Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland by Stephen Meyer (review)

120 The Michigan Historical Review Stephen Meyer, Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Pp. 247. Illustrated. Index. Notes. Cloth $95.00. This ambitious study strives to answer Ava Baron’s call for more investigations of working-class masculinities and how these shaped specific work cultures. Focused on auto workers, mainly in Detroit, Stephen Meyer sets out to explore the two poles of “respectable” and “rough” working-class masculinity, although his primary focus is on the latter, beginning with an opening quote from one worker that to “be a man” meant to “fight, work, screw, and booze” (p. 1). This imbalance likely can be traced to the peak of “respectability” during the nineteenth century when labor movements led by skilled tradesmen agitated for a “family wage,” or sufficient compensation that enabled wives to remain at home, in keeping with more middle-class aspirations. Taylorism and Fordism subsequently decimated skilled work in industries like auto manufacture, rendering obsolete this earlier dream by the time the story picks up in the 1910s. After an eye-opening discussion of the assembly-line’s physical and psychological toll, Meyer turns to forms of resistance that aimed to reclaim some control, often with implications for manhood: from underwork (“soldiering”) and bluffing one’s way in order to gain job experience, to coarse jokes and pranks as important coping mechanisms and forms of male bonding. Pro-union activism became another source of ideas about manliness; machismo and the not-infrequent resort to fisticuffs—in confronting foremen, industrial spies, company goons, scabs, and reluctant shop mates–actually became valuable tools in building the new 1930s CIO unions. It is here that we can most readily see what Meyer calls the “blending” of respectability and roughness, though he several times mentions, but does not much examine, another possibility—the respectable provider or “family man.” However, the “embedding” of “male oppositional and confrontational rituals and displays of power” in the now-unionized automobile factories came at a price (p. 116). When significant numbers of women entered auto work during World War II, often finding themselves the targets of harassment and sexual imposition, many men adopted a protective, “patriarchal,” attitude toward their female coworkers , according to Meyer. Women often developed an alternative, more mutualistic, work culture while still engaging in creative forms of on-the-job resistance, while some accommodated themselves to male Book Reviews 121 norms (by swearing, for example). Additionally, black men, traditionally relegated to the worst jobs or used as strikebreakers, had their own ideas about manliness that factored into racial conflicts that played out on the shop floor as they ascended into previously all-white departments and later organized “RUMs” (revolutionary unions). Meyer’s account flattens out by the 1960s, as he concludes that rough working-class masculinity survives into our present–although in an increasingly dysfunctional manner–even as the remnants of respectability (good union wages and benefits) have been severely undercut by deindustrialization. This account is an incredibly rich social history that creatively taps sources like union grievance proceedings and which includes forays into topics like prostitution and the Ku Klux Klan’s role in World War II “hate strikes.” At the outset, Meyer acknowledges “working class masculine identity had many roots” stemming from social relations not just at work but also in homes and neighborhoods, and with women as well as men (p. 2). While extensively documenting men’s behaviors, and while placing the critical lens squarely on the topic of masculinity, his analysis could further benefit from an increased focus on the underlying mindsets and values that also shaped working-class masculine identity in this particular time and place. Todd M. Michney University of Toledo Robert Michael Morrissey. Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 326. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $45.00. Robert Michael Morrissey begins Empire by Collaboration with a fascinating anecdote: in 1772, during a time of revolutionary turmoil, a colonial pamphlet called on the British to provide more government to the borderlands territory that changed hands as a result of the Seven Years’ War. To Morrissey, this idiosyncratic...