Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Gingrich, Andre

wartime morality play, not as an ideological move, or even a revisionist recovery,
but because the brown bodies in question were in fact engaged in a dramatic
struggle for dignity on the home front, one that called into question the domi-
nant discourses of American democracy, liberty, and equality. By consistently
comparing the East and West Coasts, by using examples from Texas, and by
analyzing the so-called zoot suit riots of Los Angeles and Harlem along with
those of Detroit and of the South, Alvarez inserts Mexican Americans and
African Americans into the all-too-often nostalgic national narrative of the
Depression-World War II “Greatest Generation.” The book therefore has the
topical appeal and intellectual import to attract non-specialist academic readers,
as well as those from a broader general audience interested in “interethnic cul-
tural exchange,” “social relationships that value rather than denigrate differ-
ence,” and the power of “social spaces and cultural identities” (243).
Anthony Macías
University of California, Riverside
David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect
of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008).
Contemporary anthropology shares some general awareness about the field’s
professional contributions to the Second World War on the US side, but the
actual range of US anthropologists’ engagement so far was not well understood.
Most among anthropology’s active participants refrained from publishing about
it in any detail after 1945. For the next generations of scholars, anthropology’s
involvement in a just war against Nazism and fascism seemed to raise few ques-
tions, and thus merely attracted mild scholarly interest.
It took the new international contexts of the late Cold War era and of
the present post-Cold War times, to bring that difference between general
awareness and lack of actual knowledge and understanding back to scholars’
attention. Recent military challenges for contemporary anthropology, such as
the US presence in Iraq since 2003 and the debate about scholars’ involvement
in it, further contributed toward transforming that difference between awareness
and knowledge into a new and timely research field: How did it all begin? What
were the historical foundations of US anthropology’s involvement with the mili-
tary, and which directions did it take? 
David Price pursued these questions at first as one element within an
important earlier project of his. When he researched the archives for his
“Threatening Anthropology” volume (2004) about the FBI’s surveillance of
activist anthropologists in the McCarthy era, he discovered that many scholars’
cooperation with intelligence and military services originated in the years before
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1945. “World War Two anthropology unleashed something dangerous that was
not easily contained.” (xiii)
One of this book’s great merits is the combination of meticulous doc-
umentation with lucid analysis. Price shows that more than half of US anthro-
pologists contributed their professional expertise to the war effort, and how
they did it. He covers their role in gathering and processing military intelli-
gence, in the production of the Army’s regional Pocket Guide booklets, in
teaching and training, in working for government agencies and for White House
projects. Price documents professional organisations’ role in anthropology’s
involvement with the US military, and he clarifies the particular weight of the
Society for Applied Anthropology in it. The author thereby succeeds in pre-
senting the first coherent and systematic overview of all major aspects in these
encounters, and he traces individual projects which to this day hardly were
known to the scholarly community. One key result from this side of Price’s
analysis is a new understanding about the extent to which major research direc-
tions of US anthropology in fact had been promoted and developed through
their cooperation with the military. They range from well-known cases such as
studies in “culture and personality” and “national characters” to less well-known
examples, such as the Human Relation Area Files.
Price’s critical analyses strive to assess the success and the failure,
morally justifiable activities, cases of individual heroism as much as the unac-
ceptable, the inhuman and the potentially dangerous elements in this record. A
remarkable case of failure features the military’s neglect of the actual impact by
anthropology-inspired propaganda leaflets upon the numbers of Japanese sol-
diers surrendering to the US army toward the end of the war: the rationale for
this intentional neglect seems to have fed into preparations for dropping the
nuclear bombs. Price’s limited list of success stories includes Ruth Benedict’s
recommendation – based on the lessons she drew from British colonialism’s
principle of “indirect rule” – to maintain the Japanese emperor in office after
1945. Cases of individual heroism included a failed OSS rescue operation led
by British-born Gregory Bateson near Sumatra, attempting to save Indonesian
operatives.
The list of activities which in Price’s presentist perspective rank as
problematic, dubious, or outright unacceptable is not short. It includes Henry
Field’s direction of the M-projects, in which one scheme (M-270) constructed
Palestine as an uncultivated and barely populated area for Jewish resettlement
schemes after the war. While M-270 became only one minor factor in the sub-
sequent history of Palestine, anthropologists’ “Internment Fieldwork” for US
authorities had more significant consequences. Carried out among those
Japanese-Americans who were forcefully “relocated” into camps, it helped to
stabilize an internment practice which already was criticized in its time. Only a
few participating anthropologists, however, also voiced their critical doubts, such
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as Marvin and Morris Opler. Price’s assessments usually are balanced and care-
ful, and much to his scholarly credit, they can be easily distinguished from his
meticulous documentation. This provides the sound basis on which his aca-
demic readers may agree or disagree with him on individual points. In fact, one
might find a few among the author’s assessments of specific cases quite inap-
propriate. As problematic and unacceptable as US anthropologists’ “Internment
fieldwork” was, for instance, it still cannot be compared to the activities of
Joseph Mengele in Auschwitz, who directly assisted in mass murder (170).
Price does not hide his deeply rooted skepticism about anthropology’s
multi-faceted engagement with the US war effort, and he makes his readers
understand that this is based on his knowledge of where this engagement led to
after 1945, during the Cold War. Although we may not agree with him on all
analytical conclusions he draws, the scholarly community still has to be grateful
for this impressive scholarly achievement. After all, it provides for the very first
time a solid basis for a debate which has been long overdue. In all likelihood,
this volume will remain the standard reference book for the years to come. It is
an indispensable source of insights not only for anthropologists, who will gain a
thoroughly new understanding about their own field’s historical contexts of re-
emergence after 1945. Moreover, this book provides ample material for histori-
ans of science in general, who sometimes tend to neglect the relevance of the
social sciences and the humanities in armed conflict.
Andre Gingrich
Social Anthropology Research Unit, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Robert McAlmon, The Nightinghouls of Paris, ed. Sanford J. Smoller
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Robert McAlmon, bon vivant and minor American writer, died in 1956. The
Nightinghouls of Paris, skilfully edited by Sanford J. Smoller, has, until now, lan-
guished unpublished in the Yale University archives. In a superb introduction to
Nightinghouls, Smoller summarizes McAlmon’s life and literary achievements:
Midwestern upbringing; bisexuality; founding of Contact Press in 1923; mar-
riage of convenience to Annie Winifred Ellerman, who preferred to be known
by her literary pseudonym Bryher; relocation to Paris; alcohol consumption;
repatriation to Phoenix, Arizona; posthumous reputation. Smoller’s scholarship
is impeccable and his prose style succinct. Unfortunately McAlmon does not
write as well as Smoller does.
An account of bohemian life in Montparnasse from about 1928 until
1932, this book, partly novel and partly memoir, recalls Ernest Hemingway’s The
Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, John Glassco’s Memoirs of
Montparnasse, and Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris. Like these works,
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David H. Price, "Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War" (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)

Beaulieu, Michael S.

Reacting to the Worker's Revolt: The Lakehead and Winnipeg General Strike

Webber, Patrick

Entryism in Theory, in Practice, and in Crisis: The Trotskyist Experience in New Brunswick, 1969-1973

Thorn, Brian

and its environs. Because of the way many readers are likely to use this book,
the index is very disappointing. To find the pages on which Fred Quilt is dis-
cussed readers need to scan the long entry under “people,” and to learn about
the Thompson Land and Cattle Company they have to consult “stakeholders.”
Readers prescient enough to look under “aboriginals” to find “Sarich
Commission” will then be directed to the non-existent entry for “Cariboo-
Chilcotin Justice Inquiry.” Nevertheless, this well-deserved winner of the
Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Prize for British Columbia provides us
with a very valuable and nuanced look at the history, and the historical memory,
of the Chilcotin plateau.
Theodore Binnema
University of Northern British Columbia
Gerald Hunt and David Rayside, eds., Equity, Diversity, and Canadian
Labour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
Labour activists and historians have debated for many years over whether or not
to focus on the divisions among workers and unionists or on the elements that
unite those in the labour movement. We might characterize this debate as one
that pits “splitters” against “uniters.” More recent scholarly writing in this field
tends to come down more on the “splitter” side of the equation. In their edited
work, Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour, Gerald Hunt and David Rayside
attempt to deal with the problem of how to create a more united, equal, and,
ultimately, stronger labour movement that will welcome workers from a diverse
array of backgrounds. Hunt and Rayside’s text is of a piece with earlier works
such as Linda Briskin and Lynda Yanz’s Union Sisters and Briskin and Patricia
McDermott’s Women Challenging Unions; it also provides a good companion to
recent historical works like David Goutor’s Guarding the Gates. On the whole,
the book is a strong addition to an area that needs more study and it is a text
that will be read by academics and activists alike, particularly those who struggle
with issues surrounding equity and diversity in unions.
The editors have assembled a strong group of scholars who offer a
variety of perspectives on the labour movement and its engagement with mar-
ginalized workers: race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability are the most
prominent “sites” of discrimination that are interrogated here. Of particular
note for historians, Julie White’s selection “Looking Back,” presents an overview
of the history of racial, gender, and gay and lesbian oppression from the 1890s
to the 1980s. In keeping with the text’s overall thrust, White suggests that,
although unions did not always take a stance in favour of equality, they generally
have moved in a progressive direction on these issues over the course of recent
history (46-47).
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In general, the tone of the book is pro-union and optimistic both
about the future of equality within unions and the prospect for future union
activism and radicalism. Anne Forrest suggests that unions need to do more to
ensure pay equity for part-time and seasonal employees, many of whom are
women (72). Judy Haiven, in her discussion of a pay equity case in the
Saskatoon Catholic School Board in the mid-1990s, implies that splitting women
workers into separate union locals might be a step toward wage parity between
men and women and a means toward challenging sexism in the union move-
ment (95-97). Gerald Hunt and Jonathan Eaton chronicle organized labour’s
engagement with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender workers’ rights. They
argue that, while much work still remains for the future, unions have become
progressively more supportive of the rights of gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers
(130). David Rayside and Fraser Valentine and Tania das Gupta deal, respec-
tively, with the labour movement and its attitudes toward disabled and racial
minority workers. Reflecting the text’s overall perspective, both chapters argue
that although significant strides have been made toward a more progressive
agenda, unions have not yet reached the goal of representing all workers equally,
regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or ability (178-179, 182).
The text’s optimistic tone provides a healthy antidote to the cynicism
and disillusionment that dominates much recent writing on labour’s present
state. It is refreshing to see scholars who express strong support for the goals
of the labour movement and its agenda for equality. Linda Briskin’s afterword
to the text offers a useful blueprint for future activism and radicalism.
There are two fairly small issues with the text. First, it is unfortunate
that the text focuses heavily on labour struggles through official, legal channels.
It might be argued that unions have achieved more for marginalized workers by
undertaking illegal actions in some circumstances: the various sit-down strikes
of the 1930s, which involved many immigrant workers and women, immediately
spring to mind. Second, in the book’s introduction, Gerald Hunt notes that 30
per cent of the Canadian work force belongs to a union (3); he argues that this
is a testament to the relative strength of the union movement in Canada. While
this may be true from a comparative perspective, 30 per cent seems like a rela-
tively small number of unionists. In keeping with this, the text might have
spent more time considering the strong neo-liberal trend in Canada and its suc-
cessful attacks on unions and, in particular, on struggles for diversity within and
outside the labour movement. These quibbles aside, this is a fine book, one that
will provide essential reading for left historians and for all of those who care
about unions in Canada and their fight for equality.
Brian Thorn
University of Toronto, Scarborough
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Gerald Hunt and David Rayside, eds., "Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)

Worcester, Kent

died because J. F. K. wanted him dead.
This is a concise recapitulation of little-known events during the PRI’s
heyday. It is truly a myth-breaker. Rural Mexicans are not, after all, profoundly
conservative; they embraced a variety of socialist operative structures from the
Revolution to the 1960s and beyond. The PRI did not enjoy opposition-free
reign from World War II to 1968. Quite the contrary: Mexico’s history during
that period is littered with rancorous and sometimes violent confrontations
between the PRI-controlled government and groups dissatisfied with the
Revolution’s failure to deliver egalitarianism and universal prosperity. Hence
Padilla argues persuasively that, rather than the watershed event that historians
have claimed, the October 1968 massacre of protesting students at Tlatelolco
was really a continuation of social movements and government brutality toward
them over the preceding quarter-century.
She errs, however, in characterizing “the fall of Mexico’s one-party sys-
tem as a product of popular resistance.” When the Partido Acción Nacional
(PAN) won the national election in 2000, it brought the former CEO of Coca
Cola-Mexico into the presidency. This is hardly a manifestation of popular
resistance. She correctly points out, however, that, by stealing the 2006 election
from the Mexican people and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, the PAN
ushered in a new era in which the ruling party clings to power by any means
necessary, legitimate or otherwise. Thus the struggle continues.
Jeffrey K. Lucas
University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Sabrina Jones, Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2008).
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), one of the icons of modern dance, has been the
subject of several substantive biographies as well as Isadora, a 1968 biopic star-
ring Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards. She also penned an autobiography,
My Life (1927), which has been published in numerous editions and languages.
Sabrina Jones joins the discussion with her informative graphic biography, which
neatly encapsulates Isadora Duncan’s hectic and arguably eccentric life story into
125 action-packed pages.
Isadora Duncan was the youngest of four children, and as a teenager
she taught piano and dance to help support their impoverished family. In her
twenties she toured the major cities of Europe, from London and Paris to
Berlin and Budapest, seeking to promote her unconventional ideas about dance
and movement through her performances and lectures. Scorning the rituals and
protocols of classical ballet, she found inspiration in Greek art and mythology,
advocating a more free-flowing and naturalistic approach to human movement.
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Isadora Duncan danced, in her own words, “as woman in her purest expression,
body and soul in harmony, emerging from centuries of civilized forgetfulness,
no longer at war with spirituality – the highest intelligence in the freest body.”
She spent almost two years in the new Soviet Union, from 1922-1924, and
opened dance schools in Russia, the United States, Germany, and France.
Although she is mostly known for her contributions to twentieth-cen-
tury dance, Isadora Duncan is sometimes remembered her tragic accidental
death at the age of fifty – her neck was broken when her shawl was caught
underneath the wheel of an automobile. “I’ve killed the Madonna!” cried the
driver, and thousands turned out for her funeral at Père Lachaise Cemetery in
Paris. Fittingly, “there were no religious rites, only the music of Beethoven,
Liszt, and Bach,” (123) says Sabrina Jones. Gertrude Stein reportedly snipped
that “affectations can be dangerous,” referring to Duncan’s exuberant fashion
sense. Not surprisingly, the Soviet authorities soon seized control of her school
in Moscow, shutting it down at the end of the 1940s. In Europe and North
America, as Jones points out, “Isadora’s dances were passed on directly from
student to student, preserved in living bodies” (125). Unfortunately, there is no
surviving footage of her dancing, only stills, contemporary drawings and
posters, and eyewitness testimony.
Sabrina Jones is one of a number of classically trained fine artists who
have embraced comics as a narrative medium. While this is her first full-length
book, her comics have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She is
a contributing editor to World War III Illustrated, and she co-founded Girltalk in
the 1990s. Her work is featured in Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial
Workers of the World (2005), as well as The Real Cost of Prisons Comix (2008). She
cares about the world of dance and has a great fondness for her subject. On
the other hand, Jones is smart enough to admit that Isadora Duncan had a ten-
dency to embellish the facts, and that her passion-seeking bohemianism and
broadly pro-Soviet radical politics were not without their hypocrisies and inter-
nal contradictions. At times Duncan comes across as thoroughly self-involved
and without regard for the feelings or considerations of others.
Sabrina Jones has produced a sympathetic biography, but not a syco-
phantic one. It may well inspire some readers to pick up Duncan’s autobiogra-
phy, or one of the biographies or collections of speeches and letters. In some
ways Duncan embodies a certain kind of romantic yet tragic figure who devotes
themselves to Art at the expense of more ordinary considerations such as rela-
tionships, parenting, and money. There will always be an audience, it seems to
me, for accounts of such personalities, since most of us are unable to entirely
avoid living mundane, prosaic lives, at least some of the time, and naturally find
excitement in reading about those who worked without a net.
Jones wrote the text and drew the pictures, and designed the eye-catch-
ing cover. She is a capable artist, one whose bold black-and-white pages pay
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homage to a lost world of recitals, champagne, and horse-drawn carriages.
Rather than sticking to a rigid, grid-based format, her panels zigzag across the
page, which she enlivens by way of inset panels and chapter titles. Her
approach is neither sepia-toned nor photo-realist, but expressive and loose. The
artist would like us to see, I think, Isadora Duncan as a landmark creative figure
whose ideas and tropes remain relevant long after her interwar heyday.
Kent Worcester
Marymount Manhattan College
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Sabrina Jones, "Isadora Duncan: A Geographic Biography" (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008)

Furner, Mary O.

Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic
Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007), and Neil Jumonville and
Kevin Mattson, eds. Liberalism for a New Century (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
These two books remind readers of the protean nature of United States liberal-
ism and raise the prospect that, after three decades of drift, it may be able to
renew itself. Liberalism for a New Century aims to instigate a renewal based on
reinstating core liberal values and policy commitments of an earlier time. The
book’s main thrust defends the democratic liberalism, concerned with economic
citizenship and social justice, that progressives and liberals built from the early
twentieth century through the 1940s. Editors Jumonville and Mattson and other
authors fault mid-twentieth century liberals for losing faith in their own ideals
(Alan Brinkley), abandoning formerly constructive relations with organised
labour and the left (Michael Kazin), buying too much into identity politics
(Jumonville and Mattson), forsaking the social gospel message that energized ear-
lier progressive movements for an amoral secularism (Amy Sullivan), and offer-
ing a feckless response to the rise of the Right (Jennifer Burns). For most of
these authors, liberalism’s potential for revival in the twenty-first century as a
broadly reformist ideology attuned to mainstream social and economic issues
depends on liberals pulling back from these failings and returning to core New
Deal-era liberal ideals.
Leslie Butler’s Critical Americans introduces an influential group of late
nineteenth century liberal intellectuals who were devoted to a different set of
ideals. The four key figures are Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and George William Curtis, who—among
them—edited and wrote extensively for the Atlantic Monthly, Century, Harpers
Weekly, Harpers Monthly, Nation, Putnam’s, and (Higginson’s favorite venue)
Women’s Journal, working to establish critical journalism as a force for elevating
American intellectual and civic life. Initially men of letters, they were drawn as
well to more broadly political questions and to a role as public moralists. In
addition to marvelously detailed portraits of the central four, Butler provides ful-
some side glances at Nation editor E.L. Godkin and at the core group’s frequent
English correspondents, among them John Stuart Mill, Leslie Stephens, and
Frederic Harrison. No women figured in the group, where manliness—defined
by upright character rather than athletic vigor and bellicosity—was a requirement
for inclusion.
By placing these closely-linked careers in the context of trans-Atlantic
reform, Butler aims to overturn entrenched representations of Victorian political
intellectuals as mugwumpish “best men” and “genteel reformers,” put off by the
rough and tumble of US politics. The formative experience for Butler’s critical
Victorians was the US Civil War, to which they came as opponents of the
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Mexican-American War, passionate abolitionists (even, in Higginson’s case, active
John Brown supporters), and advocates for women’s suffrage. The Civil War in
their eyes presaged the blossoming of a true people’s democracy that could
inspire the democratization of all of Western civilization. Yet neither then nor
later, in the 1890s, was theirs a vision of radical, populist (or Populist) democra-
cy. It demanded sober reflection, moderation, and active cultivation by citizens
of their full intellectual and spiritual capacities. This explains the importance
these men assigned to informing public opinion on political matters. Their
vision of an educative democracy included schooling newly freed black voters on
equal terms. Supporters of Radical Reconstruction, they likened the Southern
planter class to much-despised British aristocrats who had supported secession
and continued to oppose suffrage expansion at home.
Butler adamantly rejects a depiction of these Gilded Age liberals as
soulless defenders of possessive individualism. Although their principled deser-
tion of the Republican Party in 1884 made them traitors in the eyes of party loy-
alists, it showed their determination to stand for liberal virtues of clean govern-
ment, honest money, and low tariff. The critical Victorians would eventually
lapse into despondency over US and British imperialism and bemoan the brutali-
ty practiced in the Philippine-American and Boer-British wars, but in their “mug-
w u m p ” political moment, Butler arg u e s, t h ey ach i eved ge nuine coherence in their beliefs.
Yet one might argue that this coherence strangely excluded concern for
some of the most serious social issues of the day. Butler grants these omissions
with this comment: “The liberals’ critique of Gilded Age politics included many
blind spots. Their inattention to many of the challenges presented by urban
poverty and the concentration of industrial power would cause ‘New Liberals’
and Progressives of a later generation to belittle the earlier reform vision as
overly timid and naïve” (177). But the fact that her subjects essentially had no
Social Question, that they ignored the most significant debates underway regard-
ing economic policy, should have elicited a harsher judgment. Butler neverthe-
less excels in identifying the core values that her Gilded Age liberals did passion-
ately defend.
The same can be said for the Jumonville-Mattson collection in its treat-
ment of New Deal and Great Society liberals. But what a shift in emphasis
occurred in core commitments between Butler’s subjects and those later social
liberals!  The critical Victorians linked Americans’ capacity for self-government
to qualities of intellect, taste, empathy, and devotion to duty that cultural uplift
could develop in individual citizens. For Jumonville and Mattson, mid-twentieth
century liberals linked democracy to strong government, active in its defense of
legal, political, economic, and social rights that would otherwise be denied. They
defended liberty of conscience, a regulated capitalist market in which govern-
ment ensured fairness, a generous welfare state, strong labour unions, and other
independent sources of countervailing power. The concern for social and eco-
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nomic equality missing among the critical Victorians provided the vital core of
New Deal liberalism. Yet—these writers contend—the rise of Soviet power and
the onset of the Cold War prompted liberals to cut off earlier close ties with
democratic socialists, the 1930s Popular Front left, and Henry Wallace support-
ers, with whom they had largely earlier agreed.
As the source of liberalism’s subsequent decline, Liberalism for a New
Century points an accusing finger toward a specific segment of the more recent
left. Although the New Left, the anti-war movement, and the rise of the Right
get some credit, special blame is reserved for an “academic and cultural left”
(ACL) that shifted its focus to cultural politics, beguiling credulous youth.
Influenced by postmodernism, the ACL preached the fluidity of meaning, cham-
pioned minorities, and cultivated a policy bias in favor of the “other” that
“derailed important liberal commitments and increased the American popula-
tions’ animosity toward liberalism”(7). Even Jennifer Burns’ nuanced chapter on
liberalism and the conservative imagination, though granting more agency to the
Rise of the Right, still credits the liberals’ shift from class to culture, and from
emphasizing economic issues and the role of the state to stressing moral issues,
for liberals’ inability to respond effectively to the appeal of neoconservatism.
Not surprisingly in a multi-authored work, the volume’s contributors
disagree on elements of this overarching narrative. Berkowitz and John Diggins
demur regarding US liberalism’s ideological pedigree. Berkowitz argues for a
central paradox in the long history of liberalism: a passion for liberty and order
moved nineteenth century liberals, whereas mid-twentieth century “progressive
liberals” prized equality above liberty and turned statist to achieve it, undermin-
ing the necessary balance between democracy and individual rights. Diggins
attacks left-leaning professors for ignoring the teachings of early American polit-
ical thinkers, who wisely designed a state able to restrain the passions that would
motivate humans much of the time. From Mattson, Jumonville, and other key
contributors, the academic and cultural left gets most of the credit for weakening
liberalism’s hold on the national imagination. “The ACL embraced the worst
excesses of ‘political correctness,’ affirmative action, and identity politics,” (7) the
editors charge, and their attacks on traditional beliefs and values alienated god-
fearing, country-loving Middle Americans. We do get a careful critique, drawn
by Mona Harrington, of the serious flaws in what passed in liberalism’s heyday,
and continues to pass, for a family policy. Yet the volume’s framing seems exces-
sively to discount as proper concerns of liberals the subordination of women,
the gay bashing, the institutionalized racism, and the Euro-American chauvinism
that were routine aspects of life at mid-century. Indeed, the arguments present-
ed here against the ACL are more than a little reminiscent of attacks on the pro-
fessoriate, and on liberal and progressive intellectuals more generally that have
typically come not from Middle Americans, but rather from disgruntled figures
on the academic (e.g., David Horowitz) and cultural right.
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In the final section of Liberalism for a New Century, Danny Postel and
Michael Tomasky extend the postmortem for liberalism to foreign policy in ways
that support the general tenor of the earlier chapters: the liberalism of the New
Deal and the Great Society was better, more authentic, more universally appeal-
ing than the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, postmodern, anything-goes post-
1960s liberalism of relativism, fluid identity, and lifestyle choice. Postel argues
that Iranian intellectuals’ fondness for Habermas, Popper, and Arendt reveals
how appealing an older, Enlightenment-based liberalism of individual freedom,
political democracy, and rights remains in much of the non-Western world.
Tomasky contends that liberal hawks who supported the Iraq war and liberal
doves who opposed it need to own up to their mistakes: for hawks, their defense
of the invasion as a justifiable effort to establish democracy, when George Bush
actually intended to establish a client state in the Middle East; and for doves, the
view that any foreign intervention whatsoever is always illegitimate. Both groups
should resubscribe to a pre-Bush liberal internationalism, argues Tomasky, in
which fighting wars to right unacceptable wrongs may at times be both legitimate
and necessary.
The strongest (and most controversial) message of the edited volume
is a call for return to liberalism at its best and brightest, when liberals achieved
significant steps toward a welfare state, established (de jure) full civil rights, set in
place international structures and policies that ultimately defeated communism,
and retained a diverse middle and working class base in the Democratic Party.
Thus the volume can be read as an endorsement of the vision that placed Barack
Obama in the White House, promising to withdraw US forces from Iraq, redress
wrongs perpetrated at Guantanamo, achieve universal health care, restore essen-
tial economic regulation, and deal with global warming. Yet the serious defense
of workers’ job and organiing rights that these writers see as essential to liberal-
ism has not had top billing in the Obama agenda; nor, it currently appears, will a
significant redistribution of income and wealth be a major goal of the rebuilding
of economic regulation. Perhaps more renewal will be needed.
Mary O. Furner 
University of California, Santa Barbara
Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
(Edinburgh, Oakland, West Virginia: AK Press, 2008).
In 1931, as the Great Depression gathered steam, Louis Adamic published
Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America. Adamic, a self-taught Slovenian
immigrant who came to the United States in 1913, drew on extensive experience
as a wage labourer and his wide reading of literature on the labour movement to
create a compelling “popular” account of violence in American labour history.
Book Reviews118
Left History 14_1-b - Quark Final  12/4/09  1:06 PM  Page 118


Leslie Butler, "Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform" (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007), and Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson, eds. "Liberalism for a New Century" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007)

Binemma, Theodore

desiring a lasting and loving companionship. Single parenting involved stints for
the children in boarding schools and with friends and colleagues, and this pro-
foundly affected the rebellion of her eldest daughter Christine. Her broad-
minded spirit extended to her children and to the support of single parenting
for Christine and an abortion for Sally.
After she lost her seat in Ottawa in 1945, a brief respite in anti-
Semitism and anti-Communism drew her to the inner-city enclaves of Toronto.
The unfolding of the Gouzenko affair shortly thereafter meant that the country
focused on Rose’s alleged spying for the Soviets during the Second World War.
This was followed by his arrest, trial, 1947 expulsion from Parliament, imprison-
ment, departure for Poland, and ultimately, the revoking of his Canadian citizen-
ship. Revelations of Cold War policing in Canada complement our knowledge
of US McCarthysism and the work of Gary Evans on John Grierson’s manipu-
lation of wartime propaganda with the National Film Board. The author pro-
vides disclosures of Neilsen’s fear of arrest, phonetapping, and also details her
involvement with the world peace movement in this period.
The recurrence of Cold War anti-Communism in Canada and her revo-
lutionary zeal took her to China in 1955 where she conducted teacher training in
the medical corps and died on Dec. 7, 1980 surrounded by comrades and her
daughter Christine. She witnessed the dramatic consequences of the Great
Leap Forward, feared expulsion during the Sino-Soviet split, and arrest or re-
education during the Cultural Revolution. Accompanied by her daughters and
six grandsons, her health steadily deteriorated as she worked on several projects
with the Fo reign Language Press and attended study groups and public meetings.
This book is a captivating and exemplary rendition of the life of
Neilsen. The explicit use of varied sources, the detailed political analysis, as well
as the keen attention to personal relations, collective solidarity, and social injus-
tice, are praiseworthy and original contributions to historical scholarship.
Kathleen Lord
Mount Allison University
William J. Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the
Chilcotin Plateau (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
The two-month Gustafsen Lake standoff near 100 Mile House in the summer
of 1995 briefly turned Canadians’ attention to the longstanding tensions that
marred relationships between Native and non-Native people in the Chilcotin
region of British Columbia. In this book, William J. Turkel, who grew up in the
region but now teaches at the University of Western Ontario, turns his attention
to the historical roots of several controversies that erupted in the region in the
1990s. In three parts, the book “explores the ways in which usable pasts are
Left History 14.1 111
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drawn from the material substance of a particular place, typically under condi-
tions of conflict” (xxiv). The result is a significant contribution to the history
of the Chilcotin plateau, and more broadly to our understanding of the use of
history to control the destiny of a place and its people.
The first part of the book explains how promoters and opponents of
a proposed copper-gold mine turned to seemingly arcane aspects of geological
and environmental history to bolster their arguments about the genetic distinc-
tiveness of the rainbow trout population of Fish Lake, and thus the defensibility
of a mine that would inevitably destroy the lake. The case study is unique, but
the theme broadly relevant.
Part two explores the background to proposals to commemorate the
bicentennial of Alexander Mackenzie’s successful crossing of North America in
1793. How should Mackenzie’s accomplishment be remembered? Should it be
celebrated, or mourned? Does the speed with which Mackenzie was able to walk
overland from the Fraser River to the Pacific Ocean reflect the greatness of the
explorer, or does it reveal the skill of aboriginal mapping and guiding, and the
ease with which anyone at the time could travel the country, thanks to the
ancient and well-travelled overland trade routes that criss-crossed the landscape.
That it proved impossible to reconstruct Mackenzie’s route precisely, and that
the Tsilhqot’in had ceded none of the land on the Chilcotin plateau to the
Canadian stat e, o n ly complicated effo rts to commemorate Mackenzie in the 1990s.
The final section of this book examines the role of the Tsilhqot’in in
the fur trade, and the circumstances surrounding the “Chilcotin War” (1864), in
the context of the responses to the unnatural death of Fred Quilt, probably at
the hands of police, in 1971, and the Gustafsen Lake standoff in 1995. The
discussions of the Tsilhqot’in in the fur trade is an important contribution in
itself because it dispels the myth that the Tsilhqot’in had no interest in partici-
pating in the fur trade. The sections on the death of Fred Quilt, and the
Cariboo-Chilcotin Justice Inquiry (Sarich Commission) that was established in
1992 to inquire into allegations of police wrongdoings, are also important
because they brings these little known events to scholarly attention. Testimony
at the Sarich Commission made it clear that many Tsilhqot’in, Carrier, and
Secwepemc people saw Fred Quilt’s death as just one example in a long history
of abuse, a history in which contrasting interpretations of events as far back as
the Chilcotin War retained their significance. Indeed, the fact that the attorney
general of British Columbia responded to Sarich’s report with an apology for
the hanging of the Tsilhqot’in men who participated in the Chilcotin War
reflects the government’s acknowledgement of the power of historical memory,
although its inability to respond adequately to more recent history may help
explain why circumstances deteriorated into armed standoff only two years later.
Some odd weaknesses mar the book somewhat. There are some maps
that, although useful hardly seem necessary, but there is no map of Fish Lake
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and its environs. Because of the way many readers are likely to use this book,
the index is very disappointing. To find the pages on which Fred Quilt is dis-
cussed readers need to scan the long entry under “people,” and to learn about
the Thompson Land and Cattle Company they have to consult “stakeholders.”
Readers prescient enough to look under “aboriginals” to find “Sarich
Commission” will then be directed to the non-existent entry for “Cariboo-
Chilcotin Justice Inquiry.” Nevertheless, this well-deserved winner of the
Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Prize for British Columbia provides us
with a very valuable and nuanced look at the history, and the historical memory,
of the Chilcotin plateau.
Theodore Binnema
University of Northern British Columbia
Gerald Hunt and David Rayside, eds., Equity, Diversity, and Canadian
Labour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
Labour activists and historians have debated for many years over whether or not
to focus on the divisions among workers and unionists or on the elements that
unite those in the labour movement. We might characterize this debate as one
that pits “splitters” against “uniters.” More recent scholarly writing in this field
tends to come down more on the “splitter” side of the equation. In their edited
work, Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour, Gerald Hunt and David Rayside
attempt to deal with the problem of how to create a more united, equal, and,
ultimately, stronger labour movement that will welcome workers from a diverse
array of backgrounds. Hunt and Rayside’s text is of a piece with earlier works
such as Linda Briskin and Lynda Yanz’s Union Sisters and Briskin and Patricia
McDermott’s Women Challenging Unions; it also provides a good companion to
recent historical works like David Goutor’s Guarding the Gates. On the whole,
the book is a strong addition to an area that needs more study and it is a text
that will be read by academics and activists alike, particularly those who struggle
with issues surrounding equity and diversity in unions.
The editors have assembled a strong group of scholars who offer a
variety of perspectives on the labour movement and its engagement with mar-
ginalized workers: race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability are the most
prominent “sites” of discrimination that are interrogated here. Of particular
note for historians, Julie White’s selection “Looking Back,” presents an overview
of the history of racial, gender, and gay and lesbian oppression from the 1890s
to the 1980s. In keeping with the text’s overall thrust, White suggests that,
although unions did not always take a stance in favour of equality, they generally
have moved in a progressive direction on these issues over the course of recent
history (46-47).
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William J. Turkel, "The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of Chilcotin Plateau" (Vancouver: UBA Press, 2008)

Campbell, Peter

In the final section of Liberalism for a New Century, Danny Postel and
Michael Tomasky extend the postmortem for liberalism to foreign policy in ways
that support the general tenor of the earlier chapters: the liberalism of the New
Deal and the Great Society was better, more authentic, more universally appeal-
ing than the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, postmodern, anything-goes post-
1960s liberalism of relativism, fluid identity, and lifestyle choice. Postel argues
that Iranian intellectuals’ fondness for Habermas, Popper, and Arendt reveals
how appealing an older, Enlightenment-based liberalism of individual freedom,
political democracy, and rights remains in much of the non-Western world.
Tomasky contends that liberal hawks who supported the Iraq war and liberal
doves who opposed it need to own up to their mistakes: for hawks, their defense
of the invasion as a justifiable effort to establish democracy, when George Bush
actually intended to establish a client state in the Middle East; and for doves, the
view that any foreign intervention whatsoever is always illegitimate. Both groups
should resubscribe to a pre-Bush liberal internationalism, argues Tomasky, in
which fighting wars to right unacceptable wrongs may at times be both legitimate
and necessary.
The strongest (and most controversial) message of the edited volume
is a call for return to liberalism at its best and brightest, when liberals achieved
significant steps toward a welfare state, established (de jure) full civil rights, set in
place international structures and policies that ultimately defeated communism,
and retained a diverse middle and working class base in the Democratic Party.
Thus the volume can be read as an endorsement of the vision that placed Barack
Obama in the White House, promising to withdraw US forces from Iraq, redress
wrongs perpetrated at Guantanamo, achieve universal health care, restore essen-
tial economic regulation, and deal with global warming. Yet the serious defense
of workers’ job and organiing rights that these writers see as essential to liberal-
ism has not had top billing in the Obama agenda; nor, it currently appears, will a
significant redistribution of income and wealth be a major goal of the rebuilding
of economic regulation. Perhaps more renewal will be needed.
Mary O. Furner 
University of California, Santa Barbara
Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
(Edinburgh, Oakland, West Virginia: AK Press, 2008).
In 1931, as the Great Depression gathered steam, Louis Adamic published
Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America. Adamic, a self-taught Slovenian
immigrant who came to the United States in 1913, drew on extensive experience
as a wage labourer and his wide reading of literature on the labour movement to
create a compelling “popular” account of violence in American labour history.
Book Reviews118
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It remains compelling to this day, testament to Adamic’s searching critique of
American capitalism, and compassion for its victims.
On one level Dynamite recounts the familiar story of the Molly
Maguires, the great riots of 1877, Haymarket, the Homestead Strike, the 1910
dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building, the Mooney-Billings frame-up,
the Great Steel Strike of 1919, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Some readers will find
Adamic’s choice of emphasis erratic; five pages are dedicated to General Jacob
Coxey’s 1893-94 march of the unemployed on Washington, while the execution
of Joe Hill, legendary Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labour organizer,
merits a single paragraph. Adamic’s use of terminology can be confusing; in
discussing the IWW he quite rightly distinguishes violence from sabotage, cor-
rectly interpreted as striking on the job. Yet in describing some Wobblies in the
1920s as “veritable evangelists of sabotage” (269) Adamic calls into question his
own distinction, leaving the impression that Wobbly-influenced American work-
ers understood destroying company property and wrecking machinery as very
much a form of violence.
In contrast, Adamic demonstrates insight and nuance in challenging
the stark dichotomies academic labour historians have tended to draw between
the reformist American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the radical American
Railway Union, Western Federation of Miners and IWW. Adamic argues that in
the 1910-11 period the American left and labour movement was at the height of
its challenge to American capitalism and the American state; there was little to
distinguish the rhetoric of Samuel Gompers from the rhetoric of Eugene Debs,
little to differentiate the left from the right of the labour movement. At times
readers will find Adamic’s arguments contentious, contradictory, and lacking evi-
dentiary credibility, but rarely will they find them without insight and challenge.
At first curious, but ultimately understandable, is that the heart of
Dynamite is a 50-page treatment of the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times
building, a “crime” later confessed to by the McNamara brothers, John J. and
James B. Adamic uses the case to effectively communicate that in 1910 the AFL
was a hybrid beast, Samuel Gompers’ denunciations of anarchists and violence
its public face, the use of dynamite “a definite part” of its policy and tactics
(66). AFL unionists employed dynamite, Adamic insists, and Gompers and the
AFL “knew what they were doing” (67). Adamic is a fierce critic of Gompers
and the AFL, but he has no use for left-wing radicals and liberal intellectuals
who fail to understand that the Federation survived because of rank-and-file
militance and the necessary resort of its leaders to violence.
At the core of Adamic’s analysis is the intertwining of organized
labour and organized crime. The Chicago anarchists advocated the use of dyna-
mite, which was then taken up by AFL unionists such as the Iron Workers, only
then to be taken up by professional criminals. Labour unions instructed gang-
sters in the use of dynamite, not the other way around (252). Making the link
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to the rank-and-file, Adamic brilliantly reveals, with great verve and insight, why
an American worker would much prefer to be a racketeer and criminal than an
honest industrial labourer. Poverty in America, Adamic argues, drives the work-
er into the underworld, not into the radical movement. There is hope that the
American working class will some day embrace Marx and the class struggle, but
Adamic lays down the gauntlet; before that happens, Marxist intellectuals need
to truly open their eyes to the brutal underbelly of American life.
Worker run book publisher and distributor AK Press is to be com-
mended for re-publishing Dynamite, complete with a revealing “Forward” by Jon
Bekken that locates Dynamite in the context of Louis Adamic’s other works. AK
Press has looked beyond its anarchist mandate to publish a work that at times
seems to suggest that the function of labour violence has been to save capital-
ists from themselves. That said, Dynamite is a hard hitting, honest, and revealing
exposé of the brutal and unrelenting violence of American capitalism.
Desperation, Adamic quite rightly argues, breeds violence, and in terroristic acts
we see “the horror of desperate men thrown out of work with their families on
the verge of starvation” (249). Put Dynamite on your to-read list; it is a heartfelt
appeal for understanding of American workers who have been driven, and will
continue to be driven, to not-so-quiet acts of desperation.
Peter Campbell
Queen’s University
Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense
in U.S. Radical History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).
Some historians work within tightly bounded areas: one particular event, or
institution, or place, at one particular time. Others, and Rebecca N. Hill falls in
this category, look across a broader expanse of the past and see connections
between different segments that are generally treated separately. Men, Mobs, and
Law:  Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History traces the “history of
both anti-lynching campaigns and radical defense from the era of abolitionism
until the New Left” (3). From that brief description, it should be clear that Hill
has set herself an ambitious task, and the book that results is challenging but
very worthwhile.
What the campaigns discussed here (John Brown, Haymarket, anti-
lynching, various IWW campaigns, Sacco and Vanzetti, Scottsboro, the
Rosenbergs, and George Jackson) have in common is that the state and its judi-
cial apparatus is figured as the enemy of justice, particularly for those working
for social and political change. Even the anti-lynching campaigns of Ida B.
Wells and others sought social and political change, though they wanted more
vigorous action by the legal system, not less. During the period under discus-
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Louis Adamic, "Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America" (Edinburgh, Oakland, West Virginia: AK Press, 2008)

Anastakis, Dimitry

gories of class and gender interacted.
Though the book title announces that it concerns the years 1895-1917,
that is the heyday of the anarchist movement, there is a final chapter on homo-
sexual activists of the interwar era, and a conclusion on the transformation of
homosexual politics after the Stonewall riots. He accepts the usual account of
the rapid decline of anarchism after America’s entry into World War I, as born-
again Americanism led to the persecution and deportation of radicals, and the
Russian Revolution gave added luster to communism as the serious revolution-
ary movement of the left. Somewhat paradoxically, as the culture overall
became more liberated sexually in the Roaring Twenties, the left turned socially
conservative. The sexual liberation of the “Lyrical Left” of the pre-war era was
soon forgotten, while aging anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander
Berkman condemned current mores as favoring loose sex rather than free love.
Benjamin Tucker left for Europe as early as 1908, after a fire destroyed his
bookstore, and spent the next thirty years living in southern France, where
Berkman and Goldman also ended up after being deported to the Soviet Union.
Their examples underscores a point Kissack makes throughout, that there was
continuous dialogue between European and American theorists of sexual radi-
calism in this era. Kissack’s readable book highlights unique anarchist accept-
ance of deviant sexuality by ideologues who were not themselves homosexuals,
as well as anarchist realization that sexuality as well as labor played a key role in
defining how people related to their society and to themselves.
Richard D. Sonn
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the
American City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), and Lewis H.
Sidgelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
The ongoing crisis in the automotive industry reminds us all that the car
remains a central tenet of the modern experience. While the angst and fallout
over the past, present and future of building autos garners all the headlines
(especially in North America), the driving of vehicles, and their social impact, is
so ubiquitous as to sometimes escape scrutiny. There have been thousands of
books on cars and driving and the auto industry, but often the simplest and
most direct consequences of the car are overlooked.
Two recent books on the automobile’s role in society break from that
ubiquity to provide us with disparate examinations of the far reaching and pro-
found role that the car has played in shaping our world, from the very
streetscapes we inhabit to Cold War battles over ideology and real politik. Both
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books do exactly what good history is supposed to do: Reveal the past in a
manner which makes us understand better our own present, and do it in a way
that is accessible, convincing and a pleasure to read.
Peter Norton’s wonderful book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor
Age in the American City, takes us to the very moment when the car’s arrival burst
into a war over control of the city street. Citizens and “motordom” (the name
car interests gave themselves) used the courts, police, safety councils and most
importantly public opinion to battle over control of the street. And it was a
war: Norton shows how the carnage from cars left thousands of Americans
dead and how these casualties, especially children, were seen in the post-First
Wo rld War period as victims of a slaughter as senseless as the killing fields of E u ro p e.
Indeed, in an effort to slow the auto’s progress, monuments erected to
the victims of traffic fatalities consciously echoed the Great War edifices that
dotted the new cityscape. Motordom fought back by taking control over safety
councils, employing traffic “engineers”, and always attempting to shift the bur-
den of responsibility away from the car. The social construction of the street
became a war over language: drivers became “speed demons” while pedestrians
were tagged as “jaywalkers”, children were either victims, or their mothers’
deemed irresponsible. This is a particular strength of the book, as we can see
how our own emotional connections to the car, to the street, and to our ideas of
a city— identities as pedestrians or drive rs we understand eve ry time we walk acro s s
a street or get behind the wheel— came to be initially shaped and we re fought ove r.
We all know how the battle ended: Cars won, yet Norton’s book
makes us understand that this victory was not inevitable, nor was the way that
the city was reshaped to accommodate autos. Norton has done us all a service
by re-conceptualizing the already dying notion that all first-users giddily
embraced the car at first sight. No, the car’s rise to preeminence in society was
hard-fought, and sometimes tentative. This thoughtful, exceedingly well-
researched and beautifully illustrated book should be read not only by automo-
tive historians, but by social historians, historians of technology, and simply any-
one interested in reading good history.
Lewis Siegelbaum’s Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, is
about as far away from the streets of interwar New York or Philadelphia as one
can get. Writing about Soviet-era cars, automobile policy and the use of cars
(from exalted Politburo members in fancy ZIL limos to ordinary Russians in
Ladas) the books takes a much more broad and political economic case study
than Norton’s work. Moreover, Seigelbaum is also attempting to help us under-
stand the social implications of cars in Soviet Russia, while at the same time giv-
ing the reader a brief (and effective) overview of the cars that were built by the
Soviets. This is a tall task, but one which Seigelbaum manages to pull off very
persuasively, though at times he seems to be spreading himself too thin. One
almost wishes that he had written two books: one on the Soviet auto industry,
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another on the political and social impact of cars on the Motherland.
As such, the book focuses on the main auto producing cities (the vast
“Soviet Detroits”), Russia’s age-old problems of poor roads, the use and mean-
ing of autos in the Soviet era, and how the increase in car usage came to be
seen as a political and ideological problem for the government. Along the way,
Siegelbaum inundates the reader with fascinating tales of Soviet Russia’s auto
revolution— from the pervasive influence of foreign manufacturers (Fords and
Fiats were long part of the Soviet autoscape, the latter built in Togliatti, a mas-
sive car city named after the Italian Communist leader), to the role played by
cars in the October Revolution (Kerensky attempted to flee in one, but the
Bolsheviks had disabled all of them the previous night), to images of Lenoid
Breshnev’s driver’s license. A true voyage of discovery for Siegelbaum, and
clearly a labour of love, at times the book reads like a personal travel memoir.
Fighting Traffic and Cars for Comrades are two very different books, yet
for all the geographic and disciplinary distance between them, they are intimate-
ly connected: Siegelbaum’s book shows how the growing desire (not the more
state-controllable demand, as Siegelbaum makes clear) for cars and the private
personal mobility they represented was incongruent with the dictates of com-
munism; Norton’s book illustrates how the growth of personal mobility in the
US was incongruent with the idea of public space. In each case, motordom
won out over the notion of the commonweal, in both instances with very mixed
results. Ultimately, the car might have meant freedom, but as both books
demonstrate, the cost was tremendous— be it the right to walk across the street,
or the very notion of collective effort. The ubiquitous car plays a role in shap-
ing cities, and toppling empires, too.
Dimitry Anastakis
Trent University
Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance
During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
With this fascinating work of scholarship Luis Alvarez bridges social and cultur-
al history, Chicano and African American History, Ethnic Studies and American
Studies. The book’s comparative structure linking Los Angeles and New York
City both broadens and deepens its analysis of youth culture, style politics, citi-
zenship, race, gender, sexuality, and class. The author successfully sheds new
light on a multifaceted subject, arguing that hep cats, pachucos, and pachucas
“employed a ‘body politics of dignity’” (9) as a way to resist being segregated,
regulated, racialized, criminalized, and dehumanized. He situates popular cul-
ture as a site of everyday politics, and the body as a site of power relations, all
within the context of the Double V campaign to defeat fascism abroad and dis-
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Peter D. Norton, "Fighting Traffic: the Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), and Lewis H. Sidgelbaum, "Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviety Automobile" (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008)

EDITORIAL NOTE
Domestic service occupies an exceptional role in labour history for its historic and
contemporary intersections with issues of gender, race, and class. As such, the
study of paid domestic labourers—women (and to a lesser extent, men) hired to
cook, clean, perform child care and other services in private homes and public
spaces—has changed. Once seldom acknowledged as ‘real’ labour, its position on
the boundary of home and work, and the often similarly unstable position of
domestic workers in the labour market now make it an important site of study.
Along with considerations of class, race, and gendered identities, domestic service
studies have also provided valuable insights into the impact of government poli-
cies and immigration. The work of domestic servants—and, specifically, women
and men of colour—is consequently both a project of labour historians seeking to
capture the stories of these neglected workers and a site that feminist, Marxist, and
poststructuralist historians and theorists have used to interrogate the concept of
labour itself.
The editors of Left History are pleased to present four articles that we feel
make important contributions to the field. Aside from demonstrating the wide
variety of theoretical approaches that can be employed in terms of studying
domestic service, the articles commonly use the relationship between servants and
employers as a lens to study shifts in popular attitudes and to reveal underlying
social tensions and fears. In “Assessing Men and Maids: The Female Servant Tax
and Meanings of Productive Labour in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain”, Susan
Brown considers the intersections between economic policy and popular under-
standings of work and domestic service. For Brown, studying the public outcry
over a 1785 maidservant tax offers valuable insights into the mindset of servants
and their middle class employers and demonstrates the anxieties that accompanied
shifting notions of domesticity and ‘appropriate’ gender roles. Jumping ahead
more than a century, Lucy Delap finds similar evidence of social unease over the
boundaries of class and gender in her study of Victorian and early-twentieth cen-
tury domestic service class-crossing narratives. Examining folk tales, literary narra-
tives, and social commentaries, Delap’s article investigates the fascination of mid-
dle class women with role reversal plots, which she argues allowed them imagined
access into the occupational roles, psychic spaces, and distinct subjectivities of
domestic servants.
Like Delap’s article, Mary Cathryn Cain’s contribution on the racializa-
tion of Irish and African American servants in Northern U.S. antebellum society
analyses cultural texts as a means of understanding changing popular attitudes
about the home as a workplace. Studying the transition from a system of non-paid
‘helps’ to employed servants, Cain discusses the social conditions that drove
native-born white American women from service and considers the ways in which
white middle-class women increasingly viewed their employees through the prism
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 9
of race in order to protect their own ideological interests and to preserve notions
of republicanism.
Connections between femininity, domesticity, race, and domestic labour
also play a key role in Michele Johnson’s investigation of Jamaican domestic ser-
vants between 1920 and 1970. Examining relations between servants and employ-
ers, Johnson considers the ways in which both parties negotiated and drew upon
popular discourses of ‘proper’ and ‘problematic’ bodies in their dealings with each
other. Like the other contributors, Johnson is interested in the wider social impli-
cations of these interactions, and in particular, gaining insight into the perspective
of the servants themselves through the use of oral histories.
Readers unfamiliar with the existing scholarship may want to start with
Susana Miranda’s review essay “Exploring Themes in the Scholarship on
Twentieth Century Domestic Work in Canada and the United States”. Through an
examination of ten books written over the past twenty years, Miranda carefully
outlines the various theoretical approaches and techniques employed by academ-
ics from numerous fields that have shaped the emerging field of domestic service
studies.
Finally, we would also like to take this opportunity to recognize the con-
tributions of the former editorial team members Mark Abraham, Christine
Grandy, and Ben Lander to this issue and the others they helped produce over the
past two years. As new editors, we endeavour to build on the great work that they
and our other predecessors have established.
The Editors
Winter 2007
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