Reclaiming Manhood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Family Wage ◽  
Male Culture

This chapter shows that, after mass production undermined and assailed their manhood, auto workers attempted to reassert or to reclaim it in numerous ways, some positive and some negative. They relied on shop traditions, some old and some new, to regain control over their working lives. They looked to and worked to build unions that would provide dignity, a structure to resist hated changes, and a family wage to enhance their personal and economic situations. They reveled in the sexual dimension of manhood in their ribald conversations on the shop floor and in the commercialized and sexual venues of the bachelor culture. As the Great Depression arrived and deepened, they would return to industrial unionism to mitigate the worst of the managerial abuses and would build a dense white and male culture at the workplace.

Fighting to Provide

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Automobile Industry ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Work Lives ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The Great Depression

This chapter investigates the auto workers' rough tactic of fighting to redress workplace grievances and to achieve a decent income to provide for their families, which was used throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s. After the onset of the Great Depression, American workers in the automobile industry and elsewhere had reached the limits of their tolerance and endurance of the horrid conditions of their work lives. The bitter struggle for industrial unionism was a militant and masculine campaign to alleviate the conditions of life and labor in their communities and mass production factories. The struggle to build unions allowed workers to fight so that they could provide for their families.

Lost Manhood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Work Environment ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
Union Representation ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
And Control

This chapter looks at how the mass-production work regime and the aggressive supervision of work all devalued and undermined an auto worker's sense of dignity and manhood. The brutal technical system established a highly controlled work environment of monotony and degradation. For skilled workers and those who aspired to such positions, the desired autonomy and control so essential for manly independence no longer existed. For others, the vicious speed-up, the endless fatigue, the absence of concern for health and safety, the abusive foremen and supervisors, and an uncivilized work environment all revealed lack of concern for human and manly dignity. Auto workers responded, individually and collectively, positively and negatively, to reframe and to reclaim a sense of their manhood through their sometimes retrograde shop floor behaviors, their efforts to fight back through union representation, and their general devaluation of women at work and in their local communities.

Establishing the Campers’ Republic

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-192
Author(s):  
Phoebe S.K. Young
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Federal Agencies ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
Rapidly Solidified ◽  
The New Deal

Chapter 4 focuses on how federal agencies responded to the growth of recreational camping—popularized among the middle class by the mass production of the automobile—and the challenge of new waves of transients and protestors during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, recreational camping gained state sponsorship as an exercise of democracy spurred on by the design of the loop campground and its related social philosophy. As the New Deal rapidly solidified the terms of a new social contract, campers added their own set of expectations. The vast expansion of a public landscape for recreational camping emerged as counterpoint to the unsettled masses of the Great Depression and became an effective tool for national recovery. By the 1940s, citizens were claiming rights of access to or, in the case of African Americans, protesting exclusion from this public camping landscape.

Remaking the Heartland

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Objective Observer ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
Middle West

For many Americans, the Middle West is a vast unknown. This book sets out to rectify this. It shows how the region has undergone extraordinary social transformations over the past half-century and proven itself surprisingly resilient in the face of such hardships as the Great Depression and the movement of residents to other parts of the country. It examines the heartland's reinvention throughout the decades and traces the social and economic factors that have helped it to survive and prosper. The book points to the critical strength of the region's social institutions established between 1870 and 1950—the market towns, farmsteads, one-room schoolhouses, townships, rural cooperatives, and manufacturing centers that have adapted with the changing times. It focuses on farmers' struggles to recover from the Great Depression well into the 1950s, the cultural redefinition and modernization of the region's image that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of secondary and higher education, the decline of small towns, the redeployment of agribusiness, and the rapid expansion of edge cities. Drawing arguments from extensive interviews and evidence from the towns and counties of the Midwest, the book provides a unique perspective as both an objective observer and someone who grew up there. It offers an accessible look at the humble yet strong foundations that have allowed the region to endure undiminished.

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