Review, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, February 16, 1992

The recent political success of David Duke among white working-class voters prompted many commentators to attribute his popularity to economic hard times rather than his racist politics. Analysts of all political persuasions argued that the Duke campaign was only superficially about race, and that the underlying issue was economics, or class. But as historian David Roediger writes, this analysis overlooks the fact that Duke’s supporters self-consciously viewed themselves as a white working-class constituency. For some reason, or combination of reasons, the white working class chooses to define itself as much along racial as class lines.

In The Wages of Whiteness, Roediger seeks to trace this racial self-definition of the white working class to its origins in the late eighteenth century. In a process that took place between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Roediger argues that white workers, forced to adjust to the new industrial order, used African-American slavery as a point of reference in defining their own place in society. By this standard, a wide range of ethnic groups were integrated into a single, racially-defined, white working class. In the words of the historian W.E.B. DuBois, white workers accepted an inferior economic position for the higher “public and psychological wage” that whiteness entailed.

As Roediger argues, white workers used the ideology of republicanism—with its emphasis on personal independence and public good—to criticize the new social system. But they paid significant costs, he says, through their racially exclusive identification, “not only in terms of race relations but also the wedding of labor to a debased republicanism.”

Before the American Revolution, Roediger says, contrasting white labor and slavery was problematic, because whites themselves worked at a variety of levels of relative unfreedom. Many whites labored as indentured servants, apprentices or impressed sailors, all positions in which they were legally bound to their employer. But the experience of the revolution affected the nascent white working-class ideology in several ways. First, the metaphoric uses of the term “slavery” by political leaders to describe the American relation to Britain spread the ideal of independence among workers. Second, the political ideology of republicanism provided white workers with a world view explaining their role in the struggle for freedom. Finally, the proximate existence of African-American slavery provided a reference by which white workers could constantly measure themselves.

White workers maintained a strong sense of republicanism and independence as they entered the industrial era in the nineteenth century. As work gradually changed from the skilled labor of the craftsman to the unskilled labor of the factory employee, workers sought to define their role in the new order. Once again, slavery served as a negative reference point. Only in the United States did slavery exist simultaneously with the formation of the industrial working class.

Roediger focuses much of his attention on the development of language in this transformation. White workers actively sought to mold the language to fit their developing self-definition. For example, in the early nineteenth century, white workers rejected use of the term “servant” as applicable to whites. As the British visitor Frances Trollope commented in the 1830s, “It is more than petty treason to the republic to call a free citizen a servant.” Similarly, white workers differentiated themselves from slaves by dropping the term “master.” In its place they substituted the Dutch word bos, which they Americanized as boss.

This growing racial consciousness was apparent in the popular culture of the white working class. Roediger looks closely at minstrel shows, one of the favorite working-class cultural activities of the nineteenth century. The racism of the minstrel shows conveyed multiple meanings, Roediger argues. The performers in blackface represented the values of the white workers’ own pre-industrial past, a past they simultaneously scorned and missed. Using this “blackness” as a reference point, whites gradually and hesitantly formed a unified working class based on the concept of “whiteness.”

The symbolism of the minstrel blackface worked at a variety of levels. By poking fun at the pretensions of the character Zip Coon, for instance, minstrels commented not only on race relations but also on social relations among whites. Songs such as “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” and “Dixie” appealed to the recent rural past of many in the audience, whether migrants from the American hinterland or Ireland. But fundamentally, minstrel shows created a sense of solidarity among white workers because, as Roediger says, “all whites could easily participate in minstrelsy’s central joke, the point of which remained a common, respectable and increasingly smug whiteness under the makeup.”

This sense of belonging was especially important to Irish immigrants, Roediger says, because for some time it was hotly debated whether Irish were white. Many of the same characteristics attributed to blacks were also applied to the Irish, including such terms as “savage,” “bestial,” “lazy” and “simian.” Coming into America near the bottom of the social order, the Irish struggled to establish their racial identity to gain the higher “public and psychological wage” whiteness offered. Crucial in their effort was the Democratic party. The Irish came in large enough numbers that they constituted a sizeable voting bloc in several Northern cities and thus were actively recruited by the Democrats. In joining the Democratic party, which labeled itself as being “made my white men, for the benefit of white men,” the Irish effectively precluded any question of their qualifications for citizenship.

The Civil War challenged the ability of whites to be satisfied simply by defining themselves as “not slave” or “not black.” The emancipation of blacks during the war—and particularly blacks’ role in their own liberation by quitting work and leaving the plantations en masse in what DuBois termed a “general strike”—held ambiguous meaning for white workers. On the one hand, whites feared economic competition with freed blacks; on the other hand, the emerging Northern working-class consciousness viewed the liberation of black slaves as a model with lessons for the growing labor union movement. But in the end, Roediger says, established patterns of white supremacy reasserted themselves.

This pattern of racism had several important legacies, Roediger argues. Perhaps the most important is that white workers, believing they had nothing to learn from black culture, failed to see the potential value in what historian Eugene Genovese calls the “black work ethic.” As white workers fully entered the post-war era of industrial labor, they spurned the knowledge derived from the work experience of blacks, who knew better than any other group how to cope with and effectively resist regimented systems of mass labor. The failure to share experiences across races and cultures, Roediger says, has left the American working class impoverished ever since.

Most books by academics feature prose so turgid and terminology so arcane they seem designed specifically to scare off the lay reader. But, despite an occasional obeisance to other scholars that at times makes reading the book seem like invading a private club, The Wages of Whiteness is easily accessible to the non-specialist. Roediger draws on a wide variety of sources from nineteenth-century popular culture to describe the elusive struggle for status by the white working class. He shows how common people took an active role in defining themselves, and also the ways in which the social order served to severely limit the range of choices. The implications for the present are clear: The ideology of racial superiority is not natural but historically conditioned and overcoming it will involve escaping patterns of thought and culture that extend back over two centuries.

Review, George Lipsitz, The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City (University of Missouri Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, March 22, 1992

The ethnic, racial and class diversity of American cities frequently creates a volatile mix as different cultures often encounter each other with suspicion and hostility. But as George Lipsitz argues, this interaction of cultures can also lead to cross-breeding, producing a stronger, more vibrant hybrid culture. In this study of St. Louis, Lipsitz says that the city’s cultural greatness derives from the inter-mixture and mutual influence of the numerous minority groups that have composed the city’s population.

Lipsitz, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, lived in St. Louis from 1963 to 1982. His love affair with the city, he says, grew out of his experiences as a student at Washington University in the 1960s, where he lived in proximity to various ethnic neighborhoods, listened to radio stations that played blues, soul, rock and roll and country-gospel, and participated in the city’s political life, particularly the civil rights movement. As a scholar, his fascination with the city has continued; one of his previous books was a biography of St. Louis civil rights organizer Ivory Perry.

The Sidewalks of St. Louis gathers together articles that originally appeared in a column Lipsitz wrote for St. Louis magazine. Taken together they present an impressionistic portrait of the city’s history, focusing on, as Lipsitz says, “the lives of oddballs and outcasts, immigrants and artists, women and workers, and many of those whose influence is rarely acknowledged in the standard histories.”

The history of St. Louis is filled with fascinating characters who left a lasting impression. For instance, there was Edward Gardner Lewis, a flamboyant con man who designed the suburb of University City. Lewis arrived in St. Louis in 1895 hawking mosquito repellents and patent medicines. In 1899 he began publishing a magazine, The Winner, in which he advertised another of his businesses, the Progressive Watch Company, promising readers a fortune if they would become Progressive Watch salespeople. Postal inspectors charged Lewis’ watch company was an illegal pyramid scheme and began an investigation of him that lasted more than twenty years. In 1902 The Winner became The Woman’s Magazine and soon claimed a readership of 1.6 million. Advertisements in The Woman’s Magazine reflected the range of Lewis’ business investments, including the “People’s University,” which allowed students to take college courses by mail.

Lewis designed University City to be the center of his business enterprises. As Lipsitz says, “Lewis spared no expense designing and implementing his vision of suburban life as an enclave free from the pollution and overcrowding of the industrial city.” He hired sculptor George Julian Zolnay to design the lion statues overlooking Delmar Boulevard. University City was incorporated in 1906 and Lewis served as its first mayor before leaving the area in 1912. His shady business dealings eventually caught up with him and in 1924 Lewis declared bankruptcy and in 1928 he was jailed for postal fraud.

“The strange career of Edward Gardner Lewis,” Lipsitz comments, “reminds us that history is made by both saints and sinners, and that it sometimes takes an eccentric to impose a bold vision on the commonplace realities of everyday life.”

Another largely forgotten character in St. Louis business history is Chris von der Ahe, a German immigrant who, in the 1880s, owned a small store selling beer and groceries on the city’s north side. When someone suggested that von der Ahe sponsor a baseball team, he replied that he knew nothing about baseball, but “if it sells beer, then I’m all for it.” Von der Ahe’s club, the St. Louis Browns, became St. Louis’ first championship team, winning the American Association title four straight years in the late 1880s. Von der Ahe promoted the team with a variety of gimmicks, including constructing an amsement park at the ballfield and hiring an all-female band to play before games. But he never learned much about the game itself, once telling player-manager Charlie Comiskey that the Browns had the “biggest diamond” in the league. When Comiskey responded that all baseball diamonds were the same size, von der Ahe replied, “Well then I’ve got the biggest infield.”

St. Louis had a lasting influence on several figures who were in the city only a relatively brief time. Theodore Dreiser lived there only sixteen months in the 1890s, working as a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Covering the urban scene, Lipsitz says, “Dreiser cultivated his understanding of and his ability to write about everyday life in the modern city,” a talent that flourished in his novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.

Josephine Baker lived in St. Louis only during her formative years. Born in 1906 in the slums of Mill Creek Valley on the city’s south side, Baker learned to dance by hanging around the taverns and dance halls in her neighborhood. She escaped to New York in 1921 and to Paris four years later, where she became an international sensation as the lead exotic dancer in the Folies-Bergere revue. Her childhood experiences of being poor and black gave her a life-long sympathy for the downtrodden. During World War II she served in the French resistance and after the war she returned to the United States to work in the civil rights struggle.

Short stays in St. Louis by two musicians left indelible marks on the development of American music. W.C. Handy was a young, itinerant musician who spent two weeks in the city looking for work during the severe depression of 1893. Sleeping in vacant lots and under Eads Bridge, Handy experienced misery first-hand. He also saw it in others, especially a woman walking along the levee moaning that her man “had a heart like a rock cast in the sea.” Twenty-one years later Handy recalled this scene and used it as the basis for the St. Louis Blues, one of the most popular songs in American history.

Like Handy, Bix Beiderbecke lived in St. Louis only briefly, but that period marked a major transition in his career. The son of a wealthy Davenport, Iowa, family, Beiderbecke arrived in 1925 to play trumpet in the orchestra of Frankie Trumbauer. While in St. Louis, Beiderbecke frequently spent his days attending concerts of the St. Louis symphony, listening to the works of Debussy and Stravinsky. Then at night, after playing, Beiderbecke frequented the clubs of Mill Creek Valley, where he learned the wild, free improvisational jazz played by black musicians. Beiderbecke drew inspiration by fusing the two musical styles, Euro-American classical and African-American jazz.

This fusion of cultures has marked St. Louis history as a whole. Lipsitz looks briefly at some of the groups that have had a permanent influence on the development of the city. He begins with the American Indian culture of the era before European settlement which, in the thirteenth century, had established a city of more than 40,000—more residents than lived in London at the time—just east of St. Louis in what is now Cahokia, Illinois. Similarly, he examines the legacies of the French, German, Polish and African-American groups that have settled the area.

Lipsitz manages to avoid any romanticization of the American “melting pot.” If at times these cultures intermixed to produce a dynamic synthesis, Lipsitz makes clear that normally prejudice and cultural segregation prevented them from mingling. In discussing the black influence on Beiderbecke’s music, for instance, Lipsitz says the trumpeter “gained an enthusiastic following among white jazz fans for playing music that they could have heard everywhere if segregation had not limited black artists to mostly black audiences.”

Lipsitz also points out the tragic consequences of racism on the great ragtime pianist Scott Joplin. After making a fortune composing such songs as Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin sought to expand the concept of ragtime, writing extended pieces and eventually a ragtime opera. But such an idea ran up against the majority of Americans’ view of ragtime as the music of “happy darkies.” Joplin’s more serious compositions were commercial failures and he died, broke and embittered, in 1917.

The Sidewalks of St. Louis will not replace traditional histories. But in exploring the city’s neglected nooks and crannies and the various ethnic influences that are frequently overlooked, this book serves as an excellent supplement to more standard narratives. Lipsitz asks the reader to explore St. Louis’ history in the same way he describes Beiderbecke exploring its streets in 1925: “when we walk streets that he walked, we might want to remember the wealthy, young white man drawn to the culture of the working-class blacks, the wild-living jazz musician who spent his afternoons at the symphony. Beiderbecke understood that these worlds were not so far apart, that everyone has something to offer others, and that the best cultures are those that are fused from the contributions of everyone.”

Review, Chester Himes, Plan B (University of Mississippi Press, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, January 30, 1994

From 1956 through 1969, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones patrolled the streets of Harlem as representatives of the New York City Police Department in a series of eight crime novels by the African-American expatriate author Chester Himes. As black detectives on New York’s toughest beat, the two meted out their own peculiar brand of justice with their fists and signature long-barreled .38-caliber pistols on .44-caliber frames, seeking to maintain order in the violent, absurd world that was Himes’s fictitious portrait of Harlem.

As the series progressed, Himes’s vision grew increasingly chaotic, mirroring the cultural changes during the late 1960s. At the end of the final book, Blind Man With a Pistol, Harlem erupts in a riot sparked by the title character, who opens fire on a subway while the police, including Coffin Ed and Grave Digger, stand by helplessly. As Himes wrote in the prologue, the novel’s metaphor was based on a true story he heard, “and I thought, ‘damn right, sounds like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East.’ And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”

But before writing Blind Man With a Pistol, Himes had worked on a different type of crime novel, in which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are called in to help foil an organized black rebellion. Titled Plan B, the novel was to end with Grave Digger joining the revolution and killing Coffin Ed for his efforts to prevent it. Himes never finished the novel, though, and after completing his Harlem series spent the years until his death in 1984 writing his two-volume autobiography. Plan B was published as an unfinished novel in France in 1984 and now, for the first time, in English.

The disordered and absurd vision that marks all of Himes’s Harlem novels grew out of his life experiences. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, Himes was raised in several border and Southern states, where his father taught blacksmithing at black colleges. His family history was one of downward mobility as the family fell victim to a combination of personal and professional misfortunes.

Ending up in Cleveland as a teenager, Himes began consorting with the city’s underworld. After graduating from high school, Himes spent a semester at Ohio State University before being expelled. He was then arrested for armed robbery and spent seven and a half years in the Ohio State Penitentiary before being paroled in 1936. The violent and absurd world of prison in many ways mirrored the portrait of Harlem in his crime novels.

While in prison, Himes began his writing career, publishing short stories in Esquire. After being paroled, he moved to Southern California and wrote two protest novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, dealing with black workers in the booming war industries. The first was a modest success, but the failure of the second convinced Himes of two things. First, he was determined to leave the United States as soon as he could afford to, and in 1953 he emigrated to Europe. Second, he felt he needed to define himself as something other than a “protest writer,” then virtually the only available option for black authors. “I had the creative urge,” he would later say, “but the old, used forms for the black American writer did not fit my creations. I wanted to break through the barrier that labeled me as a ‘protest writer.’ I knew the life of an American black needed another image than just the victim of racism. We were more than just victims.”

Himes found this form when his French editor suggested he try writing detective stories. Only by allowing himself to be typecast as a writer within another fictional genre—one relegated to second-class citizenship in the field of literature—could Himes escape the confines of being a black writer. The Harlem series was extremely popular in France, while also slowly gaining popularity in the United States.

The universe of Himes’s crime series was marked by ambiguity, violence and what he described as “that bitter self-corroding irony which white people call ‘Negro humor.’” In his stylized portrait of Harlem, he discovered a perfect metaphor for his worldview.

Largely missing from this universe, though, is a specific political vision. Himes understood the difficulty of formulating a coherent political program from a worldview built on irony, ambiguity, chaos and absurdity. Thus, after the failure of Lonely Crusade, he largely avoided political writing.

As Plan B demonstrates, no one should mistake Himes’s silence for a lack of interest. In his own way, Himes was seeking to understand the possibilities and consequences of a full-scale black revolution, which he believed would need to employ urban guerrilla tactics and violence on a massive scale.

But Himes could not make up his mind what type of book he wanted to write. Occasionally powerful vignettes are mixed with interminable political discussions and gratuitous history lessons in which the ribald humor falls flat. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger pop in and out of the story but are not really integrated into the events. Finally, the book’s heavy-handed moralism diminishes the complexity and irony of the worldview of Himes’s other works.

There are two types of unfinished novels—those the author intended to complete but died before being able to, and those the author never intended to finish. Plan B is obviously the second type. As such, it is valuable for those wishing to know more about Himes or about African-American culture in the late 1960s. But for most readers, Plan B is important primarily for the cathartic function it must have served for Himes, allowing him to go on and write the brilliant Blind Man With a Pistol.

Review, Michael Cassity, Defending a Way of Life: An American Community in the Nineteenth Century (State University of New York Press, 1989)

Missouri Historical Review, July 1991

Hindsight allows historians of industrialization to assume an air of condescension toward opponents of the process. Because industrialization, and the social and cultural changes it produced, eventually triumphed, many historians view the transformation as inevitable and dismiss resistance to it as parochial and reactionary. In this study of Pettis County, Missouri, in the nineteenth century, Michael Cassity focuses on opponents of the new order and portrays their ideology as a creative, dynamic attempt to protect the preindustrial value of community.

Pettis County’s isolation from the burgeoning market of the early nineteenth century proved to be its major attraction for many settlers. Cassity cites General David Thomson as the best example because, unlike many others, he had alternatives. Already a successful planter in Kentucky, when he moved to Pettis County in 1833, Thomson disliked the growing commercialization of his life in Kentucky and, in moving to Missouri, sought escape from the economy and culture of the market.

Early settlers of Pettis County created a culture based on this determination to avoid the market. Economically, production was for use. Socially, mutual obligations, not individual rights, received emphasis. In fact, Cassity says, the “supreme accomplishment” of the society proved to be its ability to suppress the tension between the individual and the community. The politics of the society remained paternalistic, creating “an equilibrium between the gentry and the people.”

The transformation of Pettis County began in the 1850s and accelerated during and immediately after the Civil War. Led by George R. Smith, Thomson’s son-in-law, a business class developed which sought to end the county’s isolation by bringing in the railroad. Rebuffed by the citizens of Georgetown, the county seat, Smith created Sedalia, which developed as a railroad town. The presence of Union troops during the war, the commercial growth it spawned, and the restriction of the franchise during and after the war proved tremendous boons to the growth of Sedalia, which became the county seat in 1864. The railroad destroyed the isolation of Pettis County and introduced an industrial form of work organization. Cassity separately discusses the effects of the new market economy on workers, farmers, and women.

The author effectively captures the varied, often contradictory, ways people resisted the new industrial order, which broke down the notion of community based on mutual obligations and replaced it with one built on market relations. But the book suffers from poor organization, which causes Cassity to repeat himself, for instance, giving two separate play-by-play accounts of railroad workers’ strikes in 1885 and 1886. And though the book largely avoids the cloying romanticization of preindustrial culture that has marred some similar works, Cassity appears uncomfortable with the implications of his own study. Arguing that the triumph of market society was not complete, he concludes that whenever people joined together on the basis of a shared vision of community they, in fact, created that community. But, as this book shows, such resistance took place within the increasingly narrow parameters allowed by the new market capitalist system.

Review, James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (Pantheon Books, 2006)

This review originally was written for the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, but it got lost with a change in editors, so it appears here for the first time. I recycled some of it for an opinion piece I wrote on the history of May Day, which appears elsewhere on this site.

The events have a contemporary feel: business magnates earning fabulous wealth which, in turn, exacerbated the era’s widespread political corruption; large numbers of workers displaced by economic and technological changes; waves of immigrants prompting debates over whether such outsiders could be absorbed into the larger American society; a public fearful of conspirators in their midst planning destruction and mayhem; fanatics advocating violence as a political weapon; and—in the aftermath of the conflagration—a widespread disregard for basic civil liberties. But, though James Green’s retelling of the tragic events surrounding the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Square bombing obviously has been written with a post-9/11 understanding of such recurrent American motifs as xenophobia and the frailty of civil liberties in times of national panic, this book’s major emphasis places these events in context of Gilded Age social relations and the long struggle by workers to assert their rights in an age of rapid economic change. As he did in his superb Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (1978), Green deftly juggles a large cast of characters in recapturing a period when radical ideas played a significant role in the broader American discourse.

The Haymarket riot took place in the midst of a resurgent labor movement animated by the issue of the eight-hour workday. The eight-hour movement had originally developed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, only to be crushed by the united opposition of business. But in the 1880s, especially in Chicago, the issue was revived by a group of militant socialist and anarchist labor organizers. Many of these radicals were immigrants, though the most prominent was Albert Parsons, a Texas-born former Confederate soldier turned Reconstruction-era Radical Republican turned anarchist labor organizer. Though the eight-hour issue enjoyed widespread appeal among workers, the anarchists saw it as part of a broader strategy later to be known as the “Chicago Idea,” which saw craftsmen’s control of workshops as the creation “self-governing communities of equal producers," thus serving as models of the freedom that would follow the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. To bring about this revolution, some anarchists preached the concept of “propaganda by the deed”—the idea that “a violent act planned by a secret conspiracy and committed by a dedicated militant, could impress the world with the evil of the despotic state and with the fearless determination of those who intended to destroy it.”

As part of this strategy, anarchists engaged in a great deal of loose talk about the use of dynamite. In a period when capitalists could increasingly count on the armed support of the police, National Guard and U.S. military to defend their interests in labor struggles, anarchists saw dynamite as an opportunity to level the field. In Parsons’ words, “Dynamite is the diffusion of power. It is democratic; it makes everybody equal.”

Led by its socialist and anarchist wing, organized labor called a general strike for the eight-hour day to begin on May 1, 1886, and the call drew strong support in Chicago, where estimates are that between 40,000 and 60,000 workers walked off the job. Business interests responded by setting aside their competitive tendencies and drawing together against the common threat of an increasingly radicalized working class. The anarchists’ talk of dynamite fueled a growing trepidation, especially among Chicago’s middle- and upper-classes, of secret anarchist cabals. But, as Green argues, “the city’s most powerful men were less afraid of bomb talk than they were of the large working-class following the anarchist-led Central Labor Union had attracted in various immigrant districts." Thus, Green says quoting historian Sven Beckert, the period culminated in “the consolidation of the American bourgeoisie.”

Green provides a detailed narrative of the events of May 4, in which police moved to break up a rally of workers prompting someone to throw a bomb killing seven policemen and at least three civilians in the ensuing melee, as well as the subsequent widespread police crackdown on labor activists, the trial of eight anarchists—resulting in the execution of four and the suicide of one—and the campaign for amnesty for the remaining three. But throughout this narrative runs a melancholy sense of something potentially great being lost. Green emphasizes the disastrous impact the Haymarket bombing had on the eight-hour movement and American labor generally, especially in light of the initial success of the May 1 general strike. “Indeed,” he says, “for visionary workers and labor reformers . . . Haymarket was an unmitigated disaster; it sounded a death knell for the great hopes they shared in the spring of 1886 when they imagined their movement to be on the brink of achieving a new cooperative social order that would replace the wage system.” Even some anarchists recognized the counterproductive effects of their rhetoric of violence. As George Schilling, one of those convicted, though not executed, wrote from prison to Parsons’ widow, labor activist Lucy Parsons, “The open espousal of physical force—especially when advocated by foreigners—as a remedy for social maladjustments can only lead to greater despotism.”

Death in the Haymarket excels in portraying the complex clash of social classes, ethnic groups and ideologies in a period of rapid changes, when the country’s future seemed very much at stake, filled with, depending on one’s vantage point, hope or terror—or, quite possibly, some of both. The book is a must-read for those interested in the history of Chicago, the American labor movement, or the Gilded Age.

Review, Marguerite Young, Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Debs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2000

Novelist Marguerite Young devoted the last three decades of her life to composing a sprawling, epic biography of Eugene Debs and the social and intellectual context that produced him. Upon her death in 1995, her friend Charles Ruas undertook the task of pulling together her copious notes, research and writings and forming them into a coherent whole that tries to make sense both of one of the towering figures of American radicalism and the movement he led. Though one must admit Ruas’s task was unenviable and admire his willingness to undertake it, the end result does little to justify the amount of work expended. Young’s book ultimately emerges as an overblown, self-indulgent mess.

Most historians write with the verve of one composing assembly instructions for a piece of furniture, so usually when I comment that the author writes like a novelist it is meant as a compliment. But not in this case. Young uses novelistic techniques ill-suited to the subject. She relies on long-winded sentences that quickly grow aggravating and displays a fondness for puns and word-play that becomes cloying. The style may be Faulknerian, but to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, she’s no William Faulkner.

Moreover, she approaches subjects indirectly, digressing frequently on peripheral topics and only slowly coming to the point. For instance, a discussion of Debs will lead to a comparison to Abraham Lincoln, which then segues into a twenty-page description of the widowhood of Mary Todd Lincoln, which will end by mentioning that the Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, served as attorney for the Pullman Company in its case against Debs, thus bringing the reader back to the topic at hand. Similar tangents cover such subjects as Heinrich Heine, Allan Pinkerton, John Wilkes Booth and Benjamin Harrison. Many of these asides are interesting, but what they have to do with “the life and times” of Debs remains unclear. The adage “Don’t speak ill of the dead” has apparently been reinterpreted here as “Don’t edit the dead.”

The longest digression, covering most of the first 150 pages, focuses on German radical Wilhelm Weitling and his exploration of various utopian experiments, both in Europe and the United States. Young labels America the “millennial continent” and discusses at great length the attempts by different groups to build heaven on earth. In particular, she spends an inordinate amount of time detailing the experiences of the Mormons, never making clear what connection they have to American socialism.

The major problem is that Young completely ignores most of the salient facets of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century life that are much more central in establishing Debs’s context. No mention is made of populism, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Knights of Labor (two passing references) or Edward Bellamy and his numerous imitators (very strange for a book whose unifying theme is the “millennial continent”). In short, in presenting a large descriptive tapestry of nineteenth-century Americans (the book does not cover the period after 1900, thus leaving out the absolutely crucial final quarter-century of Debs’s life), Young explains nothing.

Perhaps most fundamentally, Young fails to place Debs in a regional context that helps explain his radicalism. An Indiana native, Young describes her fascination with Debs as a result of his status as a fellow Hoosier. But her book fails to explain Debs as a specifically midwestern radical. As yet, then, there is no synthesis of midwestern radicalism on the level of James Green’s study of socialists in Oklahoma and Texas¹, which traces the complex relationship between populism, labor unionism, socialism, religion and small-town and rural values into an indigenous movement culture.

Several specific studies provide a starting point for such a synthesis, emphasizing a vision of midwestern radicalism that, in a non-doctrinaire fashion, blended European and American ideologies with traditional American culture. Nick Salvatore’s vastly superior biography, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist,² shows how Debs drew on such influences as republicanism, evangelical Protestantism and small-town midwestern values to fashion an authentically American socialism that resonated with his audiences. Elliot Shore’s outstanding study of J.A. Wayland, publisher of the major socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, portrays radical grass-roots journalism as mixing in equal measures such political ideologies as republicanism, populism and Marxism with good, old-fashioned small-town boosterism.³ In his study of the era’s major socialist publisher, the Chicago-based Charles H. Kerr Company, Allen Ruff portrays Kerr’s efforts to present a wide-ranging, eclectic radicalism that could be conveyed to working people in terms they would understand.⁴

Such works portray the processes by which socialism, as it was translated into a mass movement throughout the Middle West in the early twentieth century, drew on a variety of influences to create an often contradictory, indigenously American radicalism. Though such midwestern radicals frequently felt themselves at odds with the more doctrinaire socialists on the East coast, their ideology struck a responsive chord with large numbers of farmers, workers, small-town residents and self-educated organic intellectuals throughout the Midwest. And it was because Debs was a product of this culture that he spoke for so many Americans. He contradicted himself; he contained multitudes.

1James Green, Grass-roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

2Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University or Illinois Press, 1982).

3Elliot Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas), 1988.

4Allen Ruff, “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Black artists and St. Louis culture

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 22, 1994

On September 6, NBC telecast a special, “The Apollo Theater Hall of Fame,” honoring three great African-American artists, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye and Dick Gregory. In introducing Gregory, comedian David Alan Grier referred to Gregory’s childhood in St. Louis and quoted his mother’s aphorism, “We’re not poor, just broke.” Then, in an aside, Grier quipped, “Isn’t everyone from St. Louis poor?”

The implication that St. Louis is some kind of cultural backwater was especially incongruous in light of the fact that two of the three honorees—Gregory and Berry—are from St. Louis.

Grier to the contrary notwithstanding, St. Louisans are not necessarily culturally deprived. But American culture as a whole would be impoverished were it not for the contributions of St. Louis’ artists, especially its African-American artists. Anyone seeking to test the validity of jazz critic Albert Murray’s characterization of American culture as “incontestably mulatto” would do well to begin in the Gateway City.

The influences of St. Louis’ black community on American culture as a whole have been enormous and varied, but a few broad generalizations can be made.

First, St. Louis artists have repeatedly demonstrated an impatience with the artificial, arbitrary boundaries that serve to confine art and have pioneered in stretching the limits of various cultural forms and genres.

Scott Joplin, for instance, part of a vibrant local artists’ community in the early 20^th century that was crucial in establishing the international popularity of ragtime, constantly sought to expand the possibilities of the music. In composing such ragtime ballets and operas as “Treemonisha,” he challenged the stereotype of ragtime as the music of “happy darkies,” though the commercial failure of his more serious work demonstrates the difficulty black artists have had in breaking the molds white society has fixed for them.

Other local artists have worked to create a fusion of disparate cultural sources into a dynamic blend that has pushed forward the artistic frontier.

Lonnie Johnson, a seminal blues guitarist who worked with Bessie Smith in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was one of the first to integrate jazz influences into the blues (he also played with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington). And any one interested in tracing the origins of rock ‘n’ roll should check out Johnson’s 1947 rhythm and blues record “Tomorrow Night.”

Similarly Berry created his distinctive sound by merging the Chicago blues with country and western influences and the jazz phrasings of such musicians as Louis Jordan. And jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who perfected the St. Louis-style—with its emphasis on smooth and sweet playing in the instrument’s middle range—to establish his reputation as one of the great musical innovators of the post-World War II era, outraged musical purists in the late ‘60s by integrating rock rhythms and instrumentation into jazz to create a revolutionary new form.

St. Louis’ African-American artists have also been quick to understand the liberating potential of humor in articulating a critical vision of American social and political realities.

Chester Himes, who was born in Jefferson City, spent several formative years in St. Louis before eventually gaining fame with his series of violent, ribald and darkly humorous crime novels that plumbed the absurdities of American race relations. Redd Foxx’s earthy comedy represented an underground tradition of black humor dating back to the antebellum era, which was more openly belligerent and critical of white society than the comedy blacks used in front of whites. When Foxx broke through to mainstream success on “Sanford and Son,” it signified the emergence of this underground tradition, albeit in a slightly tone-down form, into broader cultural discourse.

Gregory also played an invaluable role in the emergence of this new style of African-American humor as the first black comedian to gain popularity among white audiences without playing the stereotypical clownish roles black comics had customarily been forced into. His minority status helped him develop a sophisticated sense of irony, which he used to satirize American racial customs. “I sat at a lunch counter for nine months,” he commented in the early years of the civil rights movement. “They finally integrated and didn’t have what I wanted.”

Black artists from St. Louis also have often viewed their art as inextricably entwined with a commitment to social and political equality. Josephine Baker grew up in the slums of St. Louis before moving to New York and then Paris in the ‘20s, where she became the personification of Jazz Age exoticism as lead dancer for the Folies-Bergere revue. During World War II, Baker worked actively in the French resistance against Nazi occupation and after the war she returned to the United States to campaign for civil rights.

Davis, too, was outspokenly critical of American racism but also broke color barriers of a different sort by including white musicians in his band. Even Berry, usually thought of merely as a chronicler of adolescent plaints, penned several songs of social commentary, such as “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” a song of racial pride, and “Promised Land,” an ironic tour of the South at the height of the civil rights movement. Gregory, finally, risked his career and life with his work in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

Because St. Louis culture lacks the distinctive, unifying flavor of such places as Chicago, New Orleans or Harlem, its contribution has often been overlooked. But as this brief survey shows, the city has nourished a varied range of artists whose effect on the development of American culture has been incalculable.

On the fortieth anniversary of 'Network'

Marion Daily Republican, October 18, 2016

Forty years later, it looks more and more like a documentary. When the movie Network was released in the fall of 1976, it was an instant success, winning Academy Awards for screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, lead actors Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway, and supporting actress Beatrice Straight. But even many of the movie’s fans felt the satire of network news strained credulity.

The story concerns the mental breakdown of veteran news anchor Howard Beale (Finch) and the network’s willingness to exploit his illness in order to turn him into a “messianic figure inveighing against the hypocrisies of our time.”

As the network’s news division is subsumed under its programming division, Beale’s “mad prophet” persona sends ratings soaring. His jeremiads strike a responsive chord, none more so than when he says, “I don’t have to tell you things are bad…. We sit and watch our teevees while some local newscaster tells us today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. . . So we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is, please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms.”

Beale then urges his viewers “go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,… ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!’” As people across the nation take up the cry, Chayefsky wrote in his screenplay notes, it becomes an “indistinguishable roar of rage like the thunder of a Nuremburg rally.”

Chayefsky, though, makes clear the transition from news to entertainment is not sudden. As programming director Diana Christenson (Dunaway) says to veteran news man Max Schumacher (William Holden), “I watched your 6:00 news today. It’s straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park. On the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news.”

The power of television is so overwhelming, in Chayefsky’s view, it absorbs even its most radical challenges. When a small revolutionary group, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, records itself robbing a bank, Christenson signs the group to do a weekly series, filming themselves engaging in terrorist acts.

Beale’s tirades often bite the hand that feeds him. “Less than three percent of you people read books.… Less than 15 percent of you read newspapers…. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal.”

For Chayefsky, the pseudo-reality of television stultifies empathy and individualism in its incessant commodification of life. As Max tells Diana, “You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays.”

The more Beale assaults his audience the higher his ratings go. But increasingly Beale connects his cultural criticism to the system of corporate capitalism. After the network is taken over by a large conglomerate, he warns, “when the twelfth-largest company in the world controls the most awesome … propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what … will be peddled for truth on this network!”

When his attacks on the global economy grow too pointed, Beale is summoned for a meeting with the corporate CEO, who informs him, “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale…. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples…. There is no America. There is no democracy.…. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.”

In the four decades since Network, America has witnessed the intensified power of global capitalism as well as the rise of cable news programs, and entire networks, whose market success is based on stoking fear and anger to a fever pitch, culminating in a reality show presidential candidate leading a party featuring a platform with little more coherence than “We’re mad as hell.”

Chayefsky was our Cassandra. His warning entertained us. But we learned nothing.

Now that should make us mad as hell.