Poor Man's Fortune

Author(s):  
Jarod Roll

White working-class conservatives have played a decisive role in American history, particularly in their opposition to social justice movements, radical critiques of capitalism, and government help for the poor and sick. While this pattern is largely seen as a post-1960s development, Poor Man’s Fortune tells a different story, excavating the long history of white working-class conservatism in the century from the Civil War to World War II. With a close study of metal miners in the Tri-State district of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Jarod Roll reveals why successive generations of white, native-born men willingly and repeatedly opposed labor unions and government-led health and safety reforms, even during the New Deal.With painstaking research, Roll shows how the miners' choices reflected a deep-seated, durable belief that hard-working American white men could prosper under capitalism, and exposes the grim costs of this view for these men and their communities, for organized labor, and for political movements seeking a more just and secure society. Roll's story shows how American inequalities are in part the result of a white working-class conservative tradition driven by grassroots assertions of racial, gendered, and national privilege.

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Liarou

The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV's dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain's black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture.


1998 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 80-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Frank

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.”


1980 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 653
Author(s):  
Alice Kessler-Harris ◽  
Susan Estabrook Kennedy

1975 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Murray Binderman ◽  
Stanley Feldstein ◽  
Lawrence Costello

Author(s):  
Erik S. Gellman ◽  
Jarod Roll

This introductory chapter tells the story of how two preachers challenged racial divisions in the United States. Southern history, even American history generally, is too often told in white stories and black stories that seldom connect; yet the chapter asserts that the intertwined stories of Owen Whitfield and Claude Claude Williams challenges students of the history of the southern working class to take seriously the dynamic power and centrality of religious ideas in social and political movements, which raises new questions about the assumptions scholars have made about race, respectability, politics, and even gender in the Depression and World War II era. Their careers, in part, tell the story of the recovery of a southern common ground strong enough to support a working-class social movement for greater democracy in Depression-era America.


Author(s):  
Jessie B. Ramey

This chapter begins with the James Caldwell story, which brings the experience of fathers into sharp relief—a significant, and all but forgotten, aspect of orphanage history—as well as the broader history of child care, in the United States. While many orphanage children had living fathers, the institutional managers constructed “orphans” as fatherless, perpetuating a gendered and racialized logic of dependency. Yet for those men using the orphanages as a form of child care, their experiences as widowers differed from those of solo women with children. Furthermore, the experiences of African American and white working-class men were also quite different. Ultimately, the orphanages help reveal the extent to which each group of men was involved with the care of their children, as well as the connection between their breadwinning role and family life.


Author(s):  
Ethan Mordden

This book tells the full history of the British musical, from The Beggar's Opera (1728) to the present, by isolating the unique qualities of the form and its influence on the American model. To place a very broad generalization, the American musical is regarded as largely about ambition fulfilled, whereas the British musical is about social order. Oklahoma!'s Curly wins the heart of the farmer Laurey—or, in other words, the cowboy becomes a landowner, establishing a truce between the freelancers on horseback and the ruling class. Half a Sixpence, on the other hand, finds a working-class boy coming into a fortune and losing it to fancy Dans, whereupon he is reunited with his working-class sweetheart, his modest place in the social order affirmed. Anecdotal and evincing a strong point of view, the book covers not only the shows and their authors but the personalities as well—W. S. Gilbert trying out his stagings on a toy theatre, Ivor Novello going to jail for abusing wartime gas rationing during World War II, fabled producer C. B. Cochran coming to a most shocking demise for a man whose very name meant “classy, carefree entertainment.”


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 229-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

Abstract:This paper offers a critique of the existing historiography on the late apartheid period, arguing that white workers’ role in and experience of the unraveling of racial privilege in the labor arena has been obscured by a focus on the high politics of reform and on anti-apartheid resistance emanating from African labor and the broader black population. Reporting from the archive, it discusses two under-utilized archival collections – that of the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation and of the Mineworkers’ Union – as sources for starting to write white working-class organization, politics, identity, and experience into the history of reform and resistance, thereby adding a new dimension to South Africa’s broadly conceived struggle history.


1980 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 992
Author(s):  
Philip S. Foner ◽  
Susan Estabrook Kennedy

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-90
Author(s):  
Edith Sandler

AbstractIn March of 2016, the Student Archivists at Maryland (SAM) brought together archives professionals as part of Americana, their annual symposium at the University of Maryland. Americana 2016 “Archival Activism and Social Justice” focused on the intersection of archives and social justice, a topic of increasing importance and debate both in the archival field and in current events. Three speakers related their experiences documenting the experiences of displaced communities and social justice movements. Katharina Hering, Project Archivist for the National Equal Justice Library at the Georgetown Law Library related her work documenting the history of legal aid, indigene defense and the history of poverty. Diane Travis, a doctoral student at the iSchool explained her project at the University of Maryland’s Digital Curation and Innovation Center reuniting the records of Japanese Americans who were interred at the Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II. The final speaker, Denise D. Meringolo, is Director of Public History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the creator of the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising Project.


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