Labor History, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2000

Symposium on Daniel Letwin: The Challenge of Interracial Unionism*

(This symposium was conceived and organized by Alex Lichtenstein)

Exploring the Local World of Interracialism

ALEX LICHTENSTEIN**

One of the more compelling moments of my undergraduate days was attending David Montgomery’s lecture on 19th-century coal miners (for many would-be lefties, auditing Montgomery’s lectures was de rigueur). With his characteristic exhortatory cadences, Professor Montgomery made us know that no color line existed underground, for in the dangerous dark of a coal mine, black and white miners depended on one another for their very ¼ livesÐ hmm! It is a testament to Montgomery that one of his graduate students, Daniel Letwin, could produce a book that indicates how much more complex the reality was for black and white miners alike in the Jim Crow South. Though the work process certainly shaped the terms of both interracial camaraderie and con¯ ict in the mines, so too did diverse factors above ground: the social structure of community in coal-mining camps, the prevailing ethic of race relations in the post-Reconstruction South, the reigning political economy, the power of capital to recruit and control labor, including convicts, and even the role of the federal state in labor relations. In The Challenge of Interracial Unionism Letwin sets himself a dif® cult taskÐ not just to demonstrate the existence of interracial cooperation among coal miners in Alabama’ s Birmingham District (others have done that) nor to chart the persistence of racial antagonism among the same workers (others have done that as well), but to strike a balance between these poles. Indeed, it might be noted at the outset that in the last 30 years no single postbellum Southern industrial community has been as extensively studied or documented as the Birmingham District, the coal and iron center of northeast Alabama. Of course there is the pioneering work of Paul Worthman (noted in Alexander Saxton’s symposium contribution below), and the by now infamous and increasingly stale debate provoked by Herbert Hill’s dissection of Herbert Gutman’s initial exploration of the Alabama United Mine Workers’ (UMW) interracialism, carried on by each of their partisans, a debate summarized and expanded by Letwin with admirable even-handedness. Other articles and books have examined the District’ s urban history, detailed the use of convict labor, charted the rise and fall of a single

*The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878± 1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). **Alex Lichtenstein is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University in Miami, and author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (1996).

0023-656X print/1469± 9702 online/00/010063± 28 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of The Tamiment Institute 64 A. Lichtenstein industrial concern, covered race relations among iron and steel workers, unearthed the history of the local Communist party, and looked at the Civil Rights movement.1 Thus the contribution of The Challenge of Interracialism to this literature can be weighed on two scales: what new insights does it bring to the study of the Birmingham District, and what, if any, questions does it leave for future scholars to pose? The empirical heart of Letwin’s book looks at coal miners’ labor organizations and political activities in four eras: those characterized, ® rst, by the rise of the Greenback Labor Party and the Knights of Labor, and then the brief ¯ are of Populism, followed by the crystallization of segregation, and ® nally World War I. Previous accounts of Alabama’ s coal miners considered one, or at most two of these periods. Letwin’s broad chronological scope allows him to demonstrate the persistence of an interracial impulse among organized miners, one that arose before the advent of the UMW and lasted for over three decades (he leaves to others to explore its resurgence in the 1930s). Most signi® cantly, he argues that changing external circumstances rather than ª an internal collapse of interracialismº (188) conditioned the success or failure of this impulse at particular conjunctures. This approach allows Letwin to contrast the pre- and post-Jim Crow eras. With the Greenback-Labor and People’s parties as vehicles, black and white miners brought their grievances to the ballot box as well as the picket line. But with the triumph of white supremacy in Alabama, and black disfranchisement, came the de- politicization of the miners’ interracial efforts. Also highly original is Letwin’s recognition that the ª Birmingham Districtº actually consisted of congeries of communities, ranging from a major urban area to isolated rural coal towns. Many scholars, myself included, have inaccurately spoken of the ª Birmingham Districtº in one breath as if it constituted a single, undifferentiated entity, rather than an area encompassing several counties in northeast Alabama. Although we still could learn more about how race relations differed in, say, a company town in Walker county, and a working-class suburb of Birmingham proper, like Pratt City, Letwin has pointed the way here to a new and signi® cant set of variables. Similarly, his work reminds us that the structure and actions of capital profoundly in¯ uenced the possibilities of interracialism, but there remain unanswered questions about the com- parative racial policies of smaller commercial coal operators mining for the open market

1Actually, the documentation of Birmingham’ s industrial history began at its apogee, with Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham, 1910). For representative examples of the historiography of race and labor relations in Birmingham see Paul B. Worthman, ª Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897± 1904,º Labor History, 10 (1969), 375± 407; Herbert G. Gutman, ª The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America,º in Julius Jacobson, ed., The Negro and the American Labor Movement (Garden City: Anchor, 1968), 49± 127; Herbert Hill, ª Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America,º International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2 (1988), 132± 200; Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871± 1921 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977); Alex Lichtenstein, ª `Through the Rugged Gates of the Penitentiary’: Convict Labor and Southern Coal, 1870± 1900,º in Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern, eds., Race and Class in the American South Since 1890 (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 3± 42; Robert David Ward and William Warren Rogers, Convicts, Coal, and the Banner Mine Tragedy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1987); W. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994); Henry M. McKiven, Jr., Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama,1875± 1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Robert J. Norrell, ª Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama,º Journal of American History, 73 (1986), 669± 694; Judith Stein, ª Southern Workers in National Unions: Birmingham Steelworkers, 1936± 1951,º in Robert Zieger, ed., Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 183± 222; Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Glenn Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Symposium on Daniel Letwin 65

FIG. 1. Dust Jacket from Daniel Letwin’s book The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, published by The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 66 A. Lichtenstein and the vertically integrated ª captiveº coal mines of corporations like Tennessee Coal and Iron, companies that confronted the ª labor questionº under very different circum- stances. Analytically, Letwin moves the debate about interracialism among southern coal miners forward several giant steps with a host of sharp and novel insights that, for once, actually attempt to explain the sources of ª collaboration between the racesº (134), as he carefully calls it, rather than just documentÐ or refuteÐ its very existence. Most compelling, to my mind, is his insistence that the line between legitimate and illegit- imate miners did not distinguish between black and white so much as between insiders and outsiders. Thus striking miners of both races found common cause in the belittle- ment of scabs, black and white. The other demarcation was between free and convict miners, the latter de® ned by their unfree status rather than their race (even though almost all of them were African-American). Indeed, given its status as an exceptional feature of the Birmingham District’s labor force, the importance of convict labor as a catalyst for interracial solidarity cannot be overstated. Although less so here than in his 1995 Journal of Southern History article,2 Letwin also argues that the highly masculine world of coal mining proved conducive to interracial- ism. The very fragility of the bridge across the color line became clear, he contends, when enemies of the union invested the bugaboo of ª social equalityº with the threat of black± white interaction across the gender line, as they did to defeat the strike of 1908, extinguishing the UMW in the Alabama coal® elds for nearly a decade. Finally, Letwin contends that Alabama coal mining developed in such a way that blacks and whites secured a foothold in the labor force simultaneously, making racial cooperation a possibility by creating an ª insiderº culture of established and experienced miners. Is this, then, the last word on interracialism among Alabama miners? Hardly. Given the impressiveness of Letwin’s research, it seems unlikely that anyone will discover any new documents (although Nancy MacLean’s comment below suggests otherwise), but Letwin’s multilayered explanatory model provokes a set of new questions, some of which I have already suggested. In particular, given the attention focused on Birming- ham’s miners by historians, future work will have to consider the question of the District’ s exceptionalism, and thus try to map the contours of both possibilities and limits of interracialism more generally. Were the conditions of the Birmingham District peculiar, creating a common set of experiences and a particular demography that made interracialism more likely than elsewhere? For example, Birmingham was one of the few industrial cities of the South with a large immigrant population; it seems possible that the unusual heterogeneity of the white labor force weakened white racial solidarity among workers. Or was uneven development, and a transient and polyglot workforce, typical of nascent southern industry elsewhere? One might also look more closely at race relations underground (as Jacqueline Jones suggests in her comment), especially at the tension surrounding the ª subcontractingº system in which a skilled miner hired day laborers to do much of his work (it remains unclear from Letwin’s account whether black miners embraced or rejected this system). Yet, to join with John Higginson’s comment below, and inject a comparative perspec- tive, pace Montgomery nothing inherent in mining itself lends itself to interracialism, as the South African case illustrates. There the all-white Mineworkers Union (MWU) historically drew the color line most sharply, so much so that by 1979, when the South

2Dan Letwin, ª Interracial Unionism, Gender, and `Social Equality’ in the Alabama Coal Fields, 1878± 1908,º Journal of Southern History, 61 (1995), 519± 554. Symposium on Daniel Letwin 67

African state removed or lowered statutory color bars the MWU engaged in a political strike to thwart the reforms. One might also think comparatively about Letwin’s provocative argument about the facilitating aspect of a ª maleº work sphere, which he extends to dock and timber workers; again, in South Africa, mixed-gender industries like textiles and canning, rather than mining, proved most susceptible to interracial organizing. But, in trying to isolate the conditions conducive to cooperation across the color line, historians need above all to learn more about initiatives from the African-American side. Letwin is no romanticist; he reminds us that white miners acted out of self- interest, not interracial fellowship, and moreover paternalistically regarded their black brethren as pupils in unionism in need of white tutelage. At the same time, Letwin does not fully account for the African-American perspective: what did black workers think of interracialism? How did they weigh the blandishments of men like Henry F. De- Bardeleben to come work at his all-black ª Negro Edenº against the condescending and tentative solidarity of their white union brothers? Two issues deserve further explo- ration here. The ® rst is the presence of biracial union structures in Alabama coal mines, parallel and cooperative segregated local unions, like those found by Eric Arnesen on the New Orleans docks in the same period.3 By no means was this merely Jim Crow unionism, imposed by whites; blacks often saw something in biracial unionism as well. Letwin doesn’t offer an explanation for the African-American acquiescence in or desire for biracialism, but clearly it meant not having to settle for the mandated vice-presiden- tial leadership slot allowed in interracial local structures. Under which circumstances this particular approach took precedence over interracialism remains an important question. The other important area in need of clari® cation is the relationship between Birming- ham’s black working and middle classes. Letwin’s contention that the ª philosophies ¼ of the black middle class and black unionists were not always as incompatible as is often supposedº (145) is one of the few places he seems wide of the mark. Brian Kelly’ s forthcoming workÐ which, building on Letwin, goes into far greater detail on the non-union era between the strike of 1908 and World War IÐ shows that there was in fact a sharp class divide among Birmingham blacks. If African-American workers remained justi® ably skeptical about the depth of their white comrades’ commitment to solidarity, they nevertheless emphatically rejected the sort of cooperation with their employers preached by the local black elite and encouraged by the spread of welfare capitalism among Birmingham’ s largest corporations.4 None of this is to diminish the tremendous signi® cance of Letwin’s contribution. Ardent partisans of both Hill and Gutman will ® nd ammunition in this book, which argues judiciously that ª common class experience among black and white miners provided the impetus to interracialism; the prevailing culture of white supremacy imposed the limitsº (192). But if labor historians continue to fail to agree on the ultimate meaning of the shared experience of black and white coal miners, after reading The Challenge of Interracial Unionism few will deny that Gutman’s 30-year-old injunction to accumulate ª detailed knowledge of the `local world’ º they inhabited has at last been ful® lled.

3Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863± 1923 (Oxford, 1991). 4Brian Kelly, ª Up Against Itº : Race, Labor,and Power in the AlabamaCoal Fields, 1908± 1921(forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press). 68 J. Higginson Digging a Little Deeper

JOHN HIGGINSON*

Daniel Letwin’s The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, 1878± 1921 is an important attempt to reestablish the connection between labor and politics in American labor history. Industrial entrepreneurs and ® nanciers strove mightily to enforce the percep- tion that the economy and the state were separate spheres of activity during the period that Letwin has chosen to examine.1 But as engineers and new machinery snatched a greater portion of creative responsibility for the work process out of the hands of industrial workers, politicsÐ particularly the politics of industrial productionÐ began to loom large in corporate and government policy discussions.2 When the politics of industrial production were joined by the equally intractable propositions of race and immigration, a con¯ ation of politics and economics within a persisting sense of grievance was the very last thing that employers wished to foster among workers in basic industry. Industrial expansion in the post-Reconstruction South was especially mercurial. It was rapid but con® ned primarily to basic industry and bore a great resemblance to industrial organization in the colonial and dependent economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America.3 There were virtually no value-added industries. Manufacturing was con® ned to the spinning of cotton threads and the production of lumber in sawmills.4 Alabama’ s bituminous coal mining industry did not depart from this dependent pattern of industrialization. Wages were also powerfully affected by the fact that the coal mining was merely a factor of production for pig iron. Of course, the low wages of Alabama’ s coal miners were also a result of the general wage structure and labor market of the South.5 But from the inception of the mining industry, the organic connection between coal and pig iron made piece rates and the imposition of unpaid infrastructural work volatile points of contention between the mine owners and the workers. Jobs that the miners them-

*John Higginson is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author, most recently, of ª Upending the Century of Wrong: Agrarian Elites, Collective Violence, and the Transformation of State Power in the American South and South Africa, 1865± 1914,º Social Identities, 4 (1998). 1For an important analysis of the most important turns in the policy debates that shaped what is now known as ª corporate liberalismº see Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 80± 85. 2See Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 240± 244; David F. Noble, The Forces of Production (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), xiii± xiv; see also Harry Braverman’s examination of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s experiments and subsequent provisional conclusion that the determination of the wage was ª relatively independentº of productivity in Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 90± 98. 3See C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877± 1913 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 142± 174; Barbara Fields, ª The Nineteenth Century American South: History and Theory,º Plantation Society, II (1) (April, 1983), 7± 27; Stephen Skowronek, Building A New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 141± 143. 4See Gavin Wright’ s insightful essay ª The Long View of Southern Land and Laborº in his Old South, New South (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 51± 80. 5See Gavin Wright’ s essay, ª Southern Industry, Colonial Economy, Black Workers,º in Old South, New South, 194± 197. Symposium on Daniel Letwin 69 selves called ª deadº work, such as the cleaning of slate and timbering the shafts and rockfaces or ª roomsº were perceived as particularly egregious.6 Along with subcontract- ing and the use of convict labor, piece rates and ª deadº work were the principal grievances that called the earliest forms of organization into existence among the coal miners. Bitter struggles broke out between the mine owners and their workers at the mines and at the voting booths between the 1880s and the seminal strike of 1894.7 These struggles were made all the more bitter because they were so drawn out, and also because the anomalous features of the workforceÐ free and convict, black and white, foreign national and native bornÐ seemed to militate against long-term displays of worker solidarity. The strike of 1894 broke the mold of apparent constraints, however, and also had a decisive impact on the scale of Alabama’ s coal mining industry and its demographic characteristics. After the strike African-Americans, who had always been a presence in the industry, made up a bare majority of the workers in the coal mines. African- Americans also provided an important segment of the local leadership for the strike and earlier workplace and political initiatives of the coal miners. Who were these men? Where had they come from? Why did they decide to attach their aspirations to those of the mining industry and the various trade union organiza- tions that emerged within the industry, at the very moment that segregation threatened them with a powerful set of general social constraints? In 1894 a signi® cant portion of Alabama’ s black coal miners would have spent their early childhood and adolescence in bondage in one of the Black Belt counties of Georgia, Alabama or Mississippi. There would have been fewer such men in the mines in 1894 than there had been in 1878, at the height of the organizing efforts of the Greenback Labor Party, or in 1886, on the eve of the demise of the Knights of Labor. However, their memories and experiences must have formed an important template for the demands and grievances that led to the 1894 strike. But what kinds of traditions gave coherence to their memories and experiences? How did they pass them on to subsequent generations of black and white miners? For by the time of the failed strikes of 1904 and 1908, all these men would have left the mines. Can one make a neat distinction between the political and syndicalist portions of this legacy? Letwin has sought to demonstrate that Alabama’ s mine workers did not readily make such distinctions before the statutory disfranchisement of all the state’s African-Americans and a considerable portion of the white working class. He has done so by choosing to test old assumptions about the capacity of black and white workers to achieve a modicum of solidarity over questions of working and living conditions and wages during the ® rst high era of segregation and racial inequality. But he has also demonstrated how the ª recurring harshnessº of industrial capitalism, which expressed itself in a series of depressions that appeared to defy the price structure of the economy, smashed the relationship between the quest for a predictable measure of security or ª competenceº by working people and the technical requirements of indus- trial production.8 The politics of the mine workers turned on the eradication of three long-standing

6See Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, 46± 47. 7Ibid., 59± 73. 8For a general explanation of this historical problem from the vantage point of working people see Bruce Laurie, From Artisans To Workers (Urbana, IL: Universityof Illinois Press,1997); see also W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuation, 1870± 1914 (Boston, MA: G. Allen and Unwin, 1978), 28± 56. 70 J. Higginson grievancesÐ entailed or ª deadº work, convict labor and subcontracting. Letwin deftly describes the political quickening around these issues. By the 1880s the Knights of Labor, an organization that generally attempted to eschew politics, had become the political voice of the coal miners. But just before its demise at the end of the 1880s, the political program of the Knights derived largely from the earlier one of the Greenback Labor Party.9 Letwin’s evidence suggests that mineworkers spent as much time organizing them- selves around political campaigns as they did preparing for strikes. Considerable numbers of the most able and charismatic organizers for the Knights of Labor and the Greenback Labor Party were African-Americans, well before African-Americans came to compose the majority of workers in Alabama’ s coal mines. In fact, until the 1894 strike, the number of black workers turning out at the polls tended to rise sharply when a given strike threatened to end in stalemate or defeat. But with the decline of the Greenback Labor Party and the Knights of Labor, workers had no authentic or strong voice at the polls. They were often obliged to vote for apparently pro-labor Democrats who, once elected, ceased to favor labor.10 Black coal miners saw their own possibilities and strengths in terms of the failure of the mine owners to achieve substantive control over the workforce. Their struggles to assert their sense of justice re¯ ected the politics of Alabama’ s coal mining industry as well as their speci® c economic grievances. After the turn of the century, however, segregation and political disfranchisement also threatened to deprive all workers, especially African-American workers, of a political line of defense against the arbitrary decisions of the mine owners.11 Subcontracting, a practice that was relegated to the least pro® table mines by the strikes and political campaigns of the mine workers during the 1880s and 1890s, returned with a vengeance. By reinforcing the black± white wage differential after the strikes of 1904 and 1908, subcontracting became segregation’ s economic complement.12 Despite the fall of Reconstruction, the coal miners of 1878 and 1886, many of whom had spent their childhood and adolescence in slavery, experienced some success at merging the politics of the workplace and the politics of the voting booth. Their success explains why Alabama’ s Redeemer politicians could not impose a comprehensive plan of disfranchisement earlier than 1901. It also explains why subcontracting, the wedge of white supremacy in the coal mines, appeared to be on its death bed throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Part of what Letwin has left future historians to discover is how a tradition of popular republicanism was passed on to the generation of miners who came of age during the 1894 strike and how that tradition was thwarted by the resurgence of subcontracting between 1904 and 1908. A tradition of popular republicanism was dis® gured in Alabama and the rest of the South by the violent triumph of the ª Redeemersº over the Reconstruction governments and by the advent of segregation. But, as Letwin clearly demonstrates, it remained alive and well in the context of the work routine and work process in Alabama’ s coal

9Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, 59± 73. 10Ibid., 112± 115. 11Ibid., 47± 50. 12C. Vann Woodward offereda rare and candid insight into the conjuncture of race and wages by quoting an anonymous white observer of the South’s labor situation: ª In nearly all the trades, the rates of compensation for whites is [sic] governed more or less by the rates at which blacks can be hired.º See his Origins of the New South, 228± 230; see also Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, 108± 112; Wright, Old South, New South, 196± 197. Symposium on Daniel Letwin 71 minesÐ at least up to 1908. The widespread antipathy of black and white miners to subcontracting and the use of convict labor, and their consistent opposition to these measures at the polls until 1901, were only a few of the examples of the resilience of such traditionsÐ traditions that nurtured the miners’ cause until the rebirth of the trade unions in the 1930s and 1940s.13 Letwin might have examined in greater detail how the relationship between subcon- tracting and the impetus for black disfranchisement became a major obstacle to substantive reform in the mining industry and in Alabama’ s legislature. After the promulgation of the disfranchisement statutes of 1901, for example, the number of black voters in Alabama went from 100,000 to under 4000.14 If there were about 30,000 miners in Alabama’ s coal ® elds at the time, this legislation must have delivered a crippling body blow to the trade unions.15 Letwin has explored the paradoxical aspects of mineworkers’ traditions in such a way that future historians of the mining industry will be compelled to examine more closely the circumstances of the working day and the aggregate changes in working conditions. Alabama’ s coal mining industry compelled thousands of men to work 300± 500 feet underground for 10± 12 hours a day under uncertain and dangerous conditions. Under these circumstances, despite the obvious differences in the aspirations of black and white people, trust and courage were often displayed by workers without reference to the recipient’s race or nationality.

Interracialism Above Ground, Jim Crow Below

JACQUELINE JONES*

In The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, Daniel Letwin avoids the either± or dichotomies that have informed so much of the debate over the nature of the United Mine Workers from the 1870s through the 1920sÐ was the union an agent of southern racism or the champion of racial equality?Ð and instead he steers a middle course, suggesting that the UMW represented the class interests of all miners while simultaneously serving as a forum for white resentments towards blacks. Letwin’s account is exemplary for several reasons. He provides historical context for the UMW by exploring the local Alabama activities of ® rst, the Greenback Labor Party in the 1870s and the Knights of Labor in the 1880s; he stresses the demographic changes in the composition of the mining labor force over a half century (by 1915 blacks constituted fully 60% of all miners in the area); and he highlights the con¯ icts and tensions that wracked the biracial UMW, embedded as it was within a Jim Crow South, a place where employers elevated the manipulation of racial ideologies to a ® ne art. By culling racist pronouncements from articles in UMW publications and from the

13See Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, 137± 140. 14See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 7± 10. 15See Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, 161± 162. *Jacqueline Jones teaches American history at Brandeis University, and is author of American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998). 72 J. Jones speeches of white leaders of the UMW, Letwin proves his point that the union hierarchy was hardly a paragon of racial-egalitarian virtue. At the same time whites fully appreciated the demographic imperatives that mandated the inclusion and vigorous recruitment of black members. So we are left with con¯ icting imagesÐ on the one hand, the hearty camaraderie between miners of both races, in the convention hall and in the tavern, on the picket line and in the coal mines, and on the other, the persistent estrangement between blacks and whites within the mining-camp community, in churches and schools, in brass bands and fraternal lodges. In sum, then, Letwin focuses on this tension between white UMW members’ impulse to forge racial solidarity and their impulse to preserve white supremacy and racial segregation. However, viewed from a broader perspectiveÐ that of workplace organization in a variety of industries during this period in American historyÐ Letwin’s study leaves out a crucial dimension of the story of black and white workers, union members and non-members alike, in the North and South, on the countryside and in the city. Speci® cally, he alludes to, but never directly addresses, the fact that black workers could never aspire to positions of supervision over whites. Scattered throughout the book are references to the constricted employment opportunities that blacks faced outside of the mines (they were barred from working as textile-mill operators, for example), to the tenacity with which white UMW members reserved positions of leadership in the union for themselves, and to the ª superior structural position that whites on balance enjoyed at the minesº (130). Yet the theme of white predominance within the mines’ job structure goes largely unaddressed. Letwin himself does provide a few tantalizing hints that, over the years, the racial division of labor in the mines gradually came to assume great signi® cance in the minds of black workers. We might accept the proposition that blacks and whites were equally represented in the ranks of skilled workers before the 1890s (although even here Letwin mentions that black subcontractors never employed white laborers, and that whites were always bosses), and yet note that, as the percentage of black miners increased over the years, their inability to rise within the mine hierarchy proved to be a source of tremendous resentment. Letwin includes a brief discussion of a con¯ ict that arose in 1890, when black union members argued that one of their own group should be elected to the position of checkweighman, a crucial job traditionally ® lled by a person chosen by the miners themselves. At least one white miner ridiculed this move, charging ª [s]hame to the colored man,º who insists on running ª the thing your way ¼ º The fact that the positions of president and secretary-treasurer of UMW locals were always reserved for whites, with blacks assigned to the vice-presidency, suggested that the racial division of union leadership simply mirrored the racial division of labor in the mines. (Here it is worth noting that Herbert Hill, in his famous exchange with Herbert Gutman, drew attention to the fact that white UMW members apparently showed an aversion to working in any capacity under the supervision of a black man.) Following this line of inquiry, we might note some of the questions raised by Letwin’s analysis. In general, in worksites throughout the United States, as employers installed labor-saving technology, the new jobs created for operators of machines were reserved for whites exclusively. How did Henry De Bardeleben’s move to bring in mining machinery in 1894 affect workplace organization? Was there a relationship between the high rate of job turnover among black miners and their absence from the ranks of bosses? If, compared to whites, black men lacked comparable work opportunities both inside and outside the mining district, can we assume that members of the two groups Symposium on Daniel Letwin 73 did in fact share a ª common class experienceº (192) at all? Rank-and-® le black workers understood full well that they were constrained not only by the rapaciousness of employers who sought to work them to the bone, but also by a job structure that ® rst, barred them from certain types of work (like machine work) altogether, and second, kept them from ascending internal ladders of occupational mobility within certain worksites. In the late 19th century, white workers scrambled to protect their own prerogatives, modest though they were in some casesÐ their monopoly on supervisory positions, their well-founded aspirations to rise above menial jobs and move on to something better. The relative occupational immobility of blacks provided a striking contrast to the more expansive possibilities for whites as a group. This is not to suggest that white coal miners in Alabama enjoyed a markedly superior material standard of living compared to their black counterparts; they obviously did not. Still, they could reasonably hope for a different, better life, in a way that blacks could not. Certainly whites’ divergent consciousness of their own opportunities constituted a signi® cant dimension of ª class consciousnessº; by this measure it would be dif® cult to argue that black men and white men, whether UMW members or non-members, belonged to the same class of workers at all.

ª Race-ing Class, Historicizing Categoriesº

NANCY MACLEAN*

In an inspired metaphor, Daniel Letwin scorns ª models that counterpose class and race consciousness, as if they made up two ends of a seesawº (171± 172). Many historians writing today would agree: either/or ways of thinking impede rather than advance understanding of these questions. The trick is to ® gure out how to capture social relations in all of their complexity, reciprocity, and historical speci® city. The pull of dichotomous ways of thinking is powerful, however, and those pushing into new territory often ® nd themselves retreating to more familiar landscapes. Letwin has achieved a great deal in The Challenge of Interracial Unionism. Not least of his contributions is his recovery of long-silenced and intensely compelling black working-class radical voices, such as Willis J. Thomas, the Greenback Labor Party orator with whose story Letwin introduces the book. ª To think that a Negro has that much authority,º a Democratic opponent grumbled, ª is enough to make a white man commit suicideº (2). In this and other well-drawn vignettes, Letwin encourages by example a more historically precise and politically meaningful debate on the complex- ities of race and class in American labor history. He uncovers a rich tradition of working-class activism and a surprisingly broad spectrum of interracial engagements. That spectrum includes not only the expected lynch mobs at the right pole and union organizers at the left pole, but also, in between, biracial baseball matches and baptismal

*Nancy MacLean is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University, and author, most recently, of ª The Hidden History of Af® rmative Action: Working Women’s Struggles of the 1970s and the Gender of Class,º Feminist Studies, 25 (Spring 1999). 74 N. MacLean ceremonies, a joint effort by native-born white and black miners to drive out Italian contract laborers, and a campaign to establish separate, yet still Jim Crow schools for strikebreakers’ children. It is an unpredictable, contradictory, fascinating history, and Letwin has a superb eye for evidence to convey it. The result is a compelling account of the fortunes of interracial alliances among working people. It reminds readers of the force of such situational variables as the state of the economy and the degree of federal government involvement, and shows them how alliances entered in self-interest ª opened [white workers] to experiences that would alter their racial perspectivesº (63). All of this, moreover, is based on deep research in sometimes unyielding sources. And, yet, the specter of old arguments hangs over this work. It leads Letwin to an unnecessarily restrictive explanatory framework, particularly in its understanding of class. This is evident early on when he outlines the book’s core arguments. Three elements, he says, explain ª what prompted and permittedº interracial organizing: ª a broad sense of shared identity, rooted in common class experienceº ; a commitment to white supremacy that ironically shielded the unions from race-baiting; and the absence of women from the mine labor force, which made interracial organizing less challenging to the Jim Crow social order than it would have been in a mixed-sex industry such as textiles (7). Interesting as this list is, it tellingly excludes off-the-job in¯ uences. The narrow understanding of class at play is also apparent in such telling phrases as ª the distracting effects of raceº (86). Elsewhere, Letwin speaks of ª the divisive potential of raceº and endorses the view that ª whenever race came to the fore, the cause of labor recededº (92, 83). If the words ª white supremacyº were substituted for ª race,º there would be no issue. As it stands, this formulation makes it hard to understand, to take one key example, the impact of the Civil War. In this age of neo-liberal retreat from anti-racism, when so many Democrats and even leftists have been convinced that addressing racial inequality somehow undermines working-class politics, urging clarity about such distinctions is not hairsplitting. More to the point here, in Letwin’s analysis race acts as a diversion from the presumably more logical and predictable imperatives of class. The independent variable in all equations, class sometimes ® nds its operations stymied or assisted by dependent variablesÐ such as race or genderÐ but never ® nds its core algebra changed by them. The interpretative framework held out for the reader thus assumes that only phenomena closely tied to the workplace merit careful scrutiny in class analysis because only they have signi® cant causative (as opposed to simply obstructive) power. This framework has no room for powerful in¯ uences from religious conviction or popular traditions, from republican axioms or liberal democratic thought, from household organization and family lifeÐ or from whiteness and maleness as historical subjectivities. Being so workplace-focused, the book gives little sense of the texture of everyday life and social relations in mining communities. The constricted view of class has in¯ uenced not only the questions asked and the answers considered, but also the very sources consultedÐ such that other interpretive possibilities were closed off at the outset. The impressively deep bibliography thus includes no records from churches, although Letwin states that ª churches were centralº in the lives of most miners (32). It contains no records of fraternal orders or other community organizations, although he reports these were ª ubiquitousº (32). And there is no sign of engagement with popular culture sources, although the book covers the years when mass consumer cultureÐ in the form of gospel, country, and blues, the radio, the automobile, and the Sears catalogÐ grabbed the wallets and imaginations of Southerners. Most tellingly, there is little exploration of politics beyond labor’ s electoral efforts. Yet these were years Symposium on Daniel Letwin 75 of heated, often deeply racialized con¯ ict in the South and the nation as a whole over such issues as temperance and prohibition, the rise of American empire, the emerging welfare state, the call for women’s suffrage, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other forms of organized racism and nativism. Attention to such matters might have given Letwin deeper insight into his central concern. ª Above ground,º he observes, ª black and white miners went separate waysº (4); ª the color line bisected virtually all areas of the miners’ livesº dividing them into ª mutually insular spheresº (35, also 40). Given this sharp separation, it would seem all the more important to understand what each group did and thought in its own arena so as to appreciate what they brought to their encounters, encounters likely rife with misconceptions among whites, and with distrust and masking among blacks. The use of other sources might have made possible more intimate portraits of all sides. African-American historians, for example, have long examined religion as a site for negotiating secular travails. More recently, Stephanie McCurry has shown how evan- gelical Protestantism sancti® ed antebellum white yeomen’s sense of themselves as ª masters of small worldsº and thus bound them politically to planters. Ed Ayers has probed the interracial cultural challenges that Holiness and Pentecostal churches posed to the ethos of the New South. Of fraternal orders, Mary Ann Clawson has demon- strated how their roots among early modern artisans yielded an enduring male petty- proprietor politics, even as they later drew in working-class members. One gets little sense from Letwin of where Alabama miners might ® t in these historiographic models (or require new ones). Yet information on associational life might help us to sort out questions basic to the book’s own agenda such as what led some men to unions and others to strikebreaking, or what led some to become radicals and others business unionists. As it is, such distinctions are hard to explain. The result is a story that for all its richness seems curiously removed from the broader sweep of American history. The limited range of sources aside, there are points where Letwin could be bolder and more tenacious in his analysis. Some of the most signi® cant of these involve whiteness. White racial identity is treated more or less as a given here: whites can be mobilized to various kinds of organizing agendas, but what those agendas reveal about their own subjectivity is not explored. Take this case: four hundred white miners assembled as a posse when a white woman was raped and her son murdered in 1889. When they ® nally found a black man she would identify as the culprit, they promptly lynched him. Their action was lauded by the anti-union establishment press, the Birmingham Age-Herald, as the heroism of ª hordes of rough, honest menº who rightly stopped work for the duration (37). This is a rich moment that might disclose much about how miners who happened to be white men became white mine men, men with a stake in society and some standing among ª the better people,º as the southern white elite liked to refer to itself. Indeed, white union leaders aligned themselves with this tradition in referring to their followers as ª white and the better class of colored laborº (106). Letwin notes the racism and condescension evident at such moments, but doesn’t explore them to deepen his class analysis. Surely, though, it mattered that white miners could lynch black miners, but not vice versa; that white miners could sit on juries, but black miners could not; that white miners could vote in Democratic primaries, but black miners could not; that white miners could shoot at black scabs, but black miners could not shoot at white scabs, and so on. My point here is not that white supremacy existed, a fact which Letwin conveys well, but rather that it likely affected white consciousness in ways that deserve examination. Certainly such practices distorted white workers’ thinking about democracyÐ hence the 76 N. MacLean very purpose of the labor movementÐ as W.E.B. DuBois brilliantly observed in another context. One sees this in¯ uence at work when UMW activists agreed that union elections couldn’t employ direct democracy because it would produce black victors and that would be a disaster for the union (135). Black miners supported the rigging, Letwin notesÐ they understood white thinking only too well. But there is something much more tragic to this story than Letwin’s matter-of-fact delivery acknowledges. The miners’ aversion to ª social equality,º for one thing, appears directly linked to their embrace of a labor movement built on ª sound business principlesº (120). Other questions about the kind of class analysis employed here concern what class meant in the context of turn-of-the-century African-American life. Letwin treats this as self-evident; it is not. In particular, he belittles ª the southern black bourgeoisieº (145). Yet numerous recent writersÐ including Stephanie Shaw, Charles Payne, and Glenda GilmoreÐ have shown how this term distorts understanding of the Jim Crow South. To portray a newly established and barely economically stable population as a bourgeoisie is misleading. It is all the more so when the group in question is as disenfranchised, literally and ® guratively, as the black middle class was in Alabama in these yearsÐ such that its members could lose life itself at the whim of any white man, even a poor working man. The deeper problem is the way the term middle class functions as a subtle epithetÐ along with phrases such as its ª conservative preachingsº and ª accommodationist gospelº Ð to close off further investigation (111, 171). An example will illustrate the trouble this causes for making sense of the turn-of-the- century South. Letwin scorns ª the black bourgeoisieº for urging black workers not to vote for a Populist candidate in the 1896 elections on the grounds that his backers were ª [N]egro hatersº (110). Yet on the very next page, Letwin acknowledges that only two years before, these same Populists had in fact campaigned to disfranchise black votersÐ and had only turned to seeking black support when that gambit failed. Clearly, the situation was so vexed that various interpretations of the right course were possible in good faith. Letwin may be right about the overall role of middle-class leaders, but the evidence he presents here is too thin to seal the case. In any event, the very de® nitions of ª radicalº and ª conservativeº seem trickier in this context than the author allows. Somewhat condescendingly, for instance, he describes the black middle class’s ª polite but vocal opposition to the coarser excesses of the racial order, such as lynching, in¯ ammatory stereotypes, and denial of voting rightsº (166). The UMW, for its part, did absolutely nothing for blacks on these burning issues, but it organized courageously across the color line to challenge other forms of power. So which group was really radical, and which was conservative? Or do we need, instead, to drop polemical dichotomiesÐ as that brilliant see-saw metaphor urgesÐ and develop tools better cali- brated to the work at hand? I’ll end with two episodes, which capture both the power of Letwin’s work and the challenges it opens for others. The ® rst involves William Mailly, an English-born, northern-based socialist who comes to Alabama to support the mine strike in 1894. While there, Mailly spins a tale of black brute scabs who allegedly bothered white miners’ wives in a ª disgustingº way with the collusion of company deputies. Later, Mailly described a black striker this way: ª He is a black man, but beneath his ebony skin there beats a white and honest heart ¼ would that some white men in Alabama [understood as much] ¼ as this simple, honest-hearted darkey doesº (106, 122). The second story comes from Pinkerton reports during the same strike. According to Letwin, these management spiesÐ ironically, the source of the richest information extantÐ found in the miners’ saloons ª a remarkable, if casual comraderie between black Symposium on Daniel Letwin 77 and white strikers ¼ [who sat] drinking, smoking, and discussing the latest develop- ments togetherº (104). We need to rediscover the forgotten logics these stories exhibit: an immigrant radical who thought he could win American white workers to unionism by ® rst in¯ aming and then palliating their assumed prejudices, and a group of black and white Alabama minersÐ some of whom would be branded ª rednecksº by white elitesÐ who casually socialized over drinks in the Bible Belt as they discussed their common plight and goals. This is not the South many American historians think they know, nor is it the world of labor as usually imagined. Letwin deserves applause for unearthing this rich material and constructing a powerful, provocative, and compelling story from it. With work like this to build on, perhaps it is now time for a New New Labor History to make sense of the more complicated and interesting world thus revealed.

A Shield Against the Power of Industrial Capitalism

ALEXANDER SAXTON*

In the preface to Daniel Letwin’s Challenge of Interracial Unionism appears the following acknowledgement to an older labor historian: ª Paul Worthman, whose pioneering scholarship on interracial unionism in Birmingham remains among the ® nest work on race and labor in the New South, generously gave me access to his research notes, which steered me toward sources I would not otherwise have found so quickly.º The scholarship to which Letwin made reference dates from the early 1970s when Worth- man was working on his dissertation (never completed) under C. Vann Woodward at Yale. The reason the dissertation remained un® nished was not because Worthman’ s leads bottomed out, but because he had switched his lifetime commitment from studying interracial unionism in our turbulent history to organizing interracial unions in our perhaps even more turbulent present. I admired that decision and still doÐ although, as a historian with a prime interest in race and labor, I also regretted the loss to the ® eld of working-class history. I am delighted now to learn that a talented and deeply serious young scholar has picked up Worthman’s enterprise and carried it to an impressive (if as yet partial) conclusion. I am sure Paul Worthman is glad of this outcome. Letwin’s book began as a dissertation (also at Yale) under the direction of David Montgomery. Appropriately, C. Vann Woodward completed this circle by writing that Letwin had produced ª a ® ne bookº on ª a neglected and important aspect of race and labor relations in the South.º The book itself displays the virtues that make mono- graphs indispensable to scholarship: it is short, tightly focused, intensely researched. It opens leads that can be followed by scholars in several different ® elds. Letwin’s work demonstrates that there was indeed interracial unionism which persisted for half a

*Alex Saxton, who taught history for 20 years at UCLA, was a seaman, carpenter, and trade unionist before becoming a historian. His books include The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1979). 78 A. Saxton century in the northern Alabama coal ® elds despite seemingly insuperable obstacles, and persisted precisely because white and black working people labored desperately to keep it alive. Why did they do that? The evidence shows clearly enough what they understood as reasons for their own actions. Only union organization, they believedÐ and only interracial unionismÐ could set up some sort of shield against the power of industrial capitalism as they confronted it in the Alabama coal ® elds. The shield was never very effective but the only one they had. Over and again, when strikes were lost and the union virtually annihilated, communi- ties of African-American and white coal miners rallied to sign on for another round, to bring defunct locals back to life, to elect interracial negotiating committees, to join in mass meetings. When the coal companies which owned most of the houses and public buildings in the miners’ villages denied the use of meeting halls, they met in ® elds or along the creek sides; and often enough, evicted from their rented shanties, they lived in tent cities provided by the union. At least on one occasion, after the national guard shredded their tent city with bayonets, the evicted occupants moved families and possessions out into the woods. These communities were racially segregated. Their larger milieu was white supremacist Alabama at the apex of the Jim Crow era. In union meetings, black coal miners sat on one side, whites on the other. Even their tent cities would be divided into black and white sectors. Letwin’s evidence shows white unionists, including of® cers of the union, infused with racial prejudice which they made little effort to conceal and sometimes deliberately paraded. Union of® cials of both races vowed absolute oppo- sition to any sort of ª social equalityº (ª social equalityº was an accusation frequently made against the union by its enemies). When a white woman reported having been raped by an African-American, white miners quit work (with the coal company’ s enthusiastic consent), fetched out their Winchesters to hunt down black men more or less indiscriminately, and took part in the lynching that ensued. Black coal miners also owned Winchesters and used them sometimes to resist precisely such attacks. Yet these same communities brought out their weapons to repel imported strike- breakers, black and white. They consistently elected racially-mixed slates of of® cers and committee members. They negotiated jointly with their employers and never negotiated racially differentiated wages or working conditions (131). All this might follow ration- ally from the ª practical imperatives of miners’ unityº (132); but the evidence also suggests a sense of shared identity, exempli® ed (and there are many such examples) by an incident reported in the Birmingham Labor Advocate in 1900. The miners’ negotiat- ing committee was waiting to meet with spokemen from the mine owners’ association. To pass the time, a white member rose to sing ª The Honest Workingman,º and others joined in the chorus:

ª It’ s a glorious union, ª Deny it who can, ª That defends the rights ª Of a workingman.º

The union district president (white, English born) then called for a song from ª `one of the colored brethren.’ º A black committee member mounted the rostrum and sang, ª We Are Marching to Canaan;º again, others joined in:

ª Who is there among us ª The true and the tried Symposium on Daniel Letwin 79

ª Who’ll stand by his fellowsÐ ª Who’s on the Lord’s side?º Various singers followed in turn, and when there came a lull, one of the black delegates ª ® lled the void with a `powerful’ rendering of `I Am a Child of the King.’ `Just as the chorus died away’, the Labor Advocate concluded, `the [mine] operators entered the hall’ º (132± 133). Can we take this at face value? Expressions of interracial solidarity in letters by organizers and union of® cers culled from the columns of the United Mine Workers Journal have sometimes been discounted on the ground that they might simply be politically correct entries in the of® cial journal designed to enhance their authors’ status on the union payroll. But this could hardly apply to the Advocate, a paper local to Birmingham. Moreover, the actors in the episode described are (with one exception) not paid functionaries of the union; they are working miners active in their respective locals. A similar consideration applies to the bulk of evidence Letwin has brought together. It tells us not merely what the union line may have been said to be, but how local coal miners, black and white, and the communities they lived in, actually behaved. The author meanwhile has been keeping a low pro® le with respect to causal explanation. He suggested in his introduction that ª three currents ¼ of miners’ consciousnessº ª prompted and permitted black and white miners to join forces in labor campaignsº despite the Jim Crow environment surrounding them. These three were (1) ª an awareness that racial division weakened their hand against the operatorsÐ and that the latter knew it,º (2) ª a broad sense of shared identity, rooted in common class experience,º and (3) acceptance of the need for protective coloring by adherence to selected forms of the traditional apartheid. He then added one more factor, located not in consciousness but in the objective structure of the labor force: ª In an occupation pursued only by men [such as coal mining], the spectacle of blacks and whites engaged in collective activity was less viscerally threatening than in settings where interracial association crossed the gender as well as the color lineº (7). All four of these points, if they are to carry much weight as causal explanation, would need to be further ampli® ed. Under point (1), had white coal miners been members of a skilled craft union (instead of an industrial union, which the United Mine Workers was) their awareness would probably have told them that racial segregation strength- ened bargaining power. They would have known that their employers knew this also. Craft unionism under the aegis of the American Federation of Labor (which came to terms with racial segregation during the 1890s) was already invading upper echelons of labor in the South and ruthlessly excluding African-Americans, skilled or unskilled. Point (1), therefore, will be lacking in explanatory force until it can be backed up by generalizations on race and skill in Alabama coal mining, and on the viability of industrial organization as opposed to craft unionism. With respect to Point (2), we are now keenly aware that class consciousness is never automatic and that each individual inhabits diverse identities which sometimes rein- force and sometimes inhibit one another. That class identity might prevail over race, ethnic, religious, patriotic or even gender identity is certainly possible, but can hardly be adduced as a general law. The strength or weakness of each circle of identity requires historical explanation in its own right before it can serve to explain other historical sequences. Letwin’s third point is really dependent on the ® rst two. That is, if interracial unionism has already been selected as the right way to go, then a calculated adherence to forms of racial segregation might make it more ª permissibleº inside the Jim Crow 80 D. Letwin social order. A similar limitation applies to Letwin’s fourth point, involving genderÐ certainly the most venturesome of his explanatory propositions and (unlike the ® rst three) almost totally unencumbered by evidential baggage. It seems reasonable, of course, that interracial unionism for an all-male labor force would have attracted less hostility in the miscegenation-phobic South than a comparable unionism that included male and female. But history apparently offers no case for comparison. Moreover, the evidence makes clear that southern segregationists found no dif® culty whatever in concluding that interracial unionism at the workplace must leap inevitably to racial amalgamation in the school, on the village green, in the bedroom. Letwin points out that forest industries and stevedoring (both with all-male labor forces) sometimes displayed interracial unionism. On the other hand, railroads, metal trades, building and construction trades, likewise all male, organized (if they organized at all) into racially exclusive craft unions. It might be more appropriate to argue that industrial unionism tended toward racial inclusiveness, and to inquire what historical and structural circumstances favored industrial unionism. What I am getting to in these comments is that the author seems to be systematically underplaying the conceptual and explanatory problems implicit in his study. Perhaps he has done so deliberately. He may be counting on the mass of assembled evidence to speak its own piece; certainly it demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the local adaptiveness as well as the vigor and extraordinary resilience of interracial unionism in an increasingly hostile environment. And that is an important accomplishment. In our own era of globalization and the collapsing of national welfare systems into larger zones of capitalist enterprise such as NAFTA or the European common market, it may be crucially important to know that interracial unionism actually existed, actually worked, in certain historic times and places. If it existed once, and existed despite the massive repressions of the Alabama coal ® elds, something like it might exist again. Yet this by itself is not enough; and this is what I meant when I referred earlier to Letwin’s book as an impressive but only ª partialº completion of the task he took over from Paul Worthman. We need to ask also, how did interracial unionism come about? How was it sustained by people all of whom must have had to transcend, somehow, the verities into which they had been socialized? What were the conditions and limits of its existence? Why did it perish? Because the author of this book has already given a great deal, we have no choice but to press him for more.

Challenge to What? Challenge for Whom?

DANIEL LETWIN*

The interplay of race and class continues to enliven our ® eld. Its current prominence in Labor History symposia is a case in point.1 I am pleased that The Challenge of

*Daniel Letwin is Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. His current research project is entitled ª The Specter of Social Equality: The Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Eraº . 1Symposium on Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis,º Labor History, 39 (1998), 43± 69; ª Symposium on Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom,º Labor History, 39 (1998), 169± 187. Symposium on Daniel Letwin 81

Interracial Unionism enters this discussion, and that scholars who have blazed so many trails offer these thoughtful reviews. Together they engage a series of questions that animate the study of race and labor in America: How do we conceptualize race and class? How does gender mediate their interaction? How do we cast the actors in our narratives, identify their respective options, and distribute historical agency among them? Not least, how do we handle a range of methodological dilemmas, some familiar to all branches of history, and others peculiar to our own? A word about the roots of this study. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism is an unabashed product of the ª new labor history.º Like so many of my generation, I admired its commitment to broaden our understanding of work; to trace the dynamics of class in every part of workers’ lives; to retrieve a heritage of popular dissent in industrializing America. How workers have confronted a diversity of prospects and identitiesÐ it now goes without sayingÐ has been fantastically varied and unpredictable. The new labor history set out to chart these many currents of response, unfettered by doctrinaire models and jargony formulations. While no longer really new, this vision has informed my research at every stage.2 When I began this project, the interaction of black and white workers was an emerging frontier of labor and African-American history. Back in 1968, Herbert Gutman had published a seminal piece about Richard Davis, an obscure black orga- nizer for the United Mine Workers during the 1890s. Davis’ s reports from the ® eld brimmed with frustration over the barriers of racism, and yet an abiding faith in the redemptive potential of unionism. Race and labor, it would seem, had followed its own ª strange careerº in industrializing America; it was ® tting that C. Vann Woodward should be the one reader acknowledged in the essay. The time had come, Gutman concluded, for historians to examine ª the quality of life and the complexity of thought and feeling of ordinary white and Negro workers.º 3 Before long a handful of historians were probing the ª forgotten alternativeº of interracial unionism across the coal districts, timberlands, sugar ® elds, and cities of the New South.4 Recovering this tradition was no simple task, given the sparseness of the evidence and the ª complexityº intuited by

2For a good recent analysis of the rise and evolution of the new labor history, see authors’ introduction in Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene,and Bruce Laurie, eds., Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 1± 15. The very title Labor Histories speaks to the variety of ® ndings, and interpretations, arising within this tradition. 3Herbert G. Gutman, ª The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America: The Career and Letters of Richard L. Davis and Something of Their Meaning: 1890± 1900,º in Julius Jacobson, ed., The Negro and the Labor Movement (Garden City: Anchor, 1968), 49± 127; acknowledgment, 49; quotes on 125± 126, 127. 4Prominent among these early studies were Paul B. Worthman, ª Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897± 1904,º Labor History, 10 (1969), 375± 407; James R. Green, ª The Brotherhood of Timber Workers, 1910± 1913: A Radical Response to Industrial Capitalism in the Southern U.S.A.,º Past and Present, 60 (1973), 161± 200; Paul B. Worthman and James R. Green, ª Black Workers in the New South, 1865± 1915,º in Nathan Huggins, Martin Kilson, and Daniel Fox, eds., Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, Vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 47± 69; Stephen Brier, ª InterracialOrganizing in the West Virginia Coal Industry: The Participation of Black Mine Workers in the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers, 1880± 1894,º in Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed, eds., Essays in Southern Labor History (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), 18± 41; David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880± 1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Leon Fink, ª Together but Unequal: Southern Knights and the Dilemmas of Race and Politics, Richmond, Virginia,º chapt. 6 in Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 149± 177; Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865± 1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 82 D. Letwin

Gutman. Complexity became a premise of this study: if pioneering new labor historians like Gutman, E.P. Thompson, and David Montgomery had signaled the ¯ uid proper- ties of class, so a succession of scholarsÐ from W.E.B. Du Bois to C.L.R. James, Eugene Genovese to Charles van Onselen, Leon Litwack to Herbert Gutman, Eric Foner to Barbara FieldsÐ have shown the illimitable meanings of race. The story of miners’ unionism in Alabama opened a way to explore the common ground of black and labor historyÐ and, more broadly, the dynamics of race and class in America. John Higginson, Jacqueline Jones, Alex Lichtenstein, Nancy MacLean, and Alexan- der Saxton have surveyed these dynamics over a vast historical terrain. I am grati® ed by their receptiveness to some of the book’s central themes: that relations between Alabama’ s black and white miners were too ambiguous for elegant dichotomies of race and class; that neither the luster nor the limits of their interracial experiment could be laid solely to white workers, for black workers were its architects as well; and, that their endeavor was further shaped by a host of external forces, near and far.5 Ultimately, these reviews af® rm the drama and the poignancy, no less than the complexity, of their collaboration across the color line. Conspicuous by its low pro® le is the once robust assault on the so-called ª Gutman school.º 6 Leading the charge was Herbert Hill, who accused Gutman and company of harboring to a romantic zeal to celebrate interracial unionism, to exaggerate its scope, and to obscure the racism that continued to infect it. Not only did Hill’ s critique grossly caricature the spirit and substance of Gutman’s work; more to the point, it ill-served historical understanding. By dismissing interracial unions as too mired in racism to merit serious consideration, Hill denied black participants their self- determination, their rationality, or both. By casting white working-class racism as unvaried, unchecked, and immutable, he rendered it meaningful only as an expla- nation, never as an outcome to be explained. The Hill school has been ably answered elsewhere, and it need not detain us here. Ultimately the most effective response has been the acceleration of research into this complex and varied phenomenon.7 I take the present commentators’ disengagement from the oddly-named ª Hill± Gutman debateº 8 as a hopeful sign that rigorous study is carrying the day over sterile polemics. At the core of this book lies what felt to me a simple but arresting question: What induced and allowed black and white miners to unionize across a color line that cleanly bisected nearly every sphere of their lives? My conclusions divide among three currents

5At times these reviews put the narrative in fresh light, as when Higginson likens New South coal production to ª industrial organization in the colonial and dependent economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America.º 6Herbert Hill, ª Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America,º International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2 (1988), 132± 200. 7The current body of scholarship on the interaction of blacks and whites in organized labor is large enough to burst the bounds of any footnote. Comprehensive references,along with useful historiographical analyses, can be found in Eric Arnesen, ª Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History,º Reviews in American History, 26 (1998), 146± 174; Rick Halpern, ª Organized Labor, Black Workers, and the Twentieth-Century South: The Emerging Revision,º in Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern, eds., Race and Class in the American South since 1890 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), 43± 76; Bruce Nelson, ª Class, Race and Democracy in the CIO: The `New’ Labor History Meets the `Wages of Whiteness,’ º International Review of Social History, 41 (1996), 351± 374; Joe William Trotter, Jr., ª African-AmericanWorkers:New Directionsin U.S. Labor Historiography,º Labor History, 35 (1994), 495± 523. For responses to Herbert Hill, see Stephen Brier, ª In Defense of Gutman; The Union’s Case,º International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2 (1989), 382± 395; Arnesen, ª Up From Exclusion,º 146± 150. 8After all, Gutman passed away several years before the ª debateº began. Symposium on Daniel Letwin 83 of miners’ consciousness: a pragmatic aversion to racial fragmentation, a sense of solidarity arising from shared class experience, and a readiness to accommodate as well as challenge Jim Crow. Opinion divides over how effectively I show these dynamics. Saxton greets a compelling (even usable) model of interracialism, but laments my reluctance to explain it. Lichtenstein welcomes precisely what Saxton ® nds missing, noting a series of ª insights that, for once, actually attempt to explain ¼ rather than just documentº miners’ interracialism. Saxton suggests that, absent explanation, white miners’ impulse to ally with blacks takes on a gloss of inevitability. I actually share his unwillingness to presume such things, as I do his denial that class comes ® rst in the universe of social identities. As Lichtenstein notes, I depict that impulse not as re¯ exive or pre-ordained, but as a deliberate choice made amid local circumstances; chie¯ y, the coexistence of black and white miners from the outset, and the powerlessness of white miners (whatever their preference) to enforce an all-white turf underground. For that matter, black miners had to weigh the wisdom of allying with whites. Every revival of miners’ interracialismÐ be it via the Greenbackers, the Knights of Labor, or the United Mine WorkersÐ turned upon thousands of individual choices crystallizing each side of the color line. And each decision was charged with drama, for no one mistook how such a venture would appear in their society, and how it was liable to fare. Like the decision to move North, or to go off to war, the decision to join an interracial campaign in Jim Crow Alabama could rank among the most dif® cult and transformative of a miner’s life. While I differ with Saxton’s portrayal of my explanatory strategy, I value his meditations on causality. Take his searching assessment of the idea he dubs my most ª venturesomeºÐ that the all-male atmosphere at the mines left interracialism less provocative than in other areas of the coal ® elds. My point is that, unlike in schools, or churches, or housingÐ let alone bedroomsÐ voluntary association at the mines could straddle the color line without transgressing the high-voltage gender line in the process. Saxton ® nds this plausible but, as he gently puts it, ª almost totally unencumbered by evidential baggage.º He’s right about that, and the point isn’t trivial; at stake is the value of hypotheses that can never be tested de® nitively. For I doubt such an encum- brance, however welcome, will ever present itself. We are unlikely to see a miner rising at an interracial event to hail the absence of white women on the grounds that their presence would encourage race-baiting. Nor are we likely to hear a segregationist voice a willingness to live with interracialism so long as it is kept within the bounds of maleness. We are particularly unlikely to learn how women around the districtÐ black or white, within the coal belt or beyondÐ considered the issue. When it comes to evidential baggage, historians of southern labor get used to traveling light. And sparse sources are only half the challenge. Even were documentation boundlessly availableÐ even were the district blanketed with ª focus groupº surveysÐ the motivations of miners and their adversaries would still be opaque. Saxton has clari® ed a key limit to my case, one that kept me from posing the explanatory potential of gender as anything more than conjecture. Which leads to the question: are conjectures that defy clean resolution worth raising? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, I would say, depending on the context. Given how avidly segregationists peddled (and bought) sexually charged imagery of black men and white women, I concluded that this one was. If my conjecture cannot be settled either way, its plausibility can at least be gauged by comparing the Alabama coal belt to workplaces elsewhere. As Saxton and Lichten- stein astutely observe, such an exercise does not clinch my case. At best it’ s a wash: if southern workers coalesced across the color line in such masculine milieus as the timberlands and docks, the absence of women did not keep whites from rebuf® ng 84 D. Letwin blacks in the railroad or metal trades; conversely, interracialism has been known to arise in mixed-sex occupations. These realities would dash any claim that all-male work- places fostered the interracial impulse. Mine was a less extravagant idea: where black and white men already shared the impetus to unionize, the absence of women dimin- ished their vulnerability to the cry of ª social equality.º Along with the reviewers, I look forward to learning whether and how this pattern recurs in comparable work settings.9 But this is not the only available mode of comparison. My study sets the workplace against other realms of the Alabama coal ® elds. From that perspective, two features of the mines stand out as anomalous: the social distance of women, and the voluntary association of blacks and whites. While causal links cannot be presumed, it seems probable that the former helped to shield the latter from the sharpest barbs of segregationism. But what about the 1908 coal strike, which, as Saxton notes, sparked a ® restorm of ª social equalityº -hysteria, hinting at rampant miscegenation in the miners’ tent colon- ies? Does that assault not skewer my case as fully as it did the union itself? Surely it would, were I contending that the distance of women from the mines ensured interra- cialism a safe haven. That would be a rash proposition, as 1908 con® rmed, leading me to stress that the marginality of women could at most blunt, and never wholly sheathe, the ª social equalityº knife. And even a blunt knife could be used to savage effectÐ especially during major strikes, when the union expanded into a full-¯ edged community enterprise. Ironically, it was the defeat of interracialism in 1908 that ® rst turned my thoughts to the place of gender in its previous emergence. After all, that year’s orgy of ª social equalityº -mongering was remarkable not only for its coarseness but for its novelty. Although the joint action of black and white miners had long stirred grum- blings of ª social equality,º never had anti-union race-baiting taken on this kind of ferocity. If the union’s demise was hastened by the stoking of the sexually allusive ª social equalityº issueÐ an extraordinary form of anti-unionism in the coal ® eldsÐ might not its earlier viability re¯ ect a more ordinary instinct: that white womanhood could tolerably withstand the collaboration of black and white miners?10 If the proposed effects of gender get no free ride in these pages, neither do those of

9Correlations between gender and the rigidity of the color line invite re¯ ection in other realms as well. Take the threepre-eminent beach-heads of desegregation in the decade following World War IIÐ the army, major league baseball, and public schools. Controversy greeted the abrogation of Jim Crow in all three arenas, but in very different measures. The ® rst two episodes evoked relatively mild reactions; neither Truman’s order desegregating the army nor Jackie Robinson’ s arrival with the Brooklyn Dodgers triggered anything like the ª massive resistanceº soon to greet the Brown decision. Of course, the reasons are open to question, and doubtless manifold; and assuredly, neither military bases nor Ebbetts Field resembled the coal ® elds of Alabama. Still, it is stimulating to consider how the contrast between Brown and the other two points of desegregation aligns with gender: baseball and the army were, again, all-male enterprises; public schools (as segregationists never tired of howling), emphatically not. 10However one might reckon the relevance of gender to either the rise or the fall of the Alabama UMW, this rise and fall itself points toward a central theme of my studyÐ that is, no universal calculus ® xed the relation between interracial unionism and Jim Crow. To be sure, an inevitable tension ran between them, but if that tension framed the story, at no point did it dictate the outcome. The evolving capacity of Alabama’ s miners to mobilize across the color line re¯ ected two ever-shifting circumstances: the inclination and wherewithal of the operators to resist union recognition, and the intensity of segregationist feeling around the region (each re¯ ecting its own constellation of circumstances). Least variable over time seems to have been the miners’ inclination to mobilize interraciallyÐ although equally constant were the ways in which their organizations accommodated and incorporated white supremacy practices. In the end, the fortunes of this quali® ed interracialism turned not on any timeless formula, but on the grubbier particulars of time and place. Symposium on Daniel Letwin 85 class. ª Classº is a much-abused term these days, both invoked and dismissed with notorious imprecision, and so I appreciate Jacqueline Jones’s instinct to test its use here. Jones questions the explanatory power of ª common class experienceº among black and white miners: given their unequal stations underground, she asks, could they be ª assumed [to] share a `common class experience’ at all[?]º Surely notÐ such assumptions are never in order. Yet neither can inequalities at the mines be assumed to thwart it. Jones may well be right when she says that for black miners, ª the racial division of labor ¼ gradually [became] a source of tremendous resentment.º But we can only guess; if job inequality ª goes largely unaddressedº in my book, so it does in the surviving words of black miners. This does not, of course, disprove Jones’s scenario, but neither does the sheer existence of job inequality divulge the breadth, intensity, or target of black resentment. When Jones describes their ª relative occupational immobil- ityº as ª strikingº , she certainly conveys how it looks from our end of the century; it may, however, have seemed all-too-unremarkable to black miners at the outset of this ª century of the color lineº Ð a time when African-Americans met racial barriers at every turn.11 Black miners may, as Jones asserts, have ª understood full well that they were constrained not only by the rapaciousness of employers ¼ but also by a [discrimina- tory] job structure,º but neither circumstance nor evidence establishes that they held white miners responsible. If anything, circumstance and evidence suggest otherwise. It was by initiative of the operators, not white miners, that the color line extended underground; it was by initiative of the union, not the operators, that closed-shop contracts forbade ª discrimination ¼ against the colored miners,º and granted ª all competent colored men ¼ an equal chance at all workº (131). None of which is to say that ª whitenessº derived no ª wagesº from unequal work patterns, or to cast white miners as a cadre of civil rights activists. Still, only careful attention to the respective options and actions of white workers and employers can reveal the origins and purposes of industrial color lines. I have similar concerns about Jones’s point that ª the racial division of union leadership simply mirrored the racial division of labor in the mines.º 12 Mirror that division it didÐ but simply? The term implies an unquali® ed symmetry between Jim Crow in the mines and Jim Crow in the union. To be sure, whites by custom held the presidency of the Alabama UMW, along with across-the-board majorities (some large, some slim) on committees and delegations. But the presence of blacks on virtually all governing bodies, and in the vice-presidency, was not trivial. In such roles they shared in conceiving and promoting policies to which the rank-and-® le, white and black, adhered. Nothing happening undergroundÐ or almost anywhere else in southern so- cietyÐ mirrored these dynamics. If the union stopped short of repudiating white supremacy altogether, it strayed further than any other enterprise in sight. More to the point, the union’s reluctance to break entirely with Jim Crow roused little discernible ire among black members; more often, they are heard af® rming this reluctanceÐ a grimly rational instinct in segregation’s unforgiving climate. What few signs of resent- ment emerged I gave notice to, such as the black miners’ unrealized insistence that one of their own be elected checkweighman. As Jones suggests, the incident reveals an

11Indeed, the job hierarchy underground did not cleave to the color line nearly so much as in other local industries, such as iron and steel, where skilled work was distinctively ª whiteº , and the laborer’s role ª blackº . (See Henry M. McKiven, Jr., Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875± 1920 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995].) 12Jones elaborates by referring to Herbert HillÐ the one time his critique ® nds voice in these pages. 86 D. Letwin important fault line within miners’ interracialismÐ but does it negate the existence of common class experience across that line?13 Historians are widely, and rightly, disposed to recognize the prevalence of race in America, past and present. Less readily acknowledged is that of class. Yet look how broadly class bound the lives and attitudes of black miners and white miners. Their time undergroundÐ the majority of their waking hoursÐ was more than a ª black-and- whiteº affair; the coal dust that darkened them all symbolized deeper experience in common. Every time they entered the mines, a host of dangers and challenges, insensible of race, recon® rmed their interdependency. And color exempted no one from a range of embittering encounters with capital, above ground and below. The commis- sary, company housing, levels and forms of pay, weighing and screening of coal, hours and conditions of work, subcontracting of labor, leasing of convicts, modes of labor discipline, miners’ right to organize, company and state measures to repress their movementsÐ all were chronic ¯ ashpoints of resentment and protest throughout the coal district. Indignation over matters of life and labor, keen awareness of craft identityÐ here were the ingredients of common class experience. Of course, common experience does not mean identical experience. Alabama miners inhabited the Jim Crow South, no less than they did a coal district. To organize interracially was not to organize nonracially; to unite across the color line was not to ignore the color line, let alone demand its abolition. Who drew the color line, and towards what purpose; how its placement was negotiated, and when its crossing was warrantedÐ here’s a web of questions historians must continually revisit. Comprehen- sive data are essential to the task, and so I accept Jones’s and Lichtenstein’s call for more on racial dynamics underground (a profoundly political arena, as John Higginson observes).14 In the end, though, Jones’s skepticism that black and white miners ª belonged to the same class of workers at allº leaves unexplained what motivated so many to join forces. This was not, after all, the path of least resistance for either race. Organizing in simultaneous de® ance of the region’s class and racial orders meant considerable inconvenience, often wrenching reassessment, and at times astounding courage, moral and physical. Any union tempted ® erce repression in the raw world of a New South coal district, not to mention one that ¯ aunted Jim Crow in the bargain. No transcendent force of history hurled the miners down that pathÐ repeatedly, even fatalistically, they chose to take it. If common class experience does not explain that choice, what does? The dynamics of class within black America are a point of age-old debate, both contemporary and historical. It is no surprise, then, that my handling of the issue should ® nd itself in something of a cross® re. In Lichtenstein’s view, my tendency to accentuate unexpected commonalities in the perspectives of black union miners and an anti-union black middle class obscures the ª sharp class divideº between them.15 To

13Consider an analogy. African-American women were relegated to subordinate positions within the Civil Rights MovementÐ and so a growing number complained, often to the annoyance or bemusement of their male comrades. Does this mean that inequalities of gender extinguished ª common racial experienceº as a basis for their shared struggle against segregation? So clear is the answer that the question sounds rhetoricalÐ however, much gender distinguished the ways black women and black men experienced and combated Jim Crow, realities of race still enveloped their lives and attitudes. 14It is a criticism to which both Jones and Lichtenstein are especially entitled, given their own valuable ® ndings on the racial politics of the workplace. 15Here he draws on an important study by Brian Kellyon Alabama miners and the local black elite during the World War I era. (ª Up Against Itº : Race, Class, and Power in the AlabamaCoal® elds, 1908± 1921 [Urbana: Symposium on Daniel Letwin 87

Nancy MacLean, my analysis is warped by an ahistorical ª scornº for the black middle class, a ª polemicalº urge to juxtapose a ª conservativeº black elite and a ª radicalº UMW, and an assumption that class patterns in turn-of-the-century black life are too ª self-evidentº to warrant ª further investigation.º There’s quite some distance between these depictions. I’d locate myself somewhere in the middleÐ although substantially closer to Lichtenstein’s. I agree with him that divergent class agendas were pronounced among African-Americans of the Birmingham district. Precisely because the gulf between black miners and the black middle class was so apparent, I took pains to note the bonds that spanned it. How to balance the two is an issue Lichtenstein aptly raises. Whatever the answer, my research convinced me that each side to their relationshipÐ alienation and identi® cationÐ bore notice. When we ® nd black miners disregarding appeals from leading black ® gures to shun the ª white man’s union,º and yet springing to their defense against the derision of white unionists, we have come upon an ambivalence that ª sharp class divideº cannot fully capture. The approach MacLean ascribes to me is one I not only deny, but would reject in any scholarship. I do not trumpet Populism as ª the right courseº for black miners, ª scornº middle-class blacks for arguing otherwise, or relate Populist racism only as a grudging ª acknowledgmentº . I regard ª black middle class,º ª black elite,º and ª black bour- geoisieº as common usages, implying neither a ª subtle epithetº nor a facile equation with ª white middle class,º etc. Likewise, my unexceptional use of ª conservativeº and ª accommodationistº is intended not as accusation, but as straightforward description.16 (At no point do I cast the miners’ union as ª radicalº .) And even if I were a hanging judge for the union cause, it surely would be carping to condemn anti-union blacks over the objections of black unionists themselves. For the period from the 1908 strike through World War I,17 I sought to capture the perspective of Birmingham’ s leading black ® gures in tones they themselves would recognize. As with any world-view, theirs was an amalgam of in¯ uencesÐ idealistic and pragmatic, ® ltered through race and ® ltered through class. They had entered the new century steeped in the self-help values and prudent temper of Booker T. Washington. Since that time they had seen the frailties of labor interracialism; they had seen the particular price black miners paid for its defeats; they had seen the advent of model coal towns palpably superior to those of the black belt or earlier mining camps; they had sampled the in¯ uence and bene® ts attainable through operator paternalism; they felt more than ever the fragility of their own position, however ª eliteº , in the deeper reaches of the New South. In sum, they had seen scant cause to reassess the ef® cacy of Washingtonian conservatismÐ either for their particular class interests or for those of the race as a whole. However I might differ with their dissimilar critiques, Lichtenstein and MacLean have tapped a vital topic in the historiography of the black South. Treatment of the

Footnote 15 continued forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Kelly raises a similar criticism in a thoughtful review of this book for H-Labor (August 1998; see http:;dRwww.h-net. msu.edu/reviews/x). 16Louis Harlan, no polemicist, has described Booker T. Washington as ª a conservative by just about any measureº (ª Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Accommodation,º in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982], 11.) None of the prominent ministers, educators, businessmen, and editors who made up Birmingham’ s black elite would disclaim either the leader or the label. 17These are the years when Birmingham’ s black middle class launched its ® rst sustained, concertedeffort to assert moral in¯ uence in the coal ® elds. 88 D. Letwin black middle class ranges from applause to impatience, as historians probe its varied sensibilities: expansive vision and narrow self-interest, inclusive racial ª upliftº and class or gender elitism, resonant moral leadership and pious condescension. In the end, just as we must record moments of solidarity between working-class and middle-class blacks, so must we register the class breaches that divided African-Americans, even as Jim Crow pressed upon them all. Anything less would displace lived experience with what Robin Kelley has denounced as the ª [presumption] of a tight-knit, harmonious black community,º and thus deny the agency of both black miners and black profes- sionals in confronting their distinctive situations.18 There are many sides to this study where the reviewers press for more; among them, the interplay of ethnicity and class among white miners, the pace of mechanization, the racial politics of subcontracting, the social implications of labor transiency, and the varied spheres of community life. Space does not permit me to address these and other points in the depth they deserve. It is tempting to explain all shortcomings by a dearth of sources, for the areas revealed by available materials were more than matched by the broad expanses of the miners’ worldÐ above ground and belowÐ where the ª sunº of evidence scarcely ª shinedº. But of course I know that another historian would ® nd documents where I did not, or ® nd meaning that eluded me in those I did. I readily second Lichtenstein’s hunch that mine won’t be the last word on life and struggle in the Alabama coal ® elds. All told, these reviews assess how well I explore, and explain, this venture in interracial unionism. Implicitly, Higginson, Jones, Saxton, and Lichtenstein deem it a story worth telling, and their criticisms re¯ ect a desire to see it told as fully and persuasively as possible. MacLean’s are of another order, going to the very scope and premises of the study. For her, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism is hamstrung by three defects in my conception of class: ® rst (she claims), it con® nes class to the workplace, banishing all other settings to the margins of the story; second, it endows class with singular causative powerÐ ª [t]he independent variable in all equationsº Ð rendering ª dependentº all other issues or identities that stand in its way; and ® nally, it enshrines class as history’ s norm, with imperatives ª presumably more logical and predictableº than, say, those of race or gender. These assumptions explain my indiffer- ence to ª powerful in¯ uences from religious conviction or popular traditions, from republican axioms or liberal democratic thought, from household organization and family lifeÐ or from whiteness and maleness as historical subjectivities.º It is of course disconcerting to see the book linked to so primitive a framework. But while I ® nd it dif® cult to recognize my approach in the picture MacLean paints, her critique does highlight two ongoing issues in our ® eld. The ® rst concerns the validity of studies that focus on the labor movement. I chose to write a book about a series of interracial union drives in the Birmingham coal districtÐ not a social history of the district overall. Does this betray a retrograde doctrine that unions (and the point of

18The positive pole is exempli® ed by Glenda Gilmore, who unapologetically ª celebrates ¼ the black middle classº as it came to terms with the harrowing advent of segregation. The negative pole is exempli® ed by Robin Kelley, who emphasizes the ª mutual disdain, disappointment, and even fearº that divided black workers and the black middle class (he goes on to decry the ª romantic view of a `golden age’ of the black community ¼ [in which] black professionals cared more about their downtrodden race than about their bank accounts.º ). See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896± 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), xix; Robin D.G. Kelley, ª `We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,º Journal of American History, 80 (1993), 80± 81. Symposium on Daniel Letwin 89 production) are the primary venue of working-class experience? Of course notÐ to explore a given topic is not to claim saliency for that topic; to write about the labor movement is not to resurrect to the Wisconsin school.19 The value of a study in labor history turns on its capacity to throw fresh light on some corner of that experience. Organized labor is a part of that project. Unions matter, and in some cases they matter a lot, transforming workers’ sense of who they areÐ of where the line is drawn between ª usº and ª themº Ð just as they can transform conditions. No iron law of history told me that the labor movement played such a role in the Alabama coal ® elds; the words and actions of its inhabitants made that abundantly clear. The second issue concerns the dilemmas we face when desired sources prove scarce. As MacLean says, a more vivid picture of black and white miners’ divergent worlds above ground would enrich our understanding of their encounter at the mines. Unfortunately, as I lamented in the book, available sources cast ª little light on the ways miners and their families, black and white, experienced their home life, churches, fraternal lodges, saloons,º and so forth (4± 5). If the folk I present appear, as MacLean puts it, ª curiously removed from the broader sweep of American historyº Ð if they have little to say about temperance and prohibition, imperialism and the welfare state, women’s suffrage and the Ku Klux Klan, the radio and the automobile, popular music and the Sears catalogÐ it is not because I found such views irrelevant; it is because I found them inaccessible. Theoretical models and prior expectations can be powerful tools: when judiciously applied, they sharpen our sense of where to search for docu- ments, what to ask of those we ® nd, and what conclusions they might suggest. But models and expectations cannot substitute for evidence when it fails to materialize. If this conviction is part of what made the ª new labor historyº new, then it remains unclear how a ª new new labor historyº might surpass it. Challenge to what? Challenge for whom? The title of my book covers a myriad of challenges, as varied as its cast of characters. For black and white miners alike, the challenge lay in weighing the appeal of unionism against an array of countervailing concerns. For black miners, these included an acute vulnerability to anti-unionists and segregationists, a precarious economic status, condescension from their white associ- ates, and a wariness common among southern blacks over any sort of contact with whites.20 For white miners too, interracialism courted severe reprisal, but their challenge also lay in assessing its bene® ts against their claim to racial ª respect- ability,º and their assumptions about African-Americans. For the operators and their Bourbon allies, the challenge was to align their stands on labor interracialism with their material and political agendasÐ agendas that now encouraged grudg- ing toleration, now rabid assault. For middle-class blacks, the challenge lay in reconciling sympathy for black miners with antipathy for unionism. For white observers, it meant balancing compassion for miners against unease over interra-

19Relatedly, my allusions to ª the distracting effects of raceº and ª the divisive potential of raceº do not signal some universal conception of class as the norm and race as the deviant. Were my book addressed to the cause of black nationalism, I might as readily have noted ª the distracting effectsº or ª divisive potentialº of class. But when it comes to miners’ organization in the Alabama coal ® elds, I stand by the phrases singled out by MacLean. If friends and foes of interracial unionism shared one assumption, it was that ª whenever race came to the fore, the cause of labor recededºÐ and each side acted accordingly. 20Leon F. Litwack’s recent study, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), powerfully evokes the apprehension felt by African-Americans over contact with whites in the segregated South. 90 D. Letwin cialism (or worse, ª social equalityº ). For wartime federal agencies, the challenge was to negotiate the con¯ icting Progressive pursuits of industrial ef® ciency and social justice. There was no ª correct pathº awaiting the black miners, white miners, or any other party to this narrative, as they confronted these respective challenges. For their historians, the only correct path is to eschew the very notion of ª correct paths,º and embrace instead the new labor history’ s trademark of open-minded empathy. Of course, any attempt to reconstruct working-class experience meets its own batch of challenges, arising from the complexity of the story, the unevenness of the sources, and the elusiveness of human motivation. In assessing my efforts to meet those challenges, the present reviewers have themselves posed vital challenges, as enlightening and wide-ranging as their own scholarship. Their insights come too late to bene® t my study, but they remain instructive for the current wave of research on black and white workers, both within and beyond the labor movement. Every year, the history of American labor’ s encounter with race appears more vivid and varied, inspiring and disturbing, intriguing and counterintuitive. Ten years from now the picture will surely look fuller, subtler, in some ways more perplexing than it does today. And, as this symposium suggests, debate will continue to abound. How can it be otherwise, when the issues are so alive, our sensibilities so diverse, the history so varied, and problems of evidence, method, and de® nition so inexhaustible? It is a horizon that would cheer Herbert Gutman, for broad debate can only advance his vision that we illuminate ª the complexity of thought and feeling of ordinary white and Negro workersº Ð and thus, ª the tragedy and the hope embedded in recent American history.º