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.
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