Labor in the Modern South

Labor in the Modern South. Edited by Glenn T. Eskew. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Pp. v, 232. Preface, afterword, contributors, index. $45.00.) Labor in the Modern South highlights the centrality of gender and race to the latest scholarship on the twentieth-century southern working class. Michelle Brattain's thought-provoking survey of the field emphasizes workers' agency in studies of textile workers and African Americans and a broadened understanding of the role of "gender in the history of southern class formation" (p. 22). Political historians will find insightful Brattain's discussion of politicians' "neo-populist appeal to working class whiteness" (p. 33). Douglas Flamming shows that southern cotton mill daughters often kept more of their pay than did their New England counterparts and also gained "a little bargaining power within the home" (p. 53). Flamming argues that male uncertainty over female wage earning led many in the 1910s to return to agriculture and take "their family labor supply away from the mills" (p. 55). Companies responded by raising male wages and creating institutions such as marching bands and baseball leagues that "catered to male culture and bravado" (p. 57). In her study of protest activities in Atlanta and Norfolk during World War I, Tera Hunter emphasizes black women's agency. New wartime opportunities and a rising cost of living led black female workers, especially domestics, to organize in several southern cities. Authorities responded with "work or fight" ordinances and laws, violence, and arrests. NAACP branches reconstituted themselves to fight the ordinances and achieved success in Atlanta, but harassment continued. Black women and men responded with increased migration from the region. In "Fearing Eleanor: Racial Anxieties and Wartime Rumors in the American South," Bryant Simon discusses the rumors widespread among upper middle-class whites during World War II that Eleanor Clubs were encouraging African-American domestic workers "to act 'uppity' and step out of place" (p. 90). Simon argues that the rumors were a response to something real-increased assertiveness of African-American women workers-as well as to something fictional-the non-existent Eleanor Clubs. Rather than coming to grips with African-American agency rooted in dissatisfaction with an unjust racial order, whites placed blame on outsiders. Entering into the current debate on the CIO's racial liberalism, Merl Reed and Alex Lichtenstein emphasize the CIO's pragmatism but conclude that CIO unions were important vehicles for African-American workers' struggle for jobs and increased wages during World War II and very different than anti-black AFL unions. …