Book Review

The authors of these two books come from different generations, with Melvyn Dubofsky present at the founding of the field of American labour history in the 1960s, and Janet Irons a recent graduate of Duke University. Yet despite that difference, there is little to distinguish their approach and concerns. This resemblance reflects best on Dubofsky, with the essays collected in Hard Work highlighting how effectively his scholarship kept pace with the evolving field of labour history into the 1990s. Irons breaks new ground in providing a study of the 1934 Textile Strike in the south, an event long in need of a sustained analysis, but her approach, which emphasises unions, their organization, internal politics and relations with the state, and to a lesser extent, the culture of southern workers, reflects the same road travelled by Dubofsky. She maintains the focus on institutions and work cultures that defined the new labour history rather than engaging with the 'new' cultural history that has reshaped the broader narrative of twentieth century American history.	1
Hard Work defies a simple summary. The essays it presents, written over a span of three decades, lack a common thread. Their diversity goes some way to explaining Dubofsky's place in labour historiography. Pursuing a variety of topics, Dubofsky has never developed an idea or approach to unite his work and give him the prominence of other leading members of the 'founding generation' of American labour history, such as David Montgomery, Herbert Gutman, and Alice Kessler-Harris. However, his essays contain abundant insights, many of which have not been fully considered by other scholars.	2
The first section contains essays on the radicalism of workers in the western United States and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at the turn of the twentieth century, looking toward Dubofsky's most important work, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (1969). Labour's relationship with the reformist state in the twentieth century is the focus of the second section. Included here is the most enduringly provocative essay in the collection, 'Not So "Turbulent Years": Another Look at America in the 1930s'. Dubofsky's concern is to add depth to the picture of the 1930s as a golden age of worker radicalism. Without denying the existence of 'militant and radical workers, the masses in motion, a rank and file vigorously, sometimes violently, reaching out to grasp control over its own labor and existence', he showed that such radicals stand only in the foreground of a picture of Depression-era workers (pp. 131-2). Behind them are a mass of working people characterised by an 'essential inertia,' held in place by racial and ethnic tensions that pitted them against each other, by their lack of involvement in industrial actions, and, most powerfully, by a working-class culture focused, in the absence of an alternative to the existing system, on 'grab[bing] what few joys they could in an otherwise perilous existence' (pp. 142, 147). The final section moves in an entirely different direction, placing American labour history in a broader, transnational context, in the process recasting Dubofsky's earlier attacks on American exceptionalism into an analysis that treated capitalism as a global phenomenon.	3
From the work contained in the final two sections, Dubofsky conjures a future direction for labour history that 'embed[s] the story of American workers in a larger world economy' and looks beyond an American vision of 'republicanism' to explain their activities, and that is sensitive not only to the diversity of working people but also to 'their multiple forms of belief and behavior, religious, cultural and political' (pp. 230-1). Others can embark on this path more easily with the publication of his Hard Work.	4
Janet Irons' Testing the New Deal fits better with the labour history that Dubofsky helped write than with his vision for the field's future. Her subject is a crucially important one—the most extensive protest by workers in the history of the South, a strike that involved two-thirds of those employed in the region's textile mills. In rescuing the 1934 strike from historical neglect, Irons is concerned to overturn the condescending judgments of southern workers that justified that inattention. The workers who embarked on mass action were not 'passive', 'agrarian individual[ists],' possessed of a 'cultural defect that made them less committed to unionism than their northern counterparts,' who struck only when manipulated by the northern based United Textile Workers Union (pp. 5, 175). Irons argues that the 1934 strike had its origins in a set of work practices, or 'customary rights,' that mill workers collectively developed, without a union, in the years before World War I. At the heart of those practices was flexibility on the job, which allowed workers to integrate their community and work lives, to take time off to prepare meals, for example, go to the store, or hunt and fish. An efficiency campaign by employers in the 1920s, called the 'stretch-out' by workers, required a faster pace, fewer workers and heavier loads for those who remained, changes that threatened 'the balance of work, family and community life that was the hallmark of the southern labor system' (p. 7). Southern millworkers resisted the stretch-out with explosive protests that began as local actions and became regional in scope.	5
Irons insightfully traces how the New Deal led southern textile workers to redefine the meaning of those protests. Roosevelt's rhetoric about the rights of working people inspired them to go over the heads of local elites and put their faith in the federal government. Ultimately, however, the New Deal had a 'schizophrenic' impact on the South, its political structure never really allowing the workers mobilised by its rhetoric to succeed (p. 176). The sectional roots of the Democratic Party in the 1930s left southern workers little opportunity to claim it as a vehicle for empowerment; Roosevelt built his Democratic majority in Congress by grafting his new northern working-class base to his elite southern base. When the reality of the New Deal failed to match its rhetoric, workers called for a general strike.	6
While Irons goes into considerable detail in describing the nature of the union and its struggles with the New Deal, she offers only a schematic picture of the mill workers' culture that provides the foundation of her analysis. That picture is further diminished by her decision to exclude 'power relations inside individual mill villages' that are surely a central element of that culture (p. 11). Here, surely, is a missed opportunity for a fruitful engagement with the approaches offered by cultural studies, gender history and the new literature on whiteness. Testing the New Deal also contains only a brief narrative of the strike, presented in a style that fails to evoke its passion and pathos. On both counts the strikers will be better served by John Salmond's forthcoming account, which will also encompass their northern counterparts. In the interim, Irons has provided ample grounds to justify returning the 1934 strike to a central place in the history of the Depression, and including southern textile workers in the ranks of those Americans whose consciousness was transformed by the New Deal.	7
University of Sydney STEPHEN ROBERTSON

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