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A Nation of Consumer Republics: Suburbanization, Media, and Cultural Production in Postwar America

2012-06-21T08:33:57Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "When reflecting on Postwar American prosperity, many scholars have celebrated government enacted programs such as the G.I. Bill for creating social mobility and spurring the expa..."

When reflecting on Postwar American prosperity, many scholars have celebrated government enacted programs such as the G.I. Bill for creating social mobility and spurring the expansion of homeownership among Americans. The idea that a rising tide raises all boats held sway over conceptions of how Americans internalized their citizenship. The postwar shift in which terms like consumer and citizen grew to be interchangeable, created both opportunities for expanding rights and access to resources, while also foreclosing them in regard to specific communities. For example, Black Power advocates who emphasized a self-help, business oriented, consumerist nationalism did create space for their marginalized constituency but did so in a way that embedded their movement within the mass consumption ethos of the postwar period. However, economic individuation and market segmentation functioned to reduce people and communities to market variants, separated and divided along demographic lines.

The emergence of the citizen-consumer as a public ideal has reverberated widely within American media and culture. Works by Lisa Lowe, Glen Mimura, Eric Avila, Lizabeth Cohen, Ben Bagdikian, Ed Herman, and Noam Chomsky explore this tension in numerous ways and venues from the post war mass media to contemporary Asian American literature. Ultimately, the consumer citizen identity reshaped peoples’ relation to each other, the government, and the cultural productions of the post WWII era.

Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003) argues that the desire to create a consumptive middle class was achieved through an appeal to a “middle class consciousness of aspiring consumers over the working class consciousness celebrated by a militant labor movement during the 1930s and World War II.” In this context, the G.I. Bill and VA home loans were meant to encourage social mobility through suburbanization. To some extent this occurred as Cohen points out that 42% of all returning veterans became homeowners. However, Cohen suggests problems emerged out of this development. First, by making the house a site of capital accumulation. Property values emerged as the overarching concern of nearly all homeowners as Cohen suggests that the source of egalitarian hopes suburbia and mass consumption “made market concerns paramount in decisions about how and where one lived.” The home became “a mass consumer commodity”, appraised and traded unemotionally in the name of “property values”. This had two primary effects: 1) the commodification of the home, out of the socioeconomic hierarchy of communities, intensified localism 2) the inequalities of postwar America expanded past housing into public services that had been paid for by municipal governments. Control over zoning and education remained under the purview of local officials. Thus, localism undermined central authority. Cohen notes that one might assume federal postwar expenditures might imbue faith in the central government’ but did not in “large part to the impact of postwar suburbanization and mass home ownership.”

Second, Cohen argues the G.I. Bill privileged white male veterans and the formation of patriarchical domesticities. If the Office of Price Administration had influenced gender norms in the 1930s and 1940s, empowering women to occupy central positions as protectors of the public interest through consumerism, postwar policies undermined this development. For example, the aforementioned G.I. Bill disproportionately gave “men access to career training, property ownership, capital, and credit, as well as control over family finances, making them the embodiment of the postwar ideal of purchasers as citizen and limiting wives claim to full economic and social citizenship.” Moreover, fewer individuals climbed from the working class to the middle class via the bill. Instead, the bill tended to reinforce class patterns that enabled many already middle class veterans to attend college, while their working class counterparts found the G.I. Bill less applicable in regard to vocational training. Obviously, race intervened as Black veterans benefits failed to match those of their white peers. Women found their educational opportunities constricted as many colleges, universities, and professional schools limited or eliminated female applicants in favor of returning veterans. If the G.I. Bill privileged some groups over others, the tax code in the late 1940s was altered in ways the “reinforced the G.I. Bill in favoring the traditional male breadwinner headed family and the male citizen over the female within it.” In this way, the consumer republic privileged the nuclear family, forcing women to remain financially dependent on men, while limiting some communities access to the very market based freedoms such republics promised.

Of the many ways the consumer republic reshaped America, perhaps one of the most prominent was a marked shift toward suburbanization. However, as Cohen points out, the suburbs remained closed to numerous groups and individuals. As demographics changed, whites attempted to construct a “white suburban” imaginary to prevent what many saw as the excesses of a dark or racialized city. Few regions represent this shift as clearly as Southern California. Within Southern California few metropolitan areas illustrate this development as clearly as Los Angeles. Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles explores the construction of a “privatized, consumer oriented subjectivity premised upon patriarchy, whiteness and suburban home ownership.” As government policies attempted to reconstruct American identities along consumerist lines, white suburbanites attempted to build a “classless” ideal that separated them from the “darkened” inner city. For example, the post war decline of neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and Watts, a decline due in great part to HOLC/FHA policies, and the rise of suburban enclaves like South Gate meant suburban residents hoped to differentiate themselves from the evils of urban living. Thus, as “the expansion of suburban California provided a mythic space for the construction of a new “white city””, Bunker Hill, Boyle Heights, and Watts provided convenient straw men for the emerging “cinematic vision of a black and alien Los Angeles.” Here Avila juxtaposes the portrayal of the inner city in Los Angeles film noir with the rise of Disneyland, each representing an idealized/demonized version of metropolitan regions. If film noir highlighted the threats of a city inhabited by untrustworthy women and non-white citizens densely and dangerously packed into urban spaces, Disneyland symbolized the epitome of decentralized, privatized white suburbia, functioning to provide “a space where white Southern Californians could affirm their whiteness against a set of racial stereotypes.” While writers such as Matt Lassiter have argued for end to division in scholarship between the surburbs and cities, Avila seems to have addressed this relation in the negative. For Avila, in many ways like a post war American Orientalism, the “vanilla suburbs’” identity depended on the symbolic “chocolate city” as the “other. Similarly, Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right explored Orange County’s middle and upper class residents’ contributions to the construction of the conservative ideology that fueled the Reagan Revolution, Avila credits Disneyland for cradling this “racialized conservatism that informed the nascent political struggles of the New Right,” providing a popular culture touchstone for a burgeoning social movement.

Though Disneyland and L.A. film noir represent one strand of popular culture, the news media serves as another. In addition to suburban spatialization and racialization, the rise of the consumer republic reshaped news organizations as capitalization shifted media towards more entertainment based news programs while shrinking the number of independently owned media outlets such that by the twenty first century five corporations owned nearly all global media. Originally published in 1983, Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly asserts that the capitalization of the media serves to consolidate its ownership while diminishing its informational saliency. Bagdikian’s work served as a harbinger of things to come. Later critics built on Bagdikian’s work arguing that the nightly newscasts and cable news outlets now offered a product more akin to what Bagdikian refers to as “infotainment”. One might suggest that this move toward infotainment increased the relevance of cultural productions as they creep into newscasts, providing some level of legitimacy to the viewing public. In many cases, this was an unfortunate development.

Bagdikian’s updated book, entitled The New Media Monopoly attempts to insert his 1983 offering into the context of the past 25 years. The narrowing ownership of the big five media firms results in unprecedented “communications power” that exceeds even histories greatest dictatorships. Though careful not to draw direct causality, Bagdikian suggests this shrinking distribution of media ownership may have contributed to rightward political shifts that frame formerly liberal political positions as fire breathing radicalism. Going further, Bagdikian notes that news now reflects stories that interest ownership, often the kind of pieces that increase viewership and ad sales. Unfortunately, this means that issues important to the people are obscured and the neutral tone of “modern news” reifies issues rather than interrogating them. Even worse, Bagdinkian expects ownership to impose its views, “Editorially, corporate causes almost invariably become news media causes.”

Like Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Bagdikian points out that before one takes issue with the news itself, he/she must look at what “is chosen or not chosen – for print or broadcast. Media politics are reflected in the selection of commentators and talk show hosts.” (25) Manufacturing Consent drew similar conclusions pointing out that government and corporate sources were privileged over others, this resulted in news reports/articles that fundamentally reflected the views of those institutions. In the 1980s, this meant media sources that parroted the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan and conservatives who arose out of Avila’s all too real “suburban imaginary”.

Five years after Bagdikian’s 1983 work, Herman and Chomsky published the aforementioned Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. If The Media Monopoly provided a concise opening discussion on problems in the media, Manufacturing Consent organized its ideas into a theory suggesting the media functioned in relation to five filters that determined its content. Many of these filters appear in The New Media Monopoly but not with the same formal theoretical structure: 1) the size and ownership of media outlets 2) Advertising’s influence 3) Sourcing 4) Flak and enforces – outside pressure and lobbyist groups and 5) anti-communism. Of course, the fifth filter could probably today be replaced with anti-Terrorism. Manufacturing Consent then applies this five-layered filter to several cases in Central American, Indochina, and Eastern Europe.

Obviously, both works explore the corporate/government dominance of media but one particular example from The Media Monopoly proves useful as Bagdikian explores the ramifications of The New Yorker's 1967 decision to oppose the Vietnam War. The New Yorker proves useful as a example of another development, market segmentation. As Bagdikian notes, post 1967 New Yorker circulation rose but the average age of readers fell from 48 years to 34, meaning more college and high school students had gravitated to the magazine for its anti-war writing. Lizabeth Cohen’s A Conusmers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003) addressed the issue of segmentation or the practice by advertisers to segment products and market them to specific demographic groupings. While some argue this made life more democratic, Cohen suggests otherwise. What resulted was a new commercial culture that reified – at times exaggerated – social difference in the pursuit of profits, often reincorporating disaffected groups into the commercial marketplace.” (309) By the 1980s, class segmentation in marketing expanded as advertisers targeted the upper middle class and upper classes as a new market unto themselves. Clearly, Cohen views such developments negatively arguing that when marketers abandoned the mass, they contributed to individual stratification as well, “individuals soon learned that their own good fortunes as homeowners, shoppers, and voters depended on identifying with special interest constituencies with clout – for example, localistically minded suburbanites, Yuppies, African Americans, senior citizens or gun owners.” (343) If anything has emerged in terms of the public’s reading and viewing habits, though news sources may have proliferated, the audience segments along the lines Cohen points out. The kind of news people pursue increasingly seems to be the news they want to hear. In this context, Fox News and its liberal counterpart CNBC would seem to be two sides of the same coin.

If Eric Avila’s exploration of popular culture helped historians excavate gendered, racial, and class influenced spatializations and imaginaries, Lisa Lowe and Glenn Mimura further his efforts employing Asian American cultural production to question the kind of normatives Cohen’s consumer republic promoted.

Published in 1997, Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts privileges Asian American cultural production as a key site from which to questions ideas about citizenship, democracy, capitalism, and multiculturalism. Like Avila, she locates an American Orientalism at work in Los Angeles cultural productions. For example, Lowe argues that the movie Blade Runner characterizes the city’s diversity as a “third world” metropolis created by “a largely Asian, invasion” thus, rearticulating “orientalist typographies in order to construct the white citizen against the background of a multicultural dystopia.” In a second example, Lowe deconstructs the documentary “Sa-I-Gu”, which explores the observations and experiences of Korean American women during the Los Angeles Riots, to disrupt the “linear, developmental narrative that seeks to assimilate ethnic immigrants into the capitalist economy.” Lowe points out that the interviews challenge the uniformity of the Korean American community, the same uniformity upon which a “classless” white suburbia rested. Immigrant Acts fundamentally questions the consumerist identity constructed by government policies in Cohen’s Consumers’ Republic and the white suburban imaginary of Los Angeles’ post war popular culture.

Glen Mimura’s Ghostlife of Thrid Cinema: Asian American Film and Video (2009) builds on Lowe’s observations while sharing her distrust of post war American democracy, capitalism, and multiculturalism. Both authors view multiculturalism negatively suggesting that it substitutes aesthetic equality for true material and political equivalents. Lowe and Mimura argue multiculturalism symbolically embraces Asian Americans culturally while failing to address the social, economic, and political “material exclusion” imposed them. Or as Lowe suggests, it masks “exclusions by recuperating dissent, conflict, and otherness through the promise of inclusion.” In this way, Mimura and Lowe support Cohen’s conclusions regarding the consumer identity, though it articulated a classless/raceless existence, minorities did not have equal access to markets, wages, and housing.

Spectrality haunts Asian American representation and identity. Accordingly, Asian American “symbolic racialization … disappear[s] ghostlike, in public cultural and national political discourses, only to reappear as “strangers” or perpetual foreigners – that is symbolically out of place and outside of history.” Attempts by Asian Americans at claiming “political or cultural subjecthood” result in reactions of “disbelief, skepticism, disavowal”, responses not unlike those of a “scientific, rational, secular society to the presence of ghosts, and the fantastic more generally.” The emergence of ghosts threatens the normal historical consciousness undermining the idea that modern history remains stable, progressive and linear. Moreover, Lowe argues that Asian American identity remains connected to U.S. military adventures in the Pacific and Far East. The presence of Koreans, Vietnamese, and Filipinos disavow the linear developmental anti imperial history of the US domestically and abroad. Forced to “forget” Asian wars while adopting national tropes constructing the US as a benevolent international force opposed to colonizing projects, the “political fiction of equal rights” falls into question. As Lowe comments, “the “past” that is grasped as memory is, however, not a naturalized, factual past for the relation to that past is always broken by war, occupation, and displacement. Asian American culture “re-members” the past in and through the fragmentation, loss, and dispersal that constitutes the past.” Thus, Asian American culture critiques the nation state, occupies other spaces altering national terrain, reconceptualizing narratives and historiographies, establishing techniques that birth “new forms of subjectivity and new ways of questioning the government of human life by the nation state.”

Here Lowe and Mimura illustrate clear connections to Bagdikian, Herman, and Chomsky. The mass media’s coverage of international issues undermines the public’s understanding of foreign affairs and the United States place within them. Such coverage often lacks any real grasp of American actions, the policies themselves, and the effects of these policies on other nations. In the wake of 9/11, Bagdikian traces the numerous examples of media culpability in failing to report the actual ground effects of US foreign policies citing examples from the exploits of the United Fruit Company in Central America, to C.I.A. skullduggery in Guatemala and Chile. Even worse, in revisiting such stories Bagdikian points out that “the Times and other American major news media repeatedly failed to mention that Pinochet had been directed in his crimes by U.S. agents and had been supported by Washington during his long bloody, regime.” Again, Chomsky’s work compliments and often reinforces Bagdikian’s. For example, regarding the Guatemala episode, Chomsky illustrates how the media, in the context of the Cold War, privileged certain political actors suggesting that the coverage given to Eastern European dissidents led to a suspicious silence concerning the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan government. Relatedly, Lowe and Mimura suggest similar episodes regarding coverage of American military efforts in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. To be fair however, the anti-communism hysteria of mid-century America may have privileged coverage of United States efforts in Asia, thus, reinforcing the very otherness Lowe and Mimura point out, while reiterating typical Cold War tropes about democracy, capitalism, and freedom. Still, a strain of American Orientalism emerges as well. Media portrayals of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, ignore histories previous to United States interventions. Thus, as Mimura, Lowe and others note, residents appear outside history, while obscuring the reasons and affects of American interventions.

Post war government domestic policies contributed to the development of a consumerist identity that promoted mass consumption over production. Unions and others oriented themselves within similar alignments as HOLC/FHA policies, the G.I. Bill, and VA home loans contributed to suburban spatializations that promoted a gendered household and residential segregation along both class and racial lines, yet its rhetoric presented a “classless” surburbia. As these policies/legislation unfolded, popular culture envisioned a symbolic divide between city and suburb, marketed through postwar amusement parks like Disneyland that promoted a decentralized, private, white surburban ideal that defined itself in opposition to the other of the “darkened” racialized city as represented in film. As advertisers and political operatives adopted the methods of market segmentation, these differences became exaggerated both in cultural production and broader media. A post war American Orientalism emerged defining non-whites and urban areas as the “other”. Mass media reflected these developments as the profit motive overtook the civic responsibility aspects of news dissemination. Corporate consolidation pursued market segmentation and sensationalism at the expense of informational accuracy. As the century entered its last decades embroiled in “identity politics” knife fighting (and the New Right practiced this as much as any other group), such news coverage only reified difference. This reification can clearly be seen through the site of Asian American cultural production which questioned many of the underlying principles of the consumers’ republic. Moreover, media coverage of Asian Americans and American military adventures in the Pacific and beyond expanded the modern orientalist bias as often entire people’s histories were leveled as American tropes about democracy, freedom, and capitalism obscured all other factors. Thus, Asian people and their nation’s appeared outside of time, only relevant when cold war conflicts came to fore. For Asian American, this fractured their own identities and histories while encouraging their persistent presence in American culture as foreigners. A nation of consumers segmented along such demographic lines remains less a nations than a collection of overlapping memberships whose legitimacy in relation to each other rests too heavily on market based dynamics.

'''Ryan Reft'''

Deconstructing Dumbo: The Disneyland Discourse on Suburban America

2012-06-21T08:32:28Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "“Sorry, folks! We're closed for two weeks to clean and repair America's favorite family fun park. Sorry, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh!” -Marty Moose, Walley World National Lampoons..."

“Sorry, folks! We're closed for two weeks to clean and repair America's favorite family fun park. Sorry, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh!”
-Marty Moose, Walley World National Lampoons Summer Vacation (1983)

“Sorry folks, park's closed. Moose out front shoulda told ya”

- Lasky, Walley World Security guard, National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation (1983)

The Griswold family’s disappointing arrival at the mythical Walley World resulted in a semi-armed standoff in which bb gun wielding family patriarch Clark Griswold overran park security, ferrying his family to ride after ride, ultimately gaining forgiveness from Walley World’s owner. The Griswold family’s punishing trek from Chicago across the western U.S remains the National Lampoon’s series most popular production. Though Walley World was meant to be a gentle parody of Anaheim’s Disneyland, its ridiculous finale spoke to disappointment in the American Dream. Griswold confides in Walley World owner Roy Walley:

Clark: Roy; can I call you Roy? Have you even driven your whole family cross-country?
Roy Walley: Oh, hell yes. Once I drove all of them to Florida. The smell coming out of the back seat was terrible.
Clark: I know that smell, Roy; but what if you had driven all that way and Florida was closed?
Roy Walley: Closed? Uh, they don't close Florida.
…
Clark: I just want you to ask yourself one thing. If you were… if you were me, wouldn't you do the same thing for your children?
Roy Walley: No.

In 2009’s Adventureland, James Brennan (played by Jessie Eisenberg), a recent college grad with a degree in Renaissance Studies, finds his postgraduation hopes of escape to 1987 New York squashed by recessionary pressures as an alcoholic father’s demotion necessitated James’ gainiful employment. Forced to work a summer gig at a local Pittsburgh amusement park, Disneyland it was not. Roger Ebert described the park as “shabby” where “all of the rides look secondhand, all of the games are rigged, and all of the prizes look like surplus.” New York Times critic A.O. Scott noted an atmosphere of “suburban discomfort”, characterizing the establishment as “a sad little amusement park that serves as the employer of last resort for the area’s misfit young.”

Films like Adventureland and National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation represent a cultural pushback against the idyllic vision of suburban America that Disneyland has long symbolized. Disneyland’s famously scrub brushed employees, “attractive, white, young men and women” often “college students, grads, or teachers” contrast sharply with the downtrodden misanthropes of Adventureland. In National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation, the entire process of reaching Disneyland, the migration of Midwesterners to Los Angeles which just happens to be a large part of Los Angeles’ creation, and the destination itself are beset with obstacles, torturing the family, undermining Clark Griswold’s authority as father. When the final destination is closed, Clark’s masculinity knows only one way out, fake plastic guns.

As has been recounted numerous times, Walt Disney himself created Disneyland, in part as a reaction to the “vulgarity” of Coney Island. For many of Disney’s generation, Coney Island’s unsupervised ethnically diverse heterosocial spaces represented a degraded sort of leisure, one founded on a heterogenous ethnic diversity and “sexual ambiguity”. As Eric Avila points out in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (2004), Disney “renounced the contradictions and uncertainties of modern urban society. The very heterogeneity and dissonance that defined cosmopolitan urban culture inspired [him] to create a counterculture of order, regimentation, and homogeneity.” (Avila, 119)

Started in the mid 1950s, Disneyland’s pervasiveness as a neologism has become ubiquitous. John Findlay, in Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (1992), notes that by 1956, the public had brightlined Disneyland’s cultural meaning such that “it had come to mean “any fantastic of fanciful land or place; a never never land.” (52) Employed in numerous settings, phrases like “’Disneyland for adults’ was invoked to publicize (and sanitize the images of both Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs and the gambling resort of Las Vegas.” (Findlay, 52) However, beyond language, Disneyland cast a towering shadow that helped re-imagine popular culture, the urban-suburban divide, and landscapes across the country. In addition, Disneyland perpetuated patriarchal suburban domesticities while reifying racial inequality.

If as Lizabeth Cohen argues in A Consumer Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003) that postwar government policies as represented by the G.I. Bill, VA/FHA home loans, and new tax polices sought to create a “consumer republic” that enhanced purchasing power, conflating citizenship with consumerism, this new orientation reverberated politically, socially, economically, and spatially. If most writers have focused intensely on housing and school desegregation struggles, others have employed a broader lens, employing critical race theory to popular culture of the age. Prominent among such methodological turns stands Eric Avila and his aforementioned Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight. Examining meanings behind film noir, urban sci-fi, Disneyland, Dodger’s Stadium, and freeway construction, Avila locates an attempt by Southern California elites and others to construct Los Angeles as suburban “white spot” immune to the dangers of the city, protected by homogenous suburbanization. According to Avila, popular culture not only reflected the changing perceptions and normative values associated with suburbanization but also “prefigured the rightward shift of American politics during the postwar period.” (228)

As American postwar demographics changed, whites attempted to construct a “white suburban” imaginary to prevent what many saw as the excesses of a dark or racialized city. Few regions represent this shift as clearly as Southern California. Within Southern California few metropolitan areas illustrate this development as lucidly as Los Angeles. Avila explores the construction of a “privatized, consumer oriented subjectivity premised upon patriarchy, whiteness and suburban home ownership.” As government policies attempted to reconstruct American identities along consumerist lines, white suburbanites attempted to build a “classless” ideal that separated them from the “darkened” inner city, as Avila writes, “Blacks, women, homosexuals, and Communists ran rampant in the noir city, threatening the prospects for a return to a class vision of white patriarchy that defined suburban idealizations of the American Way.” (Avila, 104). Reinforcing such ideals were the perceived post war decline of neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and Watts, a decline due in great part to HOLC/FHA policies, and the rise of suburban enclaves like South Gate meant suburban residents hoped to differentiate themselves from the evils of urban living. Thus, as “the expansion of suburban California provided a mythic space for the construction of a new “white city””, Bunker Hill, Boyle Heights, and Watts provided convenient straw men for the emerging “cinematic vision of a black and alien Los Angeles.” Here Avila juxtaposes the portrayal of the inner city in Los Angeles film noir with the rise of Disneyland, each representing an idealized/demonized version of metropolitan regions.

Of course, noir did not monopolize such imaginaries alone. Sci-fiction films also contributed to this dynamic. War of the Worlds, Them!, He Walked By Night and other movies promoted white middle class suburban domesticities as much as their noir counterparts. For example, Avila points to a “climatic scene” in War of the Worlds in which “masses of Angelenos take refuge inside a church shortly before the imminent holocaust, a white family – mother, father, son, daughter – huddles together in prayer, gazing up toward the image of Christ altar.” (Avila, 100-101) Editing and lighting techniques emphasize the image of the white family under alien attack. Urbanites under the attack of “alien” minorities and the structural deficiencies of cities necessitated white flight, if only to preserve whiteness and the nuclear family. Still, the visions supplied by both noir and urban science fiction provided suburbanites with equal parts horror and fascination. Though these films encouraged fear over “alien invasion” they “simultaneously preserved a psychic tie between the city and suburb.” (Avila, 103) The “Other” remained integral to Cold War interests defining subversives from communists to blacks to homosexuals “upholding its centrality in post war American popular culture [inserting] itself into the very heart of Southern California’s cultural milieu.” (Avila, 103).

While film noir and urban science fiction highlighted the threats of a city inhabited by untrustworthy women and non-white citizens densely and dangerously packed into urban spaces, Disneyland symbolized the epitome of decentralized, privatized white suburbia, functioning to provide “a space where white Southern Californians could affirm their whiteness against a set of racial stereotypes.” (Avila, 137) In terms of family structure, Disneyland delineated a “social order” that appealed to the tastes and desires of both a growing middle class and an “embourgeoised working class” emphasizing patriarchy and the nuclear family. (Avila, 137) Here Disney’s message meshed perfectly with postwar Federal economic policies such as the G.I. Bill that privileged patriarchal domesticities. Once again Lizabeth Cohen acknowledges such developments, writing, “If the G.I. Bill privileged some groups over others, the tax code in the late 1940s was altered in ways that reinforced the G.I. Bill in favoring the traditional male breadwinner headed family and the male citizen over the female within it.” (Cohen, 144) In this way, Disneyland as an appendage of a larger consumer republic that privileged the nuclear family, thus forcing women to remain financially dependent on men. Disneyland situated itself nicely in such an atmosphere.

While writers such as Matt Lassiter have argued for an end to scholarly studies that divide suburbs and cities into discrete unconnected entities, Avila seems to have addressed this relation in the negative. For Avila, in many ways like a post war American Orientalism, the “vanilla suburbs’” identity depended on the symbolic “chocolate city” as the “other”. Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right explored Orange County’s middle and upper class residents’ contributions to the construction of the conservative ideology that fueled the Reagan Revolution. Avila credits Disneyland for cradling this “racialized conservatism that informed the nascent political struggles of the New Right,” providing a popular culture touchstone for a burgeoning social movement. Findlay points to similar developments, suggesting Disneyland contributed to the O.C.’s “distinctive suburban identity” but paradoxically also helped to “transform Anaheim, a small and subordinate town on the fringes of Los Angeles, into the equivalent of a central business district for urbanizing Orange County.” (Findlay, 54) Thus Disneyland, though serving as a symbol of postwar suburban planning, also drove local urbanization.

Undoubtedly, Los Angeles’ role as cultural producer influenced such developments. L.A’s suburban decentralized nature, when portrayed in movies, television, and via Disneyland reinforced such conceptions of post war America. In many ways, Disneyland served as a manifestation of film. Movie studio art directors supported by a slew of “architects, writers, special effects artists and other motion picture” trades emerged as the park’s chief designers. These film experts employed techniques such as “forced perspective” - tricking the eye into viewing buildings as taller than in reality - and “scaling down” - the parks features were not life size, for example the trains traversing the parks are built at “approximately five eights scale” -while threading narratives through “the rides, the several lands, and the general park” that reflected those of Disney movies. (Findlay, 68) Employing both “Disney Realism” and “Capitalist Realism”, the park broadcast a worldview that articulated sunny visions of life brought to patrons by corporate sponsors like Monsanto. Disneyland professed faith in suburban corporate living and the future that the Fortune 500 promised. (Findlay, 78) Moreover, noir’s postulation of the city suggested a shift form Enlightenment ideals of urban areas as Avila notes, “In contrast to the enlightenment view of the Western city as the site of individual opportunity and the summit of social progress film noir emphasized the social and psychological consequences of urban modernity.” (Avila, 69) McGirr’s Orange County republicans epitomize this view; Orange County conservatives wanted a return to normative traditions, “but also called for a new one based on a highly modern technocratic defense of ethos, as assertion of an invigoration of the nuclear family unit as the locus of moral authority.” In contrast, noir’s vision suggested that Progressive reforms failed to stem “the degraded culture of the modern metropolis [underscoring] the need for a sociospatial alternative to the chaos of urban modernity precipitating such transformative urban processes as suburban development, urban renewal, and highway construction.” (Findlay, 78)

Ironically, as John Findlay suggests Disneyland represented this awkward balance of modernity and tradition as it privileged “Main Street America” in its design and format but surely benefitted from the Santa Monica Freeway that led patrons to their gates. In addition, Disneyland mirrored the structural changes unfolding in the broader American economy. While it promoted traditional American individualism and the aesthetics of small town America, the park and its masters also employed the tools of modern economics and the developing mass media. Organized “along industrial lines for a type of mass production”, Disneyland manufactured “happiness” rather than “durable goods”, meanwhile the park’s workers illustrated the shift from “extractive and industrial jobs toward the service sector.” (Findlay, 94). Though Walt Disney’s creation harkened back to the days of small business entreprenueralism, the methods it used required the employment of “organization men and women” and alliances with multinational corporations. As John Findlay suggests, “Disneyland conveyed mores that were associated with America’s preindustrial and industrializing past by using techniques specific to America’s postindustrial present and future.” (Findlay, 94).

In terms of class, Disneyland obviously supported middle income domesticities. However, as is usually the case with consumerism, it proved difficult to limit its appeal. Certainly, Disney felt little connection to the nation’s poorer residents. Even in its conceptualization Walt Disney “did not necessarily intend even to admit the lower classes. [Disneyland] aimed instead to harmonize and refine the respectable middle classes with middlebrow culture.” (Findlay, 87) Despite its racialized use of the “other”, Disneyland attracted Southern California’s working classes, many of whom were non-white. Avila recounts Theresa Hernandez’s trip to Disneyland, where despite the park’s “othering” of non-whites, it appealed to the Hernandez family, “for a working class families of color who labored to reap the fruits of the American Way” writes Avila “an annual trip to Disneyland may have signaled a rite of passage into the materially abundant universe of the middle class … “ (Avila, 143)

Regionally, writers frequently conflated Disneyland with the West’s national parks, attributing to it a legitimacy that provided greater meaning. Not only did the park lend Anaheim and Orange County a cultural significance, upon which both capitalized, but it also served as a “California based critique” of both Eastern cities and the problems Walt Disney believed these cities brought to American culture. However, by the 1970s as white flight accelerated and communities’ racial make up changed, Disneyland symbolized refuge rather than escape, “For a resident of a white suburban neighborhood threatened by juvenile delinquency and racial succession, Disneyland offered a reassuring vision of domestic harmony and ethnic homogeneity and modeled the social order white suburban Americans sought to create within their own communities.” (Avila, 142) Disney officials recognized this shift. In a 1984 publication, the park claimed Walt Disney “had included Main Street U.S.A in the park as a counterpoise to ‘the rootless society and ugliness’ of Los Angeles … In later years it became standard to view the theme park not as natural outgrowth of Los Angeles but as an aberration and an antidote to it.” (Findlay, 97) That the park had been created in a manner as to be “timeless” and more in response to its “vulgar” Coney Island predecessor mattered little to such observers. Contemporaries of the day endorsed the idea that Disney’s “urban/suburban” vision merited worth. Science Fiction writer Ray Bradbury lauded Walt Disney for mayor in 1960 arguing that “Disney is a city builder. He has already proven his ability to construct an entire community, plus rivers, plus mountains, from the gaslines up. He has already solved, in small compass most of the problems of Los Angeles.” (Findlay, 96)

One final irony deserves attention. Orange County’s prosperity rested on Cold War military and national infrastructure expansion. Yet, many if not most of its residents articulated an anti-government ethos. Disneyland also benefitted from these developments. Walt Disney proved a fierce Cold War warrior displaying little to no reluctance in imbuing Disneyland with a pro-capitalist foundation, even refusing Russian Premier Nikia Krushuchev entry in the 1960s. Though these Cold War messages faded as Disneyland’s existence continued, like Orange County, anti-communism served as a unifying and in Disney’s case, profitable force. Moreover, Disneyland surely benefitted from the highway infrastructure created in the 1950s which situated the park along the Santa Monica Freeway. A freeway, Eric Avila notes came at the expense of numerous communities of color in Southern California. Despite benefitting from government largesse, both Orange County residents and Disneyland itself exuded an anti-government positioning. For Orange County this can clearly be seen in its contributions to the New Right, while Disneyland displayed its own anti government bias in its 1963 refusal to allow a Sheraton Hotel to violate the park’s “visual integrity”. Disneyland forced architectural revisions to the building, ostensibly suggesting the Anaheim skyline belonged to it rather than the city’s residents. Even some local conservatives bristled at such attitudes. (Findlay, 97)

By the 1980s, Disney’s cultural power remained dominant. As that decade drew to a close and the 1990s began, Victorious athletes announced triumphantly that they were “going to Disneyworld.” Yet, the shifting sands of American culture pointed to some uncomfortable truths for Mickey Mouse et al. In a 1984 legal proceeding, a gay couple challenged its expulsion from the park for holding hands. To the surprise of many, the Orange County jury ruled in favor of the couple, a direct affront to Disney’s ideals. By the mid-1990s even its main propaganda arm, its animated features, no longer commanded the attention of the American public as newer companies like Pixar and Dreamworks produced more innovative works. Moreover, the changes in national demographics and corporate America meant that pursing a suburban white ideal no longer sufficed. Increasingly self consciously diverse advertising campaigns grew more common as corporations attempted to tap into expanding minority markets (of course those markets had always existed but had been largely ignored). Though Adventureland’s amusement park failed to match Disneyland in any way, the protagonist escapes his suburban hell for late 1980s New York, a cauldron of mixed ethnicities, urban conflict, and economic decline. Granted a movie made in 2009, when cities have become safer and more attractive to young professionals and older couples, might look back with rose colored glasses, but certainly it hints at wider shifts that leave Disneyland’s suburban ideal less than it was.

'''Ryan Reft'''

An Age of Agency: Working Women's Role in Leisure, Treating, and Prostitution 1880-1945

2012-06-21T08:29:02Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "Throughout American history, ideas about women’s sexuality have been influenced by economic and social changes of the time. Reformers focused on female sexuality at the same ti..."

Throughout American history, ideas about women’s sexuality have been influenced by economic and social changes of the time. Reformers focused on female sexuality at the same time that industrialization brought great economic and social fluctuations. Cities provided women new social opportunities, employment — though limited in terms of real wages — and experiences, but importantly for many, some level of personal autonomy. Numerous other reasons lay behind rising single female urban populations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century such as familial exile, escaping abusive or dysfunctional homes, or a family’s economic dependence on the wages of their urban daughters. Worries about these women pervaded popular culture, academics, and reform societies. However, recent historians have emphasized the agency of urban single working class women, refusing to ascribe to victimization tropes. Scholars like Elizabeth Alice Clement, Kathy Peiss, Ruth Rosen, and others have illustrated that though bound by gender and class discrimination, urban working women’s agency came to shape not only their own lives but more broadly social and sexual practices within American society.

Characterizations of wage working single women ranged from the late nineteenth century “orphan”, a helpless, passionless, weak vessel corrupted and seduced by lecherous men to the early twentieth century licentious, diseased, selfish prostitute sexually and economically exploiting innocent male virility. Importantly, images created by society to illustrate these women often related to the nation’s larger anxiety ridden transition from a rural agrarian homogenous society to an urban industrial hetereogenous culture. Though women enjoyed some level of economic and social autonomy in burgeoning urban cultures, this independence remained couched in a society dominated by gender, class, ethnic, and race discrimination. Thus for working women, the complex balance between respectability and freedom circumscribed their social and economic worlds.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, women’s historians have looked beyond the confines of work, home, and trade unions to new areas of leisure and more informal peer networks and subcultures. The role of commercialized leisure, whose manifestations are most noted in dance halls, arcades, and amusements parks of the period, served as a site where primarily white working women could assert some autonomy over their physical body along with their social and sexual lives. However, the rise of commercialized leisure transcended all urban boundaries influencing nearly all sectors of municipalities economically, politically, and socially. The growth of heterosocial interactions among working class youth culture, a marked shift from the homosocial spaces of the nineteenth century, led to more open sexuality and greater sexual experimentation reshaping social and sexual patterns. Various sexual practices and behaviors simultaneously occupied urban spaces. Therefore, treating, dating, and prostitution existed side by side, each differentiating itself through specific rituals and practices. Entrepreneurs capitalized on these changes establishing red light districts and later legal and illegal sex industries including taxi dancers, cabaret performers, masseuses, call girls, and prostitutes. The commercialization of vice along with the gradual but growing acceptance of premarital sex, pushed prostitution to the margins whereas nineteenth century America viewed it as much more central to society.

If earlier historians often portrayed working women as recipients of middle and upper class trends and advice, more recent histories of the past thirty years have reevaluated the “trickle down” formation, arguing that working women contributed greatly to reorganizing ideas about women’s sexuality and sexual practices. Though limited sources plague historians of working class females in this period, recent works have read traditional sources such as vice societies records “against the grain” in order to get at the voices and viewpoints of wage working women. Moreover, many recent scholars have benefited from the expansion of academia into areas such as gender, ethnic, and immigration studies which have enabled historians to explore a greater variety of women’s experiences. Still, no matter which segment of the population one examines, single working women’s agency serves as a central focus including their pursuit of commercial leisure, work, housing, sexual practices, and prostitution.

By the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of single women relocated to urban areas across the nation. Removed from the protection of family and subject to poor wages, reformers and others characterized these women as naïve rural individuals placing themselves at great risk in the morally decaying, urban metropolises of the early twentieth century. Wages failed to provide adequate compensation as many employers assumed that working women remained supported by a family economy or husband. Without patriarchical protection or the family, reformers predicted many women would be drawn to prostitution, crushed by poverty and corrupted by men. However, not all families proved equal. Reformers class biased often led them to view working families as problematic. By the early twentieth century, reformers put forth a vision of the working class home as crowded and dysfunctional, contributing to directly to “fallen women”.

Ruth Rosen’s The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (1982) argues differently. Suggesting that working class women engaged in prostitution for a complex array of reasons and motivations, Rosen explores the views of reformers, prostitutes, vice societies and social workers during the nation’s most concentrated anti-prostitution campaign in U.S. history. Rosen’s work examines the “complicated web of particular economic, social, and family difficulties that led individual working class women to choose prostitution as a survival strategy.” Rosen critiques reformers for failing to focus on economic issues (low pay; segregated workplace) while ignoring the sexual abuse in families choosing to target prostitution, which contemporaries portrayed as a symptom of urban life and broader national change. The closure of red light districts in the second decade of the twentieth century failed to eliminate prostitution. Moreover, these efforts reflected the desires of political, business, and medical interests rather than those of industrialization’s ills or women. Progressive faith in government and social science emerged to create various juridical institutions to monitor and rehabilitate female sexuality. Judicial venues like Chicago’s Morals Court or New York’s Women’s Court cooperated with vice squads, social workers, and prisons to “entrap and imprison prostitutes.” Rehabilitation in reformatories and the like consisted of gendered activities such as sewing, scrubbing, and cooking, activities unlikely to prove highly beneficial in the industrial economy women inhabited. This apparatus meant to protect the “exploited prostitute” led instead to repressive laws aimed at commercialized vice that failed to end prostitution while disproportionately affecting working class women “the antiprostitution movement resulted in the professional and official victimization of poor women.” Rooming houses, flats, massage parlors, and call girls replaced the brothels of vice districts as reformers never accounted for the gender and class discrimination endured by working women .

The growth of commercialized entertainment opened up new spaces for women. However, reformers and others often associated sites of leisure with inappropriate vice and prostitution. The shift from homosocial leisure activity to a more heterosexual example caused great unease and accusations of sexual corruption. Saloons, theatres, and dancehalls stood accused of facilitating prostitution. However, commercialized leisure accommodated numerous groups and classes, while prostitution existed, it did so alongside other social and sexual interactions.

Rosen notes that historians have failed to fully explore working women’s motives for both occasional and commercial prostitution. Revealingly, working class people’s ignored morality based arguments, viewing prostitution primarily as an economic decision. Considering pay in other fields and the dangers or difficulties that came along with them, many women chose prostitution because it appeared to be easier work or at least no worse than the difficult conditions under which they already labored. Gender and class discrimination in employment, concerns about stigma, and the continuing issue of economic dependence framed choices, but as Rosen points out, “most women chose to enter prostitution … because they perceived prostitution as a means of fulfilling particular economic, social, or psychological needs.” Neither were all women who engaged in prostitution professionals, rather many women participated in occasional prostitution in order to make ends meet.

Hysteria over “white slavery” in the Progressive Period, Rosen finds emerges from the very real trafficking of women as sex slaves. Though it raised awareness and antiprostitution efforts, its focus on native born white women excluded other groups such as immigrants and blacks. Generally, reformers directed little attention toward prostitution in black communities, assuming it inherent to African Americans or believing it to be an intracommunal issue for such communities to sort out independently. Surprisingly, native born women of foreign parentage serve as the largest demographic engaged in the practice, rather than the Southern and Eastern immigrants of Europe that reformers believed responsible. In fact, immigrant groups stressing family solidarity and chastity, notably the Irish and Italian communities, often illustrated lower levels of prostitution.

Economic, social, and political change pervaded nearly all aspects of early twentieth century U.S. culture. Prostitution serves as a useful lens from which to view not only issues around female sexuality but its connection to concurrent forces. Reflecting the “rationalized and commercialized” impulses of America, prostitution mirrored several issues that drove Progressive reformers including commercialization, immigration, unfair business practices, monopolization, and alienation/lonlieness driven by economic change.

Looking back at the nineteenth and twentieth century, Jurgen Habermas noted the increasing importance of recreation, “Leisure behavior supplies the key to the floodlit privacy of the new sphere, to the externalization of what is declared to be the inner self.” As Habermas realized, leisure revealed much about one’s identity, furthermore, such sites allowed for women to craft a larger if limited place in the urban public sphere. Rosen’s work pointed in similar directions focusing on prostitution and more widely the commercialization of vice and leisure. Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (1986) builds on several of Rosen’s points shifting the focus more squarely on working women’s leisure, which served as arenas “for the articulation of different values and behaviors.” Noting Rosen’s observations that fashions associated with prostitution later emerged among middle class women, Peiss argues that working class women’s engagement with commercialized leisure helped to shift America from a homosocial to a heterosocial society. Young white working women attending urban dance halls, movies, and amusement parks mixed with their male counterparts establishing a working class youth culture that later influenced a similar middle class variant. Like The Lost Sisterhood, Cheap Amusements refutes the trickledown theory suggesting that such cultural exchange occurred in two directions. Working women’s participation in commercialized leisure reshaped the construction of gender among working class peoples while also affecting similar developments among counterparts from the middle and upper strata. Moreover, Peiss’s work pushes back against historians who argue that “cheap amusements” lulled women into a false consciousness, allowing consumerism to overtake identity.

Accordingly, the small pleasures such women took from dance halls, amusement parks, and movies failed to emancipate them. Cheap Amusements acknowledges that the freedom gained by working women occurred in a limited space that subordinated women even if the greater freedom occurred in the “context of limited heterosocial relations.” However, the agency displayed by working women contributed to the restructuring of gender and the shift from a homosocial to heterosocial culture.

Beginning with non-commercialized forms of leisure such as the street and local saloons, Peiss illustrates the sexually segregated nature of late nineteenth century leisure. Ideals of mutuality and reciprocity frequently surfaced especially in male rituals such as “treating”. In the homosocial world of nineteenth century, treating required men to purchases drinks for their fellow patrons. Illustrating the pronounced gender divisions of the time, men and women experienced these ideals differently. Working men occupied spaces of leisure such as bars or taverns while women did so in the home or among friends at sites of work such as laundering, cooking, or caring for a neighbor’s child. Women might occasionally visit saloons, however, those who stood unaccompanied at the bar risked being mistaken for prostitutes.

Local leisure often took place in the streets or in urban halls dotting communities around New York. Dancing proved popular among all ethnicities and races. Local public halls, saloon dance halls, and rackets all preceded the larger venues. Leisure options rested on the rigidity or strictness of the various ethnic groups occupying a neighborhood. The expansion of commercialized leisure simultaneously fueled similar developments in the liquor industry. Driven by the leisure desires of working women, a broader culture of commercialized entertainment expanded. Peiss’s discussion of Coney Island’s role further illustrates this point. The success of Steeplechase Park over its competitors Dreamland and Luna Park stemmed from its embrace of sexuality and romance. Drawing upon cultural patterns derived from working class amusements, street life and popular entertainment, Steeplechase successfully presented a non-threatening sexuality that encouraged working women’s attendance but also promoted middle class ideals. Diminishing class and gender boundaries, Coney Island appropriated working class youth culture’s focus on mixed sex interaction.

Female sexuality remained a dominant area of concern. The increased heterosocial nature of “cheap amusements” worried reformers. Working women attended amusements in larger groups or with a fellow female companion. Such friendships or informal networks, often ignored by historians, helped women navigate the social worlds of dance halls. Some women accepted gifts in return for companionship or sexual favors ranging from holding hands to intercourse. Known as treating, the heterosocial world of leisure altered this ideal of nineteenth homosocial spaces. “Treating” (Rosen noted a similar process) distinguishing itself from prostitution. Money was never exchanged but rather young women might articulate a material need or want, while her male companion acquired such requests in return for other favors. The cultural of communal dance halls encouraged treating which also created a new type of women referred to as “charity girls”. Though women shaped these developments to various degrees, Peiss points out that “the realities of working class life … intruded … women’s situation in the labor force and family undercut their social freedom and treating underscored their material dependency.”

Popular culture, especially through movies, broadcast much of the style and heterosocial interactions of working class youth culture so visibly on display at Coney Island and in urban dance halls. Again, Peiss notes early movies drew upon vaudevillian plots and routines that had been popular in the working class cheap theatres. Moreover, film exhibited the behavior of working class youth culture, reinterpreting then broadcasting it to other young men and women. The relative affordability of movies allowed broader sections of society to attend. For example, movies allowed for greater generational diversity. Young men and women dominated most other commercialized leisure, movies however, enabled married women and older folks to attend. For women, most leisure activity ended with marriage or motherhood.

Though women found ways to assert their independence and redefine relations between genders through commercial leisure, its effects remained limited. Wage working women may have viewed reformers as out of touch but the admonishments of some concerning the potential for manipulation proved accurate as the commodification of female sexuality contributed to new forms of exploitation. Moreover, even the few freedoms created existed in the context of economic dependence and gendered discrimination in employment. Commercial culture emphasized personal fulfillment diverting women’s class interests. No feminist response arose meaning that the allocation of power, work, and resources remained skewed favorably toward men.

Many of the wage working women attending New York’s cheap amusements lived independently from family or a husband. Shifting the urban setting to the Midwestern capital Chicago, Joanne Meyerowitz’s Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988) explores the agency and influence of similar Midwestern women. Like Peiss’ New Yorkers and Rosen’s prostitues, Meyerowitz’s “women adrift” challenged traditional society by engaging in peer and urban informal subcultures through which they established sexual and social patterns that middle class and “bohemian” later women followed. If the preferences of working women in Cheap Amusements benefited Steeplechase Park while penalizing the demonstrably more Victorian competition, Meyerowitz’s working class females contributed to the decline of Victorian culture through housing choices, participation in new informal urban networks, and occupational interactions.

Previous historians frequently describe urban wage earning women’s experiences occurring within in two contradictory frames, the liberation and family structure models. The former argues that wage work disrupted familial and ethnic ties, creating economic independence for women, thus eluding patriarchal standards prevalent in homes and the community. In contrast, the family structure model suggests that industrial wages minimally affected women who primarily remained “dutiful daughters” contributing their earnings to their families. However, Meyerowitz points to the weaknesses of each arguing for a “third way” in which “historians … now find extrafamilial “work cultures” in department stores, factories, hospitals, and offices, and peer oriented leisure time subcultures in working class neighborhoods and recreation facilities.” Informal networks and subcultures provided not only community or protection but served as “arenas for change”. Again, as in Cheap Amusements, “women adrift” experienced new opportunities and subcultures but they did so within a system based on gendered employment discrimination that greatly limited their lives.

Women adrift endured similar shifting characterizations as those established in Rosen’s work. Women began as victims corrupted by urban decay and lecherous men, transitioning to moral polluters or threats then by the 1920s fading into respectability as economic change, popular tastes, and ideas about sexuality changed. However, historians have missed their contributions for two major reasons. First, scholars too often focused on family life and trade union activity. Meyerowitz’s female wage earners did not participate in either. Ethnic backgrounds often determined occupational paths and few women adrift participated in union activity. Second, historians failed to consider sexual service whether it be treating, or prostitution, occasional or commercial.

Similar to Rosen, and Peiss, Meyerowitz argues that more complex matters than simply poverty drove wage earning women’s decisions. Women adrift migrated to cities for numerous reasons but prominent among them independence. The desire for autonomy emerges clearly in employment choices and housing. Domestic work declined not only because of industrialization but also as result of preferences for individual freedom that such employment failed to offer. Sexual harassment and abuse existed in both, but wage earning women found new networks of support in newer occupations such as waitresses and department store saleswomen. The move away from boarding with private families toward organized homes then toward furnished rooms and apartments, reflected the desire for working women to exert more control over their own lives. New employment and housing opportunities enabled the formation of new subcultures and informal peer networks. Generally, “adrifts” developed these bonds of “mutual dependence” either with peers or men, through the practice of “treating”. Acknowledging the importance of commercialized leisure in facilitating both relationships, Meyerowitz illustrates how new negative portrayals of women developed such as “gold diggers”, the “kept women” and the “pick up”. Each illustrated the continued economic dependence upon which many women struggled.

The popular image of flappers and emancipated women common to American culture in the 1920s often credits middle and upper class women for developing greater freedoms and public space. However, Meyerowitz suggests that the bohemian neighbors of “women adrift” observed and borrowed fashion, sensibilities, and sexual behaviors that eventually established themselves widely in the middle and upper classes. If concerns about the fate or influence of women adrift declined by the 1920’s, Meyerowitz argues middle class culture had so imbued many of the practices exhibited by “women adrift” that they no longer seemed threatening. Concern about levels of poverty also declined as the nation descended into economic depression, making the destitution of such women less shocking. Like other writers, Meyerowitz pays little attention to black women due to sourcing issues. As noted previously, many reformers ignored black communities. Though Reiss, Meyerowitz, and Rosen do discuss black women’s experiences pointing out racial and economic discrimination, different conceptions of “respectability” or increased levels of prostitution arrests due to biased enforcement, black women and men often take secondary roles. Though relatedly, each focuses far more on ethnic differences.

The concern centered on young single urban women encompassed more than adults. The same rapid industrialization and urban growth responsible for change also affected working class adolescent girls. Mary Odem’s Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States 1880-1920 (1995) explores the roles of four main actors in the construction of state regulation of teenage girls: middle class reformers, state officials, working class adolescent girls, and working class parents. Though like Peiss, Rosen, and Meyerowitz’s sources, most reflect the views of reformers and newspaper publishers, adopting a more juridical approach, Odem also incorporates criminal and juvenile court records from Alameda and Los Angeles counties arguing that California’s reform movement, despite high levels of activity, remained ignored by historians. Additionally, Odem’s work attempts to include discussions of racial minorities to a greater degree which it accomplishes to a certain extent.

Delinquent Daughters divides the reform movement into two stages, paralleling similar organizational divisions in Rosen and Meyerowitz’s works. The years 1880-1900 illustrate a drive by reformists and feminists to raise age of consent laws arguing that young girls were often seduced and corrupted by immoral men. Again, as victims of male lust, women’s portrayals epitomized the helpless orphan trope. In its second stage, reformers acknowledged the sexuality of young girls but framed it as dangerous, blaming social and family environments for delinquency. Such fears led to the creation of state apparatuses for surveillance and institutionalization like special police, juvenile courts, detention centers and reformatories. With this understanding Odem posits three central points. First, moral campaigns illustrated race, class, and gender tensions that had always existed but accelerated in their expression due to industrialization, urbanization, and expanding reform efforts. Reformers advocated middle class ideas of “female restraint and modesty.” Second, though reformers intended for state regulation to be nurturing and concerned with the individual, often reformatories and legal enforcement unfolded in unintended ways. Local municipal authorities resented the influence of reform, resisting its imposition. Moreover, the implementation of such policies targeted “young working class women who violated dominant codes of female respectability.” Finally, like previous authors, Odem questions the idea that middle class values were imposed from the top down by reforms. Instead, Odem points to incidents in which working class parents used the new state regulatory system to reassert control over their own daughters, though in some moments these same parents endured unexpected results from state authorities regarding their daughters including extended incarceration or institutionalization. Odem carefully notes that working class attempts to use the system in this way did not necessarily illustrate adoption of middle class morals or behaviors, but were an attempt to reassert familial control over daughters.

Odem’s work acknowledges the importance of leisure and wage work in constructing a new social reality for women, “as they earned wages in stores, offices, and factories, and spent their leisure hours in dance halls, and movie theatres, young women were constructing a new social role for themselves.” As well, their participation in heterosocial youth culture in spaces of leisure furthered the decline of familial control. However, Odem’s work focuses much more on the juridical and state regulation aspects of historical inquiry than Meyerowitz and Peiss, Still, parallels remain. If gender bias existed in employment and more widely, this proved no less true in court settings. Probation for delinquent boys frequently occurred but for adolescent girls this option rarely emerged. State regulation meant to reform girls took on a different tinge, “enforcement of the law became a punitive process for the young women and girls it meant to protect, as they faced possible confinement in detention centers and reformatories and had to endure grueling interrogations by male judges and attorneys who frequently labeled them promisicous or immoral.” Race and ethnicity proved important factors as well. Blacks and immigrants of both sexes received harsher punitive measures then whites convicted of similar charges. Reformers attempted to remedy some gender bias by promoting the appointment of female judges and juries. In Los Angeles juvenile courts, female judges presided, though in a different environment than their male counterparts. However, though female officials attempted to reduce harsh punishments, they exhibited a similar mindset regarding the threat “delinquent daughters” represented, “women court workers never doubted that young women and girls should in fact be apprehended and disciplined for legal conduct.” Rulings and institutionalization still fell disproportionately on poor and working class women and girls.

As others have argued, similar to the declining concern over “women adrift”, the diminished hysteria over adolescent girls resulted from less threatening middle class appropriations of working class sexual mores. Middle class individuals adopted new ideologies of sexual practices that focused more on pleasure. The heterosexual nature of adolescent girls took a back seat over larger fears regarding the “frigid female” and lesbianism. However, the “legal mechanisms of control” established “continued to monitor and regulate the sexuality of young women and girls throughout much of the twentieth century,” while also imposing class, ethnic, and racial biases. In contrast to Meyerowitz and Peiss who focus less on the state, Odem’s work illustrates the negative governmental aspects related to women’s increased economic and social power.

As illustrated by numerous historians, over the past thirty years, scholars have explored leisure practices, work decisions, and housing choices to illustrate working class female agency. Working women’s activities spurred the development of greater sexual freedom, which in turn realigned both middle class values and gender relations. Expanding on these ideas, Elizabeth Alice Clement’s Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City 1900-1945 “explores the historical relationships between different kinds of sexual intimacy and exchange in American history, culture, and social politic.” Building on the scholarship of Mary Odem, Ruth Rosen, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Kathy Peiss, Clement argues that a broad multi-ethnic working class culture, that illustrated marked differences according to ethnicity, religion, and race, led to significant changes in sexual norms among Americans in the first half of the century. However, Clements pushes further than the others in several ways. First, drawing upon more recent work from gender studies, specifically those relating to immigrant and African American women, Love for Sale suggests that female immigrants experienced assimilation differently than their male counterparts. For Clement’s working women, the most important areas of contestation concerning which principles of Americanization to adopt occurred within the home “over issues of family formation; that is courtship, engagements, and marriage.” Moreover, having published in 2006, Clement benefits from recent scholarship exploring with greater depth and nuance issues of race, relational identity, class, and gender than her predecessors. Thus, her work builds significantly on the significant but less robust observations regarding race and ethnicity made by previous scholars. Second, Clements extends her study to include the formation of “the larger sex industry” in the 1920s, which greatly impacted prostitution along with “racial and ethnic patterns of commercialized sex in modern America.” Similarly, Love for Sale attempts to qualify claims by historians that middle class “dating” sprang from working class experimentation while also connecting them to broader changes in sexual conduct and notions of morality.

Focusing on “the place prostitution held in the moral world of working class New Yorkers”, Clement pays close attention to how working class communities articulated a more nuanced view of sexuality than their middle class peers, “sexual behavior existed on a spectrum that paralleled a similar spectrum of respectability. Interacting in complicated ways, understandings of respectability shifted to accommodate changes in sexual behavior.” In related terms, categories of sexual interaction such as treating, dating, courtship, and prostitution exhibited specific practices and behaviors that defined each. If previous authors demanded state or middle class intervention to police these behaviors, Clements, though acknowledging state legal and juridical influence, shifts the focus to working class women policing themselves. For example, treating emerged as a “wedge that opened a space between respectability and prostitution.” Aware of the legal and social ramifications of prostitution, working women and girls distinguished sharply between the two, “young women at work evaluated each other and condemned those who fell short of the new balance that treating required … young women used work time and work relationships to define and police this new behavior.” Prostitution’s place in the local community such as its prevalence within saloons and tenements combined with the general density of New York in the early twentieth century meant it existed visibly within working class neighborhoods. Depending on the location, some located in furnished rooms or apartments integrated themselves modestly maintaining quiet lives and others, such as those in tenements occupied public space more boisterously, openly soliciting passing men. Much like earlier scholars, Clements concludes most working class peoples viewed their decisions in economic not moral terms. However, young women clearly distinguished between treating and prostitution as evidenced above, but importantly, these concerns were driven by the need for internal (self-esteem/self-dignity) and external (reputation) respect.

The repression of World War I and Prohibition, culminated in organized crime’s dominance over both the liquor and illicit sex industry. Brothels fell under their purview while the formerly dominant madams occupied an intermediary management position. At the bottom of the industry, occasional prostitution flourished “women flooded into the casual forms of prostitution.” Simultaneously, a bifurcated sex industry arose, one revolving around alcohol free family and couple friendly “cheap amusements” such as dance halls, theaters, and amusement parks and a second, featuring speak easies, burlesques, and taxi dance halls where often patrons imbibed. The effects of treating on dating among all classes along with the rise of a commercialized vice industry contributed to more open ideas about sexual interaction. As do other scholars, Clements notes the resulting rising incidence of premarital sex throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. In addition, this bifurcation established patterns of racial discrimination that continue today since black women and other minorities could not work within the legalized sex industry. Prostitution’s shift to the margins of society, the increased presence of casual prostitution on city streets along with the involvement of organized crime led to increasing levels of violence and incarceration for prostitutes. Most vulnerable were black women, the majority of whom who practiced the trade did so at the street level, enduring the most suffering by the police, while earning diminished profits. Mary Odem and Ruth Rosen draw similar observations, however, Clements work pushes beyond their periodization. For example, though several scholars note the differing interpretations behind respectability between whites and blacks, Clements also explores differing attitudes toward unwed mothers. If such incidents severely scarred whites, among blacks, at least within the family, far fewer negative associations emerged. Still, class intervened here as well. If working class blacks conveyed a sense of acceptance regarding adolescent out of wedlock pregnancy, their middle class counterparts, concerned about “respectability” in terms of racial uplift, continued to look down on such incidents. Examples of intraracial class differentiation provided by Love for Sale illustrates its more nuanced exploration of race as compared with previous historians.

Ultimately, treating opened up new public spaces where not all unaccompanied women were prostitutes, it allowed for greater possibilities regarding women’s public presence, however, it never “challenged the basic assumption that women in public were sexually available and interested in men’s advances.” Furthermore, the absorption of treating into “dating” created greater complications. If previously, two individuals clearly articulated expectations and rewards through treating, its envelopment by dating ended such conversations leading to greater confusion and warped expectations. Such developments persisted throughout the twentieth century resulting in greater sexual violence or exploitation. Moreover, increased premarital intercourse continued to be viewed by the traditional double standard. Thus, during World War II, as War Department officials realized that venereal infections spread more often from enlisted men’s interactions with average women and not prostitutes, the government expanded its repression to all “bad women”. The need to prevent the transmission of venereal disease from such women led the army to adopt “contact tracing” which tracked those women thought to be infected often leading to institutionalization or incarceration. Working women caught in this net suffered real economic hardships. As Clements observes, WWII did not create such attitudes and regulations, rather it accentuated and build upon them to further restrict women’s sexuality.

Perhaps the most surprisingly thing about the work of Meyerowitz, Reiss, Rosen, Odem, and Clements is how unsurprising it is. Issues of gender, intimacy, and agency now occupy respected uncontroversial places in U.S. history. When Ruth Rosen’s observed in The Lost Sisterhood that “a gender system exists alongside a class system, strongly shaping each individual’s psychosexual reality,” she represented a growing tide in United States history. Rosen’s contribution placed her at the forefront of gender as an analytic. Four years later Joan Scott published her famous (infamous?) piece “Gender: A Useful Category for Analysis”. In the hands of Rosen and others gender analysis provides a view of the inequality between men and women, while also proving useful in revealing other societal hierarchies such as those based on race, class, or ethnicity. In this way , the agency of women through a gender analysis enables historians to convey class stratification in the Progressive era while illustrating parallel fears about industrialization, urbanization, and unfettered capitalism. For example, the monopolization of prostitution and its commercialization reflected similar processes occurring in industry and entertainment. Each had been part of private family life but by the twentieth century working class intimacy unfolded in crowded tenements, on the streets, and at sites of leisure. The commodification of sex and leisure mirrored similar developments in labor and work.

With that said, the later works by Clements and Odem clearly benefit from the expansion of cultural, gender, and ethnic studies. While Rosen and to a lesser extent Meyerowitz investigate how race affected black women in the same period, each historian scratches at the surface. The growth of scholarship enables later works to further explore the racial issues affecting women and men of the time.

Finally, the issue of agency both for women and the working classes emerges as a unifying theme. Many historians long emphasized that working class behavior derived itself from middle class influences. These historians question that conclusion. For example, Meyerowitz argues working class fashions and sexual behavior contributed to the popular figure of the flapper. Peiss suggests that working class youth culture, visible in commercialized leisure altered formerly homosocial worlds, influencing gender relations across classes. Rosen’s women did not choose prostitution out of sheer poverty but rather such choices grew from a constellation of factors, but often it remained women’s choice. Furthermore, Rosen points out that many of the popular fashions associated with prostitution, like make up, later emerged as middle class staples. Finally, Odom’s working class parents attempted to utilize state regulatory institutions to control their teenage daughters, while Clement’s single young women policed their own community’s sexual behaviors in part to limit intrusion by authorities. Debates continue over the role of gender as an analytic, what counts as agency, and how representative cultural/intimate history truly are, but such approaches have pushed our understandings of complex processes like courtship, leisure, and prostitution.

'''Ryan Reft'''

Race, Sexuality, and the Public Sphere in American History

2012-06-21T08:27:47Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "Jurgen Habermas’ work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeoisie Society suggests that through economic change and material a..."

Jurgen Habermas’ work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeoisie Society suggests that through economic change and material accumulation there developed in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe a “public sphere” which served to “connect the state with the needs of the society” while preventing encroachment by the state into the private sphere. Dominated by middle class merchants and “men of letters”, Habermas’ public sphere created a universally accessible civil society which by definition could not exclude groups, “a public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all.” Yet, by Habermas’ own lights only those with education or property actively entered into it. Certainly, American history features not only the exclusion of various communities, but also sometime wholesale invisibility. One might ask, what role has the public sphere played for Americans? How has the role changed from the nineteenth through the twentieth century and how did it contribute to the rise of identity politics?

Recent historians harnessing Habermas’ frameworks while critiquing his conclusions, examine the role of the public sphere in nineteenth and twentieth century America establishing rights, membership, and ideas of citizenship, thus laying the groundwork for the rise of identity politics. Crucial to contemporary historians' understanding of the public sphere lay in its pluralism. If Habermas articulated a vision of a single public sphere, historians such as Elisha Barkley Brown, Mary Ryan, and David Hurewitz suggest multiple political spheres or as Thomas Holt noted “If institutional and material conditions matter, than we should not speak of the black public sphere but a plurality of public spheres.”

The rise of twentieth century identity politics remains popularly associated with the “rights” movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As people organized themselves into groups according to various factors such as race, gender, and sexuality, interests diverged creating a fragmented political landscape. According to Daniel Hurewitz’s Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, these political developments emerged decades before the Stonewall Riots or Black Power movement. Rather the interaction between three “communities” in the Edendale neighborhood of Los Angeles, artists, communists, and homosexuals created Habermasesque “counterpublics” that reformulated politics such that “all three communities strove to reformulate the relationship between the private self and the polity.” Like Nan Boyd’s Wide Open Town, Hurewitz traces fluctuating ideas about male sexuality as gender play gave way to fixed ideas of homosexuality and the “deviance” dominant culture ascribed to it. Unlike Boyd, Hurewitz explores these developments more generally in Los Angeles’ political climate exploring how the idea of the “authentic self” became dominant in political battles of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s resulting in the identity politics so prevalent in the 20th century’s last fifty years. However, the public sphere did not arise and fall within the twentieth century, but rather took form in the 18th and 19th centuries.

While Hurewitz examines 20th century efforts of communities to establish and promote themselves in the public sphere, other authors have examined similar processes in earlier periods. Mary Ryan’s “counternarrative” to Habermas’ exposition illustrates such an argument. Rather than seeing the “cacophonous style of politics” that dominated the mid-nineteenth century as fulfillment of the public sphere’s collapse, Ryan argues it “can be read as an effective means of fulfilling the public promise to openly challenge political domination.” Though vital to the nation’s idea of the public sphere, Ryan’s female reformers and suffragists first had to attain a space within it since “women were patently excluded from the bourgeois public sphere …. [placed in] a separate realm called the private.” Thus, bourgeois America anchored its publicness in a “private and gendered social geography”. Throughout the nineteenth century women did establish a public presence through various reform movements by exploiting dominant ideas about privacy and femininity, such that “women navigated a political history deeply imbricated in the transformation of the public sphere.” For Habermas, the collapse of the private sphere remained problematic, however Ryan sees in it an emancipatory development. The same private sphere in which white women had been confined, became, in great part due to the efforts of countless female reformers, “the fountainhead of public order.” The strength of women’s private virtue established a place in the public sphere. Creating space in this sphere proved the first step in gaining “publicity” or “familiarity” which later could be transformed into formal rights.

Nineteenth century African Americans struggled to gain a similar “familiarity” or as Judith Butler suggests, “intelligibility” within the public sphere. Elsa Barkley Brown confirms the importance of the media and familiarity when she notes attempts by black Richmonders during Reconstruction “to have their own story widely circulated. When local white newspapers refused to publish their account, they had it published in the New York Tribune.” Hoping to create “counterpublics” in response to the dominant white middle class public sphere, blacks harnessed the media and public spaces. Black women of the time appealed in public settings but under a specific set of political and social structures. Brown’s freedwomen and freedmen openly “participated from the gallery, loudly engaging in debates” over state constitutional reforms. Again, Habermas’ analysis of the public sphere failed to account for differentiation between citizenry. Limits placed on blacks, women, and other affected not only their participation in the public sphere but created internal and external political spheres in which roles were defined differently. Freedwomen, though denied formal suffrage, exerted pressure upon freedmen illustrating a collective understanding of the vote.

Many historians trace the burgeoning public face of black women in the late nineteenth century with the political limits placed on their male counterparts. Contrarily, Brown argues that the public spheres black women occupied deserves as much credit for such developments but that as they laid claim to this social/political arena, gender and class dynamics intervened, “The internal political arena, which in the immediate Post Civil War era was grounded in the notion of a collective voice which gave men, women and children a platform and allowed them all participation, came increasingly in the late nineteenth century to be shaped by a narrowing notion of politics and appropriate political behavior.” Mass meetings no longer took place exclusively in churches but had shifted to sites such as literary societies, ward meetings, saloons, labor organizations, and women’s clubs, expressing a black male middle class perspective. The boisterous open forum of the church no longer sufficed. How much of this was due to internal dynamics alone? Did middle class black leaders want to reassert male political dominance or were they attempting adapt to a broader white middle class paradigm that enjoyed significant cultural capital in the public sphere?

For nineteenth century political actors, establishing a public sphere or even a voice represented both opportunity and danger. While formulating a level of “intelligibility” or familiarity served to advance political interests, the representations of a community in the public sphere proved limiting, leading to unexpected consequences. Hannah Rosen’s freedwomen testified before Congress reformulating ideas of citizenship while asserting their worthiness as humans. However, though their Congressional testimony advanced this goal in the public sphere, it simultaneously reified white society’s stereotypes concerning black male masculinity. The fact that these women had been raped and now publicly testified to this fact undermined public perceptions of black men’s ability to protect the “virtue” of African American women. In relation to white society’s projected vision of black male masculinity, Brown’s freedwomen increasingly limited discussions that might inhibit black male manhood for fear that “the discourse on manhood could keep the concern with violence against women in the public discussion while at the same time setting the stage for issues of domestic abuse and other forms of intraracial violence, which could be evidence of the uncivility of black men, to be silenced as politically dangerous.” Sexual violence came to be a women’s issue as black women, in some ways mirroring Mary Ryan’s white counterparts, formed “autonomous women’s associations” that “promulgated class specific ideas of respectability, in part justifying their public role through the need to impart such protective measures to working class women.” Unfortunately, by relegating such violence to the “women’s sphere” issues of “sexual violence” no longer merited the same consideration as community wide issues contributing a silence about such matters while promoting the idea that racial violence towards blacks occurred exclusively against men. Like Brown, Rosen’s work attempts to dispute such discursive historical trends, highlighting the violence endured by black women of the nineteenth century. Ironically, in some ways attempts by Brown and Rosen illustrate the same processes of “worthiness” that political actors needed to illustrate for political and material rights from society, the violence endured by black women constituted their right to inclusion.

Middle class respectability served as a driving force for many nineteenth century communities sense of publicness. Habermas’ vision of a bourgeoisie led “public sphere” proved pervasive even for minority groups and women. Chinese merchants of the nineteenth century formed the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association which “coordinated efforts in 1882 to fight Chinese discrimination.” While establishing a public sphere to counter that by city and state health officials that labeled Chinese communities as “diseased”, perverse, or “deviant”, Chinese merchant associations also leveled the community, relegating working class Chinese and those living outside “respectable domesticities” to a marginal presence. If Brown’s community of freedpersons regulated their own political actions, such as publicly castigating individuals for casting an errant vote against the broader community’s interest, members of San Francisco’s Chinatown exerted similar pressures. When some merchants assented to inoculations which many Chinese viewed as coercive, one “leading merchant” found himself at the mercy of an angry “mob”, finding refuge only in the CCBA. This disconnection between laborers unwilling to undergo inoculation and merchants who saw an economic advantage to such actions illustrates Brown’s ideas concerning the complex interplay of class in “internal political spheres”.

The formations of women’s organizations, benevolent associations like the CCBA and other forms of civic society reveals their importance to nineteenth century social and political worlds. Associations, as William Novak argues, served as a central organizing principle in determining freedoms or liberties for nineteenth century citizens. Localities controlled ideas of citizenship as much if not more than federal authorities. Associations determined the level of freedoms and unfreedoms, individuals and their broader community enjoyed or suffered. Particular organizations carried specific subjectivities leading to a conflation of an organization’s identity with that of the individual member. With that noted, most reform societies featured middle and upper class leadership. The pervasiveness of nineteenth century bourgeoisie ideals clearly emerges among the actors in Brown, Ryan, Novak and Shah’s work.

Associations and their place in the public sphere proved no less important as the nineteenth century melted into the twentieth. Hurewitz’s examples illustrate the power of associations less for rights and citizenship (at least in terms of direct state munificence), than for establishing economic/social/political affiliations while also creating various intimacies and familiarities. Edendale housed the city’s burgeoning artistic, communist, and gay communities, even if in the case of homosexuals they had yet to form a self identified population. The artistic impulse to express the inner self authentically through their art reverberated among the Edendale community and as Hurewitz argues, more broadly. However, it is unclear whether Hurewitz suggests that artistic shifts in America (since European modernists of the same period engaged in a very different project at the time) fueled the movement toward a public “interiority” that contributed to the development of identity politics or that it reflected a wider shift within the national society. For example, Habermas argues that the “shrinking of the private sphere into the inner areas of a conjugal family” served to create the façade of a “perfectly private personal sphere.” Leisure time such as the informal gatherings that American artists in Edendale engaged in became the divining rod for interiority, “Leisure behavior supplies the key to the floodlit privacy of the new sphere, to the externalization of what is declared to be the inner self.” Similar to the salons of the nineteenth century, Edendale’s artists crafted ideas about their own interiority and how to broadcast it to the wider public. However, Habermas viewed the public sphere in more monolithic terms. He failed to consider that the disintegration of the dominant public sphere meant smaller, but no less active public spheres from atomized groups. Therefore, the artist enclave in Edendale may have been reflecting ideas that unfolded within artistic communities nationally, but only in those specific spheres rather than more broadly in society.

Habermas’ ideas concerning the public sphere clearly resonates with Hurewitz. Acknowledging the importance of the publicness while pointing a to a more expansive understanding, Hurewitz notes “The drive toward identity politics lay deeper and wider in the culture … Its roots lay in a broad array of social arenas where fundamental questions about the self and politics were renegotiated in the middle decades.” Within these social arenas various actors and their constituencies mobilized, to “renegotiate” their political positions and identities. Habermas feared that his public sphere had been “transmogrified into a sphere of culture consumption” by the wider media and that “the deprivatized province of interiority was hollowed out by the mass media; a pseudo-public sphere of a no longer literary public … patched together to create a sort of superfamilial zone of familiarity.” However, Habermas ignores the reformations of kinship and associations that also occurred as illustrated through Hurewitz’s three primary examples of artists, communists, and homosexuals. Habermas may be correct in asserting that the collapse of the conjugal family’s ability to influence individuals undermined “patriarchal authority” contributing to a situation in which “family members are now socialized by extrafamilial authorities, by society directly.” Yet, the ascendency of “interiority” into a public sphere meant such inner selves previously the domain of the family could now be between unrelated individuals. Thus, communities such as the communists or homosexuals held a vested interest in increasing their “superfamilial zone of familiarity” to the broader society through use of public spaces and media. Simultaneously, the state attempted to make such groups more familiar but in a negative manner, promoting negative associations for each hoping to reduce their growth and visible presence. The state regulated these public spaces, such as performances of gender play and other public displays that cast negative aspersions on homosexuals.

Returning to Novak, the importance of associations between artists, communists and homosexuals in Edendale helped to spread ideas about sexuality, the internal-self, and public authenticity. The collapse of the private into the public emerged from the cross pollenization between the three distinct groups. If associations did not convey formal political rights as in Novak’s nineteenth century example, they did grant access to ideas and concepts that led to familiarities, intimacies and political mobilization later which in turn contributed to expanded rights later.

Nan Boyd, George Chauncey, and David Johnson’s work clearly serves as the intellectual foundation upon which Hurewitz builds his argument. Yet in terms of Boyd’s work, Wide Open Town differs in many ways from Bohemian Los Angeles. For example, the 1930s emerges as the critical decade in Los Angeles. For Hurewitz, the 1930s brought a convergence of forces that refashioned politics and sexuality simultaneously. Ideas about “faries” and “pansies” changed. If men’s sexuality had seemed unfixed such that prior to the 1930s one could engage in “homosexual acts” while maintaining a more permanent heterosexuality, the 1930s flipped this concept presenting homosexuality as a “fixed” identity, one associated with deviance. Boyd’s Great Depression San Francisco endured similar transformations regarding sexuality, but the town’s political structure remained “as much of a “open town” during the 1930s as it had been under Prohibition” though by 1937, “Police Chief Quinn "declared war" on female impersonators and announced that "lewd entertainers must be stopped!". Los Angeles authorities also viewed “gender play” as threatening even if the wider populace remained still unconvinced, “bar patrons may have celebrated the fairies for their gender play, their homosexual desires, or both, the raids marked a growing state sponsored belief that the “panze joints” represented a serious danger.” The state’s concern did not match that of the general public’s since magazines like Variety exhibited an ambivalence toward gender play praising it on one page while noting raids on various establishments on others.

Here, clearly, Hurewitz begins to point to one of the key elements of his argument, that the developing politics of the “emotional interior” threatened state institutions such that regulation of bodies and concurrently radical political movements (communists) became priorities. Political and civil officials conflated communism with homosexuality and deviance, “their assessment of sexual perversion as dangerous was part of a wider cultural fabric that wove together a series of anxieties about sexuality and Communism and labeled them as interrelated dangers.” The recall of Mayor Shaw in 1937 and 1938 illustrated this development as “it pulled together a cultural framework that ascribed political significance and a sense of identity to sexual activities and desires.” Following the recall, individuals were often jailed or institutionalized according to their radical political beliefs or “deviant homosexuality”.

Communists also illustrate the role of the public sphere and the external “interiority”. Constantly organizing and putting on public political displays often through artistic, if sometimes too pedantic, street performances, Communists openly expressed their interiority which emerged as both political and personal. Their utilization of public space for political action, while harnessing the ideas of artists to present their inner selves, resembled the public actions of Mary Ryan’s nineteenth century female reformers but with a distinctly personal, interiority absent from Ryan’s actors. For Ryan the “private sphere” legitimized women’s activities but did not necessarily create identities. In fact, the identity of nineteenth century women legitimized their place in the public sphere, since they were seen as bringing the role of motherhood to society outside the home. In contrast, Hurewitz’s historical actors presented the “private” as public, there “interiority” did not legitimize their place in the public sphere so much as create a visibility that served to counter dominant associations ascribed to them while providing the organization necessary for political mobilization. In this way the intersection between identity or “interiority” combined with the American tradition of associations to create political movements. Both nineteenth century reformers and Hurewitz’s twentieth century counterparts created “intelligibility” for themselves, but for different ends. Women hoped to gain increased political rights such as suffrage, whereas Hurewitz’s communities attempted to either reshape society (communists), promote the essence of self (artists) or dispute negative associations while earning freedom from state interference (homosexuals) Thus, they perfected the idea of the “personal is political.” If nineteenth century actors such as women and blacks engaged in the public sphere for positive freedoms (right to), it seems their twentieth century counterparts mobilized on some level to protect negative freedoms (freedom from) .

Like Barkely’s freedmen and freedwomen, the internal debate among Communists directed its political action outside of the electoral arena. In this way like Ryan and Brown’s nineteenth century white women and freed persons, Communists refashioned urban spaces for their political spheres. Similarly, Boyd’s work suggests that the gay bars of San Francisco created a public space for homosexuals, this shared public space created a new language and lexicon. However, post-Prohibition, San Francisco enjoyed an even greater influx of individuals who held little in common except “same sex attraction and/or transgressive behavior to bind them together, the queer communities that existed in San Francisco during these years did not form a cohesive whole.” Thus over the course of two decades, bars such as Finochios and the Black Cat “established public culture for homosexuals”. Moreover, again like freedpeople of Reconstruction and the Chinese of late nineteenth century Chinatown, 1960 nightclubs like the Black Cat developed a community policing aspect, “gay patrons carved out a public niche at the Black Cat and protected this space for themselves. Through the manipulation of newcomers to the bar, gay regulars defended their space from being overrun by tourists and outsiders.” Again, as the state recognized a need to police areas previously ascribed to the private sphere, the homosexual community policed its own institutions protecting if from interference rather than attempting to carve out new rights. Protecting its image in the public sphere proved just as important as preventing state interference.

Once again, Hurewitz’s work diverges from Boyd. For Hurewitz, though the “bar scene” deserves credit, many of the members of the Mattachine Society “had moved through the world of bars without feeling that they had joined a community, let alone gained shared identity.” Rather the Mattachine Society, “offered was a different kind of camaraderie: non-sexual “family” camaraderie … this … camaraderie [was] about sexual desires [but] not constituted by those desires … it was how a communal identity – shared self perception was constructed.” Differing formations suggest the pervasive class aspect of the public sphere. Hurewitz’s Mattachine Society appears nearly uniformly middle class and white. Moreover, though the shift in a fixed homosexual identity resulted in greater persecution of gay men by the Los Angeles authorities, it also contributed to the creation of a communal identity even if that identity remained subject to internal debate.

How developing identity communities defined themselves in the public sphere illustrates the complex process of cultural capital. Perhaps one of the key pivots of Hurewitz’s work rests on Mattachine founder Harry Hay’s ability to reformulate how homosexuals identified themselves. Using a relational framework, Hay put forth the idea that homosexuals like race-nation groups such as Mexicans/Mexian-Americans, Japanese/Japanese-Americans, and Blacks/African-Americans were subject to oppression. The dominant public sphere illustrated this oppression daily through the actions of state mechanisms such as the police and through the daily media. As Judith Butler has shown, intelligibility to the larger society remains essential for rights and “liveability”. Thus, the state and media created an intelligibility even if in the negative. It established a visible framework of oppression similar to that of racial minorities and political radicals. This state sanctioned oppression “provided the foundation for political action either by group members themselves or by others on their behalf.” Moreover, Hay arranged his political model according to “analogous oppression and analogous political rights” creating a “central framework for identity driven political action and opened the possibility for groups other than racial groups to lay claim a similar equivalent position.” Hay’s ideas about “equivalent minorities” and “analogous oppressions” established homosexuals as an “oppressed social minority” as deserving of political rights as any racial group. Again, historical context drove this development as Hay witnessed the different experiences that Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and Black Americans endured during the racial conflicts of the 1940s. Zoot Suit Riots and Japanese internment and the subsequent reactions of government officials laid the foundation for Hay’s innovation.

Hurewitz’s argument deftly interweaves ideas about associations, relational identity, and Habermasian public spheres. He successfully illustrates how the practices/beliefs of artists and communists contributed to creation of a self identified Los Angeles homosexual community which in turn represented the growth of identity politics. However, though he pays close attention to race, especially its importance in defining gays as an “oppressed social minority”, like Habermas Hurewitz ignores class and racial aspects that must have been present in such a formation. The Mattachine Society appears divorced from this reality in Hurewitz’s interpretation. Certainly, segregation and cultural factors in each “race nation” may have inhibited such interactions, but Hurewitz fails to even engage this discussion. Furthermore, where are the city’s lesbians? Hurewitz suggests that they participate in the Mattachine Society but fails to fully elaborate their position within it.

In ways, Hurewitz’s example illustrates a leveling process that authors such as Nayan Shah in Contagious Divides point out. Shah argues that twentieth century Chinese activists worked through the public sphere to create ideas around Chinese domesticity that, like the nineteenth century poor, suffering, white working class, made them worthy of aid. This required a sustained effort in the public sphere through publicity illustrating Chinese worthiness. Lobbyist groups, Chinese Digest, and associations pressured government to earn federal monies for Chinatown housing. Interestingly, though still sharply middle class, the new dominant Chinese public sphere featured more experienced political actors along with greater occupational diversity ranging from social workers and teachers to physicians and nurses. Conflicts between their aspirations and those held by middle and upper class Chinese merchants emerged in the debate over new Chinatown housing, illustrating Holt’s identification of numerous public spheres in any broad community. Though this “second generation of activists” proved more attuned to the diversity of Chinatown’s population especially in terms of class, the public sphere presence they inhabited excluded those Chinese not fitting into the nuclear family paradigm. Pragmatism drove activists’ decisions to embrace both the diseased past of the area’s nineteenth century representation as a reason for intervention and to accept segregation recognizing they could subsume support from homeowner’s associations who feared Chinese moving into their communities. Thus, Chinese activists boosted their cultural capital through publicity and relations to other associations while ensuring that the housing benefited Chinese Americans.

Similarly, Hay promised members of his society would adopt more traditional public behaviors that did not transgress societal expectations at the time. Such leveling might secure greater political access or capital but also simultaneously leaves certain members of such communities suspect. As Bohemian LA concludes, the Mattachine Society engaged in a leadership struggle that reformulated its political stance, rejecting Hay’s “social minority theory” as its new leaders wanted to incorporate gay society more directly into the mainstream. Moreover, Marilyn Rieger’s remarks symbolize the shift within the Mattachine Society eschewing political pressure and in many ways downplaying the “essence” of homosexuality, “We are first and foremost people … We know we are the same .. no different than anyone else. Our only difference is an unimportant one to the heterosexual society, unless we make it important “ Though many historians of gay culture criticize the post-Hay Mattachine Society, Rieger’s remarks reflect divisions within the community. More than a few members feared that communists had infiltrated its ranks or that it had become too political in its orientation. Once again, Holt’s observation concerning multiple public spheres emerges.

The public sphere emerged as a crucial entrance into American political society from the nineteenth through the twentieth century. Though historical actors of the two periods engaged in different political and social contestations, each utilized the public sphere to expand their participation in American political and social life. The collapse of the private into the public during the early decades of the twentieth century led to a shift in how politics mobilized. Industrialization, urbanization, immigration/migration, technological advance and numerous other factors altered how people saw themselves and their place in society. Accordingly, previously ignored groups agitated by state interference, violence, and discursive negative associations organized under collective identities, leading to the emergence of identity politics of the 1960s ,70s, and 80s. Identity politics remain a viable if declining political force in American politics today. However, the idea of groups organizing around sexuality only became possible once ideas about authenticity were conflated with the public sphere. One’s interior self needed to be clearly articulated publicly, however, that is not to say it was accepted. The public sphere discussion around homosexuality created discriminatory associations. While this hostility no doubt resulted in physical confinement for many gays, it also contributed to the creation of its own public sphere to combat dominant representations. Moreover, this process rested on relational associations that enabled homosexuals and others to engage in a communal identity, even if this identity remained a topic for internal debate. According to Hurewitz this is the key to the success of identity, “the achievement of identity politics has not been the unquestioned securing of full rights for oppressed American minorities. Rather, what identity politics have forged is a political terrain in which the importance of such identities – racial, sexual, and gender – can be the focus of determined political action.”

'''Ryan Reft'''

Joan Scott Was Not Alone: The Emergence and Investigation of Gender in U.S. Women’s History 1980 – 1992

2012-06-21T08:26:35Z

24.148.45.170:

Over the past two decades, the combined influences of cultural studies and theory have reshaped history. If the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a new cohort of practitioners which illustrated a greater diversity encompassing regions, ethnicities, races, classes, and genders previously ignored or excluded, the resulting social history shifted the historical discourse away from its long running obsession with “great” men, notably white men, and political histories. As some have argued new analytics like gender have refurbished historical study, infusing studies with new perspectives, considerations, and ideas.

Among the numerous historical fields affected, women’s history provides a clear delineation of this process. Though debates between respected historians such as Joan Scott and Joan Huff over the role of gender, its meaning, and how it is employed continue, the fundamental fact remains gender now serves as a disputed but central presence in history.

Twenty years have passed since Scott’s now seminal AHR article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”. Scott prodded historians to employ poststructuralist theory, Foucualdian ideas of power and gender, and literary criticism. Scott challenged historians to reconsider their understanding of “the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past.” For Scott, the “goal is to discover the range in sex roles and in sexual symbolism in different societies and periods to find out what meaning they had and how they functioned to maintain the social order or to promote its change.” Not everyone embraced Scott’s provocations, Joan Huff responded sharply suggesting that Scott’s dependence on poststructuralists and postmodernism illustrated a flawed understanding of history and that it functioned to erase historical discourse. Meyerwitz summarized Hoff’s objections in a 2008 AHR article reflecting on Scott’s influence, “Joan Hoff …. accused postructuralists gender historians, and Scott in particular, of nihilism, presentism, ahistoricism, obfuscation, elitism, obeisance to partriarchy, ethnocentrism, irrelevance, and possibly racism.”

Of course, even a cursory examination of the prominent works over the last ten years yields a clear winner in this debate: Joan Scott. Gender’s utility to explore power relations has served historians exploring U.S. imperialism well, notably Paul Kramer’s Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (2006), Laura Briggs’s Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2002), and Allison Sneider’s Suffragists in the Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question 1870 – 1929 (2008). By employing gender as an analytic outside of formal U.S. boundaries these authors also reveal the effects of foreign policy on racial logics within the contiguous United States. Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (2009) and Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom (2008) provided two discrete domestic examples, which utilized gender to explore issues of race and sexuality. However, these works also engage in second crucial shift, the study of intimacy.
Though recent scholarship like the edited Ann Stoler volume Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North America illustrates this trend most clearly, earlier works in the U.S. field of women’s studies began to explore these areas before, during, and after Joan Scott’s academic broadside. Scott’s challenge reflected theoretical and schematic turns unfolding in graduate institutions across America. Works by Karen Anderson, Beth Bailey, and David Farber, covering the period from 1980 to 1992, exhibit numerous aspects of Scott’s argument but also shift history’s focus to sites of intimacy, reflecting on the meanings and importance of such interactions more broadly.

Publishing in the same era as contemporary women’s historians Joanne Meyerowitz, Ruth Rosen, and Kathy Peiss, Karen Anderson helped to realign the traditionally masculine historical narrative. Unlike historians from previous decades, these authors explored women’s lives from the vantage point of their own agency. Though each author acknowledged the influence of gendered economic markets which ultimately reduced women’s choices and ability to remain independent, Rosen, Peiss, and Meyerwitz all exhibited understandings that women served as actors not just unfortunate victims. Moreover, women’s agency in these periods created spaces for future women and men. In sum, these authors revealed the influence working women exerted in turn of the century America, helping to shape then nation’s future sexual mores.

In relation, Wartime Women preceded all these works setting the tone for their later scholarship. Shifting the focus of World War II from the battlefield and leading political figures to women on the domestic front, the book reexamines the various roles women occupied in wartime America. Anderson argues that though some historians attribute women’s postwar employment changes simply to economics, she suggests that the 1941-46 period played a more prominent role in these developments, helping to accelerate the economic changes that emerged in postwar America. Moreover, though such studies exist in abundance today, in 1981 few historians explored the effects of living in a society with severe sex ratios. Finally, historians had not investigated “the effects of war on sex role socialization and family structure and role divisions … “ and the influences of such experiences in thinking about postwar America.
Importantly Anderson points out that despite continuing occupational sex segregation, a lack of appropriate child care, and the lingering negative attitudes regarding female employment, women did gain employment, opening doors for themselves and later generations. The necessities of wartime America undermined “somewhat the sex segregated labor market and the ideas that perpetuated it …” Lacking national uniformity, local municipal government and attitudes greatly influenced the breath of change. Using Seattle, Detroit, and Baltimore, Anderson illustrates the influence of local factors on policies as each municipality exhibited differences in interpretation and execution of federal wartime policies.
“Mobilization themes” employed several rationales in convincing women to pursue employment among them patriotism, the prestige of war workers, and “a stress on women’s capacities for nontraditional work.” For women themselves, motives included patriotism, economic necessity, escape from the home, desire for social independence, and prevention of loneliness or anxiety. Though rates of women’s participation in the workforce vary between Seattle, Detroit, and Baltimore, in all three over 90 percent of female workers contributed to family upkeep, as families grew accustomed to increase purchasing power. This resulted in increasing income levels and “property mobility” for women and their families.
Predictably, race intervened for some women. Employer discrimination against black women resulted in their inability to secure the kind of industrial/manufacturing jobs that their white counterparts were able to secure. For black women, the intersection of racism and sexism undermined their employment opportunities meaning they frequently were referred to domestic work and other service sectors. Despite progress, the war failed to change “conventional ideas regarding women’s proper social and economic role.” Still in spite of this persistent prejudice, the war provided women with a means for refuting these very biases. Women expressed an appreciation for the “economic independence, sense of accomplishment and social contacts” that came with employment.

Occupational changes brought by the war contributed to alterations in the workplace, but family life experienced new developments including fears over juvenile delinquency, increased birth, marriage, and divorce rates, and increased stress from wartime conditions. However, Anderson points out that though the war brought changes, it also “reinforced and perpetuated existing role divisions and their ideological underpinnings.”

During the war, fears over women’s sexual conduct proliferated. Regulation of women’s behavior became a central aspect of psychological and social welfare officials as they attempted to explain and control female sexuality. Postwar America then turned to these practices as precedents to employ.
Anderson notes the paucity of historical works that explore the “unbalanced sex ratio of the war years.” Since Wartime Women’s 1981 publication, this area has received attention. For example, Beth Bailey and Farber’s The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii examined the effects of such ratios on the then territory of Hawaii. Anderson, Bailey, and Farber generally agree that the absence of males increased their importance, as Anderson suggests “men became a scarce and valued commodity.” Accordingly, an increase in teen marriage, going steady, and a general changes to sexual behavior were all results of this development.” Marital strains grew in this period as work schedules, women’s employment, new responsibilities for housewives, overcrowded housing, and “new opportunities for social and sexual contacts outside marriages” combined to stress many couples of the period. Unsurprisingly, these stresses and others resulted in rising divorce rates. Working class families especially encountered tensions as women’s employment threatened men’s marital roles more so than in middle class homes. In this way workplace resistance to female workers may have reflected not only individual economic labor interests but also the “ideological and cultural bases for” family authority. The perceived abandonment of conventional feminine sex roles only contributed to apprehensions.
For Anderson the war made a significant difference in a very short time for women. While this did not ensure linear progress it contribute to “shaping the post war decisions of women.” As the demands of the labor market changed in the postwar period, reconversion overwhelmingly benefitted men over women. Returning veterans and “the reimposition of discriminatory policies on the part of employers, unions, and government agencies all contributed to the problems of women workers in the postwar period. “ Still, some shifts in employment were voluntary as some women found the demands of work to be too much or the benefits too few.

The postwar shift toward mass consumption made women’s employment less antagonistic as Anderson points out “the materialism of the years after 1945 was probably an even more significant cultural value than the veneration of domesticity …” Even so, like Lizabeth Cohen after her, Anderson notes the nature of the G.I. bill required wives to support their veteran husbands as they took advantage of benefits. Moreover, symbols like the Rosie the Riveter attracted a new negative sheen as psychologists suggested that “wartime changes had fostered the development of widespread individual neuroses and social maladjustments largely caused by the failure of women to accept their femininity” which really meant being subordinate to men. Unfortunately, the intense focus on the family during the war and the failure of public child care resulted in maintaining “conventional attitudes regarding the role of women within the family.”
Following Anderson eight years later, Beth Bailey’s From the Front Porch to the Back Seat: Courtship in the Twentieth Century (1989) also illustrates the shift in perspectives to sites of intimacy. However, unlike Anderson, Bailey’s work employs Foucault, notably aspects of Discipline and Punishment and governmentality, as it investigates how sexual conventions regarding courtship and dating both affected and were shaped by adolescents and others from the turn of the century to the 1960s.

The rise of dating and the gradual retirement of courtship serves as Bailey’s initial focus. Courtship had been a fundamentally private exercise that took place within the women’s home giving her power over the process . However, dating brought these interactions into the public sphere, emphasizing the economic nature of the process which in a heavily gendered labor market privileged men over women.. In this context, women became a commodity with appearance, femininity, and virtue as their defining features. However, though courtship faded as dating rose in prominence and many older folks expressed disappointment over this occurrence, society ultimately accepted its ramifications, but did so by employing discursive controls over behavior.
Here Bailey utilizes aspects of Foucault as she explores how youth and adult conventions attempted to regulate sexual activity. Bailey argues that by the 1920’s and afterward, sex became youth culture’s defining characteristic, “sex became [its] central public symbol … a fundamental part of the definition that separated youth from age.” As youth cultural institutions developed, a formidable mass media emerged which trumpeted “new sexual norms” in the public arena. This proved unique as Bailey notes that “sexual experience in the twentieth century was laid open to the public view as never before in history.” The system of rules governing dating did not “control sex itself” but they did make sex more challenging by making it “logistically difficult”. However, beneath the regulatory nature of conventions operated an ideology based on “historically and culturally produced understandings of male and female roles and of systems of value and exchange,” which did not support the idea that “youth” could be united. Instead, for this ideology gender intervened. The two systems operated in tandem as Bailey notes, “While the regulatory systems attempted to control sex by controlling women, this ideological system made women, themselves, the controllers of sex.” In this sense, petting, necking, premarital sex, and even rape was described as a woman’s failure to impose sexual limits on men who by nature pursued such activity. Karen Anderson’s Wartime Women illustrates the amplified nature of these systems during war as most American cities imposed strict controls over women’s sexuality, even reinterpreting prostitution such that it “came to be defined not only as intercourse for hire but also as indiscriminate or promiscuous intercourse.”

Again, like Anderson, Bailey acknowledges women’s increasing role in the national economy and those of their families. If Anderson pointed to the war’s contribution to this development, Bailey similarly concludes that the economic benefits of female employment allowed middle class families to “enjoy the good life.” Even if antagonisms declined, both Anderson and Bailey acknowledge that due to this development the “crisis of masculinity” that had begun with economic and social changes at the turn of the century accelerated.

The rise of organizational men, with skills that had been in the past viewed as more feminine, and presence of women in the workforce bred fears that modern society sublimated masculinity. Women’s employment “robbed men” of their masculinity, while threatening to usurp their position as family provider. In part to order such changes, etiquette manuals and scientific theories developed to enforce performative gender roles. Rules of etiquette established the proper behaviors that protected a women’s virtue, which by mid-century had become of central value, while enforcing men’s masculinity. The separateness of the sexes could most visibility be witnessed by Hugh Hefner’s burgeoning Playboy empire, that rejected the “togetherness” tropes that he and others argued undermined masculinity. The turn to “scientific experts” and the use of social sciences to shape women’s sexuality, which Anderson pointed out twisted the symbol of Rosie the Riveter from a patriotic dutiful citizen into a neurotic, man challenging female, augmented these various controls.
Though the roles that Playboy and etiquette manuals proved superficial and even false, the public accepted the message broadly as Bailey suggests “they [the public] wanted to know the rules governing relations between the sexes, the rules that would tell them how to be masculine or how to be feminine.” When women began to outnumber men in postwar America, some believed the dominant themes of the day embracing the “charade” since it proved a framing mechanism for relationships, “it could make the first dates with an interesting partner seem ideal. In a time of rapid change and confused sex roles, there was satisfaction in the clearly defined roles etiquette offered.” Moreover, etiquette served as a “neutral” arbiter, balancing the power of men in women in courtship. Bailey’s exploration of the performative nature of gender served as a central aspect of several works that came afterward which focused on masculinity and femininity but also the complexities of homosexual worlds and identities which Front Porch to Back Seat ignores. Such works include George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World (1995), Daniel Hurewitz’s Bohemian L.A.: Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (2007) and Nan Boyd’s Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (2005).

Three years after From the Front Porch to the Back Seat, in the aforementioned The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (1992) Bailey along with David Farber, once again explored gender and sexuality but this time included the relation of race to each. If works such as Kramer’s Blood of Government, Briggs’s Reproducing Empire, Stoler’s Haunted by Empire reflect the recent marriage of gender, race, intimacies, and transnationalism, The First Strange Place sits at the front of this movement. Tellingly, Bailey and Farber point this out in their introduction, justifying their choice of atypical Hawaii, “Hawaii was at the margin of American life as well as of the war. But sometimes it is at the margins that the messy definitions and complicated interactions are pushed to extremes and made visible; far reaching changes sometimes germinate in marginal places.”
In terms of government policies, Hawaii exhibited numerous characterstics at odds with mainland America. First, the racial mix in Hawaii created a complicated ethnic and racial hierarchy, heavily influenced by large numbers of pacific Islanders and Asians, most prominently Japanese/Japanese Americans. Moreover, the lack of white working class altered dynamics. As result, unlike the mainland, internment never occurred. Second, the acceptance by military officials of men’s, specifically soldiers’, inherent sexual nature bred a belief that soldiers who “won’t fuck won’t fight” , thus, there existed need for female companionship in a territory where men drastically outnumbered women. As such, officials, military and eventually local, instituted a regulated system of prostitution. On the surface, this would seem to confirm Anderson’s assertion that local municipalities shaped wartime policies, however, the Hawaiian government - in part because it sat in the warzone for several months of the war – relented to military officials, giving martial law and military authority more control than other areas. In this sense, the lack of local government or their unique lack of control in this instance did determine how policies were enacted. War workers and enlisted personnel upset the delicate class and racial sexual balance that haole elites had enforced, one that separated the island’s “respectable white women” from the lower class white and darker hued residents.

Thematically, issues of race and gender predominate. Hawaii’s multicultural demographics resemble today’s increasingly diverse population more than the America of World War II. Arriving troops hailing from the mainland carried with them a set of racial beliefs and hierarchies that often conflicted with Hawaii’s own byzantine race and ethnic relations. The introduction of black troops amidst large numbers of white southern recruits allowed for numerous racial exchanges. The multiracial nature of Hawaii enabled black troops to occupy public spaces and enjoy equal footing with white soldiers more so than on the mainland. However, their lives remained circumscribed. If Hawaiian residents had no opinions of African Americans before the war due to isolation, then many white soldiers offered their views of blacks often imbuing African Americans with animalistic features and behaviors. This discourse proved pervasive, the most damaging being the conflation of black soldiers with rape. The combination of this discourse and a well publicized rape/murder in Maui by a black soldier resulted in what military officials claimed was “a Negro problem … creating poor morale among Island residents.”

White soldiers’s correspondence home often derided blacks for not knowing their place and similar sentiments. Whites resented the extra room accorded blacks in Hawaii’s multicultural milieu. The military government promoted tolerance as it saw it as the only way to avoid unrest. The army’s newspaper transformed itself into a “steady instrument for racial progress.” Army busses transporting troops from the base to the downtown area prohibited segregation, which in close quarters led to numerous fights. Nevertheless, blacks endured discrimination. Black war workers and sailors absorbed “a steady drumbeat of racist remarks, insults, and slights” from white shipyard workers. Moreover, Naval Intelligence regarded blacks as subversives on par with communists and the Japanese. For blacks, their opposition to racism served as adequate evidence for the categorization.
For the many women not involved in the sex industry, the island’s sex ratio proved simultaneously exciting and overbearing. Though due to conscription, men were in short supply on the mainland, they overflowed in Hawaii. However, their constant attentions to the fairer sex often overstepped respectful boundaries resulting in unwanted touching or groping. Some soldiers who had befriended women, feared for their female friends safety such that they upbraided them for traveling alone at night. The war, as other writers such as Alice Clement and Marilyn Hagerty have noted, changed sexual behaviors and attitudes. Farber and Bailey confirm many of Wartime Women’s and Bailey’s own conclusions regarding younger marriages, marital stress, and sexual behavior, as Farber and Bailey acknowledge, “Sexual boundaries were also renegotiated.”

Still, many women on the island resented the overly masculine atmosphere that implied the women should give up something in return for the soldier’s own sacrifices. Even young adolescent’s endured/enjoyed the attentions of servicemen. However, the public whistles earned a special enmity among the island’s female population as many grew tired of this “promiscuous sexual claiming.” Yet, though women endured these daily frustrations, many noted that they understood the stresses and difficulties these men operated under.

Soldiers own prejudices also interfered with their romantic lives. Many envisioned blond blue eyed Hawaiians to greet them, an image no doubt encouraged by films. When they encountered a Pacific Island and Asian women instead, some reacted negatively as one man explained his dating preferences, “I guess I have too much pride to be walking with a Jap, a Chinese, or the black girls. (Hawaiians are really black.)” Of course, plenty of soldiers viewed dating Asians and other nonwhites as “unobjectionable” considering the circumstances and some welcomed the opportunity with few or any prejudices. Marriage proved another issue. First, the nature of military service meant many men were not considering marriage at all. Second, mainland America forbade interracial marriages, though a territory, military officials had to approve pending nuptials. As such, they banned interracial couplings or at the very least severely discouraged them since many believed these marriages would not be acknowledged on the mainland. Furthermore, socially not only haoles opposed such marriages. Though they expressed different rationales, local Japanese American also viewed such couplings unfavorably .

The shift toward gender as an analytic may have gained professional attention due to Joan Scott’s now famous article, however, well before its publication in 1986, graduate students and others had considered many of Scott’s arguments. Moreover, as attentions turned to gendered analytics so too did the sites of historical investigation find new inspiration as intimacies provided new and exciting insights into the past. Anderson, Bailey, and Farber all exhibit aspects of these developments, though Bailey’s two works probably go the farthest. Through these works, one can trace the trajectory of scholars, culminating with the transnational race and gender focused The First Strange Place. While it remained a work of U.S. history, it also hinted at the future of the field as it simultaneously engaged mainland America and its colonial history. Moreover, though direct comparisons equate it with works such as Haunted by Empire, it also relates to recent scholarship such as Charlotte Brookes Alien Neighbors. Foreign Friends, which like The First Strange Place, notes that demographics in the nation’s more remote regions actually more precisely reflect the nation’s racial and ethnic demographics. From the margins, one may find the center.

'''Ryan Reft'''

Joan Scott Was Not Alone: The Emergence and Investigation of Gender in U.S. Women’s History 1980 – 1992

2012-06-21T08:25:57Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "Over the past two decades, the combined influences of cultural studies and theory have reshaped history. If the 1960s and 1970s ushered in a new cohort of practitioners which ill..."

Abolitionism and the Political Culture of Antebellum America

2012-06-21T08:24:26Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "The abolitionist movement is the template for American radicalism. All subsequent political radical movements either model themselves on it or relate to its legacy in some other ..."

The abolitionist movement is the template for American radicalism. All subsequent political radical movements either model themselves on it or relate to its legacy in some other way. They figured out how movements for change can work in a democratic, open society like America's. What are the appropriate tactics here? The abolitionists introduced an idea that is central to the self conception of modern America: a pluralistic society of equals, where being American does not depend on accidental variables (race, gender). The idea did not exist prior to then, certainly not in law until after Civil War.

The era before the Civil War is often referred to as the Age of Reform. All sorts of movements mushroomed then, like communitarians, temperance, labor, abolitionists, prison reformers, educationists, pacifists, advocates for the ill and insane, and so forth. They sent out speakers, drew up petitions, and overlapped in their causes. Women's rights came out of abolitionism. These movements were transatlantic, crisscrossing from the US to the United Kingdom and Europe. American exceptionalism does not explain the flourishing of these movements for change. They all spoke the language of freedom. For example, "alcoholism is slavery." At the same time, they all aroused opposition for forcing their views on others through politics. The rhetorical frames of abolitionism have echoed throughout subsequent US politics, as movements from labor and civil rights movements to antiabortion have called themselves the "new abolitionists." (See George W. Bush's invocation of the Dred Scott case during the 2004 presidential debates with John Kerry.)

Antislavery and abolitionism weren't the same, however, as the latter was the radical edge. The former might just want to stop the westward expansion of slavery. Abolionists called for immediate action, not gradual emancipation. They tended to believe in the supremacy of a higher moral law. William Lloyd Garrison expressed this radical conviction when he burned the Constitution at a July 4, 1854 celebration: "This is a covenant with the devil." Abolitionists also demanded incorporation of black Americans as equal citizens, which was a marginal view at the time. Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Webster, Lincoln and Marshall all criticized slavery in some way or another, but they all thought black people would be "colonized" elsewhere when it was all over. This was a dream of ethnic cleansing. They could not envision America as a multiracial society, because it was a white man's country. The real abolitionists consisted of a small group throughout this period, and some thought they were crazy. Wendell Phillips's family tried to get him committed, and we still do not know if John Brown was crazy. In any case, the idea of a society of equals was thought to be crazy. And the abolitionists were able to develop enormous influence despite the intransigence and resistance of conventional wisdom.

James Stewart points out that antislavery feeling had deep roots. American Revolution made it a public issue for first time, thanks to the obvious contradiction of liberty and democracy with slavery and disenfranchisement. Many northern states initiated gradual emancipation during the early years of the Republic. On the other hand, compromises like the notorious "3/5 clause" embedded slavery in the Constitution, padding the electoral power of slave states. The vast majority of presidents up to the Civil War were slaveholders, and the South frequently controlled the levers of the federal government. While the Founders had hoped slavery would die out, it actually got bigger as the cotton kingdom expanded to the old southwest, and into the rich delta areas. Southern slaveholders held not just political power, but also the key to an international commodity that was crucial to the revolution in textile production during the early nineteenth century.

As for those emancipated from slavery, few wanted to move to Africa, as Jefferson and so many others wished. In Philadelphia in 1817, free black Americans gathered together for the first time, and they agreed to condemn the colonization project. David Walker's appeal from Boston may have inspired the new abolitionist movement; it developed in the 1830s, largely from the Second Great Awakening's spiritual enthusiasm. In the North, at least, the revivals created a frame of mind of liberatory power and responsibility over one's self and society, in contrast to the ideas of original sin and predestination. Some revivalists believed that "you can eliminate sin from the world," and move human nature closer to perfection. In the 1830s and 1840s, the passion for individual salvation easily migrated into the social realm. Social institutions can be thought of as sinful, and sin cannot be compromised with. The nation itself need to go to a revival.

The downside is that these sins require new political and economic relationships to be effectively removed. This mentality is "immediatism," and it pops up in a lot of movements. The temperance movement becomes prohibitionist, and the peace movement becomes more resolutely pacifist. What does immediate abolitionism mean? It is really a call for a moral judgement from the nation. Abolitionists appeal to the slaveowner in a way, seeking his repentance. They want the North to recognize its complicity. They were willing to see states, parties, and institutions ripped to shreds, which is what ultimately happened. The rhetoric was intended to remove the middle ground as an option, so that Americans could not waffle and opt for minor reforms. Thoreau refused to pay taxes to support Mexican War, and wrote Civil Disobedience about his punishment for it. He declared that the individual has the right to resist unjust laws, because law is less relevant than morality.

Abolitionist firebrand Garrison personified this belief in a higher good that could not be delayed. He founded the Liberator newspaper in Boston in 1831, and it lasted until 1865. "I will be as harsh as truth," Garrison said, "and as uncompromising as justice." He became famous because southern newspapers reprinted his content as an example. Like Walker, he attacked colonization. He called for immediate abolition, unlike the Northern policy of gradual emancipation; there were still a handful of slaves in New Jersey as late as 1860. Garrison used harsh invective to rouse people up. He insisted on fighting racism head-on, and he supported free blacks in the North who were marginalized in many ways. In fact, two thirds of the Liberator's first subscribers were blacks. It was the first racially integrated political movement, although there were integrated religious ones (e.g. Shakers, Quakers). They were first to use visual iconography as a weapon, with lurid imagery of oppression and violence. Most white abolitionists were pacifists who did not like idea of rebellions. They used moral suasion: the idea that the slave is your brother, so you must treat him that way. The introduction of the steam printing press in the 1830s made rapid and cheap publication possible, allowing abolitionists to flood the North with propaganda. America does not really have a violent radical tradition, apart from a handful of anarchists, John Brown, and the Weathermen. Public opinion has been recognized as the ruler of society. The abolitionists could have smuggled arms to the slaves or sabotaged the southern economic slave system or assassinated slaveholders, but they did not. If you can determine the boundaries of the debate, it does not matter what is being said. Abolitionists managed to put their issues on the agenda, and their first target was the "conspiracy of silence."

The 1830s were a time of turmoil, of both internal and external threats to the slave regime. In 1831 Britain banned slavery, and Nat Turner led a rebellion in Virginia. Meanwhile, the nullification crisis pitted South Carolina against President Andrew Jackson. The South soon closed in on itself as it clamped down on public discussion. The mail was opened and burned to prevent literature from getting in, in a sort of nineteenth century version of China's "Great Firewall." This coincides with the growth of antislavery in the north. A key architect of antislavery activism was Theodore Weld, who put together "the Seventy" — ministers trained to go through rural north from town to town to speak and set up local groups. These were the shock troops, who set up a 1,000 societies with 100,000 members by 1837. They mobilize local women into action for the first time, circulating petitions. The strategy was to persuade people to sign petitions even if you knew that Congress was going to ignore it. Such actions generate a list of sympathizers, if nothing else. Organizing also provoked violent opposition: abolitionists meetings were broken up, activists received death threats, and homes were burned or sacked, etc. In 1838 a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall to the ground, albeit after removing Washington's picture. "The greatest threat to American liberty exists at home," Lincoln said at age 27.

In fact, this violence put civil liberties on the agenda for the first time, suggesting that slavery had clearly become a threat to white Americans' freedom. Abolitionism becomes surrounded by sympathetic "fellow travellers," who disdain oppression of the activists. Their persecution gets them attention and enlarges their influence. Slavery was not just a southern question any longer.

Abolitionists soon had to face the question of electoral politics, i.e. whether or not to engage with an unjust and corrupt system. The Garrisonian wing was against voting. Political parties are good for nothing, they believed, and you have to pledge to support the filthy Constitution. Politics is the art of the "possible," of compromise. On the other hand, the Liberty Party formed in 1840 and said, in essence, "Why surrender the vehicle of voting when you could use it for moral ends?" There was no need for a single tactic. These factions fought on different planes, but they were not mutually exclusive. In a sense, the split in abolitionism strengthened it.

In time, the movement became more focused on politically viable demands. You go from Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party in 1848 and then the Republicans in 1854 — increasingly pragmatic. Some abolitionists had to drop the goal of equal rights for black people, as Free Soilers and Lincoln did, because you could not get votes with that position. In contrast, the issues of brutality in the South or plantation expansion into the West had political appeal. They found the lowest common denominator by 1860, and it was Lincoln. The abolitionist movement was never anywhere near a majority in the North, although after the war many people claimed membership. They understood that the purpose of agitation is polarization, to force people to be uncomfortable, not to satisfy everyone. The people with good intentions who did nothing were actually an obstacle to the movement. As Weld suggested to the Seventy, do not allow yourself to be drawn away from the main object; men will be relieved of responsibility when they can nitpick over the problems in a detailed plan. Just make people confront a basic moral problem. Abolitionists knew that the system worked best when the fundamentals were not in question, when the minority can accept defeat because their basic interests are not mortally threatened. The abolitionists were not successful in one sense because the problem was solved through war, rather than a moral transformation in which whites embraced blacks as brothers. As Lydia Maria Child wrote after the war, emancipation resulted from "miserable military necessity." Were they successful? They managed to end slavery, but not racism.

'''Clement Lime'''

Reconstruction: A Mini Review

2012-06-21T08:23:50Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "As the United States entered the 20th century, Reconstruction slowly receded into popular memory. Historians began to debate its results. The first group to offer a coherent and ..."

As the United States entered the 20th century, Reconstruction slowly receded into popular memory. Historians began to debate its results. The first group to offer a coherent and structured argument were led by William Dunning and John W. Burgess. Along with their students at Columbia University, Dunning , Burgess, and their retinue created a historical school of thought known as the Dunning School. This interpretation of Reconstruction, placed it firmly in the category of historical blunder. According to the Dunning School, the defeated South accepted its fate and wished to rejoin the national culture. Thus, white Southerners truly hoped to offer the emancipated freedmen rights and protection along with equal opportunity. However, the bullying efforts of the Radical Republicans in Congress (inspired by their inherent disgust for the South) forced black suffrage, corruption, and economic dependence on the South. Carpetbaggers, scalawags and uneducated freedman plunged the South into depression and confusion until the white South banded together to reclaim southern culture and heritage. While the Radical Republicans were the obvious villains, Dunning and his followers ascribed blame to President Johnson as well saddling him with a responsibility for Reconstruction’s failure. Freedmen were portrayed as animalistic or easily manipulated, therefore, lacking the kind of agency they truly exhibited. While certainly influenced by the racial bias of the day, the Dunning School at least formulated a coherent argument (although a rather inaccurate and distasteful one) that refused to fragment. This model of unity did prove somewhat valuable to historians following Dunning, even if their historical research opposed the Dunning School’s argument, “For all their faults, it is ironic that the best Dunning studies did, at least, attempt to synthesize the social, political, and economic aspects of the period."

In contrast, the Progressive historians that followed the Dunning School disagreed with some of its interpretations. President Johnson was not to blame, but rather, the Northern Radical Republicans were at fault. They cynically used the civil rights of freedman as a means to force capitalism and economic dependence on the South. However, one work stands out from this period as harbinger of what was to come. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. Du Bois chastized historians for ignoring the central figures of Reconstruction, the freedmen. Moreover, Du Bois pointedly remarked on the prevailing racial bias of the historical inquiry up to that moment, “One fact and one alone explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive of Negroes as men.” Du Bois’s indictment served as a pre-cursor for the explosion of revisionist history of the 1960’s which would latch onto the argument of Du Bois and refocus the debate concerning Reconstruction to include the central figures of the freedmen.

The revisionists of the 1960’s viewed the heroes of Reconstruction to be the Southern freedmen and the Radical Republicans. Instead of going to far, Reconstruction failed to be radical enough. According to revisionists, Reconstruction was tragic not because it went too far and handcuffed white southerners, it was tragic because it failed to ensure more securely the rights of freedmen and failed to restructure Southern society through land reform and similar measures. Following on the heels of the Revisionist School were the Post-Revisionists whom viewed Reconstruction as overly conservative. This conservatism failed to achieve any lasting influence, thus, once Reconstruction ended the South returned to its old social and economic structures.

So where has that left historians today? How is Reconstruction interpreted by more recent historians? Several leading historians (James McPherson, Eric Foner, Emory Thomas) have labeled either the Civil War or Reconstruction as a sort of second American revolution. Eric Foner’s work Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution openly claims Reconstruction to be a break from traditional systems (social, political, economic) prevailing in the South. In contrast, Emory Thomas’s The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience argues the South first underwent a “conservative revolution” in breaking away from the Union since it broke from the North not to redefine itself but to maintain the status quo of the South. Ironically, according to Thomas, this first “external” revolution was subsumed by a more radical “internal” revolution which took place during the Civil War as the South attempted to urbanize, industialize and modernize in order to compete with the North. Thus, the Confederacy’s leaders, whether consciously or not, looked to recreate the South in a way that mirrored the North in several ways. Both works will be examined in more detail, however, this brief example illustrates the differences among historians and the current scholarship on the subject of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps, the best place to start might be with conditions that existed between the North and South prior to the outbreak of war in 1861.

James McPherson provides a convincing account of the growing differences between the North and South on the eve of the war. McPherson, author of Battle Cry for Freedom (considered in some circles as the preeminent account of the Civil War), is frequently acknowledged as a leading if not the leading historian in Civil War studies today. In an essay for Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction entitled, “The Differences between the Antebellum North and South”, McPherson argues that the South had not changed but the North had. According to McPherson, the Southern states had remained loyal to the Jeffersonian interpretation of republicanism. Instead of investing in manufacturing and industry, they reinvested in agrarian pursuits. Southern culture emphasized traditional values, patronage, and ties of kinship. Moreover, low Southern literacy rates and its labor intensive economy were not unique. Thus, the “folk culture” of the South valued tradition and stability, education was available to only the upper classes whom often sent children to elite schools, while political dissent was not popular since the political system rested on the foundation of patronage. In contrast, the North modernized though industrialization. Manufacturing and industry overtook the agrarian pursuits of Northern farmers. Education, unlike in the South, occupied a high position in society. Many Northerners saw education as a means to social mobility. More importantly, the North reinterpreted its ideas concerning republicanism. Accordingly, Northerners increasingly claimed to identify with egalitarian, free-market capitalism, which could only be securely maintained through a strong central government. This diametrically opposed the Southern belief in republicanism emphasizing limited government and rights of property, not to mention Southern anti-manufacturing sensibilities. Additionally, the more capital intensive economy of the North relied on wage labor and immigration. Two economic and social variables absent from the South. The rise of wage labor placed wager earners in the North in opposition to the system of slavery in the South and the rising population of the North (from immigration) increased tensions between the two regions. Along with these differences, the West of America was growing rapidly in the image of the North. Resulting from the influence and growth of railroads, trade relations were no longer centered on the North/South relationship but rather East to West.

Emory Thomas’s work, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, supports much of McPherson’s argument. Like McPherson, Thomas acknowledges the South’s political structure resting on the ideology of states’ rights, agrarianism, and slavery. Politically, the south valued stability over reform, thus, dissent was not a valuable political commodity. Moreover, the political system held a foundation based on the patronage of the planter class. According to Thomas, the South’s initial break from the Union was inspired by the hope that the South might preserve its traditions and institutions. Led by radical “fire-eaters”, Southern politicians incited animosity between the North and South, “They made a ‘conservative revolution’ to preserve the antebellum status quo, but they made a revolution just the same. The ‘fire-eaters’ employed classic revolutionary tactics in their agitation for secession. And the Confederates were no less rebels than their grandfathers had been in 1776,” . However, this intial ‘conservative revolution’ inspired by radicals was overtaken by the moderates of the political south who recognized the need for change. If the Confederacy were to survive economically, politically, and socially, these leaders would mount their own internal revolution. Peter Kolchin’s work American Slavery 1619-1877 upholds much of McPherson’s and Thomas’ arguments concerning the South’s increasingly entrenched society. Kolchin’s work attempts to synthesize the prevailing studies of the day concerning slavery in America. Divided into three sections (colonial America and the American Revolution, antebellum South, and Civil War and Reconstruction) Kolchin weaves the arguments of historians past and present into a coherent work that examines several aspects of slavery. Concerning politics and reform, Kolchin notes “The ‘perfectionist spirit’ that undergirded so much of the Northern reform effort in antebellum years, the drive continually to improve both social organization and the very human character itself, was largely absent in the South.” Moreover, politically, Kolchin remarks on the non-democratic nature of the South, “antebellum Southern sociopolitical thought harbored profoundly anti-democratic currents … More common than outright attacks on democracy were denunciations of fanatical reformism and appeals to conservatism, order and tradition.” Also, the access to education among Southerners was limited at best, “Advocates of public education, for example made little headway in their drive to persuade Southern state legislatures to emulate their northern counterparts and establish statewide public schooling … it was only after the Civil War that public education became widely available in the South.”

In general, Thomas points out three areas of change political, economic, and social. The economic change would be extreme. As the Civil War commenced, the south had neither a large industrial complex nor many large urban areas (New Orleans stands as the lone exception). Jefferson Davis and others saw the need for increased industry and urbanization, “A nation of farmers knew the frustration of going hungry, but Southern industry made great strides. And Southern cities swelled in size and importance. Cotton once king, became a pawn in the Confederate South. The emphasis on manufacturing and urbanization came too little, too late. But compared to the antebellum South, the Confederate South underwent nothing short of economic revolution.” Charles Dew’s work, Bond of Iron supports this viewpoint. Dew’s work documents the experience of both slave and master at an industrial metal working forge in Virginia known as Buffalo Forge. Repeatedly, throughout the work, southern industry is portrayed as anemic at best. When the Civil War unfolds, Buffalo Forge becomes one of few industrial sources of iron within the South. In order to obtain maximum profit, William Weaver ,the forges’ owner, used this scarcity to increase the price of iron. Ironically though, Dew’s work points out the difficulties in industrializing through slave labor. Slavery failed to encourage innovation, rather stability was seen as the optimum end. Thus, once Weaver had assembled his some 70 slaves, he no longer looked to improve industrial efficiency or examine technological advancements, “After he acquired and trained a group of skilled slave artisans in the 1820’s and 1830’s and had his ironworks functioning successfully, Weaver displayed little interest in trying to improve the technology of ironmaking at Buffalo Forge … The emphasis was on stability not innovation. Slavery, in short, seems to have exerted a profoundly conservative influence on the manufacturing process at Buffalo Forge, and one suspects that similar circumstances prevailed at industrial establishments throughout the slave South.” Thus, Dew’s assertion would render the Confederacy’s attempt to industrialize increasingly difficult, since the Southern labor system was not conducive to optimum industrial efficiency. Additionally, the Confederacy’s attempt to industrialize, urbanize, and in general command the Southern economy contrasts sharply with its belief in states’ rights federal authority. The Confederate leaders through such command of the economy were contradicting themselves, yet apparently the war called for such measures.

According to Thomas, such reorganization did not limit itself to the economic field. Southern women were no longer confined to the home, “Southern women climbed down from their pedestals and became refugees, went to work in factories, or assumed the responsibility for managing farms.” This hardly seems to be a radical premise since this cycle repeats itself nationally during both World Wars of the 20th century. In addition, class consciousness began to form in the minds or the “proletariat”, “Under the strain of wartime some “un Southern” rents appeared in the fabric of Southern society. The very process of rending what had been harmonious—mass meetings, riots, resistance to Confederate law and order—was the most visible manifestation of the social unsettlement within the Confederate South. Whether caused by heightened class awareness, disaffection with the “cause,” or frustration with physical privation, domestic tumults bore witness to the social ferment which replace antebellum stability.” Of course, Thomas is careful to couch this class consciousness with limits, “This is not to imply that that the Confederate south seethed with labor unrest; it is rather to say that working men in the Confederacy asserted themselves to a degree unknown in the antebellum period.”

In terms of social mobility, the South was forced to embrace meritocracy at least in the area of military matters. No doubt at the war’s beginning, the planter class dominated the military, however, as Thomas points out, “Before the war entered its second year, martial merit had challenged planter pedigree in the Confederate command structure. And combat provided ample opportunity for Southerners of all backgrounds to earn, confirm, or forfeit their spurs.” Again, Thomas limits his language noting that martial merit “challenged” the aristocratic system rather than replacing it. The planter class still held a powerful position, “Still, the Confederate army was at the same time an agency of both democracy and aristocracy. Members of the planter class often won the elections to company commands.” Thus, the reader is left wondering what is meant by revolution, since Thomas seems to be saying that the South revolutionizes during the war but then retreats from its revolution once the war comes to its conclusion. Therefore, would this not serve more aptly as an example of war time necessities that are undertaken for the purpose of war but not intended for permanence? Yet, one might respond that such examples begin the process of change since historically once people are granted rights or freedoms it proves to be quite difficult to reclaim such rights, mobility, or freedoms from the people. However, one last point concerning social mobility must be made. Considering the conditions of trade for the South during the war, new ways of trade needed to be located. Such avenues to wealth did provide many southerners previously excluded from the planter class to ascend the ladder of social mobility once new avenues or means to profit were established, “Those who were able to take advantage of new opportunities in trade and industry became wealthy and powerful men … Not only did exemplary men rise from commonplace to prominence in the Confederate period; statistical evidence tends to confirm that the Confederate leadership as a whole came from non-planters.” However, Thomas’s argument that the Civil War’s demands changed the nature of slavery in the South fails to convince. Thomas argues that increased responsibilities and rights given to slaves because of the War’s demands on the white population proved that the Confederacy was even willing to sacrifice slavery for independence, “White Southerners depended upon black Southerners to do more than till the fields and tend the campfires … As the war wore on the trend toward black labor became more pronounced. Every black man employed meant one more available white soldier .”

Thomas’s argument fails to convince at times. While the nature of slavery was altered, it did so on a temporary basis. The physical lack of people in rural and even urban areas because of the war granted slaves increased autonomy. Also, the war demanded laborers so the Confederacy was forced to pay slaves or hire them as workers (in case of labor shortage or in some cases strikes). Still this did not change their legal status as property. Once the war ended, providing the South won, slavery would have gone back to its previous form. Thomas remarks on the effects of Reconstruction on his ‘southern revolution’, however, Thomas comments will be examined later. However, while Thomas’s overall argument has strength, it has a weakness in that all the change he describes as revolutionary occurred strictly as a result of the Civil War. The United States’ experiences in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War illustrate the rubber band like quality to wartime societal shifts. Shifts occur but once the war ends, the shape returns with some alterations which might lead to true change but nothing revolutionary or sudden. Similarly, Thomas argues that suspension of civil liberties that occurred in the South was a radical departure from Southern culture. Suspension of civil liberties is a common wartime tactic (WWI, WWII). Lincoln did the same in the North. Thomas cannot use this as truly viable evidence of revolutionary change.

In contrast to Thomas, Eric Foner regards Reconstruction as true revolutionary period. Foner’s work, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 focuses on four main themes concerning the evolution of the Reconstruction Period. Reconstruction aimed to provide a coherent synthesis combining recent scholarship along with Foner’s own conclusions to produce a comprehensive contemporary interpretation of the Reconstruction period. However, within the work several other central themes emerge. The “remodeling” of the South serves as a central theme in the work as Foner attempts to trace the efforts to restructure the South, yet Foner notes the attention paid to local variables and conditions unique to particular regions within the South, “A second purpose of this study is to trace the ways in which southern society as a whole was remodeled , and to do so without neglecting the local variations in different parts of the South.” Still, Reconstruction engages several other main themes. The emergence of new complex race and class relations throughout the South provide Foner another historical pillar to investigate. With the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and the changing nature of the South, racial and class attitudes set upon a the difficult task of redefining race and race relations, a process that continues today. The influx of class and its twisted relationship to race into this volatile social mixture complicates Foner’s investigation, “The evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations, and the complex interconnectgion of race and class in the postwar South, form a third theme of this book.” However, further complicating this portion of Foner’s argument is the non-linear nature of race relations in the South. Rather as Foner illustrates throughout the book, race relations were subject to local variables which greatly influenced said relations, moreover, advances did not proceed in a linear manner. Instead, through complex social, political, and economic interactions between races, race relations gradually evolved at times progressing, while in other moments regressing. African American freedmen fought for their freedoms and liberties even when white resistance turned violent and exclusionary. Its this constant push and pull effect that produces the racial structure of the postwar South.

Foner’s final two themes rest on a more national portrait of the postwar United States. The United States government emerged more with increased authority over the states. Thus, Foner attempts to explain the new role of the federal government and its increasing interest in the rights of its citizens. Therefore, the activist nature of the Populists and Progressives, finds its birthplace in the activist nature of the postwar United States government and to some extent Reconstruction itself. The final theme examined in Reconstruction revolves around the influence of the North’s political and economic structure on the South. Foner’s spends less time on this theme than the others, however, as he notes it does not lack importantance, “finally, this study examines how changes in the North’s economy and class structure affected Reconstruction. Many of the processes and issues central to Southern Reconstruction – the consolidation of a new class structure, changes in the position of blacks, conflicts over access to the region’s economic resources were also present, in different forms, in the North … Reconstruction can not be fully understood without attention to its distinctively Northern and national dimensions.”

The major strength of Foner’s work lies in its attempt to sketch for the reader a process which Foner argues begins in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In reality, Lincoln’s command held very little legitimacy since it did not free slaves in the border states. Thus, Lincoln’s lack of authority over the South left his abolition of slavery in the Southern states as symbolic. Despite this fact, Foner argues that “emancipation meant more than the end of a labor system, more even than the uncompensated liquidation of the nation’s largest concentration of private property … The demise of slavery inevitably threw open the most basic questions of the polity, economy, and society. Begun to preserve the Union, the war now portended a far-reaching transformation in Southern life and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic.” Thus, the Emancipation Proclamation served as a catalyst for the eventual Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Peter Kolchin interprets the effect of the Proclamation similarly, “the Emancipation Proclamation did not -immediately end slavery: the proclamation applied only to rebel territory – where the federal government lacked the ability to enforce the law – and left untouched slaves held in loyal states. Nevertheless, the decree had enormous symbolic significance, transforming a conservative war to restore the Union into a revolutionary war to reconstruct it.” In a manner, Foner uses the Emancipation Proclamation to unite two possibly “revolutionary” periods into one: the Civil War and Reconstruction. Since the Emancipation Proclamation occurs as a result of the Civil War, it serves as the bridge from the revolutionary experience of the Civil War to the revolutionary results of Reconstruction. In this way, the Civil War and Reconstruction can be viewed as similar to stages of the French Revolution. Each with its own unique experience and results, yet both contributing to an overall movement or revolution.

For freedmen, Reconstruction’s beginnings were auspicious. African American political grass roots activism exploded with increased political autonomy. In an essay for Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction entitled “Black Reconstruction Leaders at the Grass Roots”, Foner reiterates much of his arguments concerning the redivision of racial relationships and the interaction between races. According to Foner, blacks joined associations like the Union League, attended conventions, participated in rallies, each of which contributed to the freedmen’s political knowledge and awareness. Among, African Americans, this political mobilization was unprecedented and without rival. Most freed blacks looked to the federal government for protection and acknowledgement of equal rights, since southern localities provided little protection or adopted hostile stances toward freedmen and freedwomen. Reconstruction argues similarly, “But in 1867, politics emerged as the principal focus of black aspirations. The meteoric rise of the Union League reflected and channeled this political mobilization. By the end of 1867, it seemed, virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League. The league’s main function however was political education” However, this political awareness did not mean that it was appreciated by all Southerners, nor did it necessarily lead to a better understanding between white and black Southerners, “Now as freedmen poured into the league, ‘the negro question’ disrupted some upcountry branches, leading many white members to withdraw altogether or retreat into segregated branches.” Such political activism redrew racial relationships and reorganized institutions. For example, the Union League’s acceptance of freedmen resulted in white flight or segregation among other branches, despite the obvious class similarities of the small white farmer and the freedmen. Still, the political activism by freedmen and freedwomen signifies a great change in Southern society.

During Reconstruction, the most visible change in the South revolved both around race relations and labor. In Reconstruction, Foner argues that African Americans cared about more than just receiving just wages for their labor. Instead, freedmen wanted autonomy and land, “For blacks, the abolition of slavery meant not an escape from all labor, but an end to unrequited toil … To white predictions that they would not work, blacks responded that if any class could be characterized as ‘lazy’, it was the planters … Yet, freedom meant more than simply receiving wages. Freedmen wished to take control of the conditions under which they labored, free themselves from subordination of white authority, and carve out the greatest measure of economic autonomy” Foner’s argument finds support from several scholars. Jacqueline Jones work Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow reiterates Foner’s claims. Although focusing on the labor of freedwomen, Jones work notes the differences in the meaning of freedom for black women as compared to its meaning for African American men. According to Jones, black women found themselves obligated to familial concerns, thus they retreated from wage labor. However, despite the differing focus, Jones notes the desire for autonomy among African Americans. Freedmen wished to avoid the chain gang like labor conditions of slavery, therefore labor was reorganized by black laborers into “non-buearucratic, self regulatory, self selecting peer groups”. Such demands by freedmen eventually would lead to the system of sharecropping. Unlike whites, black husbands and fathers viewed familial issues as another political issue of the day such as land reform. Whites failed to share this vision and saw the “ethos of mutuality” as a threat to free labor and self determination.

Harold D. Woodman also notes similar manifestations. However, it must be noted, Woodman refuses to use the term “revolutionary” for the Civil War and Reconstruction period. According to Woodman, historians must assess the quality of this change not the amount. Woodman notes the need for reform in the former slave society, however the reform needed was never produced. Bourgeoisie free labor was to be the basis of the new southern economy since the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War had destroyed the previous one. New roles for both slave and the planter arose, along with the need for new lines of authority. As Foner attests, these new relations and lines of authority could only be created through constant give and take (strikes, work slowdown). Planters became businessmen and merchants creating a new class of “capitalistic landlords”. Laborers developed new roles, wage labor became shared wages, which evolved into tenancy and then sharecropping. Woodman notes the change and its effects which he argues were new business elites preventing opportunity, thus retarding the economy. In comparison, freedmen sharecropping failed to offer economic responsibility or entrepeneurship.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of Reconstruction lay in white hopes for freedmen. Jones notes such in her work Soldiers of Light and Love, as many black communities chose African American teachers over white missionaries. Freedman wanted independence, privacy. Whites wanted freedmen to become like wage laborers in the North, adopting middle class values. Freedmen focused more on land and the right to own their own labor, to produce for themselves. In this way, sharecropping can be viewed as a compromise fought for by African Americans, while it failed to provide them with the economic independence they desired, it did grant them land and some autonomy. Thus, while this was a great change from the slave system, it failed to significantly change the lives of African Americans for the better, nor did it advance the southern economy. Woodman refuses to acknowledge this as revolutionary, “Instead of chronicling quantity we must rather assess quality: the problem is not how much change but what kind of change.”

So, how successful was Reconstruction? Foner argues that Reconstruction proved revolutionary for a period however, but ultimately failed, “Here, however, we enter the realm of the purely speculative. What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its future development.” Thomas views the final results of Reconstruction similarly but through a slightly different historical lens. According to Thomas, Reconstruction undid the revolutionary advances of the Confederacy, “Ironically, the internal revolution went to completion at the very time that the external revolution collapsed … The program of the radical Republicans may have failed to restructure Southern society. It may in the end, have “sold out” the freedmen in the South. Yet, Reconstruction did succeed in frustrating the positive elements of the revolutionary Southern experience.” Both historians view Reconstruction as a failure in two respects: the inability to guarantee freedmen their rights and the retardation of the Southern economy. However, while the political violence in the South (KKK) along with legislation of black codes and Jim Crow laws severely curtailed the rights of freedmen, lasting constitutional adjustments did lay the groundwork for future battles. The Reconstruction amendments did allow for African Americans to claim freedoms that were rightfully theirs with the gradual successes of the Civil Rights movement. The failure of Reconstruction resulted from several factors besides the two already mentioned. Foner points to the North’s new fascination with industrialization and labor conflict. The economics of which would shift the country’s attention away from the Reconstruction experience.

Yet, for all its failures, even Foner acknowledges the importance of Reconstruction in establishing the possibility for a more just America, “the institutions created or consolidated after the Civil War – the black family, school, and church – provided the base from which the modern civil rights revolution sprang. And for its legal strategy, the movement returned to the laws and amendments of Reconstruction.” Like Foner, Kolchin points out similar features of Post-Reconstruction America, “Even as blacks became the objects of intensified racial oppression, they struggled to remake their lives as free men and women and succeeded to a remarkable degree in their efforts to secure greater independence for themselves … In assessing these developments, the question of perspective remains critical: the South of 1910 was hardly the South they would have chosen … but it was far removed from the South of 1860” Thus, Reconstruction allowed African Americans to more fully express agency, while still oppressed, it gave blacks the chance to counter such oppression more freely. Networks, communities, and relationships were all redefined and recreated. Again, just as Foner maintained, Kolchin remarks, “And in the years after World War II, again with the help of white allies, they spearheaded a “second Reconstruction” – grounded on the legal foundation provided by the first — with the goal of creating an interracial society that would finally overcome the persistent legacy of slavery.”

Many revolutions throughout history have been consumed by subsequent counterrevolutions. The French Revolution ended with France in much the same state as when it began the revolution with the reinstatement of the monarchy. However, France was forever changed. Retrenchment occurred yet reform had begun. Similarly, Reconstruction failed to achieve its original aim, yet, it altered the South and North forever. However, one cannot separate Reconstruction from the Civil War. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation connected the two events and united them in their revolutionary purpose. Both Thomas and Foner are correct when they view both events as revolutionary. The legislation passed during Reconstruction stands as the tangible result that allowed for the legalistic protests of the Civil Rights movement. Thus, the Civil War allowed for the passage of such legislation, with Reconstruction providing the historical moment in which to ratify such measures. While Harold Woodman correctly asserts that the quality of change should be the measuring stick by which Reconstruction is measured, his denial of its gradual influence misses the point. When the FDR sent Works Progress Administration agents into the “black belt” during the Great Depression, former slaves (in interviews) repeatedly recalled both the disappointments of Reconstruction but also its accomplishments. Reconstruction and the Civil War provided the light at the end of the tunnel for African Americans. While the tunnel has been long, difficult and arduous and the light has still to be reached, its intensity has grown so that no longer is America and its people in total darkness.

'''Ryan Reft'''

Bringing Asian-Americans into the History of Segregation

2012-06-21T08:22:30Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "The discourse around housing segregation traditionally focuses on the interplay and conflict between black and white communities. Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto, Thom..."

The discourse around housing segregation traditionally focuses on the interplay and conflict between black and white communities. Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto, Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Robert Self’s American Babylon, Kevin Kruse’s White Flight and Becky Nicolaides's My Blue Heaven all illustrate the tensions arising from mid twentieth century housing struggles as African Americans slowly integrated into segregated white communities. Violence, coercion, legal maneuvering and flight emerged as many whites refused to accept integrated neighborhoods.

However, more recent works have explored how other ethnic/racial groups, notably Asian Americans, encountered similar barriers. Charlotte Brooks's 2009 Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing and the Transformation of Urban California contributes to this trend. Noting that “San Francisco’s Chinatown was America’s first segregated neighborhood,” Brooks points out historians' singular focus on the black/white binary when discussing housing segregation: “[Historians] associate residential segregation in the urban United States solely with African Americans.” (Brooks, 11)

The past thirty years have witnessed a proliferation of works focusing on Asian Americans. Ronald Takaki’s contributions alone include Strangers from a Different Shore, A Different Mirror, and Hiroshima: Why American Dropped the Bomb, all of which critique American racial ideology, especially its effects on discursive attitudes toward Asian Americans. Lisa Lowe’s 1997 work Immigrant Acts argues that Asian American culture exists as a site of agency and resistance against the very racialization wrought by American racial ideologies. For Lowe, the importance of Asian Americans lay not only in their own culture and history, but also in their relation to citizenship: “Asian Americans, with the history of being constituted as “aliens”, have the collective “memory” to be critical of the notion of citizenship and the liberal democracy it upholds; Asian American culture is the site of “remembering” in which the recognition of Asian American history in the present predicament of Mexican and Latino immigrants is possible.” (Lowe, 21)

Four years later, Nayan Shah’s Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown contributed to the dialogue focusing on how the efforts of public health officials helped construct a Chinese identity conflated with disease, vice, and filth. Shah emphasizes the importance of race, class, and nationality in shaping the discourse of epidemics among experts, doctors, social critics, and government officials. Like Lowe, Shah acknowledges the key role of national and local memberships in mediating such discourse, writing, “In San Francisco, the constellation of race and public health pivoted upon systems of governance and citizenship.” (Shah, 6)

Brooks’s Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends reorients housing history in San Francisco and Los Angeles to examine the demonization of Asian American homeownership, as segregation in the two California cities focused nearly exclusively on Asian Americans prior to WWII, including Chinese/Chinese American, Japanese/Japanese American, and Filipino/Filipino American. Moreover, Brooks explores the relational nature of race in Los Angeles, as the city’s racial logic grew incredibly byzantine in the face of growing diversity. San Francisco’s nativism never secured the same support in Los Angeles, but Angelenos expressed their own strain of anti-Asian racism. Finally, Brooks illustrates how Cold War foreign policies directly affected domestic issues such as housing. In this way, Asians maintained the very foreignness that prior to WWII led to their exclusion. “By the 1960s, the supposed Asian American “foreignness” once used to defend residential segregation became white Californians’ new rational for Asian American inclusion,” Brooks writes. (194) Citizens and officials began to worry that violence and discrimination against Asians undermined Cold War initiatives. This concern contributed to a public discourse that now celebrated Asian Americans' presence in society, though as guests rather than citizens.

Brooks traces attitudes toward Asian residential segregation which arose in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Beginning with San Francisco’s Chinatown, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends recounts the violence and coercion endured by west coast Asian populations. Though today Chinatown is often seen as a quaint tourist heaven, Brooks (with the help of Shah’s work) links this development to its exclusionary, race-driven point of origin. The paucity of the African American population, along with a fluctuating Mexican/Mexican American community, left both groups outside the direct concerns of many middle class white leaders. Instead, working class and middle class leaders demonized the much larger Chinese (SF) and Japanese (LA) populations. The immigrant background of many San Franciscans heightened their desire to mark the Chinese as others, thus enabling such individuals to claim the benefits of whiteness more forthrightly, which some Eastern and Southeastern Europeans believed they had been denied.

If in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, San Francisco’s Chinatown drew derisive glances from the city’s white citizenry, by the 1920s its function as a tourist destination altered perceptions. Chinese merchants and proprietors adapted to the white prejudices, presenting Chinatown as “essentialized” version of China itself. “San Francisco’s Chinese Americans faced a related dilemma," Brooks argues. "To draw middle class white tourists with money to spend, Chinatown had to at least flirt with the kinds of exotic stereoypes that frustrated and stymied Chinese aliens and American citizens alike.” (34) Of course, such developments paralleled similar processes occurring in Harlem, where white New Yorkers could drift uptown to enjoy black American life for its “exotic” appeal while confining it to the famous black neighborhood’s borders. Unlike black Americans, Chinese residents' lack of citizenship undermined their political influence. Much of Chinatown remained under the purview of local elites with the larger municipal government ignoring Chinatown, except to label it as vice-ridden and diseased. Though by the 1920s and 1930s, nativists tolerated the Chinese, they did so only if the population remained bound by Chinatown’s parameters.

Though Los Angeles shared a strong anti-Asian bias, the diverse nature of L.A. in the 1920s blunted the strength of nativists while contributing to a tortured racial logic/policy that lacked consistency. Unlike San Francisco, in which much of the population could claim recent European roots, L.A.’s citizenry hailed in great part from the Midwest and South. They brought with them racial attitudes that marginalized most of the city’s minorities, especially the Japanese. L.A’s sprawling nature mitigated some hostility, as Brooks points out: “Housing’s intensely local nature forced anti-Asian activists to invest significant time and resources in small areas that yielded only limited rewards.” (40) Still, even if San Francisco’s nativist organizations found shallow support in L.A., much of the local population shared their larger ambitions. “Like San Francisco nativists, Southern California’s most fervent anti-Asian activists sought not just to segregate the Japanese in Los Angeles but to expel them from the state altogether.” Of course, Brooks also suggests that most white residents who cooperated with activists only hoped to expel the Japanese from Los Angeles, not the nation.

The presence of numerous minority groups complicated any clear, rational explanation for discrimination. In fact, what developed was an uneven racial stratification where all non-whites were denied full equal citizenship, but some more so than others: “The unequal status of different nonwhite groups in Los Angeles created a legal racial hierarchy of housing opportunity in the city.” This hierarchy resulted in the growth of interracial neighborhoods such as the “racially unrestricted neighborhoods straddling Central Avenue” where both Japanese and Black Americans occupied housing. Of course, as the effects of the two great migrations became clear, white hostility to black homeownership and integration grew such that “as the city spread, the proportion of housing open to blacks shrank.” (Brooks, 60)

The previous example points to one of Brooks's key arguments — that the relational nature of identity both between non-whites and whites and between non-whites themselves illustrates the confused nature of racial discourse for much of the twentieth century. When few blacks resided in San Francisco and Los Angeles, they failed to attract the kind of resistance that the significantly more populous Chinese and Japanese communities endured. However, as demographics shifted, so too did whites' concerns. The influence of foreign affairs and policies also greatly impacted post war shifts (see below). Finally, relations between non-white communities sometimes featured cooperation and other times conflict. For example, prewar housing restrictions in Jefferson Park allowed for Japanese residents but not Mexican or Black homeowners. Such restrictions demonstrate “how the strength of legal, federal, and white public support for residential segregation in L.A. encouraged different groups to jockey for position rather than unite for greater political power," Brooks says. (124)

Postwar San Francisco illustrated similar tensions, as Chinese elites resisted integrating Chinatown: “Most Chinese Americans deplored residential segregation in general, but they had won the promise of a project for their district by working within the Authority’s system. Few wished to lose any of the precious promised units of housing to integration especially as the city’s racial demographics changed.” (Brooks, 154) By the 1960s, Chinese American leaders viewed Chinatown as a culturally distinct space, but African Americans who had hoped to integrate the area did not agree. “To black critics," Brooks writes, "Chinatown was merely symbolic of the way Chinese Americans were adopting the same practices as white homeowners.” (226) Moreover, occupational and residential segregation meant few interactions between African Americans and Chinese could develop. Likewise, the WWII internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans led some African Americans to purchase those homes and businesses formerly owned by Japanese American proprietors. The evolution of L.A.’s African American enclave of Bronzeville relates directly to the older Japanese American Little Tokyo neighborhood. Still, Brooks acknowledges the work of interracial organizations like the Citizens’ Housing Council, “a multiracial group that monitored the Los Angeles Housing Authority." (124)

The incorporation of a transnational perspective greatly enhances Brooks’ observations. The most striking illustration of Cold War foreign policy affecting domestic issues can be drawn from the post war experience of both Chinese and Japanese Americans. While the period from 1943 to 1952 saw the collapse of “urban California’s legal racial hierarchy … residential segregation of all nonwhites persisted.” The dynamics of race emerged sharply altered. Obviously, Japanese internment illustrates a clear correlation between foreign and domestic policies, but postwar housing arguments demonstrate this relationships’ persistence. For example, if Los Angeles’ Japanese Americans suffered internment during the war, American efforts to rebuild Japan along with the valorization of Nisei war service subsequently provided a direct counterweight to anti-Asian attitudes. The influx of African Americans also contributed to this shift, as anti-Japanese agitators found their biases overwhelmed by others. “In Los Angeles, which by 1942 was experiencing a massive influx of people of all racial backgrounds, the question quickly lost its immediacy after internment," Brooks says. "The issue of migration – particularly of blacks and Mexican Americans – completely eclipsed it.” (132)

San Francisco’s Chinese population - once harshly demonized prior to WWII - also experienced newfound American support. China’s WWII support along with later American military interventions in Asia made treatment of Chinese and Chinese Americans a key Cold War issue. Brooks points out that this “transnational identity” undermined Chinese claims to national membership as they were seen as permanent foreigners, albeit welcome ones. Also, as with the Japanese American example, the arrival of larger numbers of African American residents recast white homeowner concerns that now Chinese Americans came to be seen, along with other Asian Americans, as the “model minority,” to be contrasted with more “troublesome” racial/ethnic groups. Accordingly, Brooks suggests that American interventionism in Asia along with pervasive domestic fears of communist infiltration and agitation “spurred white Californians to reconsider the impact of their segregationist decisions. In the end, the deepening Cold War short circuited the emerging pattern and replaced it with a far different one” (193) White homeowners continued to exhibit a desire to live apart from nonwhites; even when they accepted Chinese or Japanese American neighbors, they did so out of a sense of anti-communism rather than any nod toward racial equality. As one white resident, who supported Nisei WWII veteran Sam Yoshira’s attempt to buy a home in Southwood (South San Francisco), commented, “My property values aren’t as important as my principles.” (Brooks, 206) Such admissions reveal not only latent racial attitudes but also the effect of FHA/HOLC housing policies that dismissed communities with nonwhites as ineligible for home loans subsidized by the federal government.

Ironically, if early Cold War policies enabled Asian American populations to move away from segregated communities, the emergence of the Vietnam War promoted solidarities with those nonwhites they “had left behind.” Moreover, as Lowe points out, the very Asian wars that served to reoriented Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and later Vietnamese American citizenship also ruptured each community's collective memory: “The 'past' that is grasped as memory is, however, not a naturalized, factual past, for the relation to that past is always broken by war, occupation, and displacement," Lowe writes. "Asian American culture 're-members' the past in and through the fragmentation, loss, and dispersal that constitutes the past.” (29) Still, the problem of race remained. As Brooks concludes, “California at mid century foreshadowed America at century’s end: a place where race was far more complicated than black and white and where international conflicts affected domestic race relations.” (239)

'''Ryan Reft'''

Early Interracial Alliances in the Twentieth Century US

2012-06-21T08:21:48Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "Often interracial alliances or formations are presented as modern developments, previously untenable due to various racial or social prejudices that divided ethnicities/races. Th..."

Often interracial alliances or formations are presented as modern developments, previously untenable due to various racial or social prejudices that divided ethnicities/races. The rise of various “rights” movements from the African American led civil rights movement to the later Chicano politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, led to a broad leveling, erasing complexities and tension within each. Additionally, though each secured greater political rights and space within the public sphere for their various peoples, they also contributed to the idea of differentiated protests based on unified racial or ethnic identities. Cross racial or ethnic developments were obscured by identity politics. However, several scholars point to the myopic nature of this viewpoint. Danny Widener, George Sanchez, and Theresa Gaye Johnson dispute such historical extrapolations, arguing that interracial movements existed for decades prior to the “culture wars” of the 1960s, 70’s and 80s. .

Johnson’s “Constellations of Struggle” examines the “cross racial” “inter-community” movement known as the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (SLDC, 1943) through the experiences of two activists Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno. Johnson’s primary purpose is to reveal the “interracial and antiracist alliances, divisions, among aggrieved minority communities, and important insights into the intra-politics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle …” In addition, Johnson emphasizes not only the importance of these alliances but also the key role women played in “the politics of education, desegregation, and gender and racial equality” regarding “urban activism in postwar Los Angeles.” Like Widener and Sanchez, Johnson’s work pushes back against recent works that highlight the role of conflict between non-white communities, most notably tensions between black-brown peoples.

Recent books, such as Nicholas Vaca’s Presumed Alliance, investigate the conflicts arising between black and Latino communities from Compton, California to Miami, Florida. Critics note that Vaca and others focus too narrowly on conflict within the structure of electoral politics which naturally creates interests and favor as various groups “battle” for municipal resources.

Unlike Vaca, Danny Widener’s “Perhaps the Japanese are to be Thanked? Asia, Asian Americans and the Construction of Black California” places the development of Californian African American identity not in terms of differentiated individual groupings but rather in a complex interplay between the West Coast’s rising Asian population and its Black citizenry. Marked by exclusion and inclusion, Black Californians came to define themselves in relation not only to whites but to Asians as well. Placing such identities within an internationalist framework illustrates the importance transcending national boundaries even when exploring domestic interracial alliances. Like Johnson, Widener points to the long interaction between groups, hoping to better understand Black self-identity but also to illustrate the interracial couplings that existed prior to the more familiar movements that unfolded after the mid-20th century.

George Sanchez’s work “What’s Good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews”: Creating Mulitracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s” articulates similar viewpoints. Using the formerly pre-dominantly Jewish Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Sanchez notes the conscious interracial efforts made to foster a multihued coalition during the 1930-1950s. Emerging from a leftist class based political movement, Sanchez attempts to reverse the process that began during McCarthyite years in which “the history of leftist multiracial organizing in Boyle Heights would be erased.”

Though each provides valuable viewpoints and critiques, some questions arise. Johnson argues that many of the latter failures of such multiracial alliances resulted from white racism. Undoubtedly, white prejudice and attempts to divide groups by the dominant society existed, influencing these movements and their disintegration. However, when Johnson argues that the Pew research center’s observation “For Blacks, the growing presence of immigrant workers adds to the formidable obstacles they find facing a job” suffers from a failure to highlight that “many economists disagree that immigration is the reason for high black employment,” she levels the debate among economists concerning immigrations’ economic impact. Correct in her assertion that widespread disagreement on the subject exits, such issues are as much a matter of perception as reality. For example, are Mexicans really taking jobs once reserved for them? No matter what economists argue, some whites perceive this as true. It is possible a similar dynamic might be at play within segments of the black community as well. In addition, though Sanchez notes the intersection of class and race, several other writers obscure this aspect of the debate. Surely, class distinctions factored into these various movements. In fact, Sanchez’s examples illustrate that among the leftist working class Jewish population, an openness to interracial solidarity persisted to the extent that a portion remained in the neighborhood despite large demographics shifts. In contrast, their middle class counterparts vacated for other communities. While admittedly, some of this internal Los Angeles migration revolved around employment and identity, class surely played a part.

'''Ryan Reft'''

Whiteness, Archives, and Oral History

2012-06-21T08:21:04Z

24.148.45.170: Created page with "Whiteness, Archives, and Oral History "In a life spent talking and, above all, listening to the voices of his fellow Americans, he rarely made time for intellectuals. Their eloqu..."

Whiteness, Archives, and Oral History
"In a life spent talking and, above all, listening to the voices of his fellow Americans, he rarely made time for intellectuals. Their eloquence, he said, came too easy. He preferred the 'inchoate thought' of people who were never heard … 'An accidental shove on a crowded Loop corner, while awaiting the change in traffic lights; an apology; a phrase that holds my attention; we go for coffee; a life unfolded at the restaurant table.'"

— Economist, “Obituary- Studs Terkel, Nov. 6, 2008

In the numerous decades Studs Terkel devoted to the capturing the speech and thought of the unheard, one wonders exactly what he did hear. When reading about the indignities of a working class waitress, was the audience really reading about Terkel himself? Were his poetic remembrances of encounters loyal to their source or constructions of reality and fantasy? At the very least, Alessandro Portelli points out, oral histories reflect as much the interviewer and the interviewee. Portelli cautions historians to remember oral histories serve most usefully as tools for getting at the meaning of an event rather than the event itself. In addition to Portelli’s reflections, Walter Johnson, Daniel Wickburg, Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook all provide historians with cautionary insights, suggesting historians divorce “agency” from resistance, consider archives and archivists as active non-passive producers of knowledge, and that historians reconsider new categorical approaches to history.

Recovering the histories of marginalized groups often emerges from an impulse within a historian toward social justice or even some solidarity. While such intents may be laudable, they do not necessarily make for great history. Richard Kilminster cautioned academics that the infection of politics in their work could lead to the establishment of arguments that failed in their ability to be proven nor disproven. Daniel Wickenburg shares his concern over the shifting of the study of identities to those of social constructions such as masculinity or whiteness. Though some argue that this move toward defining and analyzing whiteness and relations to it, serves to simply to allow white people to reinsert themselves into the discussion , Wickenburg’s main issue with it revolves around its extension of social history practices especially in regard to “reading the absences”. Wickenburg wishes not to turn back the clock on these recent “historiographical inversions” but he does plead for cultural historians to break from the methodology of their social history predecessors, “My particular claim … is that cultural historians need to be more like intellectual historians and less like social historians; they need to take ideas and language a lot more seriously than they have been willing to do.”

Social history endures a different criticism from Walter Johnson. Rather than critique the social history methodology Johnson questions the use and meaning of “agency” by historians. Johnson objects to its continued connection to nineteenth century “selfhood” along with conflation with resistance. Calling for an understanding of agency’s interrelation with other aspects of slavery, Johnson believes the “isomorphism” of agency, and resistance must end. Moreover, the “returning of agency” to marginalized or “enslaved” peoples and the self satisfied attitude by historians operates as a sort of erasure of past horrors, allowing society to act as if its structure did not rest on these past indiscretions. According to Johnson, too often historians confuse “cultural autonomy” with resistance. Johnson offers the example of African cultural forms which in themselves lacked inherent agency but enabled slaves to “set about forming the alliances through which they helped one another to resist it.” Ultimately, historians need to reconsider their use, meaning, and relation to “agency”.

If scholars need be aware of their terminology, so too do they need to consider their sources. The aforementioned Portelli advises historians to remember that they consider their role in conducting, interpreting, and creating oral histories. The subjects interviewed, the use of punctuation in transcription, and the questions asked serve as only a few examples which illustrate the complicity of the researcher in the process. Portelli points out m other nuanced aspects of oral histories. For example, emphasis on a particular event or moment by the speaker might be one of several maneuvers including evasion, regret, and numerous other key sentiments.

If historians have been reevaluating methodologies and sources, other professionals in the knowledge industry have failed to illustrate the same critical eye, “Both scholars and archivists have thus had a vested interest in perceiving (and promoting) the archives as a value free site of document inquiry rather than a site for the contestation of power, memory, and identity.” Joan M. Schwarz and Terry Cook argue that scholars must rethink the assumed institutional passiveness of archives. Instead, historians need to consider the prejudices and biases of archives while reading the sources there in more critically. Obviously, the failure of archivists to examine their role in archival creation remains a point of concern for the authors; the ideal of the neutral, powerless, non-political archivist remains a fallacy, “Archivists wield enormous power, loathe as many archivists are to admit this and reluctant as many academics are to acknowledge this.” Of course some might ask why such concerns matter? Schwartz and Cook argue that “this lack of questioning is dangerous” since it perpetuates the myth of archival neutrality, thus sanctioning “the already predilections of archives and archivists to document primarily…

'''Ryan Reft'''

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2012-06-14T19:30:28Z

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2012-06-14T19:29:21Z

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