Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front by Matthew L. Basso (review)

Matthew L. Basso, in Meet Joe Copper, argues that the masculinity of home front men was threatened during World War II, when soldiering took precedence over breadwinning as the ideal masculine trait. According to Basso, in his three study sites, Butte, Anaconda, and Black Eagle, where many men were employed in war-necessary industry, “a period of stable masculinity” came to an end, causing “working-class men to modify their behavior to meet the standards of home front masculinity,” (6) complicating home front race and gender relationships well into the postwar years. In focusing on the home front, Basso offers an alternative to the majority of World War II masculinity scholarship, which contends that the war offered men, whose masculinity as breadwinners was challenged during the Great Depression, an opportunity to assert their masculinity through military service. However, as Basso rightly recognizes, this view privileges military experiences while neglecting those of home front men.

Basso’s text is broken into three parts, “Defining Whiteness and Working-Class Masculinity, 1882-1940,” “Copper Men and the Challenges of the Early War Home Front,” and “Making the Home Front Social Order.” The first part examines the dynamics of gender and, as Basso terms them, racial-ethnic identities as they were locally constructed. It covers the ways in which men and women, various classes, immigrant groups, and races interacted in order to understand how white privilege and social norms were established and propagated in the decades leading up to the war.

Focusing on wartime propaganda and military draft debates, part two discusses how the war redefined masculinity and the increasing power of the government to define and impact copper men’s masculinity, as the Anaconda Copper Company (acm) and the government turned to female, nonwhite, aged, or disabled persons to fill labour shortages within the copper industry. Additionally, Basso illustrates how copper men deployed their working-class masculinity in order to protect their occupations in the face of deferment and labour shortage debates. Here Basso argues that Butte, Black Eagle, and Anaconda disrupt the popular narrative of increasing women and minority men in wartime industry, as Montana copper men directly challenged these employment initiatives, which they perceived as a threat to “the mine’s white male status.” (130–131)

In part three, Basso looks at wartime crisis (a wildcat strike in Butte, local soldiers posted near Black Eagle and women in smelter jobs in Black Eagle, and the fight to exclude women and minority men from production jobs in Anaconda) in each city, which reveal long-held beliefs about race and gender and the ways in which copper men worked to protect their local gender and racial-ethnic order.

In the final chapter of the text, Basso carries his history into the postwar years, arguing that when returning veterans entered working-class jobs, they integrated themselves into home front definitions of masculinity “that home front men carried from the Great Depression through the war and into the postwar.” (15) In doing so, Basso more fully accounts for the role of working-class masculinity in shaping postwar norms than previous scholarship has.

One of the greatest strengths of Basso’s text is his attention to paradoxical constructions and intersections of race, class, and gender in the American West and in the United States. Embracing these paradoxes complicates simplistic or popular narratives of World War II home front politics. Basso illustrates that during the war, the nation held a vision of masculinity that sometimes drastically differed from that of the Montana copper men. For example, the public called the masculinity and patriotism of copper men into question when they fought against acm and government policies that attempted to curb labour activism, including persuading workers to sign a no-strike pledge. However, gendered constructions in which autonomy and independence from the company were central to a working-class masculine identity meant that participants in wartime...