Eric Arnesen

Reconsidering the "Long Civil Rights Movement"

The following two essays are adapted from papers given at the Historical Society’s June 2008 conference at the Johns Hopkins University.

Civil Rights and the Cold War At Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left

Over the past generation, a consensus has emerged on the subject of Cold War domestic anticommunism and civil rights: the former was bad for the latter. The ‘‘impact of the Cold War, the anti-communist purges and near-totalitarian social environment’’ of the late 1940s, Manning Marable asserted back in 1984, ‘‘had a devastating effect upon the cause of blacks’ civil rights and civil liberties.’’ The ‘‘paranoid mood of anti-communist America made it difficult for any other reasonable reform movement to exist.’’ But for the deleterious effects of Cold War anticommunism, the influential sociologist suggested, the ‘‘democratic upsurge of black people which characterized the late 1950s could have happened ten years earlier.’’ In fact, many scholars now insist, contra Marable, that such an earlier upsurge did take place. In the decade or two

The Final Conflict? On the Scholarship of Civil Rights, the Left and the Cold War

Always controversial in its heyday, the Communist Party continues to draw scholars into the historiographical fray, even two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since the 1970s and 1980s, historians have lined up in revisionist and traditionalist camps to debate the character, accomplishments, and failings of the American Communist Party. Those debates have filled hundreds of journal pages and have taken up countless hours of conference panel time. In recent years, revelations from the declassified Venona decryptions of the extent of Soviet espionage (including the complicity and even participation of some CP leaders in that espionage) and the extent of Soviet influence or control over the American Communist Party from the partially opened archives of the former Soviet Union have challenged but not overturned the revisionists’ project. Indeed, in one scholarly field in particular, the Party’s reputation among those inspired by the revisionists remains largely unblemished. Today, the revisionist project seems most alive and well in the field of civil rights studies, where the Party and its members are often garbed in heroic cloth and placed at the centre of the political stage in the 1940s. For scholars of the ‘‘long civil rights movement,’’ the Party and those in its orbit offered the nation its best opportunity of mounting an effective challenge to Jim Crow, economic inequality, and Cold War militarism. In recent accounts, that opportunity came to naught at the hands of political reaction. According to what I call the new ‘‘conventional wisdom,’’ anticommunism proved deadly to civil rights in the 1940s and early 1950s by killing off a dynamic CP left-labor-civil rights alliance. That alliance, the story goes, had the real potential to bring about positive—even radical—social change and constituted the heart of a ‘‘long civil rights movement’’ that preceded the movement that emerged in the mid-1950s. Accordingly, the marginalization of the left and the discrediting of its ideas impoverished American political life and ensured that the new movement in the 1950s and beyond would be more

Comparing urban crises: race, migration, and the transformation of the modern American city

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001) (Cornell University Press, Ithaca) viii, 295 pp. Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (2002) (University of Chicago Press, Chicago) xi, 333 pp. Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (2001) (Temple University Press, Philadelphia) xiii, 309 pp.

Pem Davidson Buck, Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. viii + 288 pp.

Pem Davidson Bucks book is intended to offer readers a view from under the sink (1). Initially rejecting a career for which her middle-class upbringing had prepared her, Buck moved from Pennsylvania to central Kentucky, where she and her husband became back-to-the-landers, growing and canning food and raising goats and calves, sometimes supplementing the family income by working as part-time day laborers on tobacco farms, as hod-carriers, and as plumbers. But its not so easy to leave a middle-class liberal upbringing behind, especially down on the farm living below the poverty level. Working as a helper in the small plumbing and heating business she operated with her husband, Buck spent time lying on her back on the floors of the wealthy fixing leaks; from that perspective under the sink she looked up and saw fine furniture and other manifestations of wealth she could not afford. One thing led to another: seeing the world as if for the first time, “it appeared oppressive” (2). People, working people, that is, work extremely hard, and what do they get for their efforts? Boney fingers.

55.00 cloth;

The female-male ratio of earnings for fulltime earners ten years after graduation was .80 for the Stanford graduates, nearly identical to the .79 ratio found in the Todai sample. Moreover, men and women in both countries expected the gender gap to widen as their careers unfolded. When respondents were asked what they expected to earn at the peak of their careers, their answers implied a .459 female/male ratio in the Stanford sample and .548 in the Todai sample. In other words, women graduating from these top-ranked schools expected peak career earnings about half as high as those expected by their male counterparts. A number of countervailing differences account for the similarities in the gender gap in actual and expected earnings. The Todai women were a particularly small and elite group, as only 14% of the Todai student body was female. At the same time, earnings inequality is narrower inJapan than in the United States, which tends to mute the gender gap in earnings. On the other hand, child care options are broader in the United States, though still far from adequate, which enables mothers, who continue to assume primary responsibility for child care, to work more continuously and intensively. Stanford women reported more numerous child care options, and were less likely to experience career interruptions after childbirth. Some Todai mothers reported being forced to quit their jobs after the birth of a child, an experience not mentioned by the Stanford women. Who took care of the children? It depends on whom you ask. Just over half of the Stanford fathers reported sharing child care equally with their wives when they were not at work, but only 30% of Stanford wives reported being in such marriages. This gap grows to 56% versus 21% among Stanford parents working full-time. Responses to the slightly different child care question asked of the Todai sample suggest an even lower level of participation by men in parenting. Most of the Todai fathers (60%) reported spending less than half of their free time with their children, while nearly all (97%) of the working Todai mothers said they spent half or more of their free time with their children. The book contains many other interesting analyses, including an examination of the effect of relative earnings on the share of housework in the two samples, and the determinants of earnings. Housework varied inversely with a partners earnings in the United States but not injapan. InJapan, women were less likely to be employed in large firms, and received a lower wage premium when they did. Male Stanford graduates from upper-class backgrounds earned significantly more than their classmates. Analysts of gender, earnings, and family relations will find many such interesting results to ponder. The Japanese birth rate (1.57 children per woman) is well below the replacement level. Strober and Chan suggest that policy changes should be made to help make it more feasible for women to combine work with motherhood. They recommend efforts to reduce gender discrimination and occupational segregation, and call for more flexible employment and highquality child care. They recommend similar reforms in the United States, which are aimed at promoting gender equity rather than raising fertility levels. This thoughtful and timely book deserves a wide audience. Clearly written, it is accessible to the general public, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students. The survey results and statistical findings are supplemented with informative quotations from the respondents. The authors policy recommendations flow directly from the meticulously documented findings. This work should give further impetus to comparative research on gender inequality.

21.00 paper.

Before the 1960s, white historians of North American slavery justified the absence of slaves perspectives from their accounts on the basis of a regrettable lack of sources. Planters and white politicians may have left behind diaries, newspaper essays, treatises, and record books, but their human property ostensibly had not. What sources did exist?fugitive slave testimonies and subsequently recorded interviews with scholars or government officials ? were presumed to be tainted either by the propaganda purposes to which they were put, the power dynamics between interviewer and interviewed, or unreliable memories. Such dismissals proved self-serving and premature. Beginning in the early 1960s, historians revolutionized our understanding of Americas peculiar institution, utilizing both traditional and untapped sources, making slavery one of the most dynamic fields in American historical scholarship for several decades. The world of the southern slave community has been reconstituted, and the values, aspirations, and perspectives of the unfree have been placed at its center. Until recently, the same could not be said for their descendants in the nations urban centers. From the 1950s to the 1980s, historians of the urban African American experience examined in great depth northern black communities and their occupational and class structures, the contours of residential ghettos, the evolution of Jim Crow and white racism, religious and fraternal life, and the political struggle of northern blacks for representation, inclusion, and equality. But the accounts of the struggles against exclusion and discrimination were dominated by the black elite?entrepreneurs, the clergy, lawyers, and other

Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working Class

The worlds of academic scholarship and popular understandings of the past are two distinct if sometimes related phenomena. In the best of circumstances, the work of professional scholars, based on years of painstaking research and conceptualization, finds its way into the hands of those outside the academy. Ideally, academic research and arguments inform or define not just what our students might think but what the broader public does as well. But the best of circumstances is one of those phrases that might be misleading, for the occasions when academic scholarship decisively shapes larger interpretations and understandings occur far too rarely. Under more commonly prevailing circumstances, academic historians work forms a kind of backdrop against which historical popularizers, with access to larger reading markets, can paint their own distinct pictures; to mix metaphors, academic work constitutes building blocks that can be selectively arranged to suit the popularizers purposes. Academic historians—and I must confess, I am one—may be indispensable to the enterprise, but they dont have much of a say in determining the uses to which their findings and arguments get put. To put the matter in these terms, it can be argued, does a genuine disservice to the popularizers on several grounds. First, unlike academic scholars, popular historians fill a market niche and meet a genuine demand among members of the public for readable works of history. In contrast, academic scholars often make little effort to reach audiences

The African-American Working Class in the Jim Crow Era

A career-spanning collection of writings on labor history by one of the leading figures in the field, showing not only his growth as an historian but the growth of his field as well, exploring the subjects of workers, unions, and politics.

The Recent Historiography of British Abolitionism: Academic Scholarship, Popular History, and the Broader Reading Public

Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This significant new collection emphatically says No! Touching on such subjects as migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender, these thirteen essays by former students of David Montgomery -- a preeminent leader in labor circles as well as in academia -- demonstrate the sheer diversity of the field today.