Canada and the United States
places too much importance on one event in shaping
the course of race relations in Marion's history. Still,
the author succeeds by making careful distinctions
between what can be known with reasonable certainty,
and what becomes accepted as truth in a variety of
different contexts over time. Through creative and
meticulous research, this book reveals the complex
roots and lasting significance of what happcncd in one
place on one terrible, unforgettable night.
LEONARD J. MOORE
McGill University
MICHELLE BRAlTAIN. The Politics of Whiteness: Race,
Workers, and Culture in the Modem South. (Politics and
Society in Twentieth-Century America.) Princeton:
Princeton University Press. 200l. Pp. x, 30l. $35.00.
Textile mill workers have long played a leading role in
southern labor history. Now a new cohort of historians
is scrutinizing a striking feature of the mill world: its
nearly all-white character. With this book, Michelle
Brattain joins Bryant Simon, Timothy J. Minchin, and
others in seeking to understand how race mattered in
southern textiles. A detailed local study of Rome, a
manufacturing hub in northwest Georgia, Brattain's
book conccntrates on the period from 1930 to 1970.
The author argues that mill workers lived class through
race; until civil rights remade the workplace, to be one
of them was to be white. Not "false consciousness" but
self-interest explains the undertow of conservatism
that earlier scholars found puzzling. In an industry that
gave whites exclusive access to machine jobs, their
commitment to racial hierarchy was "not irrational"
(p. 228).
Brattain's freshest evidence comes from political
history. She shows how deeply conservative Georgia
Democrats such as Eugene Talmadge used race to win
support. Talmadge and other politicians encouraged
white workers' tendency to be suspicious of federal
policies that would have benefitted them in other ways
but also might elevate blacks. In this spirit, Brattain
offers a revisionist interpretation of the famed 1934
general strike. Showing how Rome workers endorsed
Talmadge's racist criticisms of New Deal labor policy
even as they walked off their jobs en masse, she argues
that they were always more ambivalent about change
than their scholarly sympathizers have allowed. Brattain then documents Rome workers' fierce resistance
to the Fair Employment Practices Commission in
World War II and their disintercst in later union
organizing drives with the potential to undercut their
racial privileges. When they confronted mounting civil
rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s, their uneasiness
about racial leveling ripened into enthusiasm for massive resistance to school dcscgrcgation and into "mass
defection" from the Democratic Party to Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Richard M. Nixon (p.
255). Brattain also suggestively observes how talk of
race "went underground" after the 1960s, as whites
turned to a "more subtle and invidious rhetoric about
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1239
'qualification'" to deny blacks better jobs and public
power (p. 243).
This is a well-crafted study, but not the ambitious
synthesis its title promises. The book makes no attempt to compare its industry with others in the South,
or even to compare Rome textile workers with their
counterparts elsewhere. The whiteness framework
seems almost a marketing afterthought grafted onto a
resolutely local narrative about events in a single town.
In fact, Brattain slays a straw man when she announces
that white and black workers did not have "identical
interests" (p. 5). Nearly all observers have understood
that this was a segregated industry in a white supremacist region. A focus on whiteness might have made for
a sustained interrogation of the foundations of the
dominant paradigm, particularly the way race slips
from view in interpretations of covert resistance and
working-class community. But the local narrative here
crowds out such frontal engagement with the historiography. Instead, Brattain asserts and reasserts the
primacy of whiteness without exploring evidence that
might complicate and deepen her case. Often it is not
clear what is new beyond the idiom of explanation:
what was long recognized as "race," "segregation," or
"racism" is here respun as "whiteness." Yet that is too
blunt a tool to explain why, for example, union meetings integrated "long before" other local voluntary
organizations and public bodies, or to make sense of
the variations Brattain observes among white mill
workers (p. 234). "They were awful good people," one
says of the black men and women who got mill jobs
after the Civil Rights Act. "They came to every union
meeting regular," the man noted, "and that's what I
stand for. I mean if you're not going to represent them,
don't take their dues" (p. 240).
Labor historians need frameworks that can make
sense of such reasoning, that can combine whiteness
with other influences in interpretive packages adequate to the complexities of the evidence and the
contradictions of lived history. Until we know more
about the political economy of race in different sectors
and the variations in white and black thought and
practice within industries, a grand synthesis of "race,
workers, and culture in the modern South" under the
rubric "the politics of whiteness" seems at best premature. In the meantime, students of Georgia politics and
history and of race and labor in the modern era will
want to read this fine case study.
NANCY MACLEAN
Northwestern University
CATHERINE LuTZ. Homefront: A Military City and the
American Twentieth Century. Boston, Mass.: Beacon.
2001. Pp. 317. $28.50.
In 1918, civic boosters from Fayetteville, North Carolina, set about the task of luring some sort of military
base to the region, offering various incentives, including what would be described in official army literature
as "acres of desolate sandhills and pine trees" (p. 25).
OCTOBER 2002