Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Holtzman, Ben

A Conversation with John McMillian

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Susan Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Prince
Edward Island. Her work includes publications on the City of London and eigh-
teenth-century commercial society. She is currently working on a project on the
commerce of eighteenth-century London theatre.
Mary Cathryn Cain is an assistant professor of history at Agnes Scott College in
Decatur, Georgia. She is currently at work on a manuscript that explores the con-
struction and deployment of racial identity among Northern middle-class white
women in the antebellum US.
Lucy Delap is a fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and a member of
the History Faculty, University of Cambridge. Her book The Feminist Avant-Garde:
Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century was published by Cambridge
University Press in 2007. She is currently working on a cultural history of twen-
tieth century domestic service in Britain.
Michele A. Johnson has taught history at the University of the West Indies,
Mona, Jamaica and is currently a member of the faculty in the Department of
History, York University. Her research interests and publications reflect an inter-
est in the socio-cultural history of Jamaica in the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, the history of the West Indies Federation and the history of domes-
tic service in twentieth century Jamaica.
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 8


Contributors

Devinatz, Victor G.

Reading Communist Biographies: The Birth of American Communism,
International Communism through the Cold War’s Early Years and the
New Communist Movement

Filreis, Alan

admirably—by combining confrontational politics with other more elusive forms
of protest and by demonstrating that diversity and inclusion are also viable anti-
dotes to oppression and injustice. The concepts of aesthetics and politics produce
a field of an irreducible complexity, which generates vast potential for individual,
communal, and societal change. This complexity can quite reasonably be
approached with a predetermined agenda that may constrain artistic freedom,
though ideally an argument would outline such a program; or this complexity can
be handled as a productive resource, which accommodates differences and which
can support experimentation and playful exuberance, along with the serious redress
of grievances.
David S. Mather
University of California, San Diego
Alan Wald, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Some of the brilliance here shines on the University of North Carolina Press, for
what university publisher these days has the nerve and the finances to promise a
trilogy? For one thing, it evinces a rare confidence in a literary scholar who will real-
ly stay the course. Such academic multi-volume projects that have been permitted
are typically reserved for the biographer (think Arnold Rampersad’s Langston
Hughes or Robert Lucid’s prospective Norman Mailer). Perhaps Alan Wald’s vol-
umes are in a sense a biography: a generation, compelled to write inventively about
its discomposed world, that looked and leaned leftward. Wald is the now surely the
preeminent chronicler of that literary generation.
Trinity of Passion is the second of three linked books that track a generation
of left-wing American writers from the 1920s through the early 1960s. The earlier
study, Exiles from a Future Time, took us from the concurrent emergence of aesthet-
ic modernism and of post-1917 forms of radical politics to the first months and
years of the Depression. (The story of that concurrence takes Wald and us to the
brink of understanding how and when modernism and communism could and
could not converge—a big, important topic that Wald himself has played a major
role in raising in other books and essays over the years.) The new work, focusing
more on novelists (poets were the emphasis of Exiles), takes us through the Popular
Front period. The third book, already researched and in states of draft, is to be
called The American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. Wald is right to
claim that each of the three “stands alone as a self-contained book” (xiii) but, when
taken together, the three will have coherently introduced dozens of fascinating
heretical writers most readers will not have known before, and will have
reworked—sometimes with the addition of stunning new information about their
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political views and affiliations—a number of writers we thought we knew.
One we thought we knew is Arthur Miller. About a book I so much
admire I am hesitant to urge readers to skip to the end. But those seeking the sort
of thrill that will then induce them to go back and carefully read the whole may
want to turn first to chapter 7, “Arthur Miller’s Missing Chapter”. Characteristic of
Wald, this blockbuster of a revelation is written in patient, understated tones. Wald
never parades his original research, yet it abounds here. In short: Arthur Miller was
Matt Wayne, pro-communist critic and activist. There are as many reasons why this
background has been suppressed as there are reasons why centrist and even con-
servative American theatergoers have come to accept what Miller is saying through
his plays. Get thee to the chapter and find out more.
Miller was and is eminent, but Leonard S. Zinberg, a Jewish communist,
is alas forgotten. Wald reveals that Zinberg bespoke his radicalism through the mul-
timillion copy-selling, tough-guy mystery writer Ed Lacy, whose protagonists are
typified by the black cop Lee Hayes, who, with his Jewish partner Albert Kahn
(named for the blacklisted communist, father of Tony Kahn whom many know
today through WGBH’s Morning Stories), is assigned to cool off a hot political situ-
ation in Harlem circa 1967.
We are entertained by hearing of Zinberg. Many readers, utterly fascinat-
ed by Wald’s summary, will lay his book temporarily down and click on their online
bookseller to buy a used Ed Lacy paperback or two. Yet serious, compelling ques-
tions are raised by this writer’s identities, and indeed they are the issues opened by
the book as a whole, a study of dozens of Zinberg/Lacys. If Ed Lacy was “a mass-
market phenomenon through the entire Cold War era” who sold twenty-eight mil-
lion copies (4), why did the fact of Zinberg’s politics become so thoroughly
obscured? First off, Zinberg went literarily underground and emerged as Lacy to
evade blacklisters and subpoena-wielding court officers. Second, for all the recent
academic interest in race, identity and narration—and simultaneously in the literary
history of the rise and then demise of the Jewish/African American cultural
alliance—Zinberg, the Jewish writer who wrote for the mass market from a black
subject position, remains forgotten because we have lost or have neglected to teach
the basic methods and tools of research. The Zinberg-Lacy connection is only dis-
coverable through the sort of time-consuming and financially draining work in far-
flung archives and interviews with political survivors that Alan Wald has mastered.
Judging only from the many books in which Wald is thanked—typically
for sharing his personal archive, providing leads, and teaching his method—we
know that he is among those who believe that the survival of such research has a
political and ethical efficacy. And if he has conveyed the sense of this style to a few
young scholars, he is also aware of his debt to predecessors: Walter Rideout for his
1956 book on the radical U.S. novel (daring for its time), Daniel Aaron for Writers
on the Left of 1961, and James Gilbert for Writers and Partisans of 1968. Wald’s work
stands in a literary-historical tradition. But his trilogy is already better and more
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coherent than the three just named. Why? Because the archives are open wider
than they were during the Cold War, and because veterans of American literary
communism were ready to talk at least somewhat honestly by the time Wald (espe-
cially in the 1980s and 1990s) traveled to them with his tape recorder.
After the Miller revelations, the most exciting portion of Trinity of Passion
for this reviewer is in the acknowledgments and list of sources. Where hasn’t Wald
been in the past twenty years, and to whom hasn’t he spoken, in his massive effort
to get this story right? The energy implicit there flows background into main body
of the work, a description of the antifascist imagination in its almost infinite indi-
vidualized forms. Only the most recalcitrant generalizer about radicalism can read
this book and then go on dubbing all U.S. communists uncritical dupes. Some
were—to be sure—and Wald doesn’t hesitate to say so. But when one goes this
deeply into a narrative that has been too often told without fine-grained knowledge,
one learns that there were as many different literary responses to fascism, racism,
and economic crisis in this period as there were people with the urge to write about
them.
Alan Filreis
University of Pennsylvania
Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing
Reform in Chicago, 1871-1919 (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2005).
Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth
Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2005).
Since World War II scholars and popular culture have associated the American
Dream with middle-class whites owning single-family homes on spacious lots in the
suburbs. These two books, in different ways, challenge that dominant association.
Margaret Garb excavates the late-nineteenth century to understand how homeown-
ership became a predominant middle-class phenomenon in the subsequent centu-
ry. Andrew Wiese examines African American suburbanization in the twentieth
century to show that suburbs and ‘suburban dreams’ were neither exclusively white
nor middle-class. While these scholarly accounts take different forms—Garb’s
book is a tightly-woven monograph of a single city while Wiese’s work is a nation-
al history—they share themes and methodologies. Both books document and
explain working-class participation in homeownership and suburbanization, the
role of race and class in stratifying housing markets and informing residential choic-
es, and the role of government in brokering the housing interests of social classes
and racial groups. As astute social historians, both focus on the agency of African
Americans or immigrant white workers as they achieve homeownership and subur-
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Alan Wald - Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade

Percy, Ruth

efforts thwarted by the economic cataclysm of 1929 and the determined efforts of
their employees to exert some control over their working lives. Like virtually all
employers in the 1930s and 1940s, those who opposed UE District 8 sought the
support of local authorities—including armed force—to coerce striking workers.
UE District 8 enjoyed considerable success with organizing and with pro-
moting a vision of civic unionism among its members. Sentner was aware of rank
and file concerns about his political views, but he also knew that communists were
viewed with suspicion more because of the supposed influence of the Soviet Union
on American communist ideology than because of how communism was interpret-
ed by him and others in St. Louis. Communists promoted the unionization of
women and African-Americans, and agitated for public relief during the
Depression. The civic model failed, however, when the union attempted to form
a broader social coalition to promote major government investment in Missouri.
The success of the Tennessee Valley Authority emboldened UE District 8 to agi-
tate for the creation of a Missouri Valley Authority that would finance the construc-
tion of a range of public works projects. The UE allied with groups like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to promote the
MVA’s creation. Feurer persuasively argues that this civic model of unionism that
was exemplified by the effort to create the MVA failed due to employer efforts to
reassert control during the post-war years. This observation is significant as it illus-
trates that American unions attempted to pursue a version of unionism in the post-
war years that transcended the work place, but were stymied more by employer
opposition than because of apathy within the labour movement.
This book is primarily about the years from the early 1930s to the early
1950s, so a title that reflects this emphasis would have perhaps been more appro-
priate. This slight shortcoming does not in any way diminish the strengths that this
book possesses. In an analysis that incorporates gender, race, politics, economics,
and biography Feurer has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of
how the American labour movement developed from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Jason Russell
York University
Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006).
In 1942 Katherine Archibald, a graduate student in sociology at University of
California—Berkeley, began work at the Moore Dry Dock shipyard in Oakland,
California. In subsequent years she wrote up her experiences and the result was her
classic participant observation study of a Bay Area shipyard during World War II,
Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity. This new edition is accompanied with
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an informative introduction by Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein. Students of
the period will find the introduction particularly useful. Drawing upon a range of
historical sources, it critiques Archibald’s text and places her story within a more
comprehensive, albeit brief, discussion of the war years.
The book focuses on job distinction (by gender, race, and skill) but also
addresses issues as wide ranging as dress, sex, makeup, and politics as it moves
through the different social groups at work on the shop floor. More than simply
an academic study, the work is observational; Archibald includes snippets of con-
versations and recounts for the reader incidents she experienced or heard about. As
such it is most valuable as a teaching resource, providing students firsthand insight
into the complex working dynamics of the shipyard. As Arnesen and Lichtenstein
state, the book “offers an unusual window into what today would be called the
dynamics of class, race, gender, and ethnicity.” (xii).
Moore Dry Dock, like others throughout the country, experienced
tremendous expansion during the war years; its workforce grew from 600 to 37,000
workers. As thousands of new workers entered the shipyard for the first time ten-
sions abounded between the established white, male workforce and the newcom-
ers. As the subtitle indicates, Archibald’s focus is the lack of unity she found in the
shipyard, something which countered her expectations. She charts the tensions
between the established white, male workers and the various newcomers – women,
African Americans, ‘Okies’, and other minority groups—and in doing so highlights
the cultural dynamics of social prejudice.
In her examination of each of the different groups that entered the ship-
yard for the first time in the war years, Archibald begins from the perspective of the
white men who were already established. Again focusing upon disunity, we read
about their resistance—at times hostile, at times polite—to the newcomers. With
each of the three main groups, women, Okies, and African Americans, Archibald
highlights the grounds of the tensions between them and the established white,
male workforce. The overall picture is the same: the established workforce feared
the newcomers would threaten their job security and was hostile to the notion that
they were capable of comparable work.
The ways in which this hostility played out varied depending on the group
concerned: women were subject to sexual objectification and harassment, Okies
were looked down upon as stupid country bumpkins, and African Americans were
subject to racism more readily associated with the Deep South. Indeed, the chap-
ter on African Americans is particularly enlightening in this respect and would be a
useful text to use not only in a course on American race relations, but also in an
introductory US survey. As teachers trying to get students to understand the
dynamics of race relations over the course of American history we tend to focus on
the South, for obvious reasons. This very readable chapter would give students a
sense of the extent of anti-black racism throughout the country and thus encour-
age them to think beyond the borders of the former Confederate states.
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Archibald gives a vivid picture of the hostility towards the newcomers,
and the language of resistance in the workers’ own words is often blunt and thus
revealing. Nevertheless, the privileging of the established workers’ position means
that Archibald fails to adequately address the newcomers’ perspective.
Consequently, we have relatively little information regarding how the newcomers
felt and how they responded to this resistance. Arnesen and Lichtenstein draw par-
ticular attention to the problem with Archibald’s representation of African
American workers. They argue that the omission of black activism during the war
years, particularly for full union membership and rights, points to the limits of a
white individual’s knowledge of the black experience at this time and in this con-
text. An additional limitation is Archibald’s examination of the shipyards in isola-
tion—she does not consider what happened when these workers went home at the
end of the shift—and thus we do not get a sense of how entering the shipyards
changed the newcomers’ lives as we do a sense of how it changed those of the men
already established there. While these criticisms are well founded, these sorts of
problems also make the book valuable as an academic work representative of its
time.
Wartime Shipyard offers an engaging insight not only into the workings of
a shipyard, but also into the nature of academic investigation. Indeed, as Arnesen
and Lichtenstein point out, this work highlights many of the tensions between aca-
demic expectations and lived reality. Archibald discusses the tensions between her
expectations of a united workforce and the fragmented one she found and thus
touches upon the complexities of academic investigation. In addition, Arnesen and
Lichtenstein argue that Archibald’s own status within the workforce, a highly edu-
cated, politically active woman, meant that she had limited access to many aspects
of the shop floor culture, which invariably tainted her observations. Because of
these issues this text would serve well to encourage students to engage critically
with primary source material.
Although Archibald does not use this language herself, her work ultimate-
ly reveals the cultural character of ‘social disunity’. While her training under
Marxist scholars led her to expect economic dislocation or fears of dislocation to
be the driving factor behind the tensions in the shipyard, what she actually found
was different. Concerns for the preservation of skill and job security were under-
lying issues, but workers did not vocalize them in the same way as cultural fears.
Thus women were feared because they represent a threat to established gender roles
and thus the status of the family; Okies were feared because of their lack of indus-
trial experience; African Americans were feared because of deep-rooted racial prej-
udices that privileged the white man.
Wartime Shipyard is an engaging read and provides a unique insight into
shipyard dynamics during World War II. As Arnesen and Lichtenstein suggest at
the close of their informative introduction, Archibald’s study offers most as a
resource for teaching; indeed, their introduction serves well to provide some nec-
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essary background and a comprehensive annotated bibliography for further reading
makes Archibald’s text all the more accessible to students.
Ruth Percy
University of Toronto
Ramsay Cook, The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
Released in between Max and Monique Nemni’s Young Trudeau and John English’s
Citizen of the World, Ramsay Cook’s memoir of his friendship with Pierre Elliott
Trudeau, The Teeth of Time, attracted only a modest amount of media attention.
Written with access to Trudeau’s personal papers, the aforementioned biographies
delve into his early intellectual formation and his journey to federal politics. Cook,
who turned down offers to write such a biography of his friend, has instead pro-
vided us with a more personal take on the man whom he met in 1961 at the wed-
ding of Jacqueline and Blair Neatby, and with whom he remained friends for forty
years. The resulting product is a fascinating exploration of the careers of two men
who sought to explain Quebec to English-speaking Canada, one as historian, one
as politician, and both as public intellectuals.
Ramsay Cook’s place in the Canadian historical profession needs little
explanation. A quick leaf through the pages of Nation, Ideas, Identities: Essays in
Honour of Ramsay Cook gives a brief, but impressive overview of the current gener-
ation of Canadian historians who trained under this redoubtable academic. In
many ways, The Teeth of Time serves two parallel purposes, providing personal
insights into Pierre Trudeau, while also giving us greater insight into the intellectu-
al and political development of Cook himself, as he developed his understanding of
Quebec, the Canadian constitution, and English-French relations. The two men
shared much in common in terms of their political beliefs, but they worked within
different spheres. While both would move from an early attachment to the feder-
al New Democratic Party (NDP) into the Liberal fold, Trudeau the politician and
Cook the historian would not always march in lockstep on their interpretation of
how best to respond to political crises. At no point was this more evident than in
the October Crisis of 1970.
Cook devotes a particularly significant amount of attention to Trudeau’s
handling of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorist attacks in Montreal
of October 1970, which comprises Chapter Four of his book. For Cook, who
wrote an MA thesis on the history of civil liberties in Canada, in which he called for
the replacement of the War Measures Act with less repressive legislation, the invo-
cation of this same Act by the Prime Minister was cause for deep concern, as it was
for so much of Canada’s left-wing academic community. For many, the invocation
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Katherine Archibald - Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity

Martel, Marcel

the author himself, most notably a naked shouting match with a former Ontario
Premier in the Glendon College gym (oddly, not the one who recently skinny-dipped
with CBC comedian Rick Mercer). As a contribution to Canadian political and intel-
lectual history, and as a commentary on public engagement by intellectuals, The Teeth
of Time is a valuable, and often entertaining, addition to the literature.
Matthew Hayday
University of Guelph
William Tetley, The October Crisis, 1970: An Insider’s View (Montreal & Kingston,
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).
Before opening the book, my initial reaction was, “Not another book on the 1970
October Crisis!” There is a sense that so much has been written on this tragic event
and if someone decides to publish a book on this, he has something new to reveal.
Unfortunately this book does not bring a new perspective on this event that cap-
tured Canadians’ attention in 1970. Even the author seems to have anticipated my
reaction and those of others since he devoted a portion of his introduction to a jus-
tification for the publication of another book on the October Crisis.
I have to confess that I expected a lot from this book since the author was
a member of Premier Robert Bourassa’s cabinet. At that time, he was Minister of
Financial Institutions. Although William Tetley warns his readers that his book is
“not a work of history … it is a commentary on a particular event …” (XXV), I
was disappointed because the book does not contain many new elements that
would make this a must read. In the author’s defence, I should mention that he
refers occasionally to his personal diary. Also, the book is the result of a careful
reading of every book, article and official report that has been published on the
issue since 1970.
William Tetley’s book is divided into twenty-one chapters, including a
conclusion, around a series of issues such as the calling out of the army, the invo-
cation of the War Measures Act, the conduct of the federal and provincial govern-
ments and the Duchaîne report. For those who want to learn anything about how
the Provincial Liberal party, the caucus, the Cabinet, the inner circle surrounding
Premier Bourassa and the Premier himself experienced these difficult events, the
reader will be disappointed. Although the author has included excerpts from a
diary that he kept during the Crisis, I wished he would have written more from the
perspective of being an elected official and a Cabinet member and revealed more
about the states of mind of those who surrounded him, other politicians and the
Cabinet. From time to time, Tetley mentioned that he approved the decisions
made by Premier Bourassa such as not negotiating with the Front de libération du
Québec, calling in the army, or asking the federal government to invoke the War
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Measures Act. On the issue of the reading of the Manifesto on television, Tetley
wrote that it was a good decision because “the document was not convincing” (37).
The use of the War Measures Act was another good decision but there were mis-
takes made in how it was implemented. According to Tetley, these mistakes were
that the State should have been “more careful in the choice of those arrested”.
Those who were arrested should have been allowed to see their lawyers and should
have been released “more quickly”. As well, the government should have said more
to the public (94). Finally, Tetley acknowledged that Cabinet ministers had access
to the list of individuals to be arrested. Did Provincial Cabinet Ministers try to
remove names from the list? Tetley wrote that “none of use recognized any names”
(96).
His comments on the Cabinet are not abundant and only reassure the
reader that ministers were not divided and not in a state of panic (134). Concerning
Premier Bourassa, he was “calm, fair and human” (41). The author does not say
much about his role during the Crisis. Was he asked to advise the Premier? Did he
feel that his views of the Crisis were well received by his fellow colleagues at the
Cabinet table, those who worked for the Premier’s office and the Premier himself?
He did not say much about it.
Throughout the book, Tetley justified the decisions made by governments
at various stages of the October crisis. His criticisms are for those who lost what
he called their “composure” during the October Crisis. Who were they? The elect-
ed members of the Parti Québécois (PQ) in the National Assembly, the PQ leader
himself René Lévesque, the editor of Le Devoir Claude Ryan, and the intellectuals
who signed the petition calling on the Quebec government to negotiate an
exchange of Cabinet minister Pierre Laporte and James Cross for political prison-
ers.
In conclusion, for those who don’t know anything about the October
Crisis, Tetley’s book is a good place to start. However, those who are familiar with
this tragic event may wish that Tetley would have written more about his experi-
ence. Perhaps I should send my review directly to him since he indicated in his
introduction that he would welcome any comments on his book by giving his email
and professional addresses.
Marcel Martel
York University
Andrée Lévesque, translated by Yvonne M. Klein, Red Travellers: Jeanne Corbin and
Her Comrades (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 2006).
In the corpus of writing on the Canadian left, there have been few critical scholar-
ly biographies, particularly in comparison to US and British historical writing.
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William Tetley - The October Crisis, 1970. An Insider’s View

Chaturvedi, Vinayak

A Critical Theory of Subalternity: Rethinking Class in Indian Historiography

Blocker Jr., Jack S.

Paul Ortiz - Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing
and White Violence in Florida; William P. Jones - The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South

Gosse, Van

by poverty, inferior education and race and sex discrimination at nearly every turn.
In the wake of President Clinton’s so-called “welfare reform,” which Orleck notes
ended FDR’s “belief that a civilized society provides a safety net for its poorest and
most vulnerable”, and in light of increasing privatization of functions once deemed
the responsibility of government, policy-makers, politicians and activists would do
well to acquaint themselves with the history of a federally subsidized program that
worked (305). For these and so many more reasons, Orleck’s first-rate study is a
must-read, not just for scholars, but for all those concerned with gender equality as
well as racial and economic justice.
Christina Greene
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World
Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
Soul Power is an intriguing book, and contributes to a broader historical under-
standing of the U.S. New Left which does not privilege white student activism
and posits a critique of empire as formative rather than a late development. It
functions as a series of case studies: a 1960 delegation to Cuba which shaped the
perspectives of three figures key to Black Power (Harold Cruse, LeRoi Jones,
Robert F. Williams); the cultural activism of the Local 1199 union of hospital
workers in New York city from the late 1950s on; the development of first
Newsreel and then Third World Newsreel as radical film collectives; Angela
Davis’ praxis as a black Marxist; the L.A. Rebellion of black and African filmmak-
ers in the 1970s, many of whom (Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima)
remain important figures today.
Cynthia Young posits that each of these instances or institutions con-
tribute to the development of a ‘United States Third World Left’, parallel to but
distinct from various other movements like the white student left and the Black
Power movement. This is a challenging proposition, since Third-Worldism in
Young’s account is notably nonracialized—several of the groups she studies are
white-led, like 1199 and Newsreel, so what matters is not experience or even
standpoint but discourse.
Some of these investigations are more innovative than others. Those
focusing on institutions like 1199 and the filmmakers, which have rarely been
integrated into the larger ‘movement’, underline the importance of cultural work,
and the New Left’s complex web of residual and emerging formations.
Conversely, Young’s treatments of familiar figures like Angela Davis or Robert F.
Williams act mainly as ballast for her larger argument, rather than making origi-
nal claims. In large part, this is due to her reliance on a few published works by
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or about these individuals, rather than archival research, such as the loosely-
organized Amiri Baraka collection at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, or
the voluminous Cruse papers at the Schomburg Library, both of which offer
enormous insights into how these seminal men came to constitute themselves.
At some points, it is unclear whether the author is trying to fashion an
original historical narrative, or offering a cultural analysis based on existing schol-
arship; only a few people have been able to carry off both (Harold Cruse is one
example). If this book is meant to fashion a new history, then it has problems of
depth: it is not correct to write that “it was not until 1966 that Stokely Carmichael
would coin the phrase black power,” as Young does on page 44. Those two loaded
words had become famous as the title of a 1954 book by Richard Wright, itself a
prime instance of the kind of Third Worldist discourse which Soul Power seeks to
surface. Then in the early 1960s the idea of ‘black power’ was repeatedly invoked
by key intellectual actors like Lerone Bennett and James Boggs.
However, one suspects that rather than simply (or mainly) a historical
narrative, Young intends to move across several disciplinary modes, intervening
in both scholarly and political debates, so a critique on purely historical terms may
not be useful. Her theoretical argument raises more fundamental questions. To
this reviewer, it never becomes clear how the ‘U.S. Third World Left’ is distinct
from the more internationalist sections of the New Left itself, or the implications
of claiming it as a distinct trend. Who or what was included: was the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee part of the Third World Left in the U.S.?
What about Dr. Martin Luther King, given how from 1956 on he insisted on the
connections between ‘civil rights’ in the U.S. and anti-colonial liberation in Africa
and elsewhere? If it was indeed multiracial, which white-led organizations played
a role, besides the few cited here? Minus that articulation, a ‘Third World Left’
seems more of a discursive construct than a useful insight into the actual struc-
ture of the American Left between the 1950s and the 1970s.
The most intriguing argument Young makes, which could have been
made much more strongly, is her suggestion that the Third World Left stretched
across the so-called Old and New Lefts, most notably via her inclusion of the
quintessential example of surviving Communist Party influence, Local 1199. Of
course, the enigmatic Davis—an icon of Black Power and yet, at least formally,
an orthodox Communist—by her very presence raised the question of why we
insist on segmenting the U.S. Left into so many particularistic strands. Soul Power
forces us to consider that question, which may be its largest contribution to the
ongoing debate about how to understand radicalism in the Cold War era.
Van Gosse
Franklin and Marshall College
Book Reviews162
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Cynthia A. Young - Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S.
Third World Left

Russell, Jason

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
Left History 12.2 177
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and meaning of broad regional or national themes. This type of historiography has
occasionally met with mixed success. Rosemary Feurer’s new book is unquestion-
ably a successful effort to view the remarkable challenges faced by the American
labour movement over a fifty year period through the lens of one mid-western
community. Anyone who may question the efficacy of community based studies
need look no further than this book to have their concerns dispelled.
Feurer contends that the uneven nature of capitalist development led local
terrain to be an important area of class struggle and movement formation. Her sub-
sequent supporting evidence, which is firmly grounded in broad primary source
research, ably supports this main thesis. Choosing to make District 8 of the United
Electrical Workers the focus of her study is particularly significant. The UE was
often viewed as being run by communists by other unions in both the Congress of
Industrial Organizations and the American Federation of Labor. The UE, despite
its importance in the history of the American labour movement, has not received
the kind of attention that has been devoted to unions in auto and steel. District 8
was also based in the mid-west – an area that deserves more scrutiny from work-
ing-class historians. Feurer’s analysis of UE District 8 sheds light upon the inter-
nal operation of the union, and reveals internal tensions and rivalries that seem to
have roiled virtually every American union in the 1930s and 1940s.
The main conflict within the UE, as with many industrial unions, was over
the role of communists. This book would be a major contribution to the existing
body of work on industrial unions for its commentary on communism if for noth-
ing else found between its covers. Like Stephen Meyer’s Stalin Over Wisconsin: The
Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900-1950, this book shows that commu-
nists made decisive contributions to unions at the local level. Feurer also shows,
like Meyer, how local communists often paid an enormous personal price for their
political beliefs. In the case of the UE in St. Louis, the communists were led by
William Sentner. Sentner frequently found himself under siege by employers, rank
and file union members, and national union leaders. His own beliefs, like those of
so many American communists, were challenged by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
and the revelation of the brutal nature of Stalinism. He and other communists in
UE District 8 operated fairly openly in their early years with the union, but their
activities were circumscribed in the post-war years due to the anti-communists fer-
vour that gripped the United States.
Electrical industry companies are the employers discussed in this book.
Components manufacturers like Emerson are often seen as ancillaries to larger
industries like steel and auto, but we see here that they played an important role in
local economies. The electrical companies in St. Louis were locally owned opera-
tions that practiced employer paternalism while simultaneously doing everything
possible to oppose unionization. Like the meat packing employers described by Liz
Cohen in Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, St. Louis’
industrial capitalists sought to maintain full control of their plants but found their
Book Reviews178
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 178
efforts thwarted by the economic cataclysm of 1929 and the determined efforts of
their employees to exert some control over their working lives. Like virtually all
employers in the 1930s and 1940s, those who opposed UE District 8 sought the
support of local authorities—including armed force—to coerce striking workers.
UE District 8 enjoyed considerable success with organizing and with pro-
moting a vision of civic unionism among its members. Sentner was aware of rank
and file concerns about his political views, but he also knew that communists were
viewed with suspicion more because of the supposed influence of the Soviet Union
on American communist ideology than because of how communism was interpret-
ed by him and others in St. Louis. Communists promoted the unionization of
women and African-Americans, and agitated for public relief during the
Depression. The civic model failed, however, when the union attempted to form
a broader social coalition to promote major government investment in Missouri.
The success of the Tennessee Valley Authority emboldened UE District 8 to agi-
tate for the creation of a Missouri Valley Authority that would finance the construc-
tion of a range of public works projects. The UE allied with groups like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to promote the
MVA’s creation. Feurer persuasively argues that this civic model of unionism that
was exemplified by the effort to create the MVA failed due to employer efforts to
reassert control during the post-war years. This observation is significant as it illus-
trates that American unions attempted to pursue a version of unionism in the post-
war years that transcended the work place, but were stymied more by employer
opposition than because of apathy within the labour movement.
This book is primarily about the years from the early 1930s to the early
1950s, so a title that reflects this emphasis would have perhaps been more appro-
priate. This slight shortcoming does not in any way diminish the strengths that this
book possesses. In an analysis that incorporates gender, race, politics, economics,
and biography Feurer has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of
how the American labour movement developed from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Jason Russell
York University
Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2006).
In 1942 Katherine Archibald, a graduate student in sociology at University of
California—Berkeley, began work at the Moore Dry Dock shipyard in Oakland,
California. In subsequent years she wrote up her experiences and the result was her
classic participant observation study of a Bay Area shipyard during World War II,
Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity. This new edition is accompanied with
Left History 12.2 179
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A Conversation with John McMillian

Contributors

Reading Communist Biographies: The Birth of American Communism, International Communism through the Cold War’s Early Years and the New Communist Movement

Alan Wald - Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade

Katherine Archibald - Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity

William Tetley - The October Crisis, 1970. An Insider’s View

A Critical Theory of Subalternity: Rethinking Class in Indian Historiography

Paul Ortiz - Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida; William P. Jones - The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South

Cynthia A. Young - Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left

Rosemary Feurer - Radical Unionism in the Mid-West, 1900 – 1950

1,044

1,130