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REVIEWS
| The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A. By Lisa M. Fine (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. 256pp.).
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| Scholars, like everyone else, inevitably respond to their cultural milieu. Lisa Fine's excellent study of the workers at Lansing, Michigan's Reo Motor Car Company reflects this tendency. Over the last generation most labor historians lived through an era where progressive politics and popular insurgency most visibly revolved around questions of gender and race. While class tensions certainly influenced political life, no organization, movement, or cultural tendency with an explicit self-consciousness of class had a mass following. Indeed, as Fine notes, the archtypical proletarian heroes of the New Deal-Popular Front era—white male factory workers—and their children were depicted in both popular and scholarly discourses as part of "George Wallace's popularity in the North in 1968, the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s, the Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992, the so-called `angry-white-man' congressional election of 1994, and the importance of working-class members of the National Rifle Association during the 2000 presidential election." (9). |
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Reo employed an overwhelmingly white male work force with rural and not infrequently southern roots. Although they joined the CIO, few of them appear to have had any sympathy with radical politics. Indeed, despite a sometimes combative union local, a significant proportion of them endorsed the company's paternalistic "we're all one big happy family" ideology. The author interviewed many retirees for whom memories of the factory's family atmosphere remain decades later. Fine is careful not to claim that these REO Joe's are more representative of American working people than the Popular Front children of the immigrants that loom so large in twentieth century labor historiography, but the implication is clearly there that understanding these folks should help labor historians better understand the recent trajectory of American workers. And Fine argues quite explicitly that understanding how racial and gender identities shaped their world view is at least as important as understanding the influence of class. |
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