Book Review

Canada and the United States

Daniel Letwin's book contributes significantly to our understanding of how the issues of class and race mingled to shape unionization efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his study of Alabama coal miners, Letwin ably articulates the complexity of this interaction and its impact on worker resistance to employer control. Using the Birmingham coal mining district as his focal point, he examines to what extent union organizers and the workers stepped past racial and social constraints in the New South and cooperated within the context of an occupational/class sense of unity.

1

Letwin points out that organizers recognized that ethnic and racial division within the ranks could destroy any attempt to unite workers. Thus, they made every effort to stymie operator strategies to use the race issue to wreak havoc within the miners' unions. The operators' employment of black strikebreakers time and time again made this a necessity. Letwin goes on to argue, however, that the miners took this strategy only so far; in numerous ways they continued to function within the white supremacy tradition. The segregated nature of many union locals, the predominance of white miners in leadership roles (even within largely black locals), and the stereotyping of blacks in union/labor publications demonstrated the latter. Simply put, the miners' interracialism was very complicated, qualifying as both "bold" and "adaptable" (p. 7). In an intriguing argument, Letwin takes this position a step further, suggesting that the male-dominated nature of the mining occupation removed the complication, at least underground, of the supposed sexual threat that white supremacists claimed black men posed to white women. This may have lessened anxiety about integrated working situations.

. . .