Music and Sound Design as Propaganda in Hell-Bent for Election

2021 ◽  
pp. 589-603
Author(s):  
Lisa Scoggin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt ◽  
Musical Styles

Though political television and film commercials may be thought of as a recent phenomenon, these have in fact existed for a number of years. Consider, for example, the animated two-reel film Hell-Bent for Election from 1944. Created by the left-leaning studio Industrial Film and Poster Service (later UPA) for the United Auto Workers union, the cartoon pushes for the re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt over Thomas Dewey. The film is a metaphor where the two candidates are represented by trains. Joe Worker represents the voter, who must let the “Win the War Special” (Roosevelt) through the station rather than the “Defeatist Limited,” despite the obstacles put in Joe’s way. As with many propagandistic and political messages, the symbolism is not subtle, and the cartoon certainly gets the message across. This chapter examines how Earl Robinson’s music, along with the lyrics of Yip Harburg, works with the other aspects of the film to accomplish the mission of getting out the vote. Robinson, a classically trained composer who is best known for his pro-labor songs, uses a variety of musical styles to convey the message in the animated film, from classical modernist to popular song quotation to agitprop mass song, each of which is designed to appeal to the primary audience: the working class and union members.

Opportunities Found and Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Korstad
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The South ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The North ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Tobacco Workers

This chapter explores two examples of the workplace-oriented civil rights militancy that arose in the 1940s—one in the South and one in the North. It analyzes the unionization of predominantly black tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the ferment in the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Michigan, that made that city a center of black working-class activism in the North. Similar movements took root among newly organized workers in the cotton compress mills of Memphis, the tobacco factories of Richmond and Charleston, the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Birmingham, the stockyards and farm equipment factories of Chicago and Louisville, and the shipyards of Baltimore and Oakland.

Traversing Arab and American Spaces

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela E. Pennock
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Community Center ◽  
Arab American ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
Workplace Justice ◽  
The Creation

The chapter explores how a transnational Arab American political consciousness played out on the local level in a series of inter-related developments in Dearborn, Michigan, starting with a movement to fight the city’s plans to destroy a working-class, immigrant neighborhood called the Southend, the creation of ACCESS, an Arab American community center, and a movement to protest the United Auto Workers’ investments in Israeli bonds. Tied to these activities was the activism of the Arab Workers Caucus that combined struggles for workplace justice and justice for Palestine.

Merging Traffic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Slobin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Auto Industry ◽  
General Motors ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The Media ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Special Case

This chapter surveys the institutions and movements that brought together the city’s musical life with the aim of merging disparate styles, trends, and personnel. First comes the auto industry, based on archival sources from Ford and General Motors that show how the companies deployed music for worker morale and company promotion. The complementary work of labor follows, through the United Auto Workers’ songs. Next comes the counterculture’s musical moment in the age of the folk revival and the artist collectives of the 1950s–1960s. Motown offers a special case of African American entrepreneurial merging of musical talent and style. The chapter closes with a look at the media—radio and newspapers—with their influential role in bringing audiences together, through music, in a city known for segregation, oppressive policing, and occasional outbursts of violence.

White Working-Class Support for Trump

Contexts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Cherlin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Community Study ◽  
Reverse Discrimination ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
White Working Class

Why do working-class Whites support Donald Trump? The accepted explanation points to racial and ethnic resentment and anxiety about immigration, with economic factors secondary. Based on a community study, the author argues that feelings of reverse discrimination and anti-immigrant sentiment reflect both racial and economic factors. This article explains why it is difficult to conclude that either factor was more important than the other.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
James Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Jury Verdicts ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
A Charge

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

White Working-Class Women and the Race Question

1998 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 80-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Other ◽  
White Trash ◽  
White Writers ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”

I Was a Retail Salesperson: An Examination of Two Memoirs About Working in Retail

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
Brittany Clark
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Working Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
Retail Workers

This article considers Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (originally published in 2001) and Caitlin Kelly’s Malled (2011) as representational narratives of working-class retail workers. The display of working-class experience in each work is considered in the context of the authors’ lives and experiences, considering use of language, events and broader expectations of the working life of retail salespeople. Using Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘Other’ (2013) as a theoretical key point, the article also considers, for an American perspective specifically, how these workers are constructed in the broader ideology of the nation state.

Misfortune and resilience: a community study of women

1984 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Bebbington ◽  
E. Sturt ◽  
C. Tennant ◽  
J. Hurry
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Psychiatric Disorder ◽  
Community Survey ◽  
The Other ◽  
Community Study ◽  
Vulnerability Factors ◽  
Vulnerability Model ◽  
Working Class Women

SynopsisA community survey of psychiatric disorder carried out in South London enabled the authors to investigate the ‘vulnerability model’ proposed by Brown & Harris (1978). In the current study none of the ‘vulnerability factors’ proposed by Brown & Harris fulfilled the requirements of the model. It was, however, found that working class women with children seemed particularly prone to develop minor psychiatric disorder in response to adversity. A similar result is apparent in the analyses of the earlier authors. A number of studies now published give some support to the vulnerability model using what are broadly measures of social support, but there is little corroboration using the other variables proposed by Brown & Harris.

Ugliness and Beauty: the Politics of Landscape in Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Claire Warden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Surrounding Area ◽  
North West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The North ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Open Fields

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

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