| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Michelle Brattain, The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001).

THE FAILURE OF US unions to organize southern industry since the New Deal was one of several setbacks that later accounted for the diverging fortunes of unions on opposite sides of the US-Canada border. Having failed to establish a strong foothold in the south, private-sector American unions saw themselves isolated geographically and politically. While Canadian union density held steady or increased after the 1950s, US union density continuously declined to the point that by 2002 one half of American membership was confined to just six states. And no industry foretold the post war travails of US unions in the south better than textiles.

Michelle Brattain argues in this well written, exhaustively researched, and judicious examination of textile workers in Floyd County, Georgia, that the politics of race are in fact crucial to explaining textile unionism's failure. Brattain grounds her book in recent literature which sees the construction of "whiteness" as crucial to US working-class consciousness and behaviour. She argues that the southern textile industry "began, and remained for much of its history, wholly captive to race" (5) and even "though southerners in the early twentieth century did not use the term," whiteness "was deeply embedded in social relations, politics, and class formation." Nor was whiteness instituted from above. Working- class whites participated in its construction: none more so than southern white textile workers, who "inscribed and gave meaning to working-class whiteness." (7) By embracing whiteness, white workers made clear that they "did not in fact share identical interests with black workers" in the racialized south. (5)

Brattain uses the analytical tool of whiteness as well as any labour historian has used it to date. Her narrative opens with an account of the making of the southern textile mill workforce, as the process unfolded in northwest Georgia's Floyd County. The arrival of the cotton mills in the early 20th-century "seemingly reunited the interests of all classes of southern whites" who were "sorely divided" at the time, she writes. (35) The exclusion of black workers from the vast majority of textile mill jobs (other than as janitors) meant that just as "janitorial work was associated with blackness, textile work became associated with whiteness." (47) Brattain argues that whiteness consequently helped define what it meant to be working class in the south. Indeed, she contends that "whiteness in the South became something that largely determined the ability to become part of the industrial working class." (5)

Yet because Brattain is such an adept historian, some of the limitations of the whiteness paradigm become clear as her finely detailed narrative unfolds. To a greater extent than her title suggests, the politics of whiteness serves as a periodic referent or touchstone rather than the organizing principle of Brattain's entire narrative. Wisely, Brattain rarely uses this now ubiquitous concept to explain what it cannot explain. Rather, she generally lets her narrative speak for itself. The inadvertent result may be that she teaches us less about the explanatory promise of whiteness analysis than its limited potential as an analytical tool.

Brattain's modest approach is well advised, for references to the politics of whiteness in fact do not explain some of the central issues taken up in her narrative. Whiteness ultimately tells us little about how and why white mill hands resisted their white employers by unionizing and striking, what conditions favoured or undermined their actions, or why the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) in Floyd County was "initially at the forefront of changes in race relations...long before the passage of the Civil Rights Act." (232) Nor do references to the whiteness of textile workers explain why they were less likely to support the rabidly racist politics of Eugene and Herman Talmadge than were their rural white neighbors.

Indeed, Brattain's narrative suggests that if whiteness bounded the arena of Georgia politics, it did not determine what happened within that arena, where class and regional dynamics exerted enormous pull. The example of Georgia's Depression-era governor, Eugene Talmadge, who exploited race politics as well as anyone in his time, provides a case in point. An anti-New Deal governor, Talmadge placed the race card heavily to cover his betrayal of white workers during the 1934 national textile strike, when he used the National Guard to facilitate strike-breaking only days after seeking labour's vote to win a decisive gubernatorial primary. Yet in the first campaign Talmadge ran after his 1934 treachery, there is little evidence that textile workers fell for his racist charade: they helped defeat him in a 1936 Senate race. Though Talmadge won an election again as governor in 1938, his victory had less to do with his appeal than the self-destruction of the incumbent administration. When he tried to use demagoguery to get re-elected in 1942 by race-baiting President Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practices Committee, he failed to win either Floyd County or Georgia. And when he mounted yet another campaign for governor in 1946, mingling red-baiting with his familiar racist conjurings, Floyd County voters helped thwart his bid. If anything, Brattain's evidence suggests that "lintheads" responded more tepidly than other Georgians to Talmadgism's appeals to whiteness during the 1930s and 1940s.

Similarly, Brattain explains the defeat of the CIO's Operation Dixie after the war by referring to the dispersed structure of the south's textile industry, the anti-unionism of local authorities, and employers' red-baiting more than she refers to the politics of whiteness. And in explaining post-war strike defeats in Floyd County she cites "workers' vulnerability to regional under-employment, hostile local officials, and the failure of federal labor policy" as decisive factors (194), not race politics. Yet because Brattain crafts her argument about the centrality of whiteness with a light touch, such facts tend to qualify — rather than contradict — her thesis.

To her credit, Brattain offers much evidence to undercut any exclusive claim for the centrality of the politics of whiteness to textile labour history. And she is too faithful to the evidence to bend her entire narrative around constructions of race. Thus she relies on her final chapters, detailing the "Republicanization" of Floyd County whites in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, to seal the argument that whiteness was ultimately a determining force in the history of textile workers. These chapters detail how warmly Floyd County's "lintheads" embraced "the most recent incarnation of whiteness," the racist populism that George Wallace promoted in response to the civil rights movement. (267) As Brattain reports, Wallace easily out-polled Republication Richard Nixon in Floyd County in 1968, and drew twice as many votes as Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey.

These concluding chapters would be stronger, though, had they considered the textile industry's larger market dynamics and the severe limitations the industry's economic forces placed upon textile workers and unions in the post-World War II era. But the post-1948 portion of this book gives no attention to the economics of the industry, focusing instead on electoral politics, civil rights, and integration. Thus, one learns only in the book's penultimate paragraph that between 1946 and 1960, 202 southern textile mills closed (including 5 unionized Floyd County mills), eliminating 54, 290 jobs. (280) Had these facts been integrated into Brattain's analysis, rather than inserted into her conclusion, she might have arrived at different conclusions regarding Wallace's appeal to Floyd County whites. She might have considered the degree to which whites felt imperilled not only as a racial elite whose system of apartheid was threatened, but as workers whose economic futures were in doubt. In short, she might have looked beyond whiteness to more fully grasp Wallace-ism's dynamics.

As it is, those not already won over to whiteness literature are not likely to be converted by this book. Thankfully, however, one does not have to embrace whiteness analysis to appreciate this as an outstanding historical narrative. Michelle Brattain's wise and well informed account throws a bright new light on the failure of unionism in the US south, raising issues that scholars are likely to debate for years to come.


Joseph A. McCartin Georgetown University

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