Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Nosal-Buzak, Melinda

densely populated communities, a product of the persistent belief that the current
of the St. Lawrence River was capable of purifying itself.
A comprehensive understanding of the extent to which poor sanitary
practices threatened health and commerce in Montreal only emerged in the decades
after Confederation. Gagnon links this development to the expansion of the city’s
professional middle class, which included in its ranks sanitary experts and bacteri-
ologists. The emergence of such experts and their body of knowledge is another
example of how international discourses were being put into practice at a local level,
where they were adapted to fit Montreal’s unique circumstances. Gagnon argues
that the high costs of improving the city’s infrastructure were brought about by the
need to conceptualize the city as a comprehensive network, one whose growth
would have to be carefully planned by a phalanx of trained professionals. Among
other things, the transformation of drainage from a private undertaking to a public
concern led to a remarkable expansion of the City of Montreal. The costly projects
that local governments were urged to finance by the 1880s sounded the death knell
for a number of small municipalities on the urban periphery, thereby leading to a
flurry of municipal mergers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Gagnon has crafted a useful contribution to the historiography of nine-
teenth-century Montreal, and will no doubt be of interest to those concerned with
the emergence of the professional middle class, both in Quebec and elsewhere.
Questions d’égouts demonstrates how Montrealers engaged with transnational dis-
courses regarding living conditions in the industrial city. Readers, however, will be
struck by the relative absence of the voices of those who suffered most from the
abysmal condition of Montreal’s sanitary infrastructure: its poor families and other
marginalized residents. Gagnon’s portrayal of the concerted resistance in the name
of fiscal austerity faced by those who laboured to tackle the root causes of the city’s
notoriously unhealthy urban environment will prove to be particularly resonant to
the twenty first century reader.
Dan Horner
York University
Celia Haig-Brown and David Nock, eds., With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian
Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 1997).
As historians and scholars continue to delve into the complexities of Canada’s
colonial existence, new and perhaps yet-to-be categorized pieces of this imperial
puzzle reveal themselves. Editors Celia Haig-Brown and David Nock deal with
one such piece, that of Canadians of European ancestry who displayed sensitivi-
ties towards Aboriginals while being fully implicated in the colonization process
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(2). The contributors focus on individuals and organizations ‘with good intention-
s’ that worked with Aboriginal people against the injustices they faced in Canada
between the mid-nineteenth century and the first two decades the twentieth.
However, this collection is neither an apologist text nor one that aims to “vindi-
cate the wrongs done to First Nations people and cultures as colonization pro-
ceeded” (1).
This twelve-chapter book begins with a well-crafted introduction by both
Nock and Haig-Brown. In addition to discussing the impetus behind the writing
of this work and the urgent need to address land claims, the introduction also
includes concise explanations of the racialist thoughts that were dominant from
the mid-Victorian era to the early decades of the twentieth century. As the editors
note here, this is particularly helpful to many ‘modern’ readers who have been
reared on scholarship that discusses the negative legacy of residential schools and
are therefore unfamiliar with the ideologies of biological racism and social
Darwinism (5). Those that are categorized by Nock and Haig-Brown as having
‘good intentions’ include missionaries, ethnographers, secular advocates such as
lawyers and government agents, and individuals with Aboriginal ancestry them-
selves.
Many of the notable works in this collection focus on Euro-Canadian
individuals who challenged contemporary racialism and ethnography without an
outright rejection of them. The chapters that are most illustrative of this approach
include both of Nock’s pieces on Horatio Hale and Rev. E.F. Wilson. This is not
surprising, as Nock wrote the bulk of the material on racism in the introduction.
In these, Nock examines how Hale and Wilson promoted positive representations
of the Aboriginal groups they visited in both Canada and the U.S, where their pos-
itive descriptions were attributed largely to a peoples’ adoption of agriculture, non-
nomadic lifestyles, and Christianity (173). Thomas Abler’s examination of Rev.
Silas T. Rand reveals a similar pattern. Convinced of the equality and common
humanity of the Mi’kmaq to the white settlers in his Maritime home (74), Rand
nonetheless had his beliefs bolstered by the agricultural and Christian pursuits of
the Mohawk and Ojibwa that he had begun visiting in the late 1850s.
Perhaps the most radical of these Euro-Canadian challengers is Arthur
Eugene O’Meara. Mary Haig-Brown’s analysis of O’Meara’s role as a missionary-
turned-advocate for the Cowichan, Nisga’a and Allied Tribes of British Columbia
in their quest for the recognition of Aboriginal title is both compelling and indica-
tive of careful research. But in spite of her thorough discussion of his thoughts
and actions as an advocate during the first two decades of the twentieth century,
one cannot help but feel that Haig-Brown has not accounted sufficiently for the
ethnocentric biases that would have influenced O’Meara, particularly in his early
years as an Anglican missionary.
Other contributors examine the ‘good intentions’ of individuals of
Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian ancestry and these are perhaps the most com-
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pelling selections in this book. For example, Sarah Carter examines how Amelia
Paget, a woman with distant Aboriginal heritage, sought to provide authentic rep-
resentations of Plains people in her 1909 The People of the Plains. Although Paget
conducted her field work while inculcating the Eurocentric belief that it was nec-
essary to capture Plains life before it inevitably vanished (201), her striving for
veracity in these representations was her way of subtly “talking back” to demean-
ing colonial narratives, thus earning her the moniker of the “cordial advocate”
(222). The actions of Nahnebahwequa (Catherine Sutton) are a good contrast to
this “muted” approach. As Celia Haig-Brown proves, her ability to combine her
Christian faith and Quaker support with her Anishinaabe oratory tradition gave
Nahnehbahwequa a vocal and visible, if ultimately unsuccessful, opportunity to try
and reclaim her stolen family farmland in the 1850s and 1860s. Although it is never
quite clear if Honore Joseph Jaxon’s Métis identity is adopted or biological,
Donald Smith’s examination of him is an important inclusion here. From advo-
cating aggressively for Métis rights to following the Bah’ai faith, through Jaxon,
Smith demonstrates that the identities of the colonizer and colonized were never
absolute.
These are just some of the essays that captured my attention while read-
ing this collection. Overall, the book itself was well balanced in the sense that the
contributions represented many facets of this theme found in the colonial dichoto-
my. The good intentions and shortcomings of Euro-Canadian missionaries are
covered in the works by Nock, Abler, and Jan Hare and Jean Barman (who also
offer interesting observations on gender and the colonizer). Additionally, Nock
examines the good intentions in late Victorian ethnography, as does Wendy
Wickwire in her later consideration of James Teit. The roles of Euro-Canadian
secular advocates (or at least those whose primary motivations were not religious)
are discussed in four of the essays, and they are particularly noteworthy because
they do not ignore the existence of simultaneous Native agency. For example,
Janet Chute and Alan Knight’s analysis of Allan Macdonell highlights the role of
the Ojibwa during the Mica Bay incident in 1849.
With Good Intentions is a worthy contribution to Canadian colonial histo-
riography as it offers multiple examinations of the motivations of those that occu-
pied spaces that were so often in between that of the colonizer and colonized. As
Nock and Haig-Brown write, Canada needs to move forward and decolonize; this
kind of approach is important to understanding that Canada’s colonial history did
include critics and not just those who defended its policies (5). Perhaps if there is
one criticism that can be aimed at the work as a whole, it is at its overall structure.
Although it is organized in an approximately chronological fashion, it does not
always flow well. While this approach works when there is direct continuity
between the works, as is the case with both Chute and Knight articles, there is a
disjointed feeling between other works. Maybe this would have been eliminated
had the collection been organized differently—perhaps by thematic groupings
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such as gender, or geographic factors like region. Ultimately, With Good Intentions
succeeds in its original goal of not being an apologist text, as the contributors are
quick to point to the Eurocentric biases of the individuals and organizations that
offered challenges and alternatives to colonial policies.
Melinda Nosal-Buzak
Wilfrid Laurier University
Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe,
1200-1425 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
In Lust for Liberty Samuel Cohn sets out to examine revolts in medieval Europe
between 1200 and 1425. The dates are chosen to allow a broad consideration of
the situation before and after the Black Death, and the field is a little narrower than
the title suggests, as he focuses on Italy, Flanders and France. Nonetheless, this is
an ambitious study, based primarily on chronicle evidence from the areas under
consideration, with judicial records from some Italian and French archives. In all,
Cohn is using 1,600 descriptions of popular revolt dealing with 1,112 separate inci-
dents (14).
Given the size of this database, Cohn begins by elaborating the problems
of defining revolt. He argues, for example, that a revolt does not need to be vio-
lent, nor does it need to involve only peasants, workers or artisans; indeed one of
the interesting themes of the work is the rebellion of the relatively powerful against
their overlords (4-8). He spends chapters two and three taking apart our assump-
tions about medieval revolt. Thus he argues that most medieval revolts were not
economic, nor were they bread riots of the starving, nor were they driven by
women (whom he later argues were almost entirely absent from medieval revolts),
nor did they necessarily fail.
Having spent the first few chapters disabusing us of our ideas about
medieval revolt, Cohn then moves on to construct new typologies. He lays out an
almost bewildering variety of revolts, including revolts of the people, revolts against
the Crown, against territorial dominance, against merchants and oligarchies, and by
women and youth, among others. This is the richest and densest chapter, and by
itself does the most to emphasize the variety of medieval revolt and the dangers of
setting up simplistic notions of ‘norms’ of ‘peasant revolt’. It also suggests the ubiq-
uity of revolt, not simply by the number and range of revolts that it elaborates, but
by demonstrating that judicial records reveal revolts that go unmentioned in local
chronicles, thus indicating that the real number of revolts is probably higher again.
The drawback to this chapter, and a problem that runs through the book, is that
many of these revolts get mentioned, sometimes numerous times, without the
revolt in question ever being fully described or contextualized.
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Celia Haig-Brown and David Nock, eds. - With Good Intentions: Euro-
Canadian Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada

Standley, Michelle A.

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
the ‘other Europe’ saw vacation travel as an opportunity to learn about foreign cul-
tures, to acquire new experiences and consumer goods, and above all to relax,
preferably on a sunny shore. The question therefore arises as to what was similar
and what was unique about tourism in Russia and Eastern Europe?
To begin with, up the 1970s most socialist European states drew a clear
line between purposeful, active tourism and mere passive, relaxation. Party leaders
struggled to convince their citizens that their vacation leisure must not only be reco-
operative but must also have a purpose. Similar to the authoritarian states of Nazi
Germany and Fascist Italy, the socialist states also sought to centrally organize and
maintain control over their citizens’ travel and touring practices. However, as Scott
Moranda and Christian Noack show—Moranda in his examination of nature
tourism and the GDR, and Noack in his look at Soviet wild camping on the Black
Sea—socialist citizens were able to carve their own creative pathways through the
authoritarian state structures. Moreover, there was a large gap between the regimes’
stated aims and actual abilities to carry them out, plagued as they were by shortages,
bureaucratic infighting, and structural inefficiencies. A push and pull between
objectives and realities also characterized the socialist leaders’ ambition to control
the meaning that their citizens ascribed to their travels and vacation practices. As
Koenker and Eva Mauer demonstrate, Soviet efforts to encourage proletarian
tourists and mountaineers to “willingly meld their individuality with the good of the
whole” met with very mixed success (120). Instead of creating a truly alternate set
of socialist values, socialist tourism, with its emphasis on purposeful, goal-oriented
tourism, frequently replicated the travel norms of the nineteenth-century European
bourgeoisie.
As Wendy Bracewell argues, in a chapter devoted to Yugoslav travel writ-
ing, consumption and the desire for goods permeated socialist travel, in turn, trig-
gering a quandary for tourism planners. Bracewell sums it up well, “How could
reforms,” she asks, “reconcile individual consumer desires with a commitment to
socialist collectivism and equality? How were limits to be placed on desire?” (261).
Perhaps the most original works in the collection deal with Soviet cross-border
travel and perceptions of Other. In her chapter on Soviet tourists in Eastern
Europe, Gorsuch suggests, that Soviet travel challenged the view presented in the
Soviet press that the East European “little brothers” were “younger and less
advanced version of the Soviet self” (207). Eleonory Gilburd writes eloquently of
how Soviet travelogues and European realist literature, especially Charles Dickens,
shaped Soviet perceptions of London.
One shortcoming of this otherwise excellent work is that by focusing pri-
marily on Russia and the Soviet Union—only five out of the fourteen essays deal
with Eastern Europe—it unintentionally replicates the conceit of the Soviet impe-
rial project. While conceptually it makes sense to unite the Soviet Union with the
other communist countries of Europe during the postwar era, it is not clear why the
regions should be examined together in the period preceding the war. Prior to the
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postwar period, Hungary, for example, had more in common with its co-imperial-
ist power Austria then it did with Tsarist Russia. Thus, why consider the two
regions side-by-side? At the very least, it would have been useful for the authors to
have addressed the hotly contested issue of defining the borders (mental and geo-
graphic) of Eastern Europe, rather than to have simply subsumed East European
countries within the Russian sphere of history.
This complaint notwithstanding, I highly recommend Turizm to historians
concerned with such issues as transnational developments in leisure and consumer
culture, as well as the role of culture (broadly understood) in modern nation and
state building. Filled with rich detail and analysis, Gorsuch and Koenker’s volume
successfully brings tourism history, and the socialist experience of modernity, out
of the historical ghetto and into the mainstream—where they both belong.
Michelle A. Standley
New York University
Eugene Gogol, Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism (Eugene,
Oregon: Resource Publications, 2004).
Raya Dunayevskaya (Rae Spiegel) was born in the Ukraine in 1910. In 1922 she
moved to Chicago with her family, where she joined the Communist youth organ-
ization the Young Workers League, and worked in the offices of the American
Negro Labour Congress’ paper, the Negro Champion. Expelled in 1928 for
Trotskyism, she served as Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in Mexico in the late
1930s. In the early 1940s, as a member of the Workers Party, Dunayevskaya joined
forces with C.L.R. James, perhaps best known for his history of the Haitian slave
revolt, The Black Jacobins. Known as the State-Capitalist Tendency, in 1945 they
became the Johnson (James) - Forest (Dunayevskaya) Tendency. Along with co-
leader Grace Lee, they led the Tendency in the Workers Party, then as a minority
in the Socialist Workers Party, then as an independent group. In 1955 the
Tendency split apart, with Dunayevskaya and her followers creating the paperNews
and Letters, which continues to this day. Dunayeskaya herself died in 1987.
Eugene Gogol’s work Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist Humanism
presents Dunayevskaya’s ideas by means of long quotations and a minimum of his
own analysis. In this work Gogol, who was one of Dunayevskaya’s secretaries in
the 1980s and the editor of News and Letters from 1980 to 1992, is not so much
writer as reporter. At times Gogol himself is almost invisible, in one sense an
admirable act of self-effacement, in another a worrisome abdication of his respon-
sibilities as author. The book is repetitive, at times frustratingly so. We are present-
ed with aspects of Dunayevskaya’s life and work over and over again, yet come
away from the book knowing remarkably little about her, or about many of the peo-
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Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, eds. - Turizm: The Russian and
East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism

Juarez-Dappe, Patricia

His preferred emphasis correctly lies on “the cross-fertilization of ideas between
Africa and the rest of the world” (28).
Thinking of Ibhawoh’s study in the context of the most comprehensive
history of the human rights movement to date, Paul Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution
of International Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), reveals the
tensions between the local and international narratives. Lauren’s is a progressive
history in which empire created the international political stage for the emergence
of a new dispensation of human rights. Lauren is at great pains to demonstrate that
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the product of an international and
hence multicultural political community. The smaller chapter of a local history as
drawn by Ibhawoh disturbs the easy relation in Lauren’s study between the partic-
ular and the general. The international history is limited when it is told as the sum
of the world’s parts, because, if Nigeria is one such part, then unambivalent
progress is a difficult argument to make and the networks of negotiation which
mark the “evolution” (Gordon’s word) of human rights merely shift from one
interested party to another. But, if the emphasis on the international narrative flat-
tens out detail, a comparative context could have usefully broadened Ibhawoh’s
ultimately slim history. Since the title of the book suggests a continental perspec-
tive, one cannot help but wonder how different the nuances of this history would
have been had Ibhawoh used some comparative analysis. One comparison which
might have been particularly fruitful is a comparison with Kenya’s colonial political
history especially given the striking difference in degrees of violent repression in the
two colonies. Ibhawoh’s extensive discussion of land rights in Nigeria, moreover,
could bear comparison to the central role that land rights played in Kenya’s strug-
gles and their eloquent articulation in Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya.
Eleni Coundouriotis
University of Connecticut
Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK
Press, 2006).
On the evening of 19 December 2001, soon after Argentine President Fernando de
la Rúa had declared the state of siege, popular protest erupted on the streets of
Buenos Aires and other major cities throughout the country. Banging pots and
pans, Argentines marched towards downtown areas where they met with other
groups demonstrating against the government. The following day, unable to con-
trol the situation, de la Rúa resigned. For the next two weeks, the country had four
different nominal presidents until the situation stabilised with the appointment of
Senator Eduardo Duhalde to serve the remainder of de la Rúa’s term. After the fall
of the de la Rúa’s administration, violent protests and mass demonstrations dimin-
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ished but Argentina was still to face one of its most profound economic and social
crises. Unemployment skyrocketed, salaries went unpaid, thousands of people
were unable to withdraw their savings from the banks, and the numbers of those
living below the poverty line rose dramatically. The December events represented
a dramatic turning point in Argentina’s recent history. As such, they have attract-
ed the attention of journalists, sociologists, economists, and historians alike. A rel-
atively vast body of studies have examined the looting, the repression, the mone-
tary devaluation, and the social movements that emerged during and after the cri-
sis.
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina by Marina Sitrin con-
tributes to this literature although from a significantly different perspective. The
book consists of a collection of interviews conducted by the author during 2003
and 2004 among members of neighbourhood assemblies, participants in the unem-
ployed workers’ movements, workers of recuperated workplaces and occupied fac-
tories, contributors to alternative media collectives, human rights organisations, and
students and indigenous groups. The book documents the experiences of those
directly affected by the crisis thus adding a critically important element to our
understanding of the events and their aftermath. It is organized around ten differ-
ent themes. Participants in the different movements that took shape after the
December events are asked to discuss their opinions on the crisis, horizontalidad,
autogestión, autonomy, creation, power, repression, women, protagonism, and
dreams. Rather than being an impulsive selection, the book’s topics clearly indicate
a progression that begins during the moment of rupture that signalled the need to
create alternative realities, moves to cover the actions of those involved in the
process, underscores the challenges faced by the protagonists, and ends with
accounts of their dreams and hopes for the future.
Through the direct voices of the participants, the reader is able to retrieve
and recover the lives, collective actions and the new reality created by previously
excluded and marginalised groups. The interviews reveal how, after decades of fear
and social inaction, December 2001 represented one of the most significant rup-
tures in recent Argentine history. The political and economic crisis that followed
gave large sectors of society an opportunity to reclaim spaces previously monopo-
lized by the few and, in the process, to create alternative ones. Built upon consen-
sus and direct democracy, these new social arrangements established horizontal
relations among its members. Horizontalidad rejects the pyramidal and hierarchical
system emanating from the state, unions, or political parties. For the participants
in these social movements, horizontalidad is a goal as well as a means to create an
alternative society built upon the principles of autonomy and self management. In
the process of constructing this new reality, every individual is a protagonist and as
such intervenes actively and creatively. During this process of constant creation,
participants found new ways to interact with one another, redefined gender roles,
and faced numerous challenges imposed from the outside. The book includes rich
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accounts of workers who took over factories and put them back into operation,
groups who occupied vacant buildings and transformed them into community cen-
tres, doctors and nurses who refused to stop providing health care services, neigh-
bourhood assemblies that created popular kitchens, and members of community
organisations who established barter networks and other collective activities. The
collective actions that are the focus of the book transgressed the state’s delineated
space in the name of social justice thus, as the accounts clearly indicate, experienc-
ing persecution and harassment from the authorities.
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina is a powerful and inspira-
tional book as it gives voices to the voiceless. The testimonies included uncover
the strategies implemented by the participants to survive, challenge, and resist thus
contributing an important element to our understanding of Argentina’s recent past.
Firsthand accounts from below, they reveal the day-to-day struggles involved in the
construction of new social spaces and the creation of alternative forms of partici-
pation in an attempt to achieve a more loving, egalitarian and inclusive society. In
a much broader sense, by bringing to the forefront the words and actions of the
movements’ protagonists this book not only uncovers the devastating effects of
neo-liberal policies in Latin America but also provides strong evidence that an alter-
native world is not only possible but being constructed day by day.
Patricia Juarez-Dappe
California State University, Northridge.
Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-
1988 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).
Thirty years ago, Henry Rousso, then a young historian with a budding interest in
France’s Vichy regime, was contemplating how recently-opened World War II
archives might throw light on economic policy during that period. But fascinated
by the burgeoning public interest at the time in the Occupation years, he made his
subject not the history of Vichy itself but rather how it was remembered in subse-
quent decades. His magisterialVichy Syndrome (1987; English trans. 1991) and other
publications have shown how a society’s remembered past can shape its present
and helped establish the flourishing field of social memory.
This wonderful book by Steve Stern is a major contribution to this field
and a convincing demonstration of how social memory can illuminate fundamen-
tal aspects of a whole historical period. Like Rousso, Stern was impressed by how
the conflictive recent past was expressed in irruptions of divided memories, in his
case during a year of research in Chile in 1996-97, a time when the country’s long
‘transition’ to democracy seemed stalled. He was also struck, like Rousso, by the
moral dimension of these memories, which related to truth and justice and to both
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Marina Sitrin, ed. - Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina

Huskins, Bonnie

opposition to the opening up of the American workplace, and more generally, to
all equality movements. Meticulously she traces the emergence of neoconserva-
tives and the growth of right wing movements, their deliberate attack on affirma-
tive action and the insidious penetration of their ideas and values into most aspects
of US life.
Her book offers a wealth of detail, about workplace struggles, legal cases,
political campaigns, and debates about government policy. She follows debates
about specific legislation or about particular policy implementations in great detail.
This may be a useful resource for those interested is such specific information. At
times, however, I lost track of her main argument and wanted her to summarise
the details for me and to develop her main argument more succinctly. In contrast,
while the Frager and Patrias book is lovely, full of lively accounts, and shocking
examples, it is deeply flawed by its startling lack of citations. Page after page of
examples, including direct quotations from, for example, an anonymous teacher
(3), a union publication (117) and the Communist Party of Canada (143) are unref-
erenced!  I wonder if this was imposed by a publisher concerned to shorten the
text. If so, it was a poor decision.
Both books thoroughly discredit the prevailing beliefs of neoliberalism that
individuals are responsible for their own situations. Despite the insistence of
many that patterns of inequality reflect differences in individual ambition, inter-
ests, or talents, these authors offer compelling evidence of enduring systemic dis-
crimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and class. And those systemic
inequalities are maintained and perpetrated by the elites who benefit from them.
Their conclusions are sobering. Despite over a century of struggles, and despite
some important gains, the labour markets in Canada and the US are largely con-
trolled by employers and shareholders at the expense of workers and the state poli-
cies of the last thirty years are increasingly designed to maintain the power and
privilege of the elites. Disparities are increasing and the struggle to change that
trend will be long and hard. Discounted Labour and Freedom is Not Enough are valu-
able contributions. Separately and together they add to our collective knowledge
and provoke further questions.
Meg Luxton—York University
Craig Heron and Steve Penfold, The Worker’s Festival: A History of Labour
Day in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
Labour Day was proclaimed as a statutory holiday in Canada in 1894, but accord-
ing to The Worker’s Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada, its roots can be traced
to earlier spectacles organized by the country’s skilled workers in the 1880s-1890s.
The book begins by outlining the respectable and burlesque processions with
which the craftsmen would have been familiar. In their tightest chapter, “The
Craftsmen’s Spectacle,” the authors analyze the performance of Labour Day
Left History 12.1 155
parades. According to Heron and Penfold, the craftsmen’s costumes, banners, and
‘allegorical cars’ expressed their respectability, the inherent value of their labour,
and their roles as ‘producers’ and ‘citizens’. Women and racial minorities were not
equal participants in these performances, however: “From St. John’s to Victoria,
early Labour Day parades were craftsmen’s spectacles, celebrations of the
respectable, male, white, skilled worker, and reflected both the expansiveness and
the exclusiveness of his aspirations” (77).
The rest of this study traces the “ups and downs and twists and turns of
the workers’ festival” (xvii). Although labour leaders invented the tradition of
Labour Day, they were “not successful at controlling the meaning of the festival
in the wider community” (xvi). They soon found that they had to ‘share’ Labour
Day with a multitude of bourgeois players: journalists, clergymen, merchants, and
entrepreneurs. As craftsmen suffered the impact of mass production during the
Second Industrial Revolution, Labour Day was reinvented by groups of workers
“marching to different tunes”: nationalists who objected to Canada’s close rela-
tionship to the American labour movement; Quebec’s Catholic unions, who feared
“godless secularism”; and industrial unionists, socialists and Communists, who
sponsored more radical expressions of working-class solidarity, most notably the
commemoration of May Day. Labour Day experienced temporary revivals after
World War One and in the mid-1940s, but by the postwar period, Labour Day had
“lost some of its earnest, philosophical tone” (269), as parades became more com-
mercial affairs and most workers “voted with their feet” (273), preferring to
imbibe in more privatized leisure pursuits.
The Workers’ Festival is more so a work of labour history than cultural his-
tory. Labour historian Nolan Reilly notes in his review of the book that its “loca-
tion within the literature of the meaning of cultural celebrations and their signifi-
cance is informative but rarely intrudes unnecessarily into the narrative” (H-NET
Book Review, March 2006). It could be argued, however, that the authors do not
take full advantage of the literature on cultural history. The Workers’ Festival would
benefit from an expanded introductory chapter which incorporates some of the
analytical insights from the concluding chapter and also reviews recent publica-
tions on the nature and history of ceremonials and spectacles, as well as the liter-
ature on public memory, such as Alan Gordon’s Making the Public Pasts: The Contested
Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891-1930.
A significant portion of the book is devoted to examining the multitudi-
nous transformations of traditional Labour Day demonstrations. It would be use-
ful for this study to develop more explicitly the concept of polysemy, the embod-
iment of multiple meanings. Indeed, even the skilled workers themselves did not
“always present a single, coherent social vision or political interpretation” of their
Labour Day spectacles, instead reflecting the “different emphases and trajectories
of particular crafts and local unions” (65). Moreover, bourgeoisie and working-
class actors transformed the holiday in their own image. Heron and Penfold
Book Reviews156
repeatedly assert that the term ‘labour’ was “sufficiently flexible to open it to mul-
tiple voices and competing ideas” (110-11, 90, 105). Initially this was not a “ran-
dom cacophony of voices” until the emergence of merchants and entrepreneurs
who spoke a “different language”: the language of commerce (112). By the early-
twentieth century, Labour Day “moralists” had been usurped by “merchants of
leisure” (111-12, 132).
Commemoration, according to Alan Gordon, often reflects an “ongoing
contest for hegemony.” This contest can take the form of reaffirmation or sub-
version, as Heron and Penfold assert in their conclusion (271). In The Workers’
Festival there is a tension between the reaffirmation of the craftsmen’s parade and
its subversion by various players and performers. Heron and Penfold wax elo-
quent about the potentiality of subversion: “If the festival is less tightly controlled
from the top ... [i]t can become a time for escaping the normal and trying out the
imagined - an opportunity to behave outrageously, to play unusual social roles, to
act out new possibilities, to assert different priorities, to dream and fantasize, or, at
the very least, to retreat from the constraints of daily social relations” (271). The
authors have an opportunity here to examine the creative complexity of subver-
sion. Most studies focus on the carnivalesque subversion of bourgeois ceremoni-
als by the `lower orders’; this study, on the other hand, is fascinating in that it cen-
tres on a festival invented by the working class (albeit the aristocracy of labour),
but recast and reinvented by other workers and bourgeoisie alike.
Given the interpretive potential of subversion, one wonders why Heron
and Penfold chose to focus on continuous reaffirmation, on the `ups and downs’
of the traditional Labour Day demonstration, rather than adopting the concept of
polysemy as the study’s organizing principle. This is undoubtedly due, in part, to
logistics, and the need to define the parameters of one’s research. This focus is
understandable but limiting: it defines alternative spectacles as ‘other’ and thus as
reinventions rather than as rich ceremonials in their own right. Indeed, Heron and
Penfold assert that the short-term postwar revival of Labour Day demonstrations
were “partial, uneven, and ultimately unsuccessful” (268). Furthermore, accord-
ing to the authors, the ambiguity and openness of Labour Day was both a
“strength” and a “weakness,” a “source of its cultural power” and a “cause of its
dilution” (111). Were Labour Day holidays ‘unsuccessful’ and ‘diluted’ because
they moved away from the format of the skilled workers’ festival?  It would be
interesting to see chapters devoted to alternative expressions of labour, in addition
to the cra f t s m e n’s spectacl e — M ay Day, D avis Day, s t r i ke para d e s, a n d
International Women’s Day events—rather than explaining them away in relation
to the decline of the former. This focus on multiple workers’ festivals (instead of
a workers’ festival) would allow the authors to more fully explore the complex rich-
ness of reaffirmation, subversion, and polysemy.
The authors try to avoid judgment on the decline of traditional crafts-
men’s spectacles: “These processes seem to invite metaphors of decline and decay.
Left History 12.1 157
But this would be misleading and too simple...the pattern was not one of linear
decline but rather of periodical revival… ” (273, 276). Indeed, they point out that
traditional Labour Day parades were “not pristine cultural creations”, but rather
expressions of the “possibilities and limitations of Victorian respectability” (276).
They also admit that the transmogrification of Labour Day into a largely privatized
holiday brought it back to one of the original goals of its founders: the opportu-
nity for workers to relax and enjoy a day away from work (115, 269). Nonetheless,
in the concluding sentences of the book, there is a hint of nostalgia for the politi-
cized demonstrations of yesteryear. After lamenting that there were “fewer of
these events than in the past” and that they “caught the local imagination much
less than their turn-of-the-century predecessors,” they conclude: “But they
revealed how important it has been to many Canadian workers to remind their fel-
low citizens that this was not just another day off work. They still have a message
to deliver” (278).
Lastly, it would be interesting to see Heron and Penfold reflect more
explicitly on the reflective and instrumental nature of such festivities. Heron and
Penfold cast their study in the context of broad social changes: they certainly illus-
trate how festivities reflected the social forces around them. But they also hint at
the transformative power of festivities, particularly in their analysis of May Day.
Here we see how May Day organizers challenged the established social order,
which led to subsequent harassment and repression (166-88).
This book obviously generates many questions of interpretation and
approach, which is the hallmark of an important contribution to scholarship. As
Joy Parr has reminded us in her seminal analysis of gender history: “Scholarship is
to open rather than extinguish questions, to discomfit rather than enshrine both
settled certainties and the collective practices they sustain.” (Canadian Historical
Review, 73, no. 3, 1995: 354) Not only will this study appeal to the academic com-
munity, but also to students and the general public. The monograph works espe-
cially well as an assigned text in an undergraduate history classroom. One further
strength that must be noted is the rich collection of photographs, sketches, and
advertisements in this work, which are not merely illustrative, but contribute in an
important way to the authors’ interpretations and conclusions. In this sense,
Heron and Penfold remind us that there is more to visual sources `than meets the
eye’.
Bonnie Huskins—University of New Brunswick
Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life and the
Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005).
In 1948, what legitimated the People’s Revolutionary Army’s rise to power in
North Korea was the participation of many of its leaders and soldiers in anti-
Japanese struggles in Manchuria during the Pacific War (1931-1945). In a 1958
Book Reviews158


Craig Heron and Steve Penfold - The Worker’s Festival: A History of Labour
Day in Canada

Barber, David

Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: the Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).
That today’s youth would be curious about the New Left Weatherman/Weather
Underground is certainly understandable. Weatherman, after all, appears to be the
most radical segment of the most radical group of young whites in the most radi-
cal era of recent times. For young people living in the desert of contemporary pol-
itics, looking back on Weatherman and its time must indeed be exhilarating.
Unfortunately, people stranded in a desert sometimes see water because they want
to see it, and not because it’s there. Such is the fascination that Weatherman exerts
on radical youth today, Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America, the Weather Underground and
the Politics of Solidarity, being a prime case in point. Berger extols the group, seeking
to accomplish three objectives with his book. First, he looks to “explain what
drove the Weather Underground and why” and to “trace” the group’s history and
relation to Black and Third World struggles (12, 13, 102, 134, et passim). Second, he
looks to “situate the group in the context of its times,” (6, 13 273, 281 et passim).
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Berger wants to use his history of the
Weatherman tendency as a means for arguing “that any progressive movement
must make the struggle against white supremacy and white privilege central to any
political work,” (273-274).
Berger divides his well-written and fast-paced book into three sections. In
the first he attempts to establish Weatherman’s historical context by tracing the his-
tory of social struggles in the United States through the 1960s, with special atten-
tion to the development of the Black Power movement, the antiwar movement,
and the most important white radical organization of the day, Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS). Berger concludes this section with the emergence of
the Weatherman political tendency in June 1969. In his second section Berger
traces Weatherman’s development over what he sees as two periods. From June
1969 to March 1970, in what Berger describes as a frenetic nine months,
Weatherman moved rapidly from leadership over the mass organization SDS with
100,000 members, through street fighting and the beginnings of small, armed
actions, to the planning of major anti-personnel bombings in the United States.
Along the way, Weatherman allowed SDS to die and it alienated numerous allies,
doing this in the name of building a more militant solidarity with the black struggle
and with Vietnam. In March 1970, as a Weatherman member was constructing an
antipersonnel bomb, it accidentally detonated, killing three Weathermen. This pre-
cipitated Weatherman’s decision to go underground and Berger traces the Weather
Underground Organization’s (WUO) development from March 1970 into late 1976
and early 1977, when the organization disintegrated. During this period of under-
ground activity, the WUO took credit for a score of bombings, including bombing
a bathroom in the Pentagon, a bathroom in the Capitol Building, and a variety of
other federal, state, and local government offices. The WUO also produced a polit-
Left History 12.2 163
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 163
ical statement during this time, Prairie Fire; fostered the growth of an aboveground
organization, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), which it secretly con-
trolled; and issued a half-dozen numbers of a political journal. In 1976, following
a failed political conference organized by PFOC, PFOC members successfully chal-
lenged the WUO’s control over PFOC. The political fallout from that challenge
splintered the WUO. In Outlaws’ final section, Berger seeks to draw political les-
sons from the Weatherman experience. Here and throughout the book he argues
for the centrality of the politics of revolutionary solidarity with black and Third
World struggles. In particular he convincingly underlines the importance of fight-
ing for political prisoners in the United States.
While Berger’s larger political objectives for his book are admirable,
nonetheless, Outlaws is deeply flawed. In the first place, Berger puts far too much
weight on his interviews with former Weathermen. In consequence, Berger, a
young activist and scholar, has created what in reality is a collective political mem-
oir. His book suffers then from the problems of the memoir: occasional self-criti-
cism notwithstanding, Berger’s interviewees justify their side of the story. For
example, when Berger asks his interviewees, “What drove you and your comrades?”
the answer, invariably, is some play on this thought: Weatherman “represented an
insistence on up-front support for Black liberation as a centerpiece for any political
movement among white people. It represented total commitment to a high level of
militancy in relation to Vietnam” (quoting former Weatherman Robert Roth, 102).
Or, in Berger’s words: “Solidarity with Third World people and movements was the
cornerstone of WUO politics and what most former members are proud of” (278).
Not surprisingly, this is the same argument Weatherman made to distinguish itself
back in 1969: “we are the only white radical formation to insist upon the centrality
of the struggle for black and Third World liberation to the overall struggle for social
change in the United States.” How can we assess the validity of such claims? We
do so by comparing Weatherman’s claim with the organization’s actual practice.
Berger, however, is sparing in this effort, and to the extent that he does make these
comparisons, he draws principally on his interviewees to justify the Weatherman
position.
Let us take a specific case from Berger’s book. In the fall of 1969,
Weatherman, in the name of solidarity with the black liberation movement and with
the Vietnamese, began organizing for a street-fighting national action slated for
Chicago and subsequently known as ‘The Days of Rage’. Early-on in
Weatherman’s organizing efforts, the Chicago Black Panther Party, under the lead-
ership of an extraordinary activist, Fred Hampton, condemned the action.
Hampton argued that Weatherman’s plans for a deliberately provocative demon-
stration would bring down increased repression on Chicago’s black community and
he urged the white radicals to take up their real responsibility: organizing other
whites against racism. A Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist group with Chicago
origins, the Young Lords Organization, similarly condemned the action. As Berger
Book Reviews164
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 164
acknowledges, this seems to be a fairly significant contradiction. But Berger, in
2006, explains away this contradiction, with as much ease as his protagonists
explained it away in 1969. According to Berger:
the Black Panther Party was not a monolithic organization
and… fissures within the groupwere becoming more
apparent. … because the Panthers were under such heavy
attack, manyin the group (including Hampton) wanted to
build a broad united front for their own self-preservation.
Weatherman’s street antics were thus seen as alienating
potential allies and bringingdown serious repression.
However, the New York Black Panthers largely cheered
Weather’s militancy (108).
Unfortunately, Berger does not base his account on a serious examination
of the conflict; he does not interview former Chicago Panthers, nor does he seek
out whatever documentary record exists from the time; and the Young Lords dis-
appear from his account entirely. Instead, he bases his explanation on the oral his-
tories offered by three former Weathermen. In other words, Berger, who with his
book seeks to champion the centrality of the black struggle, fails to give prominent
leaders of that struggle their own voice in criticizing Weatherman. Berger summa-
rizes their argument for them in two sentences, and then undercuts this already trun-
cated argument with the false claim—evidently provided by one or more of his
interviewees and uncritically embraced by Berger—that the New York Panthers
“cheered” Weatherman on at the time. The New York Panthers would support
Weatherman’s militancy further on down the road, but in the fall of 1969, prior to
the Days of Rage, New York’s Panther leadership, scattered throughout New
York’s penal system behind a government conspiracy indictment, were barely able
to communicate with each other, much less take issue with Fred Hampton and the
Chicago Panthers. If we recall that Berger wants to ‘situate’ Weatherman in the
context of its time, and in the context of Black revolutionary leadership, certainly
we have the right to expect more of Berger’s handling of this contradiction than
what he actually gives us. But in following the course he does, Berger simply repli-
cates what Weatherman itself did in 1969: if we don’t agree with a given black rev-
olutionary leadership—even one so powerful as the Chicago Panthers under Fred
Hampton—we needn’t conduct a serious discussion about this evident contradic-
tion, nor try to understand what the Panthers are saying; some other black revolu-
tionary leadership will come along that we can ‘follow’.
Berger takes this same approach in explaining away other glaring contra-
dictions between Weatherman’s claims about itself and its actual practice. Most
notably, he downplays Weatherman’s part in the destruction of SDS; its disregard
for the considered advice of the Vietnamese on building an antiwar movement; and
Left History 12.2 165
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 165
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
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Dan Berger - Outlaws of America: the Weather Underground and the Politics of
Solidarity

Cruz, Adrian

Left History 12.2 175
Chinese Immigrants, African-Americans, and Racial Anxiety also gives interesting
insight into the relationship between foreign policy and immigration restriction in
the early post-bellum moment. The study shows how important the 1868
Burlingame Treaty between China and the US was to shaping the debate.
Burlingame prohibited forced labor (the ‘coolie’ trade), acknowledged the natural
right of migration, and denied the right of Chinese subjects to become naturalized
American citizens. Both the possibilities and the contradictions of the law were used
by judges, lawmakers, and immigrants themselves to point out the need for more
clarification in policy. Aarim-Heriot returns to these points throughout the book as
she weaves her analysis to its culmination: the 1882 Chinese Exclusion law. She con-
vincingly shows that the Exclusion Law was not only the beginning of an era, which
others have suggested, but the culmination of a decades-long course that had an
increasingly predictable outcome. This study, therefore, serves as a corrective to
accepted periodization in immigration history. A periodization starting with 1882
and ending with the 1924 Johnson Reed act which set strict quotas on European
immigrants and made initial distinctions between racial and ethnic groups now
seems more problematic.
Because Chinese Immigrants, African-Americans, and Racial Anxiety is told from
the top down, the study’s arguments are, at times, overdrawn and claim more than
the documents warrant. Though it is a minor point, the book’s organization could
use further editorial advice. The eleven short thematic chapters might be combined
in a way that would be more beneficial to Aarim-Heriot’s challenge to historiograph-
ical regionalism. In the end, this book provides a new framework for understand-
ing nineteenth century anti-Chinese sentiment. Aarim-Heriot’s research and the way
she connects her sources should help historians think about racism beyond the bira-
cial paradigm which has entrenched us for too long.
Caroline Waldron Merithew
University of Dayton
José M. Alamillo, Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure
in a California Town 1880-1960 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 2006).
José M. Alamillo traces the historical development of a Mexican community in the
lemon industry’s company town of Corona, California. This community would alter
their status from marginalized citrus workers to politically engaged agents of change.
In writing up the history, Alamillo’s study teaches lessons on processes of social
change and the shifting formation of racial, ethnic, gender, and class identities.
Further, the book’s analysis provides insight on the creativity and persistence which
subjugated groups rely upon to actualize social equality.
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 175
Book Reviews176
The author takes care to place gender at the forefront of the text. This is
an essential venture since part and parcel of Mexican working class masculinity’s
development was its paradoxical mode of operation. Mexican male workers would
congregate in saloons and pool halls—some of the few, if not only, venues where
they possessed autonomy. However, this very assertion of masculinity in an
autonomous space occurred in a mostly ‘women-free’ zone. Thus, the book argues
that masculine identity proved to be sexist and weakened family and community ties.
Yet, the men forged important networks that proved invaluable. Alamillo writes that
Mexican men would participate in “rough behavior, vulgar jokes, incessant horse-
play, and fighting with coworkers and bosses” (76). While ostensibly representing
nothing more than mere high jinks, Alamillo shows how these activities served as a
means to cultivate activism.
Still, women were personas non grata in these male-dominated social spaces.
Moreover, at home where women carried out long hours of unpaid labour, men
often ignored responsibilities and in more severe cases, became violent toward
women. Additionally, the dominant white majority in Corona, masking their anti-
Mexican racism in the cloak of temperance advocacy, embarked upon (partially) suc-
cessful efforts to shut down the ‘immoral’ establishments frequented by Mexican
male workers. While directed at the haunts of Mexican men, these efforts were
emblematic of the racism directed at all of Mexican Corona.
Though excluded from the cantinas and pool halls, Mexican women assert-
ed their agency. Ironically, it was they who were able to labour and make contact
with whites on white turf such as private homes and by securing employment in the
lemon packinghouses. Mexicanas would clean the abodes of white families and nan-
nied white children. They worked alongside whites and Italians indoors where
Mexican men were disallowed from taking up jobs. Uniquely positioned within the
tense racial political economy of Corona, Mexicanas proved to be among the most
efficient organizers when opportunities to mobilize presented themselves.
Still, Mexicana struggle for equality, it seems, could not occur in
autonomous joints such as their own watering holes. Mexican women would have
to foment social change in places where whites were bound to show up: churches,
movie theaters, and Cinco de Mayo fiestas. Alamillo illustrates how Mexicanas car-
ried out the “cultural work” for fiestas by adorning “parade floats to working the
food booths to organizing dance contests” (95). Thus, what are seemingly trivial
events such as men’s baseball games, shooting pool, and heritage celebrations would
actually provide a platform from which Corona Mexicans would move into action.
That being said, in order to compile such a rich narrative, the author relies
upon an array of primary source material and interviews that he himself conducted.
The primary documents are drawn from archival sources such as the Corona Public
Library, the local newspaper, and court records. The interviewees’ quotes are
informative and methodologically significant as they provide confirmation of and
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 176
expand upon the historical events which the book weaves together. In regards to
the interviews, it is never clear as to whether they are done in English, Spanish, or
both. While this is only a minor point, it may be helpful to know if some interviews
were translated into English.
Whichever language was used, as Corona emerged out of the 1930s, pri-
mary data and interviewees testify that by 1940, Mexicans were primed to mobilize
and strike against their long time white patrones. Mexican men used networks from
playing baseball and local hangouts to plan the strikes. Though denied any positions
of leadership in the formal organization process, Mexicanas were key facilitators of
the burgeoning labour movement as they walked on picket lines and used their webs
of association to marshal support.
Sadly, these efforts would go the way of most poor people’s episodes of
struggle and deteriorate into defeat. But the Mexican American community went on
to access institutional power in Corona during the 1950s and 1960s. Those success-
es could have only occurred on the foundation of a long history of struggle. Much
of that success is attributable to Mexican American soldiers returned from World
War II and eligible for GI Bill benefits. This provides a hopeful conclusion to the
story of Corona’s Mexican origin community. However, unanswered questions
remain as to whether this access to the levers of power produced equality for
Mexicanas and inclusion for later Mexican arrivals such as Bracero workers. Last,
what of the remaining working class Mexican Americans? GI Bill benefits connote
ascension to the middle class for some, but not for all. Indeed, after demonstrating
his ability with this book, these are matters which the author could certainly address
in later research.
This book has been necessary for a good while. Generally, we are provid-
ed with a textured analysis of how subalterns procure equality within an antagonis-
tic social structure. Specifically, Alamillo fills part of the considerable literature gap
on Latina/Latino and US Southwestern community and labour history. This review-
er is sold on the book and I will have my labour history and comparative
race/ethnicity students read it. However, the book would also be useful for other
courses and scholarly endeavours in American Studies, Women and Gender Studies,
and Social Movements.
Adrian Cruz
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Mid-West, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2006).
Many of the working-class history monographs that have been published in recent
years have been community-based studies that have striven to illustrate the origin
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José M. Alamillo - Making Lemonade Out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor
and Leisure in a California Town 1880-1960

Fisher, Ali

tive governments get elected now and again. It did not if one considers the
extreme demands of the students, especially after 1968. Perhaps this ambivalence
can best be captured in a recent commercial on television for a large bank which
used Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are a Changin’ as the musical motif. The union
of students, young workers, feminists, and the Third World, foretold by Herbert
Marcuse and others found its expression in reality in radical Islam thirty years later.
Graham’s book is evocative of a time. As a serious analysis, it is light.
Cyril Levitt—McMaster University
John Hoerr, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in
America’s Cold War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
As the title suggests, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice, tells the story of three men on a
very personal level. The narrative demonstrates how their lives intersect during
the McCarthy era and the repercussions of their actions. While many histories of
the McCarthy era have focused on the impersonal, political analysis of events,
John Hoerr draws on his extensive experience as a journalist to bring the story to
life by demonstrating the human impact of the events his narrative describes. This
provides another perspective to the studies of famous entertainers such as the
Hollywood ten or academics like F.O. Mattheissen.
Harry is Harry Davenport, a rep resentative from Pittsburgh sent to
Congress for one term, never to be re-elected. His 1948 election had been secured
with union support, but the increasing hostility toward some left-leaning unions
severely tested his courage to speak out against the excesses of the anti-commu-
nist witch-hunts. The moment which tested his resolve to the point which, in the
narrative Hoerr presents, ultimately cost him his political career came when the
hearings by a House Un-American Activities Committee turned their attention to
members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).
Father Rice, is Rev. Charles Owen Rice, who made his name as a fervent
anti-communist. His importance to Hoerr’s narrative comes from the attacks he
concentrated on members of UE. During 1949 the CIO, in a move which
strengthened their anti-communist credentials, expelled those unions which were
considered to be left leaning. One such union was UE. Father Rice, closely asso-
ciated with CIO president Philip Murray, provided support for this move and par-
ticularly provided a means through which pressure could be placed on members
of UE.
Tom Quinn, a welder and leader in the local labour movement, was caught
in the anti-communist posturing. A friend of Harry Davenport, Quinn was sub-
poenaed by HUAC following pressure from Father Rice. However, at the point
where Davenport could have offered support to a friend who had played a central
role in his election effort, his convictions failed to materialise. To the leaders of
the East Pittsburgh Westinghouse plant, this was a betrayal of the support which
Book Reviews128
had been pivotal to Davenport’s election. The narrative demonstrates the reper-
cussions of this decision on all concerned. Quinn was cited by HUAC for con-
tempt, Father Rice has repeatedly felt the need to justify his actions, while Harry
Davenport lost the support of UE and was subsequently never re-elected to
Congress. Davenport spent his last days in Ulrich’s Hotel in Pennsylvania “where
solitary old men, living on a Social Security pittance, go to die” (1).
John Hoerr is certainly an accomplished writer who brings the history to life
through his description of the events. The construction of the McCarthy era on
this personal level is aided by his personal engagement with the main protagonists.
Harry Davenport was John Hoerr’s uncle and the prologue charts Hoerr’s journey
in 2000 to the place where his uncle died. Furthermore, as a reporter in the 1960s
his job had brought him into contact with all the main characters and the environ-
ment in which they worked. This allows Hoerr to infuse the narrative with per-
sonal reminiscences that create a particularly personal atmosphere. The sense of
injustice at the excesses of the witch-hunts is palpable. Few could argue with
Hoerr’s observation; “if HUAC’s intention was to inquire into Communist activi-
ty in Local 601, a glaring question was why none of the open, admitted
Communists in the local were subpoenaed” (146). However, while the strength of
this book is in the vivid construction of the narrative, the origins of the anti-com-
munist fervour receive little attention. Indeed, the clear outrage at the suffering of
those with whom he has a personal connection dominates the discussion. The
demonstration of the persecution suffered by the innocent becomes the focus
rather than an analysis of the events. There is, however, also the assertion that
there were some who were ‘guilty’ within the political left and the labour move-
ment. This creates a tension between Hoerr’s objection to the methods employed
by the committees and his apparent justification of the need to take action. Hoerr
does not take this opportunity to produce an analysis of this tension within the
narrative construction of the book.
Hoerr also misses an opportunity to engage with the analysis of the role reli-
gion has played within the development and repression of organised labour.
Given the pivotal role played by Father Rice, this narrative appears to present an
ideal opportunity to engage with the area of academic research that has developed
since Liston Pope produced his early works. In essence this is the locus of the ten-
sions between the strengths and weaknesses of this work. Hoerr is an accom-
plished journalist who writes with great style and conviction. Through extensive
research, he has been able to produce a clear narrative from material many would
have found opaque. Yet while this book is a valuable contribution to the collec-
tive knowledge about both labour relations and the McCarthy era, there is ulti-
mately a sense of disappointment about the depth of the analysis.
Ali Fisher—Counterpoint, the cultural relations think-tank of the British Council
Left History 12.1 129


John Hoerr, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice - Accusation and Betrayal in America’s Cold War

Rhodes, Michelle

tle understanding as to how, under conditions of modernity, such knowledge
develops and exists. Do people working in capitalist resource-extraction indus-
tries, or with little day-to-day contact with the environment at all, really have
knowledge of the environment based in personal narratives and experience?  Or
is their understanding of the environment and their experience a composite of
competing scientific ideas, press reports and cultural assumptions?  This is not to
say that people are misinformed, nor is it to deny the absolute importance of
learning about local context – needs, values, and customs – as part of the environ-
mental decision-making process. But I need further convincing that a unique form
of local knowledge exists that can be opposed to, and tapped into by, science and
industry. In North America, after all, we are usually not dealing with communities
with long pasts on the land. We are dealing with the people who displaced those
communities in favour of suburbs and industrial logging.
Second, I am not sure that this is really a book about politics. It is more a
book about policy. When Bocking imagines environmental politics as a “conver-
sation, with no one interest dominating, but all parties able to have their say…,”
(221) I think of the Harper government’s manipulative “Clean Air Act” of 2006,
which concentrated on smog to divert attention away from climate change. I think
of the way that the Bush administration has hijacked the language of postmod-
ernism for political gain. In one well-known incident, a Bush staffer dismissed
reporters by telling them that they were part of the “reality-based community,”
whereas Bush’s people “created realities.” I am convinced that Bocking’s critique
of science is correct and that science must be much more firmly rooted in politi-
cal and social context to become effective at solving environmental problems. But
we cannot assume that our enemies will be reasonable. The previous generation
of environmental politics relied on the authority of science. Bocking (and others)
have pointed out the chinks in the armour, and Bocking offers a solution that
seems sensible for the policy process and local politics. However, more needs to
be said about politics at the larger provincial, state, and federal levels at which the
rules of the game are set, and where conflict, not consensus, is the norm.
I offer these points as arguments with a piece of work I admire. In gener-
al, both books raise issues around science and politics that need to be addressed in
contemporary environmental history.
James Murton—Nipissing University
Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the
Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Edmonton: University of
Alberta Press, 2005).
Even by today’s standards, the Montana-Alberta borderlands are ‘remote’. This
semi-arid and serenely beautiful setting is one where the weather can quickly turn,
and the open plains can leave one suddenly feeling very exposed. These border-
Left History 12.1 133
lands were among the last areas of the plains/prairies zone to be surveyed,
mapped, and settled by whites. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when
both the US and Canada were eager to settle their respective Wests, the rugged
Montana-Alberta borderlands posed a colossal challenge to the parallel imagina-
tions of national economic and cultural expansion. As Sheila McManus writes in
The Line Which Separates, “In the case of these borderlands, their distance from the
national seats of government meant that most federal forms of differentiation
were indirect and imaginary” (xviii).
The delineation of political boundaries across an uninterrupted physical
region requires surveys and mapping, as well as the imposition of socio-cultural
norms and expectations used to create distinct territorial affiliations. McManus,
Assistant Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge, explores these
processes in her study of race, gender, and national identities in the Montana-
Alberta borderlands. She adds, with some limited success, to the body of research
on the creation of gendered and racialised identities in the West, as she presents a
historicized social geography of this borderlands region.
McManus focuses on three concerns: the mapping and legislating of the
borderlands; Blackfoot-state relations; and gender and racial expectations that
accompanied white settlement to the region. She concentrates on the two decades
between the 1872-74 Boundary Survey and 1890, shortly before more widespread
settlement took place. To begin, McManus examines measures taken to survey and
map the international boundary through the borderlands. In doing so, the govern-
ments could create “a border where one did not exist and reinforce it with social
and political categories that could outweigh the physical and social geographies of
the West” (8). Here, the two governments created legal templates for the econom-
ic development of the region, which included replacing the ‘family farm’ ideal with
a more realistic vision where “the discourse of ranching”, one which was “over-
whelmingly masculine”, prevailed (47).
Next, McManus investigates social boundaries within the borderlands—
those between Blackfoot nations and agents of the state, between Blackfoot peo-
ples and whites, and between men and women of multiple racial and ethnic back-
grounds (including a handful of Chinese and Black settlers). Delineating clear and
appropriate roles for each of these groups was critical in successfully settling this
region and buttressing national identity. National identity was likewise used as
leverage to reinforce social categories and difference. For example, McManus
notes that policies regarding Native-white marriages differed, particularly with
regard to the status of Native women. “North of the line mixed-race couples
were not allowed to live on ‘Indian land’…South of the line a couple could live on
Indian land and a white man could access Indian resources” (161). These policy
differences called into question how ‘masculinity’ and ‘whiteness’ were defined in
the by the two national governments.
McManus relies on two types of primary research materials. The first is
Book Reviews134
gove rnment documentat i o n , n a m e ly annual rep o rts produced by the US
Department of the Interior and the Canadian Department of Agriculture.
McManus rightly recognizes the research value of the annual reports in that local
agents of the state often provided perspectives on Native relations, ranching, and
other issues that differed from official government policy. Second, McManus uti-
lizes the journals and remembrances of a small number of white women settlers
in the region. Limited in number, these materials nonetheless provide a greater
insight into social identities in the region, and McManus’s use of them is her
strongest contribution.
McManus’s decision to treat gender and nationality, and not class, is conspic-
uous, however. The viewpoints of the white borderlands women were strongly
influenced by both gender norms and class expectations, and addressing one
absent the other misses a critical contributing factor in how social identities were
constructed and perceived. Also problematic is the consideration of non-white
female and Native experiences. While McManus is concerned with the ways in
which social categories such as race and ethnicity are imagined (3-4), only limited
attention is paid to the role of individual (non-white) agency in this imagining
process. Did all Native peoples or Chinese migrants in the borderlands, for
instance, unwillingly assume the identity as ‘Other’ given to them by whites, or did
some contest or, alternatively, willingly adopt these social boundaries and identi-
ties?
The Line Which Separates utilizes a linear temporal approach to understanding
identity construction at multiple scales, moving from a consideration in early chap-
ters of how large western spaces were envisioned to an analysis of local social
geographies in the final chapters. This format is unnecessarily limiting. The dis-
cussion of survey and policies, for instance, is somewhat, albeit not entirely, iso-
lated from the more complex discussions of gender in the last third of the book.
The chapters therefore are only loosely tied together by McManus’s stated goal of
illustrating that “categories of race, gender, and nation, were intangible and unsta-
ble…challenged and redrawn at the local and federal levels” (xiii).
Two additional issues require attention. First, at no point does McManus
define and describe her region, ironic as she is building in part on geographic
scholarship. Calgary and Great Falls are given limited attention, but enough so as
to question whether they are part of her study. If they are, what differences
emerge in how race, gender, and national identities are created in nascent urban
communities? Second, the book lacks adequate visuals. Most of the maps used
have been reduced too much to be of much value, and archival photographs could
have been used to present the borderlands’ social and physical landscapes.
In the field of US-Canada borderlands studies, consideration of social
boundaries has been limited relative to research on the US-Mexico borderlands,
where cultural differences are more pronounced. The Line Which Separates lacks the
depth and variety of source materials needed to address this lacuna but it does
Left History 12.1 135
provide a partial treatment of imagined social and national identities in this bor-
derlands region. It also serves as a good starting point for further inquiry.
Michelle Rhodes—University College of the Fraser Valley
Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labour, and the Republican
Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
Mark A. Lause, an Associate Professor of history at the University of Cincinnati,
has distinguished himself as a keen analyst of the insurgencies that influenced
mainstream politics throughout the nineteenth century. He continues this schol-
arship with his fine study of the National Reform Association (NRA). This organ-
ization carried to the fore the concerns working class Americans had for land
reform. Lause argues effectively that the “NRA’s agrarianism formed a persistent
and underlying theme for the later working-class movement” (129). Lause demon-
strates how the agrarian movement of the antebellum period succeeded in secur-
ing the “Republican” Homestead Act of 1862, and also laid the ideological
groundwork for the rise of fraternal organizations of the postbellum period. With
this work, Lause demonstrates the intellectual connection between agitation that
‘peaked’ in the years 1850-52, with the later movements known as Greenbackism,
the Single Tax proposal of Henry George, and other “non-electoral communitar-
ian, socialist musings” that gripped national politics in the late-nineteenth century.
But the organization’s influence also helped to “mobilize public opinion strong
enough to topple the slaveholders’ party from office” (133). Thus we find in
Lause’s work a critical link between antebellum political agitation and the social
radicalism of the late-nineteenth century.
The leaders of the National Reform Association understood initially that
“theirs was but a partial white, urban, Anglo-American perspective on the work-
ing-class experience” (2). Yet, their message, according to Lause, appealed to a
broader segment of the working class then the anti-monopoly rhetoric of the
Locofocos. National Reformers advocated three principal and inter-related meas-
ures. First, they pushed at the state level for debt reform and the end of proper-
ty seizures. Second, homestead legislation that would “permit the free settlement
of the landless on the public domain.” Third, reformers wanted to eliminate spec-
ulation by limiting the amount of land any one individual could own (3). As the
NRA spread from an eastern, urban, working-class movement into the Midwest
and West, they embraced another set of “secondary” or “auxiliary” movements,
including the ten-hour workday, direct election of government officers, and “abo-
lition of practices ranging from the Electoral College to slavery.” According to
Lause, National Reformers also consistently defended newcomers to the country,
urged peace, and fostered international associations” (3). While most scholars
focus on the impact these undercurrents had on the Democratic Party, Lause con-
tends that it was the Republican Party that benefited most (but ultimately learned
Book Reviews136


Sheila McManus - The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of
the Alberta-Montana Borderlands

McDonald, Tracy

Kevin Murphy - Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow
Metal Factory, International Studies in Social History Series; Jeffrey J. Rossman - Worker Resistance under
Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor

Shore, Marlene

Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of
Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
In A Crooked Line, Geoff Eley deftly combines intellectual history and memoir to
analyze some of the most significant currents that have affected the historical pro-
fession during the past four decades. Rather than presenting a comprehensive
account of that period, Eley focuses on two major reorientations in scholarship -
the rise of social history and turn to the ‘new cultural history’, the former begin-
ning in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s; the latter emerging in the
1980s and cresting during the 1990s. As he shows, both were affected by interdis-
ciplinary and external influences. The hegemony of the social sciences, and espe-
cially modernization theory, initially shaped social history until Marxist theory and
Marxisant radicalism provided alternative frameworks. Cultural history was stim-
ulated by cultural studies, interactions between anthropology and history, post-
modern and postcolonial theories. As a result of these two movements, the his-
torical profession became dramatically pluralized in its composition, practices, and
subject matter. In stressing inclusiveness—bringing hidden and suppressed histo-
ries to the surface—both aimed to provide disempowered groups with entrée to
the academy. Social historians emphasized material life, class, and society while
cultural historians refocused attention on meaning, perception, and understanding
of forms of production and display.
The turn from one approach to the other was not straightforward, howev-
er, as the book’s evocative title suggests. Relating academic history to political
transitions that were counterpoints for the changing interests of historians, Eley
skilfully traces bitter controversies over goals and theories in his discussion of key
works and personalities in American, British, and European scholarship. In hon-
est and self-reflective fashion, he is forthright about the perspectives he brings to
his analysis as a British, Marxist scholar from a working-class family, affected by
1968, a specialist in German history who migrated to the United States in 1979.
In direct and sometimes more subtle ways, his entire approach reflects the very
currents he discusses—a commitment to writing politically engaged history and
acute awareness of the complexities involved in historical explanation.
Raymond Williams, the Annales School, Raphael Samuel, Joan Scott,
Charles Tilly, and Natalie Davis are among a welter of historians discussed. E.P.
Thompson, Tim Mason, and Carolyn Steedman serve as centrepieces in a sophis-
ticatedly conceived structure in which chapters are arrayed around attitudes that,
according to Eley, constituted the main registers of the radical historian’s sensibil-
ity. Thus, the 1960s was a period of ‘optimism’, characterised by a belief in
knowledge–shaped by nineteenth-century aspirations of the pioneering social sci-
ences–that it was possible to make the world knowable through history. The late-
1960s’ sense of political possibility was another stimulus to social history. By
recounting episodes of popular resistance, Thompson’s Making of the English
Book Reviews166
Working Class regrounded the history of democratic gains; it also attacked narrow-
ly based economic history, overdeterministic Marxism, and static theories of class.
The result was a counternarrative to the story of national consensus that opened
up the complexities of cultural history by revealing how ordinary people handled
large-scale experiences in cultural ways.
To discuss the period of intellectual and political ‘disappointment’ that fol-
lowed, Eley shifts to Germany. Although social history made some inroads in
Britain after 1945, in Germany it was re-established along conservative lines until
the political events of the 1960s provoked change. In the 1970s, Tim Mason tack-
led the issue of working-class resistance against Nazism: rejecting the heroizing
approach of Communist historiography, he planned to use a study of the working
class for a general history of the Third Reich by revealing the tensions between the
regime’s objectives and its ability to enlist the resources of Germany’s class-divid-
ed society. In the late 1980s, he abandoned this goal, believing it impossible to
move from class relations to full-scale political-social history. Eley explores this as
one manifestation of materialist social history running up against its limits–in
Mason’s case, a tragedy, because of his suicide.
A period of ‘reflectiveness’ ushered in the turn to ‘culture’, which Eley sees
as a common denominator for various discontents–scepticism about the study of
‘society’, unease with existing paradigms, and appeal of studying smaller settings.
Beginning in the late 1970s, an array of new ideas, among which Eley views fem-
inism as the most important, provoked additional ferment in the historical disci-
pline. With the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1980s, rhetoric and practice shifted from
‘social’ to ‘cultural’ modes of analysis. Most significantly, in Eley’s view, it facili-
tated theoretical understanding of gender whose effects transformed the ground
of thinking about history. As the two impulses in the social history accumulated
since the 1960s–to grasp the development of whole societies and to study partic-
ular locales–came apart, and the materialist paradigm of social totality grounded
in the primacy of class eroded, radical and innovative younger people entering the
profession gravitated toward cultural history, which was not without its own
aggrandizing logic, sometimes subsuming too much.
To highlight these changes and suggest remedies, Eley focuses on Carolyn
Steedman. A post-Thompsonian social historian, she became known as a cultur-
al historian with publication of her Landscape for a Good Woman, in which she used
her mother’s and her own experiences to question the main scenarios of modern
British history. For Eley, she is an historian who understands the theoretical and
philosophical implications of writing history, combining social and cultural histo-
ry by exposing the false dichotomies between them, thus showing there is no rea-
son to choose between one and the others—a view he shares.
Neoliberalism’s languages of ‘modernity’, market principles, and rhetoric
about good and evil in the world now proclaim ‘the end of history’. In ‘defiance’,
Eley urges new histories of society that are pluralistic, use generalization and the-
Left History 12.1 167
ory, and reassert confidence in the possibility of grasping society as a whole. He
reminds us that Eric Hobsbawm’s landmark essay, “From Social History to the
History of Society” (1971), demonstrated that the real point of the new approach-
es was not so much recognition of hidden or marginalized subjects or groups but
opportunities presented for writing the history of society as a whole.
Marlene Shore—York University
Nadine Hubb s, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay
Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004).
Judith A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer
Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005).
To say that queer people have had a huge impact on music in America pretty much
makes most of us say “yea, ok, now tell me something I don’t know.” Well, that
is exactly what Nadine Hubbs and Judith A Periano did with their respective
books, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and
National Identity and Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from
Homer to Hedwig.
Hubbs’s book opens with the story of Aaron Copeland, a beloved American
patriotic composer, who had much of his work released by none other than the
United States Army. On the informational pages of the album the US Army went
into great detail about Copeland’s heritage (he was Jewish), his work ethic, his sen-
sitivity toward those of different races—in fact they pretty much covered every-
things—except for his sexual identity, which was queer. As Hubbs ironically notes
in her work “Copeland…who…has been dead for over a decade is treated here to
(the US Army’s) ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy” (ii). In other words, even after death,
and even in 2007, history is still being rewritten to exclude queer people, even as
the unique and special things they have brought to that history are celebrated and
embraced. Thankfully though, we have people like Hubbs to set the record
straight—no pun intended.
Thoughtfully produced and meticulously researched, this book is a welcome
addition to the field of queer history. Hubbs, an Associate Professor of Music and
Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, introduces her read-
ers to the vibrant subculture of twentieth-century queer music in text, pictures,
and yes, composition. But it is not just the work of the queer artists that she pro-
files handily, it is their personal and professional lives as well.
Hubbs’s work is nothing in fact if not honest. Just as the title of her book
states, her work is as much about national identity as it is about the impact of
queers on American music. Thus we learn about such things as Virgil Thomson’s
Book Reviews168


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