Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Johnson, Michele A.

“Problematic Bodies”: Negotiations and Terminations in Domestic
Service in Jamaica, 1920-1970

Heron, Craig

130
© Left History
12.2 (Fall/Winter 2007)
REVIEW ESSAY
Recreation as Vice: Drugs in Twentieth-Century Canada
Craig Heron—York University
Catherine Carstairs, Jailed for Possession: Illegal Drug Use, Regulation, and Power in
Canada, 1920-1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006).
Marcel Martel, Not This Time: Canadians, Public Policy, and the Marijuana Question,
1961-1975 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006).
Jarrett Rudy, The Freedom to Smoke: Tobacco Consumption and Identity (Montreal and
Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2005).
This morning, countless millions of us ingested heavy doses of caffeine. Many
enhanced the pleasure by adding sugar. Some also inhaled nicotine at the same
time. As the day rolled on, these pleasures were often repeated. Some also turned
to various over-the-counter barbiturates to enhance daily experiences. Before
bedtime, many would take into their bodies one or more psychotropic sub-
stances—marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and so on. Vastly more would intro-
duce into their bloodstreams the ethanol in various alcoholic beverages. Rarely
were any of these drugs a remedy for a specific illness. We simply turned to them
to heighten the pleasure of particular moments, often those enjoyed with friends
or loved ones. They were, in the language of the experts, ‘recreational’ drugs.
There has never been a consensus in most western countries that we
should have easy access to such substances and the pleasures and dangers they
provided. At various moments, often identified by historians as ones of ‘moral
panic’, public discussion of many of them has crested, and some kind of state
intervention has ensued to restrict or prevent consumption (or sometimes, as in
the case of alcohol, to roll back restraints). Three recent books explore some of
these moments in twentieth-century Canada and open up fascinating windows on
how some particularly controversial recreational drugs came to be constructed and
regulated. Jarrett Rudy looks at the rapid expansion of tobacco smoking in the
opening decades of that century, as seen in Canada’s one-time tobacco capital,
Montreal. Catherine Carstairs examines the fate of users of more marginal drugs,
especially heroin, in the middle decades. And Marcel Martel describes the wide-
ranging debate over marijuana in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The main substances discussed in these books were certainly not intro-
duced into Canadian society in the same ways. Distinctive drug cultures and com-
munities of users developed around each. Tobacco consumption had a long his-
tory, in fact pre-dating the arrival of European settlers, who learned smoking from
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 130
the First-Nations occupants of North America. The practices of smoking, how-
ever, were evolving considerably at the turn of the twentieth century, and subtle
social distinctions arose over what to smoke and where to smoke it. Pipe tobac-
co came to be discredited as ‘uncivilized’ by urbane bourgeois gentlemen, who pre-
ferred fancy cigars, and well-paid urban workers, who savoured the five-cent vari-
ety, although smoking Canadian pipe tobacco continued to be highly valued
among many French Canadians keen to assert their rurally based national identity.
Aside from some native and farm women who might enjoy a pipe of tobacco and
prostitutes who might light up a cigarette, smoking was an almost exclusively male
activity, and, as Rudy argues so well, was part of the ways through which men
defined their own collective gendered space free of females, sometimes at home,
but more often in public places (such as clubs, taverns, or cigar stores), where
male-only recreational life could flourish. The rituals that men developed for
smoking together also helped to distinguish them from each other, particularly by
class, on the basis of the refinement of their tobacco choices (Cuban, not
Canadian) and their independent self-control (not smoking excessively or in the
presence of women, for example). Such distinctions explain why working men’s
preference for enjoying a smoke on the way home from work sparked sharp class
tensions when smoking was banned on Montreal’s streetcars in 1913.
The really new product of the early twentieth century was the mass-pro-
duced cigarette, which was less popular among Canadian smokers than pipe-smok-
ing until the late 1920s, but which was culturally more open-ended, attracting defi-
ant youths, provocative women, and disreputable dandies. Rudy could have said
more about how cigarette smoking became the leading way for gangs of pre-ado-
lescent boys to assert a defiant, transgressive masculine identity, especially in work-
ing-class neighbourhoods, but he does describe well how the young bachelors who
were recruited into the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I turned
cigarettes into a widely shared symbol of youthful, sensual manliness that persist-
ed after the war (just as they did with beverage alcohol). The interwar period also
saw women gradually take up cigarette smoking as part of the new, more assertive
femininities of the period. By the 1930s, new advertising targeted middle-class
women as a distinct market, and female movie stars were puffing away sensuous-
ly on screen. Tobacco smoking was mainstream and respectable.
There were other drugs that residents of Canada turned to for pleasure
that were not greeted with such tolerance. Opium was the drug of choice among
Chinese immigrants a hundred years ago, and small but growing numbers of white
middle-class Canadians sought pleasure in this substance as well. For the Chinese,
it was most often used for after-work relaxation, somewhat similar to social drink-
ing among the European population. As it became less accessible and more
expensive in the 1920s, opium more or less disappeared everywhere outside
Vancouver and heroin (along with, to a lesser extent, morphine and cocaine) grad-
ually became the most commonly used psychotropic drug in Canada. In contrast
Recreation as Vice 131
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 131
to the highly visible Montreal tobacco factories or even the early Vancouver opium
factories, the usual source of these drugs was illicit trafficking on the street.
Since selling and using these narcotics was illegal and ruthlessly policed,
casual users, whether Chinese or white middle-class, dropped away, and hard-core
users formed close-knit communities, more likely sharing a needle than an opium
pipe, and operating in the shadows of Canadian social life. Carstairs gives us a
remarkably clear picture of these people, based on a careful analysis of case files in
legal and John Howard Society records. Most came from poor, white, working-
class homes, typically had brushes with the law in their youth, and served time in
penal institutions, starting with juvenile reformatories. Many were marginally
employed vagrants or prostitutes, and after World War II they were typically young
adults. They turned to opiates not simply for the physical relief the drugs could
provide from such difficulties in their lives, but also as part of an assertion of
transgressive defiance of authority and “the excitement of participating in a high-
ly criticized and deviant activity”(66). She emphasizes that they were not all phys-
ically addicted, and often moved in and out of consumption, drawn back to the
companionship of the users’ community, which frequently included their intimate
partners. It nonetheless offered a life filled with health risks and regular trips to
jail, and many users tried to quit for good as they aged.
Marijuana was almost unknown among these people before the 1960s.
But, in that decade, smoking pot became popular among a whole new constituen-
cy that had had no contact with older illicit drug cultures—young baby-boomers
of high-school and university age. How that happened is not discussed at much
length in Martel’s book, which, to be fair, is a study of public policy rather than
drug cultures. The public uproar about Toronto’s Yorkville or Vancouver’s
Gastown certainly does not explain what was going on in suburban basements far
from the evils of downtown life. But he does link the consumption of marijuana
(and LSD, which gets considerable attention in his study as well) to other well-
known trends in youth cultures of the period, particularly rebellious rejection of
conventional morality about dress standards, comportment, sexuality, and defer-
ence to authority in general. In the eyes of numerous investigative bodies, the
marijuana problem was intimately wrapped up with the general ‘problem’ of youth.
As with tobacco, there were significant gender dimensions to the con-
sumption of other drugs. Far more men used them and got caught. Among the
later generations of ‘soft-drug’ users, males were typically more likely to smoke
pot, while females were much higher users of barbiturates. Men, of course, were
also much heavier drinkers than women.
The three books thus help us appreciate how drug cultures take shape.
Along with the search for recreational pleasure, it is repression and regulation that
shapes the contours and rituals of consumption. Before World War II, smoking
tobacco raised few of our current health concerns (many doctors even recom-
mended moderate amounts of smoking), but moral reformers such as the
Heron132
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 132
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) abhorred the bad associations
connected with the practice and spearheaded campaigns for prohibition. They did
their best to generate a moral panic to parallel the public lamentations about booze
in the early twentieth century, but, aside from getting an age restriction (under six-
teen) entrenched in law, Rudy explains that they never succeeded in significantly
suppressing adult tobacco consumption. The same could not be said for the other
recreational drugs discussed in these books, which have remained illegal since
1908. There were nonetheless continuities in the moral construction of all these
substances. The WCTU itself liked to link the degradation of tobacco smoking
with the dangers to white youth that lay in Chinese opium dens. In fact, even
though Chinese consumption dwindled, race (and racism) played a central role in
the ongoing discrediting of opiate use and the stereotyping of drug traffickers as
immoral. The fears raised about teenage pot smoking in the 1960s had the same
resonance. As Martel notes (and might have explored further), “recreational drugs
were no longer linked to specific subcultures and groups such as artists and writ-
ers, or certain ethnic groups such as blacks and Mexicans” (39). More generally,
enjoying all these drugs, including at points tobacco, was repeatedly denounced as
unacceptable self-indulgence—what Sabbatarians liked to call ‘pleasuring’—and a
lack of appropriately sober, restrained self-discipline.
The repressive policies that grew up around the most despised recreation-
al drugs significantly distorted patterns of consumption. This is clearest in Car-
stairs’ compelling account, which documents how the remarkably large-scale, inva-
sive anti-drug policing of the 1920-60 period compelled users to find their increas-
ingly expensive supplies through backstreet peddlers or by outright theft, put them
in a regularly revolving door to a prison cell, made the defiant posture of drug use
more attractive to young working-class users, and, perhaps most importantly,
pushed them toward heroin as the most accessible drug. Similarly young marijua-
na users turned to the streets for their drugs, faced stiff jail for simple possession
until 1969, and still continued to toke up in a determined gesture of defiance.
How did such repressive policies emerge and what challenged them?
Rudy shows how efforts to cut off tobacco foundered on the shoals of deeply
entrenched expressions of masculinity. Carstairs traces the intersection of racial
concerns and social-purity issues that erupted between the 1900s and the 1920s.
Martel devotes much more space to how public policy on drugs was challenged
but ultimately not fundamentally changed, despite the lengthy ruminations of the
federal Le Dain Commission on non-medical use of drugs between 1969 and 1973.
Beyond widening use of marijuana, the main issue that provoked discussion was
the heavy penalty young people were playing for this victimless ‘crime’. Martel
presents a model of interest group competition, in which some groups lacked the
power to move the mountains of resistance. He identifies four groups—universi-
ty students, police forces, doctors, and the pharmaceutical industry, each of which
took a different public stand, all but the students opposing substantial liberaliza-
Recreation as Vice 133
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 133
tion of marijuana legislation. He might also have given interest-group status to the
government-funded drug-research centres, notably in Ontario and British
Columbia, whose claims to expertise sometimes gave them considerable autono-
my from provincial governments (and the medical profession, despite the domi-
nance of doctors within them).
There might have been a different way to construct an argument about
the failure to liberalize marijuana legislation. A closer look at the ‘traffic’ in this
drug would have made clear that it was a black-market operation with no public
face that could come forward to present its case, as tobacco producers or, in the
great debates over alcohol consumption, the perfectly respectable brewers and dis-
tillers had done. Indeed, drug traffickers may have preferred the illegality, which
guaranteed high prices. Moreover, those who seek pleasure from a clearly labelled
‘vice’ often savour the illicit qualities of the product and are reluctant to climb the
ramparts of public opinion to defend their ‘bad habits’. As I have argued else-
where, for example, Canada’s tipplers were remarkably quiet during most of the
prohibition crusade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Martel
notes, the students and youth more generally made few appearances before the
investigative bodies, including the Le Dain Commission (my own memories of
that period of student activism include a haze of pot smoke around many gather-
ings, but virtually no formal discussion of pro-marijuana resolutions in student
councils or mass demonstrations demanding legalization). Young pot-smokers
were not so much lighting up “to shock their parents and anyone else in authori-
ty” (most tried to avoid detection) as to create alternative communities among
themselves (44). Baby-boomer youth was actually more divided on this issue than
Martel suggests: surveys of drug use among the young consistently revealed that
the numbers of these cultural rebels were rising dramatically, but that they
remained a minority within their own peer groups. Ultimately, rather than invok-
ing political-science models about interest groups, Martel is on firmer ground
when he describes this debate as part of a cultural confrontation of wide and deep
proportions, which pitted stern moralism and cultural conventionality against
flamboyant, subversive ‘pleasuring’.
What he also makes clear, as does Carstairs in her examination of earlier
drug policies, is that there was a fundamental battle over expertise. Police forces,
especially the RCMP, asserted their knowledge of drug use based on their contact
with the criminalized users, from the ‘hop-heads’ of the 1940s to the teenage pot-
smokers of the 1960s (whom the police pursued relentlessly). Their position never
wavered and contrasted with the fragmentation of medical opinion. Most doctors
throughout the twentieth century seemed uncomfortable with heavy drug users (as
they also were with chronic drunks), and thus kept their distance. The Canadian
Medical Association split between a more liberal approach (decriminalization and
education) and grave caution. Medical science did not help much, since studies of
the impact of psychotropic drugs on the body were limited and contradictory, and
Heron134
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 134
debates raged over whether there was a ‘slippery slope’ from marijuana to harder
drugs. Even the concept of ‘addiction’ itself and the disease-model that sustained
it were uncertain. The two leading drug-research agencies in Canada, Ontario’s
Addiction Research Foundation and BC’s Narcotic Addiction Foundation, pre-
sented radically different policy proposals, as the west-coast body allied with the
RCMP in a more repressive perspective than the more liberal-minded Ontario
foundation, which favoured a health-care approach. Social workers also tried to
weigh in with greater concerns about the social adjustment of heavy drug-users,
but they remained much more marginalized. The federal government’s hand was
also restrained both by the inevitable chorus of disagreement among the provin-
cial governments and by the international commitments that successive govern-
ments had made since the early twentieth century to combat drug trafficking and
consumption, generally spearheaded by the United States.
The debates about all these drugs have never let up. Indeed, there has
been some convergence as the health risks of tobacco smoking and the healthful
possibilities of marijuana have been widely promoted. The deep differences of
opinion about liberalization of ‘soft’ drugs continue as well, and late in 2003 the
Supreme Court weighed in with a harsh judgment against any ‘right’ to smoke pot.
There are unquestionably problems with the use of any of these recreational drugs,
but appropriate public policy remains elusive. What these histories of recreation-
al drugs should remind us is that ‘scientific’ analysis has all too often been laden
with moralism, and that heavy-handed repression of drug use has raised at least as
many problems as it set out to solve. Carstairs’ conclusion is dead right: “lawmak-
ers should be suspicious of simplistic solutions” (161).
Recreation as Vice 135
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 135


Recreation as Vice: Drugs in Twentieth-Century Canada

Smith II, Preston H.

Margaret Garb - City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership
and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919; Andrew Wiese - Places of Their Own: African American
Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century

Greene, Christina

Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on
Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).
In this beautifully written and meticulously researched study, historian Annelise
Orleck has accomplished what few scholars have managed: the history of a local,
grassroots movement led by poor Black women, interwoven with analyses of
national politics and a critique of federal and state social welfare policies that will
oblige critics on the both the left and the right to re-assess the War on Poverty. In
this compelling narrative, replete with high drama, Orleck punctures holes in dep-
recating myths about ‘welfare queens’ and the ‘culture of poverty’ and instead
reveals how welfare mothers created and ran one of the most successful anti-pover-
ty programs in the nation.
White supremacy and the debilitating poverty of the southern sharecrop-
ping system combined with the expansion of the World War II defence industry
and especially the emergence of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca in the post-war
years to fuel the westward migration of Southern Blacks. However, Black women’s
dreams of the ‘promised land’ in the ‘Mississippi of the West’, as Las Vegas was
appropriately named by its African American newcomers, quickly crumbled. Black
migrants faced western-style Jim Crow housing and job discrimination, becoming
trapped in low-wage, literally back-breaking jobs as hotel maids, cooks and kitchen
helpers in Las Vegas’ expanding tourist industry. Even union membership proved
no panacea, for corrupt union officials too often made ‘deals’ with management
(e.g. union pension funds helped build some of Vegas’s largest Strip hotels) that did
little to mitigate the worst workplace conditions. But the union also offered low-
income Black women some of their first political experiences in cross-race alliances
and grassroots activism.
Orleck does not shy away from the ill-fated personal choices that some
women made; however, she convincingly demonstrates that the major causes of
their impoverishment and welfare dependency were not personal failings or the
‘culture of poverty’, but resulted from structural barriers as well as the discrimina-
tory (and sometimes illegal) practices of employers and public officials. For exam-
ple, while Ruby Duncan, the book’s main heroine, bore seven children in several
failed marriages, her placement on a hotel blacklist (after she complained about
being forced to work overtime without compensation) followed by an incapacitat-
ing workplace injury as a kitchen aid (never-mind workers’ compensation which she
was eligible for but did not receive) landed her on the welfare rolls, a poverty-trap
nearly as formidable as Southern sharecropping. Not only were Nevada’s public
assistance grants among the lowest in the nation, but by the late 1960s, 47 percent
of its welfare recipients were employed, the highest rate in the country. Indeed,
Nevada held the distinction of being “the least-taxed state in the nation” (89) and
in 1955 was the last state in the country to accept Aid to Dependent Children (more
commonly known as ‘welfare’). The ultimate blow came in 1971 when Nevada,
Left History 12.2 159
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 159
which spent less than 2 percent of its GNP on social services (even less than
Mississippi), decided to cut its welfare rolls in half without notice to recipients. In
response, scores of destitute mothers launched a march and sit-down strike at
Caesar’s Palace, a key tourist attraction, and on the Las Vegas ‘Strip’. The women
also forged an interracial alliance among local supporters and attracted Hollywood
celebrities to their cause. After a federal judge ruled that Nevada’s cutbacks were
illegal, the poor received federal funds that the state had previously blocked in order
to guarantee a low-wage and subservient labour force for the tourist industry. (One
state official even suggested that a welfare mother—who was white—take a job as
a prostitute!)
Drawing upon federal financing as well as private foundation grants, low-
income Black women established a wide range of social services including a day
care center, job training programs, a health clinic, low-income housing and eco-
nomic development projects. Even more remarkably, the women ran the programs
themselves. They also deployed ingenious if unconventional lobbying strategies
and entered electoral politics. Duncan even attracted the attention of President
Jimmy Carter who hoped their organization, Operation Life, might become a
model for well-run, cost-efficient and successful welfare programs.
Orleck reveals how a national conservative backlash, driven almost exclu-
sively by partisan Republican politics and ideology, undermined the efforts of
Duncan and her cohorts. Cutbacks of federal aid during the Reagan-Bush years are
well-known, but Orleck also uncovered more insidious attacks on social welfare
programs. For example, Duncan was investigated for over five years on alleged
financial mismanagement (a common form of harassment that decimated scores of
anti-poverty programs nationwide). Although a federal judge finally threw out the
charges, Operation Life was ineligible during the investigation to apply for most
federal funds. In another more devastating attack, Nevada, with backing from
Washington, implemented new licensing standards making the low-income women
ineligible to run the very programs they had set-up and operated for two decades.
Republican appointees replaced the women in Operation Life’s few remaining serv-
ices and today the Elks Club occupies their building. As Orleck persuasively argues,
the War on Poverty did not simply fail as conventional wisdom insists; rather, some
of its most successful programs were deliberately eviscerated.
Orleck’s captivating account of the collective accomplishments of those
too-often demonized by mainstream society—welfare mothers—offers crucial les-
sons about government programs and federal responsibility for the poor. Her
study reminds us that impoverished residents in particular should be included in
formulating solutions to poverty, a lesson that might well be applied to Hurricane
Katrina survivors. We marvel at the women’s ability to accomplish so much with
so little; yet Orleck does not romanticize the decades of hardship that took their toll
on low-income women and their families. One cannot help but wonder what
dreams were deferred, what talents remained undeveloped in lives so circumscribed
Book Reviews160
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 160
by poverty, inferior education and race and sex discrimination at nearly every turn.
In the wake of President Clinton’s so-called “welfare reform,” which Orleck notes
ended FDR’s “belief that a civilized society provides a safety net for its poorest and
most vulnerable”, and in light of increasing privatization of functions once deemed
the responsibility of government, policy-makers, politicians and activists would do
well to acquaint themselves with the history of a federally subsidized program that
worked (305). For these and so many more reasons, Orleck’s first-rate study is a
must-read, not just for scholars, but for all those concerned with gender equality as
well as racial and economic justice.
Christina Greene
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World
Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
Soul Power is an intriguing book, and contributes to a broader historical under-
standing of the U.S. New Left which does not privilege white student activism
and posits a critique of empire as formative rather than a late development. It
functions as a series of case studies: a 1960 delegation to Cuba which shaped the
perspectives of three figures key to Black Power (Harold Cruse, LeRoi Jones,
Robert F. Williams); the cultural activism of the Local 1199 union of hospital
workers in New York city from the late 1950s on; the development of first
Newsreel and then Third World Newsreel as radical film collectives; Angela
Davis’ praxis as a black Marxist; the L.A. Rebellion of black and African filmmak-
ers in the 1970s, many of whom (Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima)
remain important figures today.
Cynthia Young posits that each of these instances or institutions con-
tribute to the development of a ‘United States Third World Left’, parallel to but
distinct from various other movements like the white student left and the Black
Power movement. This is a challenging proposition, since Third-Worldism in
Young’s account is notably nonracialized—several of the groups she studies are
white-led, like 1199 and Newsreel, so what matters is not experience or even
standpoint but discourse.
Some of these investigations are more innovative than others. Those
focusing on institutions like 1199 and the filmmakers, which have rarely been
integrated into the larger ‘movement’, underline the importance of cultural work,
and the New Left’s complex web of residual and emerging formations.
Conversely, Young’s treatments of familiar figures like Angela Davis or Robert F.
Williams act mainly as ballast for her larger argument, rather than making origi-
nal claims. In large part, this is due to her reliance on a few published works by
Left History 12.2 161
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 161


Annelise Orleck - Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their
Own War on Poverty

Brown, Michael E.

its actual relation to the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s. At the
heart of all these errors lies Berger’s argument—again, uncritically following his
sources—that “Everything we did was being shaped by what was happening in
Vietnam or in the Black Power movement” (quoting Donna Wilmott, on page 281,
but a continual theme throughout). In reality, in the late 1960s, black and Third
World liberation struggles did shape events and world culture as they had never
done before, or since. But these struggles were not and could not have been more
than one side of a contradiction. The other side of that contradiction in the United
States was the power of white supremacy. And white supremacy shaped the whole
of white society, the lives and consciousness of white radicals included. The young
white people who organized and joined Weatherman were not blank slates
responding to the external stimuli of black and Third World revolution. They were
young people who had been raised in a society that for hundreds of years had priv-
ileged white over black, men over women, and the United States over the rest of
the world. If we want to understand how it was that these young white people were
able so easily to write off a Fred Hampton, or so self-confidently destroy SDS, try-
ing to understand how white supremacy shaped these young people would be a fine
place to start. Weatherman never made the kind of effort it needed to understand
this simple reality. In Outlaws of America, despite the pleasing narrative he offers,
Dan Berger has not yet made that effort either, and the goals he sets for himself are
compromised by that failing.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I have a book being published in Fall
2007 by the Press of the University of Mississippi, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why
it Failed, in which I deal with Weatherman and other SDS factions. I am also an
SDS veteran and was briefly associated with Weatherman.)
David Barber
University of Tennessee at Martin
Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, eds., The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the
Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
This book presents essays by nineteen accomplished and prominent sociologists,
from the US and other countries, which attempt to account for their development
as professionals and academicians in the context of what the editors believe are
historically specific cohort-shaping experiences. In effect, the authors are asked to
answer a question to which few of us are normally prepared to respond and to pro-
vide personally relevant information (beyond the simple facts of personal contacts,
dates, encounters, schools attended, and the like) which is normally beyond first
person explanation and for which the principles of selection are not and probably
cannot be made clear. On the other hand, there is enough which is disarmingly
Book Reviews166
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 166
off-hand in the willingness of most of the writers to assume a shared reality with
their readers (the sixties). Because so many of the essays correspond to the sort
of allegorical narrative that journalists call ‘human interest stories’, most of these
readers will find something to enjoy This is certainly not without value, but it is
not what the editors seem to have intended.
The problem is that the book promises far more than it delivers, and
what it delivers has little to do with the project envisioned by its editors. In this
respect, it is a failure, at least if judged by the editors’ description of their inten-
tion. On the other hand, like many failures this is not without benefit, since it sug-
gests that the problem lies in the project itself and not merely in the fact that it is
in no sense realized. That is, its failure allows us to rethink the presuppositions
under which the editors framed their project, and, more generally to consider
whether or not this approach to the history of sociology is intellectually worth-
while. The reason I say this is that if the editors’ intention is to shed light, as they
say, on the relationship between experience and theory, one must conclude either
that the authors were poorly instructed or that it is not possible to provide an
account adequate to such a project. I believe that the book demonstrates that the
project is at fault, not the authors. If I am correct, the failure provides a good rea-
son for thinking rather differently about how to write a history of sociology which
can illuminate the pragmatics of theory construction; and it provides an equally
good reason for thinking seriously about what problems would have to be
addressed before one could even begin discussing the possible influences of expe-
rience on theoretical dispositions. It goes without saying that there are readers
who would prefer to persist in the sort of project represented by this book, but
they will find only weak support here. In what follows, I will use quotation marks
to indicate that ‘the sixties’ is for this book a virtually undelineated construct.
Sica’s introduction purports to establish what 1968 has ‘come to mean’, but it is
not consistent in that respect with most of the succeeding chapters and so, despite
the fact that it offers a sympathetic take on aspects of the period, it doesn’t quite
fit the material which is supposed to realize the project.
The editors introduce the collection by describing their overall intention,
which is to help readers learn “about the private mechanisms that give rise to cre-
ative endeavors” (ix). Specifically, it is aimed at clarifying the ways in which ‘the
sixties’ and its immediate aftermath influenced a group of accomplished and
prominent academic sociologists. This way of describing the project relies on an
essentialist definition of the period at odds with the possibility of fitting what is
thereby fixed to what must be considered fluid (‘life experience’ presumably
including retrospection). As a result, the authors are asked to do what the very
nature of the project prevents them from doing, namely take a stance toward
something which is, for each of them, impossibly definite and total. They are
asked, then, to situate themselves within that impossible circumstance, and to pro-
vide a personal account which can be reasonably interpreted by readers as bearing
Left History 12.2 167
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 167
on the relationship between ‘life experience’ and theory, itself conceived of by
what is dangerously close to an essentialist model. Moreover, the limits the editors
placed on their selection gives sociology itself an essence (tied to something called
‘the classical tradition’), in my mind most notable for what it excludes and not for
what it includes.
The book attempts to provide support for several hypotheses: 1) that ‘the
sixties’ established parameters for the intellectual development of a specific cohort
(born between 1944 and 1951); 2) that the effects of these are evident in both their
work and their methods of accounting for themselves, as it were, autobiographi-
cally; 3) that the ties to the “classical tradition of social theory and sociology” is
due not so much to their academic training as to their capacity to resist “the pass-
ing enthusiasms of the past fifteen years, from rational choice theory at one end
to transgender theories at the other” (xii); 4) that “life experiences at critical
moments helped define and determine ultimate scholarly aspirations and achieve-
ments” (xiii); and 5) that the collection offers to return “the corpus of social the-
ory to its homeland in the larger sociological tradition” (xiii).
The fifth hypothesis is tautological since, the editors tell us, the authors
were selected according to their ties to the ‘classical tradition’, which also accounts
for why so many of them are not known specifically for their theoretical work.
That is, the exclusion of those whom the editors believe are caught up in “passing
enthusiasms” means that the absence of representatives of other philosophically
informed theories is a matter of principle, and it is at least arguable that some of
those “enthusiasms” are part of what is most vital in theory today. In any case, the
bias in the selection begs the most general question of the relationship between life
experience and theoretical work. It is perhaps unfair to complain about omissions
since no such collection can avoid the limitations of selection. But it seems to me
that at least some of what was omitted has to do with where theory seems to be
going today, and with better philosophical reason than is implied by reference to
“passing enthusiasms.” The few authors whose writings do not straightforwardly
fit under the umbrella of the ‘classical tradition’, for example, the essays by Steve
Woolgar and K. Knorr-Cetina, do not reflect on the relationship between their
work and the sixties in any way designed to address the editors’ hypotheses,
though Cetina’s discussion of some paradoxes of the period is helpful in thinking
about how it is typically represented.
It is notable, given the confidence in the project expressed in the preface
and introduction, that many of the authors began by raising questions about the
viability of writing autobiographically in regard to those claims. On the other hand,
most at least gave it a shot, as if the problems are not as important as they seem
to have thought. Paolo Jedlowski, for example, begins one of the most provoca-
tive essays with what might initially appear to be a strikingly theoretical statement
which probably ought to have been engaged in the preface: “autobiography is a
suspect genre” (141). Quite a few others seem to agree with his confession that “I
Book Reviews168
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 168
have difficulty in saying clearly what binds me to those years” (142). Yet he con-
tinues as if the difficulty poses no serious obstacle to continuing in an autobio-
graphical vein.
Two authors easily identified as American theoreticians, Jeffrey
Alexander and Craig Calhoun, wrote what for me were disappointing essays.
Alexander chose an unreachably elevated register in which to characterize the peri-
od and its possible effects. Consequently, he never comes close to the pragmatics
of theory; in particular, he provides little information relevant to how he goes
about addressing conceptual ambiguities in the course of constructing theory such
that one might begin to get a glimmer of how his theorizing might have been relat-
ed to his experience. Calhoun’s prose is admirable written but his essay provides
little to suggest a complex enough connection between the sixties and his theoret-
ical work (or to the idea of theory) to allow one to place it within the editors’ proj-
ect. The difficulty so many of the writers apparently had in identifying with the
project occasionally produced results that seemed hostile to it. Several took so
radically ironical a stance toward the sixties that it is difficult to read their essays
without seeing them as expressing bitterness or indifference to the very idea of
linking their work to the period. Several essays, perhaps for similar reasons, were
overly didactic and, in that respect, were simply not responsive to the question the
book was intended to address.
The two essays which were, for me, most interesting and inspiring were
by Michael Burawoy and Saskia Sassen. Both provided the sort of autobiograph-
ical information that either comes from an extraordinary memory or a terrific file
system. Burawoy wrote about academic, political, and theoretical influences during
the long period of his development as a professional sociologist, and, though his
choice of discipline was almost by default, one gets the feeling that the level of
commitment to the political realities he faced was in no small way part of that
development. To that extent, he at least shows what might have been done more
generally to shed light on how some people come to accept sociology as a calling,
not to mention on the pragmatics of theory, had the book’s project been framed
less ambitiously and, I should add, more sensitive to its own theoretical status.
Sassen’s chapter, which I found the most gripping, both in its prose and its con-
tent, depicts her rich experience as an activist, a performer, a lover, and a partici-
pant in geo-politics; and it recounts some of her adventures in negotiating the
terms of her career in an occasionally unfriendly academic environment. But even
in this case, the essay speaks to an altogether different relationship between career
and extra-curricular life from what is projected by the editors.
If the book is disappointing, both in the failure of its project and the
unevenness of the essays, there are still good reasons to buy it—for several excel-
lent essays, for the different ways in which the history of recent sociology is rep-
resented by different writers of note according to their mentors, the places they
found themselves in or chose during their careers, and for evidence that there
Left History 12.2 169
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 169
remain no plausible accounts of whatever “the sixties” names and no agreement
on what it means. In these respects the book is a symptomatic document, not
even an approximate realization of an idea about the historiography of sociology;
and it is only as such a document that I recommend it.
Michael E. Brown
Northeastern University
Xiaolan Bao, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in
New York City, 1948–92 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
Moon-Kie Jung, Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor Movement
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Moon-Kie Jung’s Reworking Race and Xiaolan Bao’sHolding Up More Than Half the Sky
exemplify the fruitfulness of recent scholarship on Asian Americans. Characteristic
of such recent scholarship, the two studies demonstrate both theoretical innovation
and investigative rigor in research. By placing their experiences in larger historical
contexts, the two books not only deepen our understanding of Asian Americans but
also shed new light on broad critical issues, especially race and class. For many, race
and class are two of the most perplexing issues in American history in general and
in labour history in particular. Many have viewed them as two competing and mutu-
ally exclusive consciousnesses. Therefore, the perceived lack of working class con-
sciousness, a focal point in the long-lasting debate over the notion of American
exceptionalism, has widely been seen as attributable to the influence of racial con-
sciousness.
In Reworking Race, Moon-Kie Jung offers refreshing insights into the inter-
section of race and class in the context of the development of the interracial labour
movement in Hawaii during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In chap-
ter two, he chronicles the emergence and organization of highly centralized and con-
centrated capital in the hands of a few corporations, controlled by a haole (non-
Iberian white) oligarchy. Its unyielding and vigorous antiunionism prepared one of
the conditions under which workers of multiracial backgrounds became conscious
of their common interest. Chapter three discusses the arrival of a racially diverse
labour force, its stratification, and the racial divisions in it. The remaining chapters,
chapters four through five, cover developments that eventually led to the formation
of a successful interracial labour movement in the post-war years.
Measured by the growth of the International Longshoremen’s and
Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), a focus of Jung’s discussions, the labour move-
ment’s success is remarkable, indeed. As Jung notes, “Its estimated membership of
900 frozen and declining from the beginning of the war to the end of martial law in
Book Reviews170
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 170


Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, eds. - The Disobedient Generation: Social
Theorists in the Sixties

Sangster, Joan

Measures Act. On the issue of the reading of the Manifesto on television, Tetley
wrote that it was a good decision because “the document was not convincing” (37).
The use of the War Measures Act was another good decision but there were mis-
takes made in how it was implemented. According to Tetley, these mistakes were
that the State should have been “more careful in the choice of those arrested”.
Those who were arrested should have been allowed to see their lawyers and should
have been released “more quickly”. As well, the government should have said more
to the public (94). Finally, Tetley acknowledged that Cabinet ministers had access
to the list of individuals to be arrested. Did Provincial Cabinet Ministers try to
remove names from the list? Tetley wrote that “none of use recognized any names”
(96).
His comments on the Cabinet are not abundant and only reassure the
reader that ministers were not divided and not in a state of panic (134). Concerning
Premier Bourassa, he was “calm, fair and human” (41). The author does not say
much about his role during the Crisis. Was he asked to advise the Premier? Did he
feel that his views of the Crisis were well received by his fellow colleagues at the
Cabinet table, those who worked for the Premier’s office and the Premier himself?
He did not say much about it.
Throughout the book, Tetley justified the decisions made by governments
at various stages of the October crisis. His criticisms are for those who lost what
he called their “composure” during the October Crisis. Who were they? The elect-
ed members of the Parti Québécois (PQ) in the National Assembly, the PQ leader
himself René Lévesque, the editor of Le Devoir Claude Ryan, and the intellectuals
who signed the petition calling on the Quebec government to negotiate an
exchange of Cabinet minister Pierre Laporte and James Cross for political prison-
ers.
In conclusion, for those who don’t know anything about the October
Crisis, Tetley’s book is a good place to start. However, those who are familiar with
this tragic event may wish that Tetley would have written more about his experi-
ence. Perhaps I should send my review directly to him since he indicated in his
introduction that he would welcome any comments on his book by giving his email
and professional addresses.
Marcel Martel
York University
Andrée Lévesque, translated by Yvonne M. Klein, Red Travellers: Jeanne Corbin and
Her Comrades (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 2006).
In the corpus of writing on the Canadian left, there have been few critical scholar-
ly biographies, particularly in comparison to US and British historical writing.
Left History 12.2 185
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 185
Although a few well-known social democrats like Grace McInnis and Helena
Gutteridge have been the subject of biographical studies, most biographies of com-
munist women have been short and/or hagiographical, with the very notable
exception of the recent biography of Dorise Neilsen by Faith Johnston. For this
reason, Andrée Lévesque’s treatment of Jeanne Corbin’s life is a welcome addition
to scholarship on the communist left in Canada, providing valuable insight not only
into Corbin’s life, but especially into the left milieu that Corbin was very much a
part of.
Lévesque was faced with an unusually difficult task, since Corbin died of
Tuberculosis while she was still quite young, at thirty-eight, leaving no personal
papers for posterity, and by the 1990s, the circle of communists who worked with
her had also become quite small, limiting the number of oral interviews possible.
In fact, Corbin might not have wanted to leave any personal papers, as she grew to
maturity in the communist movement in a time when state repression was particu-
larly harsh: she saw Party headquarters raided, all the office papers confiscated and
Communist Party of Canada (CPC) leaders imprisoned. Discretion was both a
political necessity, and ‘personal’ life in the sense that we know it was in some ways
a luxury for dedicated comrades whose whole life involved the Party and class
struggle.
The latter most certainly did define Corbin’s life, and Lévesque has done
an excellent job of reconstructing Corbin’s evolution as a communist, using every
source at her finger tips, from RCMP files to judicial records detailing strikes, to the
Communist Party papers seized by the government under Section 98 of the
Criminal Code. She has also gleaned some information from interviews with the
few surviving CPC members who knew Corbin. As Lévesque notes on her source
dilemma, it was impossible to really delve into Corbin’s ideas and inner motivations,
but it was possible to reconstruct her communist milieu, placing Corbin firmly
within a historical context and surmising her political beliefs. The result is a ‘life
and times’ biography that suits the subject very well.
Corbin’s role in the Party was distinctive, not simply because she was a
mid-rank leader in a Party with almost no female leaders, but also because she was
French. Although born in France and raised in a rural area of Alberta in a poor
farming family, she was seen as a glimmer of hope for the Party’s efforts in urban
Montreal and in the northern Ontario/Quebec resource hinterland. The Party was
ever conscious that it lacked francophone members particularly since the
Comintern continually chastized the Canadian leadership for failing to recruit these
doubly exploited and oppressed Quebeçois workers. Corbin was thus a part of
Montreal organizing efforts in the early 1930s, particularly party efforts to start a
French-language communist paper, and she subsequently played a key role in
northern loggers strikes, in the mining town of Timmins, and especially in the
Rouyn loggers strike of 1933-1934. By re-focusing our attention on party organiz-
ing these geographical areas, understudied in communist historiography, Lévesque
Book Reviews186
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 186
adds considerably to the more general history of the communist left in Canada.
Lévesque must also account for Corbin’s interesting role as a woman lit-
tle interested in the woman question. Corbin’s radical identification, as she points
out, clearly took shape around class and ethnicity, not gender. Unlike Becky Buhay
and some other communist women, she was not very involved in the Women’s
Department, and her organizing efforts were for a time focused on male-dominat-
ed resource industries. This was not really a contradiction, though, for the Party
did have a strong attraction for women and men alike whose sense of injustice was
shaped from reading and experience that saw class as the primary and overriding
contradiction of capitalist society. Moreover, as a single woman, Corbin was unen-
cumbered by the tasks of familial care that limited the participation of many other
female comrades. Lévesque also does a good job of placing Corbin generationally
within the communist movement, another means of understanding her brand of
radicalism. Corbin was not part of the founding group of the early 1920s, but
joined late in the decade, at precisely the time the party was becoming Stalinized,
and also during a period—the Depression—when the party faced both state repres-
sion and the intense immiseration of working people. All these factors created an
activist who believed fervently in class struggle, and also in the wisdom of the
Comintern and Canadian Party leadership; Corbin never deviated from the party
line and she was selfless in her dedication to party goals, even serving a jail sentence
after the Rouyn strike.
In the final resort, Lévesque tries to help us understand this sense of com-
mitment and sacrifice without romanticizing Corbin, whose uncritical dedication to
a Party increasingly intolerant of criticism could also been interpreted more nega-
tively. This biography thus makes an important addition to the existing literature on
the communist party in Canada, offering us both a tantalizing view of one commu-
nist life but also a better sense of the difficult and tumultuous times that made her
the communist she was.
Joan Sangster
Trent University
Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Common discourse suggests that ‘caught’ signifies a capture or seizing hold of
some intended object (a fish, for example). But it also denotes contraction (catch-
ing a cold), arresting (the flashing light caught my eye), to attend (catching a show)
and, but certainly not limited to, become popular (catch on). Common to all this
is the idea of grabbing, holding or encircling. As such, Caught is an apt title for
Tamara Myers’ book subtitled Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945.
Against the backdrop of a rapidly morphing social, economic and political ethos,
Left History 12.2 187
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 187


Andrée Lévesque, translated by Yvonne M. Klein - Red Travellers: Jeanne
Corbin and Her Comrades

Harrison, Hope M.

Like Porter, Greeley does not depart from her subjects’ political views,
largely accepting their interpretations of Republicanism and, in the case of Miró,
Catalan nationalism. Though it is one of the most compelling themes of her work,
Greeley seems uncomfortable with the notion that truly political art of the period
should be compelled to contend with fascism as well as socialism. The reader also
will encounter a few minor factual errors, though these do not undermine the argu-
ment or diminish the book’s overall strength, which is its clear and rich analysis of
the Surrealist engagement with the Spanish Civil War. Both books are useful
sources on aspects of the Spanish Civil War as an international political and cultur-
al event. The war and accompanying revolution produced a chaotic autochthonous
reality, but to many outsiders it was also an ideal laboratory to bring hitherto theo-
retical and intellectual abstractions to fruition.
Sasha D. Pack
State University of New York, University at Buffalo
John Rodden, Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology and Eastern German Identity
(University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
At a time when a former East German, Angela Merkel, is the chancellor of
Germany, it is fitting to have a study that examines the influence of East German
schoolbooks and culture on eastern Germans since the 1990 unification of
Germany. Indeed, a recent article by Roger Boyes in the Berlin newspaper, Der
Tagesspiegel, (22 September 2007) credited Chancellor Merkel’s commitment to the
environment and to combating global warming to her background in the former
communist East German youth organization, the Free Democratic Youth (FDJ).
With Merkel in office, it makes a lot of sense to examine how people brought up
in East Germany view the world now.
There are many strong points to John Rodden’s book, Textbooks Reds, but
a significant drawback is that it sets out to do too much within the covers of one
book. There is not enough connective tissue holding the three main sections of the
book together. The largest first section of the book (almost 170 pages) examines
the ideological components of former East German school textbooks in many sub-
jects: language and literature, geography, civics, history, biology, chemistry and
math. The second section of the book (almost 140 pages) is a series of interviews
with students and teachers from the former East Germany about their textbooks
but also about many other things. A third section of almost forty pages looks at
how post-unification German schools try to ‘educate for tolerance’. There is no
real conclusion, just a two-page epilogue that is further indication that the author
could not tie all the different parts of his book together.
While each section of the book definitely has its strengths, the reader is
Book Reviews200
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 200
Left History 12.2 201
often confused at what the author really wants to demonstrate other than that var-
ious East Germans experienced school, textbooks and their teachers differently and
carry varying degrees of ‘baggage’ from their East German background with them
in the united Germany. The first long section on what exactly students were taught
in different subjects in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) sometimes reads
like one table of contents after another. It is fascinating to see how Marxist-
Leninist ideology and socialist thought permeated every subject, but the compila-
tion of tables of contents, mathematical problems, and excerpts from textbooks
does not necessarily make for easy reading. Rodden uses as his source base over
two hundred textbooks, teachers’ manuals, exams, school songbooks and profes-
sional journals. Thus, there is no question that the reader gains a thorough sense
of East German textbooks and particularly how permeated they often were by
socialist thought and anti-Western, anti-capitalist discourse.
At times, Rodden alludes to ideologically motivated conflicts over school
textbooks in the United States. He is presumably trying to say that communist East
Germany was not alone in trying to control what its students learned, but the com-
parison feels awkward. After all, there are open discussions in the United States
with parents and school boards about what books are assigned to students, where-
as in East Germany these decisions were controlled by the communist party with
no open, public discussions.
Of course, which textbooks were used in schools is not necessarily the
same as which material teachers actually taught. Thus, the second part of the book
contains many interviews Rodden did with former students and teachers to find out
how much of the ideological slant of the textbooks was in fact taught and how
much of it continues to affect how former East Germans view the world today.
Some of these interviews are very interesting, and they certainly make the subject
come alive for the reader. But many of the interviews go way beyond a specific dis-
cussion of textbooks and how a general East German upbringing affected the inter-
viewees. The section is often more like a sociological study of Ossis (people from
the former East), Wessis (people from the former West), and Wossis (people from
the former West working in the east since unification). Parts of the interviews are
reminiscent of Peter Schneider’s 1983 novel Wall Jumper in its focus on the differ-
ence between Ossis and Wessis and Jana Hensel’s 2003 autobiography, Confessions of
an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next. Some of the interviews are
directly related to the first section on textbooks, such as the interview with 29-year-
old Stefan about how much of the “ideological crap” from the textbooks the teach-
ers really taught: very little in his experience (243-247). The interview with 31-year-
old Kersten indicates, on the other hand, that teachers did really teach with an ide-
ological slant (247-247, 258-260). But some interviews, such as with twenty-four-
year-old Dorothee, deal with differences in university education and in culture more
generally between most Europeans and the United States and seem only distantly
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 201
Book Reviews202
related to a focus on the former East Germany (279-288). Similarly, the interview
with the same Dorothee several years later focuses on the heavy weight of the
Holocaust on German identity, making it difficult for many to feel “proud to be
German” (288-297). This is a wonderful interview showing the ongoing weight of
the Nazi past on Germany, but how exactly it is connected to the first section on
textbooks is not at all clear.
The third rather unrelated section of the book, on efforts in united
Germany to educate students to be tolerant of people unlike themselves and par-
ticularly focusing on education in Jewish schools in Berlin, is actually listed as part
of the second section, but it really stands alone. This chapter just does not belong
in the book and one wonders why Rodden did not publish this as a separate jour-
nal article. It further confuses the reader, leading to questions about what this book
is really about. And the two-page epilogue makes no effort to tie the loose strands
of the book together, making for a disappointing ending. Rodden really missed the
chance to draw attention to what he thinks are the most important findings of the
book. Instead, the reader is left with a hodge-podge of impressions of what former
East Germans learned in school and how much their East German schooling con-
tinues to affect their thinking now.
Hope M. Harrison
George Washington University
Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds., Turizm: The Russian and East
European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2006).
“Why ramble far afield, see the good things that lie nearby.” According to this old
German proverb, repeated in an East German handbook on leisure in 1969, it is
better to appreciate the joys of home than to wander into the unknown distance.
Yet far from heeding this advice, East Germans like their socialist bloc ‘brothers’
were eager participants in the worldwide emergence of mass tourism after the
Second World War. Despite the prevalence of tourism in the former socialist bloc,
Diane P. Koeneker and Anne E. Gorsuch’s edited volume is the first work to doc-
ument tourism’s place in the construction and maintenance of Soviet and East
European states and societies. As the essays in their collection demonstrate, many
Russian and East Europeans made creative use of the resources at hand—state
organizations, personal connections and sheer ingenuity—in order to make their
yearly jaunts to sunbathe on the coasts of the Baltic and Black Seas, to hike to
mountain retreats in the Caucasus and Tatras, or to embark on shopping excursions
in Yugoslavia or Hungary. Like their counterparts in capitalist countries, citizens of
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 202


John Rodden - Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology and Eastern German
Identity

R. Hinde, John

activity down, although other forms of resistance remained. The final two chap-
ters of Worker Resistance Under Stalin detail the two most violent strikes in the
Ivanovo region that took place in 1932 which broke out after the March cut in
workers’ rations.
Rossman provides a detailed portrait of the textile workers who are the
focus of his study and has a comprehensive sense of the factors affecting identi-
ty and unity such as age, gender, literacy, ties to the land, the type of job held, party
membership, and family ties. He emphasizes the importance of work traditions
and culture as well as family to create a nuanced portrait of a complex group of
workers. The book would be even richer if Rossman could have provided more
insight into those workers who opposed unrest and those local officials who took
measures to end it. What was the impact on officials of having to be the ones to
implement the First Five Year Plan on the local level?  Some workers remained
loyal to the Party and the state; who were they?  One can glean a portrait of these
workers and local officials from the book but more on them explicitly would be
beneficial.
Overall the book is an important contribution to labour studies and to stud-
ies of the period of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. Rossman’s focus on Ivanovo
allows the reader to draw closer to the reactions on the shop floor to Stalin’s indus-
trial revolution and seriously challenges any notion that textile workers, at least,
took these changes lying down.
These two books add much to the literature on workers in Soviet Russia
after the October Revolution. Together the two works illustrate the challenges of
regarding the working class as a single entity and the value of close regional or
micro-study to further develop and nuance general historical understanding of the
Soviet Union.
Tracy McDonald—McMaster University
Carl R. Weinberg, Labour, Loyalty, Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal
Miners and World War I (Carbondale, Il.: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2005).
On 5 April 1918 a German-born coal miner, Robert Prager, was lynched just out-
side the mining community of Collinsville, Illinois. An active member of the
vibrant German-American communities of the Midwest and a staunch unionist,
Prager fell victim to the wave of anti-German sentiment and hypernationalism
that swept through the United States following its declaration of war against
Germany in the spring of 1917.
Weinberg utilizes this rather isolated event as a lens to explore the important
issue of the US working-class response to the First World War and the subsequent
labour revolt that rocked the US from 1917 to 1919. Beginning with a compre-
hensive survey of the history of the coalfields of Southwestern Illinois, Weinberg
Left History 12.1 149
then examines the wave of strikes that followed the declaration of war, an impor-
tant episode that vividly illustrated the dramatic tensions between radicals who
sought to wage war against ‘capitalist militarism’, and the state and the United
Mine Workers of America, which opposed the strike action.
The lynching of Robert Prager occurred not just at a time of heightened
class tensions in the United States, but during a period of global working-class
unrest. But at the root of the Prager incident is a paradox. While the Prager inci-
dent is usually interpreted as an example of working-class patriotism and intoler-
ance of things German during wartime, it occurred during a period of intense
strike activity and working-class solidarity. Weinberg’s goal is to resolve the appar-
ent contradiction between the miners’ patriotism and their propensity to strike and
fight for their interests.
Of course, this paradox was by no means restricted to the United States. It
was evident in most belligerent nations, Germany in particular. But while many
have seen this as an example of how the labour movement and the socialist par-
ties betrayed their class interests, Weinberg’s analysis of the miners’ patriotism and
the labour rebellion that shook the Illinois coalfields from 1917 to 1919, which
builds on both the local and the global experience of workers, offers an important
reassessment of this issue. Inspired by the work of US social historians such as
Gary Gerstle, Herbert Gutman, Sean Wilentz, and David Corbin, all of who offer
critiques of traditional Marxism, Weinberg examines the language of protest and
ideology, arguing that radical working-class demands during a time of internation-
al conflict and revolution fell within the distinctive matrix of working-class
Americanism. Accordingly, class interests did not need to conflict with the work-
ers’ patriotic imperative for a number of reasons. First, because demands for
workers’ rights were cloaked in the language of liberty, equality, dignity and citizen-
ship, ideas that were associated with the long tradition of patriotic US heroes, such
as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Second,
because the state held out the promise of reforms and rewards for loyal workers.
However, if the miners believed that their patriotism would lead to marked
improvements in their work conditions and living standards, they were mistaken.
The promised rewards never materialized after the war, and rather than uniting the
workers, patriotism and support for the government’s war effort led to nothing
less than the fragmentation and weakening of the labour movement. As Weinberg
concludes, the notion that workers could have it both ways—that as patriotic
Americans, they were part of the same “national family as their class opponents”
fighting for the cause of bourgeois “democracy”, while at the same time fighting
for their collective needs as a class—was a myth, an “impossible dream”.
According to the author, “Working people paid, and continue to pay today, for the
fundamental illusion that such a ‘family’ meaningfully exists” (199).
In fact, Prager was not just a victim of the “false fetish of patriotism” that
ran through working-class communities during the war years (33). The Prager
Book Reviews150
lynching was a by-product of deep-rooted tensions and class conflict. From 1917,
the Wilson administration was determined not just to wage war on Germany; it
was also committed to a “war for the hearts and minds of Americans” (29). In
order to “line up the people with the government,” the administration whipped up
pro-war sentiment and curbed the anti-war movement. Through the Committee
of Public Information, a wide range of propaganda was employed to generate the
“white-hot mass instinct” of the masses against external enemies as well as inter-
nal enemies, whether pro-German, pro-labour, or pro-socialist (112). This was
followed by the passing of the Sedition Act in 1918, partly in response to the spy
hysteria that swept through the US at this time, which not only generated further
fear, but may have actually encouraged the formation of bands of vigilantes, such
as the one that hanged Prager.
Weinberg’s book is informative and persuasive. But it is also disturbing. The
explicit parallels he draws between events of the First World War and the post-9-
11 Orwellian ‘war on terror’ are more than just hints of the power of the state to
manipulate the masses in the name of the ruling classes’ economic and political
interests. The stigmatization of aliens as internal enemies, government propagan-
da and the “pro-war righteous path,” the Sedition Act and the struggle to maintain
civil liberties in a climate of conflict and alleged threat to national security, reveal
a deep-seated pattern of violence and repression. It is no wonder that Weinberg,
in this new climate of fear, is concerned about how “new generations of working
people living in a declining empire [will] struggle with how much they can contin-
ue to sacrifice for the powers that be” (201).
John R. Hinde—Malaspina University College
Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias, Discounted Labour Women Workers in
Canada, 1870-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American
Workplace (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 2006).
Although these books look at different countries, Canada and the USA, and dif-
ferent time periods, 1870-1939 and the 1950s-2000s, both examine systemic dis-
criminations in the workplace and the struggles both of those fighting to win
equality and of their opposition. They offer detailed analyses of the complex
interactions of the shifting politics of class, gender, and race, as they have played
out in structural changes in the labour market, in political organising by both cap-
italists and workers and supporters of both, and in the subsistence strategies of
working people.
Frager and Patrias note that in 2002, “the earnings of women employed full
time, year round were just 71 per cent of those of their male counterparts” (3).
They ask three questions: “How and why did women become confined to low-
Left History 12.1 151


Carl R. Weinberg - Labour, Loyalty, Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners
and World War I

Delap, Lucy

“Campaigns of Curiosity”: Class Crossing and Role Reversal in British
Domestic Service, 1890-1950

Mather, David S.

Allan Antliff - Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin
Wall; Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, eds. - Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority

Not a member yet

“Problematic Bodies”: Negotiations and Terminations in Domestic Service in Jamaica, 1920-1970

Recreation as Vice: Drugs in Twentieth-Century Canada

Margaret Garb - City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919; Andrew Wiese - Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century

Annelise Orleck - Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty

Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, eds. - The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties

Andrée Lévesque, translated by Yvonne M. Klein - Red Travellers: Jeanne Corbin and Her Comrades

John Rodden - Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology and Eastern German Identity

Carl R. Weinberg - Labour, Loyalty, Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I

“Campaigns of Curiosity”: Class Crossing and Role Reversal in British Domestic Service, 1890-1950

Allan Antliff - Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall; Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, eds. - Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority

1,044

1,130