Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877-1920 (review)

Historians' fascination with the genealogy of the hypermasculine Anglo-Saxon male—Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Sandow, Ivy League athletes—has tended to bully into invisibility other, seemingly meeker constructions and campaigns of masculinity that have persisted and shaped class and racial identities and claims to power during the last 120 years. Winter's study of efforts by the Young Men's Christian Association (ymca) to make railroad (and later industrial) workers into "Christian men" moves beyond this usual cast of masculine characters to consider how gender informed and guided the workplace and political agenda of industrial capitalism from 1880 to 1920.

In the late 1870s, the organization established a Railroad Department and joined with leading railroad corporations to combat radicalism among their workforces. A "secretary" supervised each ymca railroad facility, offering alternatives to the leisure occupations that supposedly bred radicals. The secretaries themselves, Winter contends, were stirred to action by a sense of Christian "mission" and "social purpose." They aimed to guide workers to a "higher plane of Christian manhood," where "moral, pious men, regardless of social standing, would self-sacrificingly cooperate in the production of industrial wealth, while bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth" (14). For the working-class male, Christian manhood meant manly submission to the good of the company. The secretaries also envisaged themselves as masterful men who, by force of personality, produced (working-class) men of character. Despite the rhetoric of uniting men as "men" across class lines, the ymca's gender project reformulated class difference and hierarchy, making a place for workers' dependence and the secretaries' own independence in a two-class system of manhood.

Winter's account of the campaign shows that it had little effect on labor unrest. By the end of the 1910s—when more than 4 million men had joined unions, and strikes were as common as ever—the ymca railroad and industrial departments counted about 236,000 members nationally. Although the secretaries "hoped to remake the workers in their own image, without actually empowering them" (139), the evidence suggests that the workers tended to join on their own terms, demanding (and getting) billiard tables in the ymca parlor in exchange for their presence. In this sense, they shaped these spaces in opposition to the intended agenda, much as gay men in the early century claimed ymca hotels for their own notions of fraternity.

Winter's interdisciplinary approach focuses on discourses of class and gender (race, a usual concern in examinations of the period, is mainly absent). Theoretical and historiographical debates get so much attention that significant use of materials from the actual period are not apparent until twenty or more pages into the book. The theoretical build-up prepares us to see how the ymca programs contributed to a more general ideological process in which gender and class boundaries and codes were reworked to the benefit of capital. This insight seems reasonable enough, but the ymca's assistance is hard to detect. The research leans heavily on prescriptive and promotional literature, providing little evidence that the secretaries "made" any men—working-class or otherwise—besides themselves. Winter also insufficiently positions the ymca programs in relation to the long and continuing histories of "young men's" reform movements. Attention to how the "youth" of the secretaries and of their working-class subjects figured in the reworkings of gender and class might clarify how the secretaries' determination to engineer an industrial Christian order affected, if at all,"middle-class culture and capitalist cultural development ... more generally" (147).