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Working-Class Racism: Broaden the Focus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Gary Gerstle
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America

Abstract

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Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1993

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References

NOTES

1. Painter, Nell Irvin, “French Theories in American Settings: Some Thoughts on Transferability,” Journal of Women's History 1 (Spring 1989):93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Full citations to the work of these historians can be found in Goldfield's notes and bibliography.

3. The socialist contribution, though, should not be completely ignored. A. Philip Randolph, a socialist and the best-known black trade unionist in the country during the 1930s and 1940s, deserves attention.

4. For a perceptive discussion of this intensity among white New York communists in the years from the introduction of the Popular Front through McCarthyism, see Naison, Mark, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana, 1983), 216–17.Google Scholar

5. These fears and their expressions have been the subjects of some astute historical scholarship. See, for example, Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York, 1984);Google ScholarHáll, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Snitow, Ann, Stansell, Christine, and Thompson, Sharon (New York, 1983), 328–49;Google ScholarRogin, Michael, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” Representations (Winter 1985): 150–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See Hirsch, Arnold R., Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York, 1983), 4099 in particular;Google ScholarSugrue, Thomas J., “The Structures of Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in Three Periods of American History,” in The Underclass Debate: View from History, ed. Michael, B. Katz (Princeton, 1993), 85117.Google Scholar In his study of Detroit in the years from 1945 to 1965, Sugrue has counted more than 200 instances of white homeowners violently resisting residential integration. This statistic is mentioned in his “The Structures of Poverty” and is analyzed at length in his important dissertation, “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race, Industrial Decline, and Housing in Detroit, 1940–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992).Google Scholar

7. Sugrue, Thomas J., “The Origins of White Backlash and the Fragmentation of the New Deal Coalition in the Urban North” (unpublished paper, 1992), 17.Google Scholar

8. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 196.

9. Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990), 323–60.Google Scholar

10. Hirsch offers a probing analysis of this process at work among Chicago's European ethnics. Making the Second Ghetto, 171–211.

11. Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York, 1989);Google ScholarBarrett, James R., “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930,” Journal of American History 79 (12 1992), 9961020;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcCartin, Joseph A., “‘An American Feeling’: Workers, Managers, and the Struggle Over Industrial Democracy in the World War I Era,” in Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise, ed. Lichtenstein, Nelson and Harris, Howell John (New York, 1993), 6786.Google Scholar

12. David Roediger's and Alexander Saxton's works on racism and republicanism in the nineteenth century are indispensable for understanding race and Americanism in the twentieth. See Roediger, , The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991)Google Scholar and Saxton, , The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London, 1990).Google Scholar Also suggestive are Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’”; Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Souls of White Folk,” in Literature and the Body, ed. Scarry, Elaine (Baltimore, 1988), 185210;Google ScholarAlba, Richard D., Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven, 1990);Google Scholar and Lichtenstein, Nelson, “The Making of the Postwar Working Class: Cultural Pluralism and Social Structure in World War II,” The Historian 5 (11 1988):4763.Google Scholar