Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Pereira, Anthony W.

Reviews 179 
"Romantic anticapitalist" is useful. But the more generalized line of argument 
perpetuates stereotyped notions of the relation of Enlightenment to Romantic 
culture and of "the nostalgic charm of the Romantic worldview" (1 15). It fails 
to establish a coherent connection between the future-oriented utopian strain in 
the writing of the Romantics and their emergent sense of the past not as a pre- 
capitalist memory of social harmony capable of "restitution," but as that part of 
the present which Marx would refer to in The Eighteenth Brumaire as "imme- 
diately found, given, and transmitted circumstances" ("unmittelbar vorgefunde- 
nen, gegebenen und iiberlieferten Umstanden"). 
Romanticists need to read and come to terms with Romanticism Against the 
Tide of Modernity because of its persistent, passionate attention to a dimension 
of Romantic culture that has yet to be adequately examined and articulated. 
Socialists and others on the left should read it because it engages with a dimen- 
sion of the Marxist tradition that resists being relegated to nostalgia or residual 
idealism antithetical to "scientific socialism." Lowy and Sayre themselves 
sometimes engage in such relegation - when they characterize as "Romantic" 
the criticism of Stalinist state capitalism to be found in such "Trotskyite dissi- 
dents" as C.L.R. James and Tony Cliff (152), for instance, or when they cite 
Lenin's definition of socialism as "the Soviets plus electrification" as an expres- 
sion of "modernizing" as opposed to "Romantic anticapitalism" (29). Shelley 
loved electricity - and he would have understood very well that the people who 
work to generate and harness the power of electricity also have the power to 
organize society based on meeting human needs rather than on perpetuating the 
rule of the exploiters over the exploited. 
William Keach 
Brown University 
Shawn C. Smallman, Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society, 1889- 
1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 
The Brazilian military regime of 1964-85 was one of the longest-lasting author- 
itarian regimes in recent Latin American history, and had a decisive impact on 
Brazil's pattern of economic and political development. Unlike neighboring 
Argentina and Chile, prior to 1964 the military in Brazil had not directly ruled 
the country in the twentieth century. The organizations and structures that facili- 
tated military rule in Brazil, according to Shawn Smallman, were not created 
overnight at the time of the coup d'etat in 1964. Instead, struggles between dif- 
ferent military factions, each allied with different civilian political groups in the 
decades prior reveal the gradual development of a military capable and willing to 
engage in direct authoritarian rule over society. 
180 Reviews 
Smallman suggests that the best way to understand those factional struggles 
is to look at informal structures of power linking the military - here understood 
as the most important branch of the military, the army - and civilian groups. In 
this book Smallman proposes to use social history to illuminate the military's 
long-term pattern of political behavior, thus moving away from two other kinds 
of history. The military's own official history is written by the winners of inter- 
nal conflicts and tends to exaggerate internal military unity, while conventional 
studies of civil-military relations often focus narrowly on formal politics and the 
activities of the military high command and top civilian politicians. 
Against these other two approaches, Smallman argues that informal struc- 
tures shaped military behavior. "Informal structures are the unwritten rules, 
organizations, and beliefs that shape power without official sanction or govern- 
ment funding. Examples of these structures would be corruption networks, civil- 
military alliances, army factions, racial beliefs, family ties, and regional 
alliances.. .Often, informal structures shape the military's relationship with civil- 
ian society more than its official organization" (5). Informal structures can best 
be revealed in factional fights within the military, when leaders of each faction 
turn to civilian allies for support. Smallman examines these factional fights and 
concludes that "many structures that later bolstered military rule - the existence 
of a powerful military party, with a system of intelligence and terror to repress 
dissent, strong civil-military alliances, a network of corruption to provide 
rewards, and a clear program for the nation - existed by 1954" (6). 
Smallman is thus lead to a much more directly political explanation of the 
1964 coup d'itat than some influential works in political science, for example 
Alfred Stepan's emphasis on a "new professionalism" within the armed forces 
(Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics, 1971). Smallman also challenges the 
work of rational-choice theorists who explain Latin American authoritarianism 
largely in terms of the conscious choices of political leaders at the time of dem- 
ocratic breakdown (for example, Youssef Cohen, Radicals, Reformers, and 
Reactionaries, 1994). By showing how the dominant internationalist faction 
within the military used repression and terror to crush internal dissent and oppo- 
sition after the end of World War 11, thus paving the way for later repression 
throughout society, Smallman adds an important perspective to debates about 
Brazilian military rule. 
While he is interested in social issues such as the "whitening" of the army 
after 1930 and networks of corruption involving military officers, he is not real- 
ly able to reveal much about these topics because of limitations of data. Instead, 
the heart of the book is a riveting account of factional infighting that in some 
ways resembles the work of a previous generation of military historians such as 
Robert Potash and Frederick Nunn. (Robert Potash, The Army and Politics in 
Argentina, volume 1 [ l  928- 19451 published in 1969, volume 2 [l 945- 19621 pub- 
lished in 1980, and [1962-19731 published in 1996; Frederick Nunn, The Military 
Reviews 181 
in Chilean History, 1976.) Like those other two scholars, Smallman links the mil- 
itary's role in politics to larger debates about social, economic, and political 
change and the connections between military factors and social groups. What 
Smallman adds to this approach is sensitivity to issues of class. 
The most vivid parts of the book are chapters 4-7. Chapter 4 shows how the 
rise of the U.S. after World War I1 incited a profound division within the Brazilian 
army. On one hand internationalist officers saw Brazil's interests as compatible 
with U.S. hegemony, and favored an elitist and hierarchical anti-communist 
alliance with the U.S. that pursued liberal economic policies with the assistance 
of foreign capital. Nationalist officers, on the other hand, wanted to create a 
mass-based, popular alliance that would pursue state-led development in defiance 
of the U.S. This split widened when fonner dictator Gehilio Vargas was elected 
president of Brazil on a nationalist-populist platform in 1950. 
The first round of the struggle went to the nationalists. Nationalist officers 
mobilized civilians against the military hierarchy in the campaign for the nation- 
alization of oil, using the slogan 0 Petroleo & Nosso (The Oil is Ours). 
Communists supported this campaign, and the high command used this fact to 
label the campaign Communist and to try to repress it (100). However, the high 
command was not able to prevent the eventual creation of a state monopoly in the 
oil sector, accomplished in 1953. Unlike the Peronists in the Argentine tnilitary, 
however, nationalists in the Brazilian military never formed strong bonds with 
trade unionists. Brazil's trade unions were also weaker than their Argentine coun- 
terparts, and Brazilian industrialization was less advanced in the 1950s than in 
Argentina. This comparative insight helps to explain that while the nationalists 
won the battle for the nationalization of the oil sector, they eventually lost the war 
for the control of the Brazilian armed forces and society. 
Chapter 5 is a thoughtful exploration of the ideologies on both sides of the 
nationalist-internationalist conflict. Chapter 6 discusses the changing nature of 
the conflict between 1949 and 195 l ,  while Chapter 7 chronicles the defeat of dis- 
sident nationalist officers and the wave of terror and purges that was unleashed 
against them by the high command (repression that was completed in the after- 
math of the 1964 coup). Smallman shows how the rise to prominence of the 
Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG or Superior War College), created in 1948, and 
its promulgation of national security doctrine signaled the victory of the high 
command and its internationalist vision of the role of the military. 
This book succeeds on many levels. At the most basic level, it challenges 
accounts of the Brazilian military regime that are content to analyze the precipi- 
tating causes of the coup d'ktat without taking into account long-term factors. 
Second, on its emphasis on informal contacts between military officers and civil- 
ians, it challenges accounts that rely on official military history or conventional 
frameworks of civil-military relations. Finally, by suggesting that a kind of 
underground social history can subvert the military's official view of itself, 
182 Reviews 
Smallman is opening up a potential new pathway for research. (Although, as his 
own book reveals, such social histories can be blocked by the non-cooperation of 
the military itself?) 
Some aspects of Smallman's argument are demonstrated better than others. 
For example, Chapter 7 is very good in showing the deveIopment of an intelli- 
gence and terror apparatus that was used inside the military itself to root out dis- 
sent. Smallman is also insightful on the programmatic preferences of the inter- 
nationalist officers who won the internal battle by 1954. However, he is less illu- 
minating about the link between internationalist military officers and the Uniiio 
Democratica Nacional (UDN or Democratic National Union), the chief civilian 
party in favor of the internationalists, and he also has little direct evidence of cor- 
ruption. One also wishes that he had provided a few more links between 1954, 
when he essentially ends his story, and the coup of 1964 - to posit a general con- 
nection is plausible, but a lot happened over those ten years, and the direct impact 
of the events he analyzes on the coup is left rather unexplored. In addition, some 
words about the endurance of nationalism within Bwzil's military might have 
been useful. For example, the ESG was widely seen as a center of intellectual 
resistance to neoliberal economic reform in the 1990s, and the majority of mili- 
tary personnel apparently voted for Lula in the presidential elections of 2002. 
This suggests that the internationalistfnationalist split that Smallman diagnoses in 
the 1950s still exists, in a different form, in the Brazilian military today. 
This reader found several minor errors in the text - for example, it should be 
Delegagia (not Delegacion) Especial de Seguranqa Politica (3); Ilha Grande is an 
island offshore of Angra dos Reis, and is not in the bay of Rio de Janeiro (93); 
and it should be Escola Superior de (not da) Guerra (107). Nevertheless, this 
book is well researched and written and offers suggestive insights to scholars 
interested in the origins of authoritarian rule, civil-military relations, and 
Brazilian political history. Smallman engages with a variety of other scholars in 
defense of his own lively interpretation of the development of the Brazilian army, 
and the book deserves a wide readership and careful attention. 
Anthony W. Pereira 
Tulane University 
Anthony Chase, Movies on Trial: The Legal System on the Silver Screen (New 
York: The New Press, 2002). 
For those of us who are not trained legal professionals, habitual criminals, or seri- 
al plaintiffs, films and television series about the law and its processes provide 
most of the images that shape our understanding of these issues. This is particu- 
larly the case in American theatres and households, where motion pictures and 


Shawn C. Smallman — Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society, 1889-1954

Rosenberg, Daniel

The Twilight of Reason: Neo-Conservatism and Corruption at Adelphi University, 1985- 1997

Kotsopoulos, Aspasia

Gendering Expectations: Genre and Allegory in Readings of Thelma and Louise

Skrentny, John D.

154 Jones 
AFL-C10, "Facts About Working Women," http:llwww.aflcio.orglwomenlwwfacts.htm; and 
"Unions Are Important for Minorities," http://www.aflcio.org/uniondifference/uniondiffl2.htm. 
Nelson Lichtenstein, Stare of. the Union: A Century of American Lahor (Princeton University 
Press, 2002), 2. 
Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor; and Race in a Modern 
Anzerican City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 
When one of the most economically vital areas of the United States becomes 
one of the least desirable places to live, and loses population like a melting ice 
cube loses mass, the situation cries out for an explanation. In recent years, his- 
torians have begun to supply answers to the question of what happened to 
Detroit, a project that has important insights for the status of other Rust Belt 
cities. Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis is the best known contri- 
bution in this growing field. Heather Ann Thompson's Whose Detroit? takes a 
different tack than Sugrue, and in so doing highlights political dynamics in the 
Motor City that heretofore remained obscured. For Thompson, Detroit is a set- 
ting in which we can explore the development of American political liberalism 
and conservatism, as well as their more marginal variants. Thompson's book, 
though hampered somewhat by conceptual ambiguities, is a significant and 
original contribution to the field. 
In Sugrue's analysis, Detroit and other cities are sites of conflict that fell 
into decline because of the failure to achieve integration of blacks at work, 
schools, and perhaps most importantly, in housing. This decline had early roots; 
Sugrue argues against those who see the 1960s as a crucial turning point. 
Instead, the 1960s are the product of forces long in operation, most important- 
ly, the multi-faceted exclusion of African Americans since their arrival en 
masse during World Wars I and 11. 
Thompson offers a different take on almost all of these points. First, she 
says it is wrong to see Detroit and liberalism as in decline; the city is still good 
for blacks, and liberalism offers more places and power for blacks than it did in 
the past. Labour went into decline, she agrees, but this was because of bad 
strategic choices. Second, the 1960s were a crucial turning point; the bad deci- 
sions made by labour, specifically the United Auto Workers, occurred in that 
crucial decade. Last, though Thompson's is very much a story of conflict - the 
title refers to continuing struggles of radicals, liberals, and conservatives to 
define Detroit's future - she emphasizes throughout the instances where blacks 
and whites worked together, whereas Sugrue showed the bitter conflicts of 
white vs. black. 
Revicws 155 
Thompson is at her most compelling when she recounts the everyday 
abuse experienced by black workers in the auto industry and black citizens seg- 
regated into the city's poorest neighborhoods. Each chapter begins with details 
of the life of James Johnson Jr., an autoworker who, like many other Detroitcrs, 
experienced and witnessed severe discrimination and terror fin his case, the 
lynching of a cousin) while living in the Deep South, and to a shocking extent 
saw more of the same once in the supposedly more egalitarian North. Unlikc 
others, however, Johnson lost control of himself while at work, and in 1970 
responded to workplace discrimination with a shooting spree that left two fore- 
men and one co-worker dead. 
Substantively, the book has eight chapters that chronicle events from the 
1950s through the middle 1970s. Thompson wiscly concentrates on the real 
decade of upheaval, 1965 to 1975, rather than "the Sixties" as such. Primary 
topics are struggles for political control of city hall, police brutality faced by 
Detroit's black communities, and exploitation and discrimination in the auto 
industry. Throughout, she emphasizes uneasy coalitions of the white and black 
left and radical left in their efforts for reform, and the continuing failure of the 
city's leadership to understand the plight of the city's African Americans. 
The failure of this leadership, especially the supposedly representative 
UAW, contributed greatly to fueling grievances and ultimately revolutionary 
pressures from below. Black radicals, especially the various "RUMs," or 
"Revolutionary Union Movements," are key players in this story as they fight 
for the protections of black workers that the UAW decmcd unworthy of effort. 
Black auto workers were concentrated in the most dangerous jobs, some even 
losing their lives as their employers forced them to work despite medical prob- 
lems, or when faulty machines ravaged their bodies. A vibrant, radical left 
flourished in this environment of deprivation, frustration and abuse, and 
Thompson skillfully captures it through her research into their leaders' papers 
and thc many newsletters, papers and flyers. The black radicals were joined by 
and sometimes conflicted with a variety of communist, socialist or liberal 
groups. 
Thompson's research uncovers some of the ugliest aspects of life in 
Detroit, especially the police brutality and workplace exploitation. Though crit- 
ical readers may suspect she is not providing the whole story (more on that 
below), these are undeniably horrible tales of racial oppression occurring in the 
supposedly promised land of the urban north. Hundreds of miles from Dixie, 
even up near the Canadian border, black workers endured racial slurs at work 
and blocked promotion paths. RUMs at various auto plants called wildcat 
strikes because the UAW would not, and when its popularity seemed to prom- 
ise black radical candidates elected into UAW leadership, the out of touch 
union resorted to crafty maneuvers to have those candidates defeated and the 
I56 Reviews 
status quo retained. The police department created in 197 1 a special unit called 
STRESS, or "Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets." This program of under- 
cover police typically worked by having a decoy act as an easy robbery victim, 
such as a drunk or a solitary woman, while other officers watched hidden from 
view. But STRESS proved too aggressive, making thousands of arrests but 
managing to kill 22 suspects in less than three years. Unauthorized searches of 
black-owned homes became a fact of life in Detroit, and though the outraged 
community strongly protested the reckless unit, it worked unhampered for 
years until it ran into trouble in the courts. The authorities' steadfast refusal to 
respond to these worker or citizen demands for reform was a significant factor 
in leading to rising tensions in the city, and for Thompson suggests that Detroit 
might have turned out differently if leadership had listened, understood and had 
some will to act. 
My criticisms of the book are perhaps, fitting my own training, the criti- 
cisms of a sociologist. Most centrally, I would have preferred more work 
explaining the concepts used to illuminate the analysis. To her credit, 
Thompson does not resort to some undefined "racism" as an uncaused causal 
factor to explain these dynamics. However, she replaces the "racism" that 
might be invoked in less sophisticated analyses with another undefined term: 
conservatism. Thompson's story is filled with ideological labels that serve to 
categorize the various actors in the story, most often conservative, liberal, or 
radical. Occasionally, "conservative" is modified with "racial" or "political." 
These labels do a lot of work in the analysis, but almost no space is spent defin- 
ing them. If it was conservatism, racial or otherwise, that led to support by 
some Detroit residents for programs like STRESS, then one wonders just what 
this conservatism was, where it came from, and why it had such a strong grip 
on the minds of so many. 
Thompson's analysis is sensitive, detailed, and at many points deeply mov- 
ing. Yet the conservatives who populate it come across as thick headed or sim- 
ply evil. Why would some Americans so strongly resist the efforts of other 
Americans to achieve equality? Though we learn much of the lives of tortured 
blacks such as Johnson, we learn little about their fellow white workers, and 
why they would be driven to such aggression. We know much of the roots of 
Jim Crow discrimination in the Deep South, but white discrimination in the 
North is relatively unstudied. 
Thompson is far from alone in this neglect; Sugrue's study excepted, stud- 
ies of race relations and labour rarely make any effort to understand the roots 
of white resistance to integration. Yet, as Paul Frymer has argued, just as we 
would not view it as sufficient if we treat "racism" sometimes expressed by 
blacks (some of which are detailed by Thompson) as simple racism, we should 
also avoid treating the racism expressed by whites at the bottom of society as 
Reviews 157 
simple racism, or simple "racial conservatism." A fuller understanding of the 
struggle for Detroit requires some understanding of why working class white 
Detroiters fought so hard to hold what they had rather than allowing others to 
share in the meager bounty - or why they did not seek to move up, through col- 
lege and professional schools, and then out. 
This project would almost certainly require some understanding of the 
white ethnic experience. Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left 
Boston and the Catholics Stayed would likely provide insights for historians 
seeking to account for these dynamics. Thompson's prose is filled with ethnic 
Polish and Italian names, she discusses a group called the Black Polish 
Conference, as well as the move to bring a GM plant to the Poletown section of 
Detroit (Thompson describes this effort as a gift from Mayor Coleman Young 
and does not mention that the residents strongly opposed the project). Yet 
Thompson never seeks to account for the role of white ethnicity in her account, 
though it pops up in the narrative again and again. 
An understanding of white conflicts with blacks would also necessitate a 
closer look at actual crime statistics. Thompson should be commended for 
bringing the history of policy/public relations, a neglected but crucial topic in 
studies of urban racial strife, to the front and center. Though we should never 
take white complaints of black crime at face value, the fact was that crime was 
indeed increasing in Detroit, as measured by murder rates. This does not excuse 
the outrageous and unconstitutional excesses of STRESS, but it helps us to 
understand some of the anti-crime hysteria of the period and the law and order 
politics that it encouraged. 
A critic might also contend that Thompson's focus is too narrow, and so 
she misses important contextual factors that shaped Detroit. I am hesitant to 
make this charge because Thompson does a superb job of including various 
political contextual factors - the Vietnam War is here, as is Third World efforts 
at decolonization, both through the writings of radicals. Moreover, she right- 
fully points out the effects of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and then the 
coming of competition from Japanese auto makers. Yet I wanted to see some 
reference to the fact that much of America's investment in the auto industry in 
the last few decades has not been in Detroit (Sugrue argues that this process of 
capital flight actually began in the 1950s). Rather than revitalizing the city with 
new plants, American automakers have built new plants in rural areas, such as 
GM'S Saturn plant in Tennessee. Foreign automakers similarly avoided Detroit, 
and indeed any big city. Auto plants literally sprouted in what were formerly 
cornfields. Why was this the case? This omission may be important, because it 
may be that the labour unrest that Thompson describes so vividly was actually 
what caused this capital investment to flee Detroit to rural America, as well as 
to foreign countries. 
158 Reviews 
A final point: Thompson takes an interesting position on the rise of black 
political power in the city. She argues that this is a good thing; she urges us to 
see that blacks never before had the power that came with Coleman Young and 
other city leadcrs. Yet one can also argue that black political power in Detroit 
was more symbolic than real. Is black control of a city that was only a shadow 
of its former self, a city laid waste by years of capital flight, worth great pride 
or praise? One might claim that African Americans took power at the worst pos- 
sible moment, when memories of former glory were still fresh, but the trajec- 
tory of economic decline was well underway, and the new black leadership 
could be hit with much of the blame. Regardless of how one comes down on 
this question, Thompson's work is valuable for forcing us to think in fresh ways 
about this tragic story. 
John D. Skrentny 
University of California-San Diego 
Mark A. Lause, The Civil Wark Last Campaign: James B. Weaver, The 
Greenback-Labor Party, and the Politics of Race and Section (Lanham, 
Maryland: University Press of America, Inc., 2001). 
A troublesome aspect of U.S. history for Marxian analysis is America's failure 
to turn to socialism during the industrial surge of the late nineteenth century. 
Even the search for viable radical insurgencies during that period has borne lit- 
tle fruit, except for a Populist moment in the 1890s. And agrarian radicalism 
diverged from the working class upheaval called for in Marxist dogma. Lause 
re-examines the empirical record and finds a precedent actually existed prior to 
Populism. The Gilded Age did spawn class struggle, which produced a 
Greenback-Labor Party in 1880. Although the third party polled few votes, its 
very existence, according to Lause, indicates a dialectic was operative. The fact 
that the new organization was stillborn was not due to lack of potential mass 
opposition to plutocracy. Lause argues overt political repression preserved the 
two-party monopoly on public power. 
Lause's interpretation is not intended to supplant other scholarship, but his 
thesis does, in fact, challenge at least the emphasis of much earlier historiogra- 
phy. Most historians locate the G.L.P. within a model stressing entrenched par- 
tisanship, continuity across time, the centrality of national debates on currency 
reform, and the ebb and flow of other "greenback" parties both before and after 
1880. From this perspective, the "soft" money issue was primarily an intra- 


Heather Ann Thompson — Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City

Cahill, Barry

212 Reviews 
ernism and communism holds out: the ground to struggle against history 
whether we believe in its stoppage or not. If history is in motion, as Marx sug- 
gests that it must be for revolutionary change to occur, then we need to work to 
overcome what Walter Benjamin called "the one single catastrophe" that it has 
been. This becomes the reason, as Benjamin also put it, to "brush history 
against the grain," or change the course of historical time and events. Yet, post- 
modern stoppages of history do not need to be viewed as antithetical to this 
cause. They might also be viewed as a means to "brush history against the 
grain." They may provide us with an immanent experience of power, a "pres- 
ent-ness" for it, that would stand as a reason to resist it and rearrange it. Either 
way, we would be engaged in struggle, which seems to me to be the point. It 
seems to me that only in struggle may we "oppose the existing social and polit- 
ical order of things," as Marx put it. Surely Hardt and Negri would like to do 
that in George Bush's America and Silvio Berlusconi's Italy. Why not provide 
us with the largest number of means for doing so? 
Ben Dorfman 
Aalborg University 
Laurel Sefton MacDowell, Renegade Lawyer: The Life of JL .  Cohen (Toronto: 
The Osgoode SocietyNniversity of Toronto Press, 200 1). 
In a liberal democracy such as Canada, which professes to be ruled by law, 
lawyers are important and the ideology of lawyers important for the diverse 
roles they play both inside and beyond the law. A few lawyers have sought to 
extend law's frontiers, not in order to forge a new weapon for class warfare but 
to ensure that the fundamental, legal, and democratic rights of the working 
class are respected by the ruling class. Among the first and most important of 
them was the subject of this book, a lawyer who worked both within and against 
the system in order to changk it. Jacob Lawrence Cohen (1897-1950) was born 
in Manchester, England, and came to Canada in 1907. Called to the Ontario bar 
in 1918, within twenty years he had become Canada's most prominent labour 
and civil-liberties lawyer. J.L. Cohen did not so much invent labour law as 
invent the idea that law should serve labour's interests as well as management's; 
that workers had something significant to gain from law's hegemony. Cohen 
was a left-winger who not only acted for the Communist Party and trade union 
organizers, but also served as legal counsel for the new industrial unions, pro- 
Reviews 213 
moted the development of industrial standards, and the right of workers to bar- 
gain collectively, and defended left-wing leaders and organizations during the 
Depression, internees during the Second World War, and alleged spies after it. 
Cohen was a lawyer for social responsibility long before the idea was invented. 
Renegade Lawyer, which received honourable mention for the Canadian 
Historical Association's 2002 Sir John A. MacDonald Prize for the best book in 
Canadian history, is a most welcome addition to the minuscule corpus of schol- 
arly Canadian lawyer biography. It demonstrates the promise and potential of 
sociolegal history, and should help reduce the anti-lawyer sentiment which still 
prevails among historians of the mainstream. 
Though both MacDowell and the legal biographer, the late David Ricardo 
Williams, use the term "pinnacle of the profession," Williams would not have 
agreed that Cohen had reached it. Williams' Seven Giants, only one of whom - 
Eugene Lafleur - merits serious consideration as an historical figure, were all 
establishmentarians who swam with the corporate elite. All were lawyers' 
lawyers. All were the complete antithesis of J. L. Cohen. Yet unlike most of 
Williams' subjects, Cohen was more than just a lawyer. Williams, for example, 
makes much of the fact that one of the elect, Frank Covert, was a "labour 
lawyer." Covert, some ten years younger than Cohen, was unusual for a corpo- 
rate lawyer practising industrial relations law in that he not only advocated 
union recognition and negotiated collective agreements, but also sat on concil- 
iation boards and occasionally (and controversially) acted for unions seeking 
certification. Behind Covert's enlightened attitude lay the example of J.L. 
Cohen. Thanks to Cohen, corporate lawyers such as Covert sought to educate 
their big business clients in the new industrial relations reality of the post-war 
world. Corporate capitalists were forced to acknowledge that labour-manage- 
ment relations were a two-way street. Cohen was influential and successful 
enough to make Toronto's corporate lawyers and law firms take notice that 
industrial relations law was one of the two big new areas of practice opening 
up as a result of the Second World War. Of course, the legalization of collective 
bargaining during the war made the "lawyerization" of industrial relations after 
it inevitable. 
J.L. Cohen was perhaps less a labour lawyer than a civil liberties lawyer, 
for whom the working class happened to be the largest constituency disenfran- 
chised by the vested interests whose ideology the rule of law favoured. Ergo, 
though working people were not the only constituency whose civil rights were 
not respected, they engaged his attention most. It was at the height of his fame, 
in 1945, that Cohen, while working on an important brief for one of his union 
clients, was involved in an incident that led to his being falsely accused and 
wrongly convicted of assault with bodily harm against his secretary-cum-mis- 
tress du jour. Whether he was framed on the basis of a mere lovers' quarrel is 
2 14 Reviews 
another matter. That he was seems probable, as does his suicide a mere four 
months after his reinstatement at the bar, when it became clear to him that his 
career ha4 for all practical purposes, ended when the Ontario Court of Appeal 
upheld his conviction. Though MacDowell grasps and develops the point that 
Cohen was more or less automatically disbarred because of his conviction, sus- 
tained on appeal, for a Criminal Code offence, she does not cite the only law 
report - [l9471 Ontario Weekly Notes, 336. Nor does she appear to have con- 
sulted the Timiskaming District criminal assize minute book, which, given the 
loss of the trial case file, might have shed some light on anomalous aspects of 
the prosecution. The unknown complainant was someone other than the alleged 
victim. The prosecutorial instrument was a preferred indictment, an extraordi- 
nary proceeding which the Attorney General of Ontario would have had to 
approve, if not instigate. The case, which MacDowell analyses in riveting 
detail, bears all the marks of a "get Cohen" put-up job. The lawyer who was 
anti-establishment had much more to fear from his enemies in the establish- 
ment than the lawyer who was part of the establishment. Cohen's downfall was 
the inevitable result, if not necessarily the purpose and design of the prosecu- 
tion. 
MacDowell devotes the muscular Epilogue to a discussion of Cohen's 
place in history, and a critique of the prevailing Marxist cast of Canadian labour 
historiography. Cohen has been excluded from it - not only because he 
approved the "post-war settlement" in industrial relations wrought by P.C. 1003 
(Wartime Labour Relations Regulations), but also because he played a large 
role in helping to establish it. Other than the book under review and D.M. 
Estok's 1981 Master's thesis, there is little if any scholarship on Cohen at all. 
That he was the Communist Party's quondam lawyer and throughout his career 
championed the civil and political rights of the Left and worlung people gen- 
erally seem insufficient to establish his left-wing credientials. Caught up as he 
was in, and his political ambitions frustrated by the bitter rivalry between the 
CCF and the Communists, he has been tarred with the broad brush of social 
democracy. Cohen, nevertheless, was a major figure of the Canadian Left dur- 
ing the interwar and war years and deserves, no less than J.B. McLachlan, to be 
recognized as such. How different the outcome of McLachlan's 1923 trial for 
seditious libel might have been had Cohen defended him! 
Regrettably for a book of such distinction, typographical errors abound - 
the most serious of which is "cents" for "seats" (201). There are a few non 
sequiturs. In 1939 Sidney Smith was president of the University of Manitoba, 
not dean of its law school (22); "stressful" (203) does not mean "under stress"; 
Dosco was a corporation not a "company" (203). The Carroll Commission 
(Royal Commission on Coal, 1944-46) concerned the entire coal-mining indus- 
try in Canada, not just Nova Scotia (256). An accused may be discharged, not 
Reviews 215 
"acquitted," as the result of a preliminary hearing (345 n. 24). MacDowell had 
access to Cohen's file at the Law Society of Upper Canada and has made excel- 
lent use of it. One wonders whether she also had access to Cohen's RCMP file, 
to which she alludes ("J.L. Cohen's personal file was no. 2885") without indi- 
cating whether it is still extant. Neither the published proceedings nor the 
archival records of the National War Labour Board, of which Cohen was briefly 
and controversially a member, appear to have been consulted. While the 
Bibliography in addition to the Notes is interesting and useful, a complete bib- 
liography of the published writings of J.L. Cohen - both books and articles - 
together with a description and discussion of the extensive Cohen Papers at the 
National Archives, would have been much more so. A surprising omission from 
the Bibliography is the important recent work of Dominique ClCment on the 
Royal Commission on Espionage, in which Cohen was involved as counsel for 
the alleged spies. Also omitted is Ross Lambertson's definitive Ph.D. thesis at 
Victoria on civil liberties in the post-war period, which complements and 
advances MacDowell's discussion of that aspect of Cohen's late career. A case 
could be made that Cohen's own civil liberties were destroyed by the infamous 
prosecution to which he was subjected. 
Though its title is unfortunate - Cohen was a genuine radical but in no 
sense a "renegade" - Renegade Lawyer is the best kind of biography. It is an 
exemplary work of history by a leading historian of industrial relations; a life- 
and-times history that explains more than it narrates. The chief danger of his- 
torical biography is that content may be completely subsumed by context. Here, 
however, the author strikes a near-perfect balance between the two, as between 
overarching and subordinate themes and historic periodization. The organiza- 
tional structure lends itself especially well to historical analysis and contextu- 
alization, and proves the truism that biography should only ever be written by 
professional historians specializing in the study of the area in which their sub- 
ject flourished. Few subjects of biography are truly historical and scholarly 
biographers have to demonstrate to the satisfaction of mainstream historians 
that their subject is indeed of historical significance. Laurel Sefton MacDowell 
has succeeded brilliantly in presenting J.L. Cohen as a great, tragic Canadian 
who personified the legal struggle for human rights in Canada and paid a terri- 
ble price for his iconoclasm. That he was neither the great lawyer beloved of 
internal legal historians nor the "great man" beloved of popular biographers 
does not matter. 
Barry Cahill 
Halifax. NS. 


Laurel Sefton MacDowell — Renegade Lawyer: The Life of J.L. Cohen

Magee, Paul

"They'll Think I'm an Indian Won't They?": Colonial Capitalism and Primitivist Fantasy in Tierra del Fuego, 1832-1996

Hull, James P.

Working With Figures: Industrial Measurement as Hegemonic Discourse

McElligott, Greg

148 Reviews 
engaging and edifying read. Historians of slavery, nineteenth-century social 
movements, African American politics, and American politics will do well to 
consult this study. Its conciseness also makes it well suited for the classroom 
where it will offer a great deal to students and professors alike. 
Stephanie M: H. Camp 
University of Washington, Seattle 
Ray Hudson, Producing Places (New York: The Guildford Press, 200 1). 
We live in a time when most urgent political questions relate to boundaries of 
one sort or another. Globalization, of course, is reconfiguring the shape and 
meaning of those at the national level. Related pressures have pushed back the 
institutional frontiers of the welfare state, rearranging communities and families 
to make room for market forces. A wide-ranging assault on civil society is now 
being conducted in the name of national security, using measures that only 
recently were considered beyond the pale. Those who oppose such intrusions 
find themselves grappling with the limits of solidarity, for inclusiveness and 
diversity demand attention to borders, if not respect for them. And any consid- 
eration of who is "us" and who is "them" is likely to be entangled - at least 
metaphorically - with spatial boundaries. The distinction between "core" and 
"peripheral" workers is illustrative here. 
In this context it seems reasonable to consult geographers on the 
changing meaning of space and place. And economic geographers seem 
to be well positioned to comment on the global extension and domestic 
intensification of work. In Producing Places, Ray Hudson examines both 
"places in which production occurs" and "the production of places" 
where "the realms of use values and exchange values" intersect (v-vi). 
Much of the book is an attempt to rehabilitate traditional Marxist 
economic theory by melding in regulationist approaches and highlighting 
the spatial dimensions of production (especially uneven development). 
This argument seems to be aimed at mainstream geographers who neg- 
lect or obscure the pervasive impact of capitalism on their objects of 
study. By focusing on production, Hudson is able to synthesize a wide 
range of theoretical material, covering production's relationship with 
states, labour markets, corporate strategies, worker organizing, places, 
spaces, and nature. He therefore makes a very comprehensive case for the 
relevance of Marxist theory in a geographic context. 
Those familiar with similar debates elsewhere may find little that is 
novel in this strand of the book beyond a useful synthesis of existing 
material. And at times they may be put off by Hudson's dry, abstract, and 
Reviews 149 
heavily qualified style of writing. Although he occasionally uses concrete 
examples, the breadth of Hudson's project seems to prevent him from sit- 
uating them in depth. As a result, the book is often strangely devoid of 
any real sense of place, and human motivations tend to be portrayed in 
awkward, stylized terms. Hudson does try to approach a lower level of 
abstraction, but the results are often tentative, and sometimes frustrating 
(on page 267, the word "complex" appears five times in one paragraph). 
Nevertheless, the sheer scope of Hudson's coverage is impressive, 
and he manages to include a number of very useful observations in the 
course of his travels. One of these is his portrayal of some business strate- 
gies as "spatial fixes" to problems of profitability and worker resistance. 
Firms able to access cheap labour abroad may be using a spatial fix to 
deal with union wages at home, for example (102). Another sort of spa- 
tial fix occurs when those engaged in "strong" competition strategies 
smash open new markets, creating more economic space, rather than sim- 
ply aiming for success in the old spaces (147). 
Workers organizing community resistance to relocation, or merely 
trying to provide for their lives outside work, are engaged in "spatial 
praxis," on the other hand (223). Hudson focuses on the defensive fea- 
tures of this activity, and presents (in a rather cursory way) non-class 
identities based on gender and ethnicity primarily as divisions that com- 
plicate "labour's spatial fix" (230-37). 
Although this is pitched as an example of agency on the part of 
"knowledgeable subjects with their own projects" (223), there is surpris- 
ingly little discussion of projects that aspire to more than survival. 
Workers are depicted for the most part as objects to be acted upon, and 
although capital can create new spaces (via strong competition strate- 
gies), workers' capacity for similar endeavours is not treated here. This 
is unfortunate because, as James Scott has shown, major regime changes 
are often preceded by a proliferation of secret oppositional spaces where 
"hidden transcripts" of resistance are developed and rehearsed (see his 
Domination and the Arts ofResistance). The failure to take seriously this 
facet of worker agency may help explain why Hudson reaches rather 
tepid conclusions about "what is to be done." Toward the end of the book 
he seems to endorse "eco-Keynesianism" because "such reformism is as 
much as is currently possible" (322). 
While he is unable to muster much enthusiasm for progress through 
worker action, Hudson is refreshingly optimistic about the potential for 
contradictions within capital's newer economic strategies. And it is here 
that geographic perspective seems to have made the difference. 
Dissecting lean production and "just in time" sourcing, he hints that they 
rely on social constructions like "trust" (among businesses) that are 
150 Reviews 
markedly easier to maintain over short distances (199). It turns out that 
such trust and a "shared sense of purpose" are also crucial elements of 
regional development projects (203). 
So by this point Hudson seems to be edging toward the claim that 
even capital needs some sort of bounded space that is smaller than a total- 
ly globalized market. Conversely, for workers, ". . .looking for comrade- 
ship abroad may be the only possible strategy for fighting successfully at 
home" (257, citing J. Wills). Both trajectories pass through the creation 
of community - a (notional?) social place that receives scant attention in 
this work. This neglect is unfortunate because one gets the impression 
that community is very important to the author. One passage dealing 
with plant closings speaks with a kind of restrained passion: 
"Devalorization is always necessarily place-specific. Nonetheless deval- 
orized places remain meaningful for people who live and learn there, 
embedded in social networks of family, friends, and relations" (282). 
L i k n g  such feelings to popular conceptions of community, and explor- 
ing the changing meaning of this term would have extended this point in 
useful directions. 
It should be noted that Hudson is remarkably lucid in a chapter that 
deals with topics perhaps most foreign to readers schooled in the social 
sciences. Discussing the relationship between production and nature as 
a process of "materials transformation," Hudson applies the laws of ther- 
modynamics in a cogent and evocative way (287-89). His elaboration of 
the distinction between "first" (precapitalist) nature and "second" nature 
(as remade by capital) then provides a very useful segue into an exami- 
nation of environmental disasters and strategies (295-96). And he inci- 
dentally notes the influence of accounting cycles on the rate at which 
nature is transformed (295). One wonders how different history might 
have been had accountants tracked the rate of profit by fiscal months or 
fiscal decades rather than fiscal years. 
Despite its occasional frustrations, Producing Places is a thoughtful 
and provocative book that deserves to be read by a wide audience. In the 
end it does tackle some of the fundamental questions of our time, and it 
does so in a way that leaves space for progressive solutions. 
Greg McElligott 
McMaster University 


Not a member yet

Shawn C. Smallman — Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society, 1889-1954

The Twilight of Reason: Neo-Conservatism and Corruption at Adelphi University, 1985- 1997

Gendering Expectations: Genre and Allegory in Readings of Thelma and Louise

Heather Ann Thompson — Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City

Laurel Sefton MacDowell — Renegade Lawyer: The Life of J.L. Cohen

"They'll Think I'm an Indian Won't They?": Colonial Capitalism and Primitivist Fantasy in Tierra del Fuego, 1832-1996

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Ray Hudson — Producing Places

Personal Ad Politics: Race, Sexuality and Power at The Body Politic

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