James R. Barrett

Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the New Immigrant Working Class

In 1980, Joseph Loguidice, an elderly Italian-American from Chicago, sat down to give his life story to an interviewer. His first and most vivid childhood recollection was of a race riot that had occurred on the city’s near north side. Wagons full of policemen with ‘peculiar hats’ streamed into his neighbourhood. But the ‘one thing that stood out in my mind’, Loguidice remembered after six decades, was ‘a man running down the middle of the street hollering … “I’m White, I’m White! ” ’ After first taking him for an African-American, Loguidice soon realised that the man was a white coal-handler covered in dust. He was screaming for his life, fearing that ‘people would shoot him down’. He had, Loguidice concluded, ‘got caught up in … this racial thing’.1

Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism

Taking the communist memoir as a sub-genre of working-class autobiography, the article analyzes, first, the characteristics of the communist autobiography, the conditions under which such works were produced, and their intended functions. Second, the article considers some personal dimensions of American communist history and how this more subjective side of the history relates to the more familiar political narrative of the movement. Recent feminist and other theory of autobiography are employed to analyze approximately forty communist autobiographies and other personal narrative material to analyze personal love and marriage, child rearing and family life, and self-identity within the party.

Irish Americanization on Stage : How Irish Musicians, Playwrights, and Writers Created a New Urban American Culture, 1880-1940

In January 1907 a wave of riots broke out in New York’s theatres. Irish American audiences heckled actors, pelting them with rotten vegetables. Twenty-two men were arrested in one melee alone, though an Irish American judge dismissed all charges. Organized by the United Irish Societies, the protests were aimed at a vaudeville skit called “The Irish Servant Girl.” Once one of vaudeville’s most popular acts, the Russell Brothers had been performing it without incident for many years. Dressed in drag, the actors depicted dim-witted Irish maids, but now the protests forced the Russells out of New York and eventually out of vaudeville entirely.(1) “The Irish Servant Girl” reflected vaudeville’s preoccupation with ethnic stereotypes, while the protests, part of a broader movement against ethnic caricature, were emblematic of evolving attitudes toward ethnic difference in the Irish American community and in urban society generally. A new popular culture that reflected urban themes and a sense of realism reached maturity in the Great Depression era, but its roots lay earlier in the striking ethnic and racial diversity of the American city at the turn of the century. The curiosity and conflict this social difference engendered and the realities of social class in American cities emerged on stage and screen, in the narratives of late nineteenth century musical comedies, in early twentieth century vaudeville routines, in the pages of realist fiction, in the lyrics of Tin Pan Alley songs, and in newspaper columns and cartoon strips. Vaudeville – the variety shows embracing a series of music, comedy, and dance acts – became synonymous with this new urban culture that emerged between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s. This new culture was the product of interactions between the Irish and other city dwellers from diverse backgrounds. Irish efforts to interpret this urban diversity to themselves, to the immigrant peoples around them, and to the mainstream public reflected their biases toward and their conflicts with other ethnic groups, but they all reflected