Browsing by Author "Deutsch, Sarah"

Following World War II, in the estimate of the Congress of Industrial

Organizations (CIO), one out of every six people in the city of Gadsden, Alabama

belonged to the union, making it the “best organized CIO city in the US.” At

midcentury, as most southern communities were growing more antiunion and more

conservative, workers in this city of 60,000 in northeastern Alabama insisted that they

had the same interests as union workers elsewhere and looked to a liberal Democratic

Party and robust federal government to bolster them. In the late 2010s, little evidence

remains that Gadsden and Etowah County were once so different from the rest of the

South. White people here often vote for Republicans. Unions have all but vanished. Development officials openly brag that 94 percent of

industry in the county operates unorganized.

A visitor to Gadsden today might find it hard to believe that the community was

once perhaps the most pro-CIO city the world has ever known. Yet those who came to

study Gadsden in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to see it as a union town, like the

famous American author John Dos Passos, had to reckon with a transformation even

more difficult to conceive: just a few years before their arrival, the city was perhaps the

most anti-CIO town in the country. In the mid-to-late 1930s, it was dangerous to give

even tacit support to the federation. On more than one occasion, workers joined with

police and civic leaders to literally run organizers out of Alabama. But this antiunionism

represented even yet another sea change: in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Gadsden had

also been something like a union town.

The purpose of this dissertation is to use Gadsden as a case study to come to

terms with the historical forces that have turned its feeling about unions upside down

and inside out. When the residents of Gadsden changed their minds

about unionism, for the most part, they did so as a community. This consensus was not

the result of shared values; neither was it compelled by the dominance of local elites. It

was, to the contrary, an outcome of Gadsden’s relationship to the out-of-town capitalists

who sustained it. For all but a few exceptional years in the twentieth century (when

Gadsden could be a union town), residents here have had to fight for capital against

people from communities like their own. In both of the cases in which this working class

city has forsaken unionism, it was because, and only because, that was what American capitalism demanded of it.

According to conventional wisdom, the period of intense antiradicalism that followed World War II effectively drove all radical activity underground by the early 1950s, severing the intergenerational connection between the "Old Left" of the Great Depression era and the "New Left" of the 1960s. Building a Better World revises this narrative by examining how radical activists in New York City carved out space for young people's participation in leftwing political culture between 1945 and 1965. Contrary to most studies of the postwar Red Scare that focus on the Left's decline, this study tells a story of survival. Despite concerted efforts by social critics and governmental officials to curtail radicals' political influence among the young, radicals maintained a surprisingly robust radical social world centered in summer camps, private schools, youth groups, cultural organizations, union halls, and homes throughout New York City and its environs. In these spaces, youth continued to absorb a radical worldview that celebrated the labor movement, decolonization struggles, and African Americans' quest for freedom, while forwarding a biting critique of American capitalism. This process of intergenerational transmission would not have been possible without access to social space and an ever-evolving interpretation of radical values responsive to changes in political culture and demographics. Building a Better World relies on extensive archival research, print material, visual sources, and original oral histories to document this hidden history. In so doing, the dissertation significantly revises our understanding of the American Left, the history of American childhood, spatial change in New York City, and the evolution of political, ethnic, and racial identities in modern American history.

My dissertation examines the circular transit of ideas about race and identity. Through transnational archival research and oral histories in North Carolina and throughout Mexico, I argue that migrants' ideas about race differed depending on their sending community. I use the experiences of migrants from Cherán, Michoacán, to emphasize that race making is a fluid process. Though historians conventionally have treated ethnic and racial categories as separate, if often intersecting, I treat them as fundamentally similar and interchangeable. While the majority of historical scholarship on Mexicans in the United States focuses on areas that were once part of Mexico (like the US Southwest), my study attends to how ideas about race form differently in regions traditionally isolated from Mexican migration, like North Carolina. This research reveals that indigenous migrants' identities developed and transformed differently, intimately linked to the ways racial and ethnic histories have been propagated and lived by Mexican citizens in diverse regions of Mexico. My dissertation also demonstrates that migrants not only adopted the racial ideas of their receiving state, but they also transmitted racial knowledge back to their home communities. In doing so, this history of migration to the United States both begins and ends outside of the country. In our increasingly global and transnational context, my project changes our understanding of how racial formations are generated in a transitional world.

From 1852 to 1910 Congress labored to find the right instruments to eliminate polygamy among the Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggled to retain its claim as the most American of institutions. What these struggles reveal about the shifting role of religion in the developing definition of American citizenship is at the heart of this dissertation. By looking at developing ideas about citizenship in this particular frame, the social and political history of exclusion and inclusion comes into focus and exposes the role religion played in determining who could lay claim to citizenship and who could not, who tried and failed, who succeeded, and why. In the end, the coercive measures of the state and their own desire to join the body politic drove the Saints to unquestionably abandon the practice of polygamy, a central tenet of their faith, so that they could be accepted as American citizens.

The battle over polygamy and the rights of polygamists was not limited to the floor of the U.S. Congress or the Supreme Court, although those sources are carefully examined here. Debates over polygamy and Mormons' right to be Americans also took place in sermons, novels, newspapers, and popular periodicals. Official actions of the state and popular discourses simultaneously defined citizenship and influenced how Mormons understood their own citizenship. This dissertation is a history of the discourse generated by Mormons and their antagonists, laws passed by Congress, and court cases fought to defend or deny the civil, political and social rights of Latter-day Saints.

National Crimes and Southern Horrors examines the contested meanings of the terms civilization, race, and empire in trans-Atlantic conversations during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that understanding these dialogues requires us to understand the interplay between regional and transnational definitions of these terms. It further explains both white Southern opposition to empire at the end of the nineteenth century as well as white Southern acceptance of their region as similar to European empires and imperial mission described in Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The White Man's Burden." Reading newspaper US and British articles and editorials, international periodicals, personal papers of activists and politicians in both the US South and Britain, it uncovers the dynamic definitions of race, empire, and civilization at play in the work of constructing the US South as both a part of and distinct from the imperial world. Reading conversations about Irish home rule, the gold standard, international bimetallism, British interactions with white and black Southerners, the disfranchisement of black men in the US South, the construction of Jim Crow, lynching in the US South, Turkish atrocities in Armenia, the Philippine American War and the Boer War, it reveals that to understand the transnational development of white supremacy in imperial sites in Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and the US South requires to look not only at the ways whites within each site defined their right to rule but also in the ways they looked to each other. It also argues that understanding the place of the US South within trans-Atlantic conversations about race and civilization but also regional politics and the ways that regional concerns structured and limited how people in Britain and the US South saw each other. Through comparison and conflict, the US South was an essential part in constructing global color lines, and imperial ideologies worked to prop up white Southern defenses for segregation and Jim Crow.

This dissertation compares four programs to create equal employment opportunity on the trans Alaska oil pipeline construction project in order to demonstrate the ruptures and continuities between manpower programs to end poverty and affirmative action to eradicate race and sex discrimination. These four programs posited different subjects and strategies for equal employment opportunity, including a statewide affirmative action plan supporting minority men in the construction industry, federal hiring goals for Alaska Natives, a state "Local Hire" law establishing hiring preference for residents of Alaska, and corporate affirmative action plans for women and minorities. I use archival records and original oral histories with pipeline employees to examine the methods government officials and agencies, corporations, trade unions, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations used to fulfill their visions of equality in employment on the 800-mile long, $8 billion pipeline project. I bridge the gender history of welfare with the history of civil rights in order to show how liberal ideals of economic citizenship in the late 1960s that prioritized creating male workers and breadwinners served as the foundational impetus for equal employment opportunity. I challenge the standard historical narrative of equal employment opportunity in the US, which has attributed affirmative action for women to a logical, if hard won, expansion of positive liberal rights first demanded by the black civil rights struggle, then legislated by the state and implemented by state bureaucrats and corporate personnel. What this narrative does not account for is how the gendered dimensions of liberalism underlying affirmative action for male minorities were able to so abruptly accommodate women as workers and economic citizens by the mid-1970s. I find that, over the course of construction of the pipeline, women in nontraditional jobs on the "Last Frontier" emerged as symbols of the success of equal employment opportunity and the legitimacy of American exceptionalism.

In the attempt to plan and mobilize teaching on a massive scale, literacy campaigns bring otherwise implied working theories of human and societal development out in the open. Aside from offering a lens into the role of ideas in political contest during the Cold War, the lessons of literacy campaigns in the United Nations-named “Development Decade” of 1960-1970 are useful for contemporary programs (such as the Algebra Project). This is in large part because literacy campaigns highlight how communities on the periphery of society can conduct planning and mobilize limited staff and resources to meet, replicate, and expand highly targeted goals, shifting the balance of power by setting an agenda when otherwise unable to wield state or monetary influence. The most important problems are which form of planning and which school of pedagogy.

This dissertation studies Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987) of Charleston, South Carolina USA and Elza Costa Freire (1916-1986) of Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil as activist-educators who formed—and with their colleagues mobilized—literacy methods as part of a pedagogy of liberation. Clark and Costa Freire represent a “grassroots” school of liberation pedagogy while the Cuban literacy campaign of 1961 represents a “guerilla” school. While Clark and Costa Freire’s methods can be localized to the settings of Charleston and Recife—and also considered apart from the methods of the Ministry of Education in Havana—each one’s process toward campaigning indicates a shared intellectual context of development planning, even “solving” the problems posed by the exact same pre-existing literacy methods. Moreover, these three cities, like distant sisters, each unevenly transitioned from “slave” and “free” society. In the Cold War’s turn toward the “Third World,” literacy campaigns experimented in the politics of freedom where communities once owned could take ownership of their education.