Labor, Class, Racism Struggle & Ideology

As well as the useful, thought-provoking How the Irish Became White, there are two other really fine studies that were published in the same period, which should be read, as content and slants of all three books illuminate and cite each other.

Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1990 - reprinted in 1996:

and

The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David R. Roediger (1991). Originally it came out from Verson, like Saxton's, but Verso has made a pdf available at no cost online. This one includes an Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver.

Among what I personally am finding so useful for my own research and what I'm writing right now is that each work includes good sections on the Jacksonian era. Unlike The American Slave Coast though, these books are focused on the years after Reconstruction and the making of the labor struggle to organize for better working conditions as we've generally understood it into and through the 20th century.

Additionally, these are historians who reject entirely the Psychohistory view of history -- which is such a relief, particularily when working with issues such as the construction of "race." I hadn't even consciously realized how much I rejected Psychohistory until listening (as oppose to re-reading) Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror and the way she built out huge portions of that book from a psychological diagnois of 14th century Europeans -- that these mothers and parents didn't love their infants and small children because they died so frequently, and based it the lack of art that showed such parental love except with the Virgin and Jesus -- and yikes! there wasn't secular art to speak of yet in the 14th century! particularly at the start of it!

Each of these works are now classics in the relationship in our nation among racism, class and labor. So why aren't these works and the many other useful studies that appeared in the 90's that focus on this cluster of issues by black and white authors not cited by those who insist that it is class that matters only these days, not racism? For these books make it very clear that the truth of the matter is quite otherwise.

There is enormous room for more work too, particularly now as the jobs that have so long been the springboard into the middle class for the working poor and labor, along with the artisan skills, have shrunk to nearly zero. How is this going to play out in the coming years in this cluster of intimately entwined categories?

The more I look into everything around slavery and racism in our national history the more I see how little things change, really. Which, as the author of The Wages of Whiteness says can create a sense of pessimism, at least in the readers and critics. What we see are the patterns of our own national folkways. But I'm wondering if we really aren't approaching the time when this will change. Because, folks, when it comes to those jobs and the future, there isn't even a social caste-status payoff for whiteness in the mix any longer.

Culturally, at least the musicians recognized this (well, not Charlie Daniels and his ilks, of course -- but then we're speaking of the really good stuff that you need a great deal of talent to play, compose, arrange, or jam on). All three of these books have sections on culture, particularly music.