Spinning Their Wheels:

 Confronting Scholarly Perceptions of Southern Auto Workers

• Vol. 7 no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2013/14)

Scholars who examine the labor force in the American South often have a hard time breaking away from well-worn tropes. The characterization of southern workers as docile, backward, and generally hostile to organization has continued to endure in fields as diverse as labor history, economics, and industrial relations. A new generation of labor scholars began to mount a challenge to this tradition, starting in the early 1990s. They argue that when given the chance, southern workers have been as militant and likely to organize as their northern counterparts. They point to a long tradition of divide-and-conquer racism, directed violence, and general conspiracy by economic interests and their political allies for the widespread failure of organized labor in the south. They point to multiple episodes of successful worker organization and mutual cooperation, occasionally across racial boundaries, as evidence of this. While not universally applicable, the conclusions of this new school (often referred to as the “new southern labor history”) are invaluable in helping shake off old, stale stereotypes about southern workers. These historians have restored some measure of dignity and historical agency to these laborers, who have often been dismissed as willful subjects of a paternalistic economic order. This essay addresses scholarly attitudes towards southern auto workers, who make up an increasing portion of the labor force in that key industry. The rise of so-called “transplant” factories owned by foreign automakers in the US South has brought increased prosperity. But it has also turned many of these factories into a battleground for pro- and anti-union forces. A variety of explanations have been put forward to explain the unorganized status of most of these factories, including the alleged docility of southern labor. This essay finds that traditional paternalistic attitudes towards southern industrial workers still appear in scholarly literature, although some writers have moved away from these. Overall, there is still much work to be done regarding the attitudes of southern laborers in the auto industry towards unionization. Recent efforts by the United Auto Workers to organize the labor force at Mercedes-Benz in Alabama, Volkswagen in Tennessee, and Nissan in Mississippi may add another twist to the historiography of southern labor.

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A review of The World America Made by Robert Kagan

• Vol. 6 no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2013)

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Martyrdom Used For a Practical Purpose

The Narrative Construction of Militant U.S. Suffragists as Martyrs

• Vol. 6 no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2013)

During the militant U.S. suffrage campaign of 1917, many suffragists were incarcerated and driven to hunger strikes. In mainstream and suffragist press at the time, as well as memoirs produced after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, these suffragists were portrayed as martyrs to the suffrage cause. The figure of the martyr was used by the suffragists as a political strategy. Though the attempt to present these women as martyrs faced challenges, the suffrage movement was able to employ methods that helped redefine the meaning of a modern martyr in a way that benefited the suffrage cause. Ultimately, the publication and dissemination of the narratives of suffering produced by the suffragists relegitimized the suffrage movement’s justifiability and reinforced the position of the antagonistic Wilson administration as their adversary, thus solidifying and reenergizing their cause.

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The Demolition of Public Housing in American Cities

• Vol. 6 no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2013)

Public housing in the United States is in a state of decline. Underfunded and often badly maintained, decades-old public housing developments are being torn down to make way for mixed-income, privatized housing. The central aim of this paper is to explore the cultural and material underpinnings of the demolition of public housing in American cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, among others, and to address some of the problems found in public housing today. This paper will attempt to demonstrate the importance of public housing as a source of housing for lower- and working-class people across the United States and suggest that demolishing and privatizing public housing should not be the go-to option for policy makers.

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