construction unions, and organized a 1966 transit boycott, foreshadowing and paralleling targets of northern civil rights activists in other cities.
Perhaps most significant for contemporary observers and activists, Lang’s study provides a framework for understanding how the democratic urban agenda of black workers lost efficacy in the early 1970s. Black Power, an effective if ambiguous agenda for black workers in the late 1960s, later became a tool for black middle-class politicians to gain offices in municipal politics. Instead of democratizing the ward machine of St. Louis, Lang explains, these politicians continued the graft and patronage networks of their white predecessors. This development — combined with the unprecedented federal police suppression program of COINTELPRO, the ouster of black Teamsters leaders by their increasingly suburban and white membership, and the hoax of Nixon’s conversion of Great Society programs into “Black Capitalism” — left working-class blacks without resources or government support, which led to a new generation of African Americans bereft of jobs and power.
For people outside the field of history, this compelling book shows how we may need to recover the long and unfinished urban activist agenda of black workers in order to begin to attack the contemporary pipeline that has flowed from a failing education system to joblessness to prison. Lang’s account might help us envision an interracial labor union agenda that could become an expansive class-based movement with workers of color at its center.
Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (U. of Michigan)
by Cherie Rankin, English, Heartland Community College
Concentrating on four diverse aspects of country music history, one of the most impressive features of Natural Acts is the depth and fresh angle of its coverage. Theorizing a genre that is often (mistakenly) pigeonholed, Fox’s book explores the dark corners and attics of country music history, emerging with fresh perspective and a new understanding of some of the music’s often brushed aside darker elements. The book is timely. With the resurgence of country music and country “ethos” at present (think Jeff Bridges’ portrayal of outlaw country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart), Natural Acts is a valuable look back at country music’s role in wider American history and in working-class “country” identity.
The first section reads the performance of “white Southern rube” and “blackface” characters in the Barn Dance Era of the 1920s-1940s and what the staying power of these phenomena says about notions of authentic country rusticity. Particularly enlightening are Fox’s reading of how the Southern “rube” (male and female) and the male blackface character both functioned as forms of masquerade, allowing performers to claim, but also subvert, the representation and the experience of poor Southern life.
In the following section Fox’s topic is “honky-tonk” and its role in re-masculinizing country music in the post-WWII era. Much of the postwar honky-tonk movement was backlash against women’s moving out of the domestic sphere and their increasingly common refusal of that singular role. Working-class identity was shifting, and many working-class men found themselves in unfamiliar, unsettling territory. Juxtaposing Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams as examples of the hyper-masculine performer with female stars Kitty Wells and Jean Shepherd, Fox engagingly explores the different class and gendered expectations they were forced to operate under. Tubb and Williams could be the hard-living, hard-drinking personas they sang about; Wells and Shepherd could sing about “honky tonk angels,” but could not “be” such, having to carefully cultivate their public personas as wives and mothers outside the musical arena. Fox’s strength here is her exploration of how the female performer had to do most of her talking-back through music and performance, while little was allowed otherwise.
The third section explores memoirs by female country stars Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Naomi Judd, Reba McEntire, and Sarah Colley Cannon (better known as Minnie Pearl). Here Fox highlights multiple tensions—how “success profoundly unsettles [class] identity” (114), insecurity at assuming the mantle of “writer,” and the pressure of negotiating expectations of “proper” motherhood and Southern womanhood. The inclusion of Cannon (Pearl) seems an odd choice at first, but as the lone example of a female country performer from a genteel Southern background, the inclusion is a particularly revealing contrast in gender and class conflict.
Fox’s final chapter examines “rusticity” in a contemporary context, in the directions taken by “alt.country.” Examining a wide range of artists and styles, Fox finds fault with trying to “reproduce” a vintage past, instead championing those artists who move in bolder and more productive (rather than reproductive) directions. One of the most valuable features in this section is Fox’s look at misogynistic strains in alt.country; her exposure and exploration of a number of powerful female alt.country artists is a successful counter measure.
Those who reject country music and its historical significance out of hand are missing something. Natural Acts makes valuable connections between country music history in particular and American history in general, especially as it pertains to relationships and intersections of race, class, and gender.
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking) and Imperial: Photographs (Powerhouse Books)
by Corey E. Andrews, English & Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University
Following in the wake of Poor People (2007), a nonfiction travelogue of global poverty, William T. Vollmann in his new book explores the conditions of poverty in Imperial County, California. Where Poor People aimed for a macro-analysis of poverty, Imperial offers an intensely local look at the lives of Americans and Mexicans living in southeastern California. These lives are marked by the tumultuous history of the area, as well as the frenetic politics of border crossing. Vollmann’s great achievement in the book is to humanize the people of Imperial County, people who have been frequently subjected to coarse stereotyping and blatant racism.
Despite its tight focus on Imperial County, the scope of Vollmann’s book is impressive. As he proved with his seven-volume analysis of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), Vollmann can produce richly-researched accounts of contemporary and historical events, people, places, and things. In the case of Imperial and its accompanying book of photographs, Vollmann equals (and surpasses) his earlier efforts to fully document the nameless and faceless lives of the poor. What makes Imperial so striking is the combination of ethnographic research and novelistic skill that Vollmann employs to depict the residents of Imperial County. Based on over ten years of field research, Vollmann’s exploration of the area is further enriched by his keen sense of narrative and characterization. In fact, Vollmann explains that Imperial was first conceived as a novel. Through the process of research and writing, however, he reconceptualized the book as a local history, reaching far into the past in order to fully explore the origins of this volatile place.
Indeed, on the surface, the book appears to be a history or even an academic study, but that is deceptive. As in his previous nonfiction accounts like An Afghanistan Picture Show (1992) and Riding Toward Everywhere (2008), Vollmann inserts himself directly in the midst of his subjects, interviewing them and trying to stay true to the reality of their experiences. Imperial begins, for example, on the border in Mexico with Vollmann accompanying would-be “pollos” and “solos,” who risk capture by crossing a filthy body of water called the “All-American Canal.” Although his sympathies clearly lie with the so-called “illegal aliens,” Vollmann is surprisingly even-handed in his portraits of border guards who often capture the same people again and again. As Border Patrol Officer Gloria I. Chavez says, “I think we all feel sorry for them.”
In order to discover the underlying reasons for both groups’ Sisyphean labors, Vollman examines the history of Imperial County,extending from the 18th to the 21st centuries. In so doing, he depicts the complicated interrelationship between people, place, and history. Of particular importance is the presence of water for irrigation. Imperial recounts the historical battles for control of the water supply that have plagued the area and created an apparently unbreakable gap between American haves and Mexican have-nots. This class division is amply documented throughout Imperial as well as in the fascinating book of accompanying photographs taken by the author.
As he demonstrated in Poor People, the experience of poverty and class inequality has not disappeared from our world, just from our sight. Vollmann’s work in Imperial is a corrective vision, giving us greater clarity about the very real economic and social divisions that continue to imperil and marginalize whole communities.