Review, George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (University of Illinois Press, 1994)

Gateway Heritage, June 1996

Historians usually have portrayed the years between World War II and the Vietnam War as a period of cultural and political consensus. But as George Lipsitz argues, that consensus was only achieved after a bitter and protracted struggle between capital and labor over economic policy in the postwar era. Immediately after the war ended, American workers engaged in an unprecedented series of strikes, both official and unofficial, culminating in general strikes in such places as Oakland, California, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The implications of this struggle, Lipsitz shows, extend far beyond the specific issues of postwar economic reconversion, significantly affecting the subsequent development of social, political, diplomatic, and cultural history. In this brilliant portrait of the era, the late forties emerge as a defining moment in U.S. history when the options available to Americans immediately following the war were foreclosed in the interests of an increasingly symbiotic relationship between big government and big business.

In a substantial revision of his 1981 book Class and Culture in Cold War America: A Rainbow at Midnight, Lipsitz breaks down traditional distinctions between social, political, and cultural history. He draws on a wide variety of sources, ranging from the tactics of wildcat labor strikes to the development of the cold war, from the country music of Hank Williams to roller derby, from the working-class background of Marilyn Monroe to the rhythm and blues of Louis Jordan, from zoot suits to images of workers in postwar Hollywood films. The book’s title comes from country singer Ernest Tubb’s 1946 hit, “A Rainbow at Midnight,” a song that conveyed the ambivalence Americans felt as they looked toward the postwar future. As Lipsitz writes, “their recent experiences made it possible for them to imagine the future as a time of material abundance, as a time of cross-cultural cooperation, or as a time of deliverance from the trials of war. But they also might have viewed the future as a time of peril, encapsulated in the existence of the atom bomb and exacerbated by the uncertainties of postwar politics and social conflicts.”

In a series of examinations of specific labor struggles in various locales, Lipsitz shows that the struggle for control over the labor force was complicated by division among both capitalists and workers. The wartime policy of large-scale government contracts primarily had benefited big industries which, to preserve industrial harmony, had made their peace with organized labor. But many smaller, more competitive industries had accepted unions only grudgingly, if at all. Thus, in the postwar period some smaller industries sought to break their unions while most large industries worked merely to limit the role of labor. Unions were also divided, because many of the work stoppages during and after the war were unofficial “wildcat” strikes, originating on the shop floor, which further fragmented the unions. Labor leaders, seeking to prove to industry heads that they were responsible and able to keep union members in line, often cracked down on such rank-and-file militancy. The result of this struggle for hegemony was the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act, which sought to prevent mass strikes and maintain management’s control of the production process. At the same time, organized labor ensured a measure of economic stability through the permanent militarization of the American economy brought about by the cold war, which guaranteed lucrative government contracts for large industries.

The consequence of this process was that, by the late forties, labor militancy had been eviscerated. But as Lipsitz convincingly argues, the struggle for legitimacy takes a wide variety of forms, only some of them obviously political. “Working-class dissent did not disappear in the fifties. On the contrary, aspirations denied expression through politics, suppressed on the shop floor, and contained in the community often found powerful expression with emergent forms of popular culture and commercialized leisure.” As examples, he cites the popularity of such working-class pastimes as automobile customizing and stock-car racing.

The major example Lipsitz uses to illustrate the persistence of the working-class culture of dissent, and the way in which this subculture emerged into the mainstream, is the development of rock-and-roll. Growing out of the intercultural, urban, working-class environment created by the mass social migrations caused by World War II, the music provided a critique of the increasingly regimented and antidemocratic work culture of American capitalism. “Rock-and-roll lyrics talked about loving, working, eating, sleeping, buying, and the connections between all those activities. If one views politics as only the public struggle for political power, then rock-and-roll songs were apolitical. But if one defines politics as the social struggle for a good life, then those songs represented politics of the highest order.”

This argument, however, is problematic because it tends to underestimate the ability of the dominant culture to absorb dissident subcultures. In celebrating the oppositional nature of rock-and-roll’s commingling of working-class racial and ethnic traditions, Lipsitz largely ignores the ways that white, middle-class adolescents came to dominate the music’s audience, thus altering the nature of the music. As music critic Nelson George has written in his book The Death of Rhythm & Blues, the very term rock-and-roll—consciously chosen to replace the racially specific rhythm and blues—began a subtle process of transforming the music. According to George, “the generational schism and teen-eye view that has always been the crux of the rock-and-roll ethos was mostly foreign to black consumers, young as well as old. . . . Rock-and-roll was young music; R & B managed to be young and old, filled both with references to the past and with fresh interpretations, all at the same time.”

Despite an occasional tendency to overstate the dissident legacy of the era’s working-class culture, Rainbow at Midnight is an excellent survey of the forties, impressive in both its argument and the diversity of its sources. Lipsitz recaptures the period’s Zeitgeist in all its complexity. As he demonstrates, the consensus of the fifties—based on a global foreign policy and hysterical anticommunism, suburbanization, the nuclear family, conformity, and consumption—was neither preordained nor acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness. Rather, it grew directly out of the social struggles of the late forties. And while Lipsitz shows that Americans have reaped many cultural benefits from the contributions of the working class, he also reveals something of the world we have lost in the effort to deprive labor of more direct control of the workplace.