Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality.

By Bruce Nelson. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, Eng.: Princeton University Press, c. 2001. Pp. xliv, 388. $39.50, ISBN 0-691-01732-8.)

Bruce Nelson's ambitious volume on the relationship between organized labor and the struggle for black equality in the twentieth century makes a valuable contribution to the increasingly acrimonious debate over the meaning, content, and significance of white racial identity in American labor history. Influenced by recent scholarship on the process by which certain immigrants to the United States--whom Nelson calls "in-between" peoples (p. xxvi)--became white, Nelson documents the persistence of ethnicity and the intractability of race among longshoremen and steel workers. If Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants defined themselves in ethnic terms, over the course of the twentieth century they increasingly had the ability to "claim their inheritance as `white' Americans" (p. 45), which left African Americans to "bear the mark of the stranger" (p. 87).

Part One focuses on longshoremen. Nelson explores how a "persistent localism" (p. 26) shaped hiring patterns in the docks of New York City, where foremen drew their labor force from the neighborhoods adjacent to the piers. Since blacks were not part of the "network of family, church, and parish school that funneled young men toward the neighborhood pier" (p. 51), they remained on the margins. The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) proved reluctant to challenge entrenched employment patterns built on the city's ethnic geography. The International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), a CIO-affiliate that operated on the West Coast, though committed to a ban on racial discrimination, in practice allowed the principles of seniority, local autonomy, and rank-and-file democracy to take precedence over racial equality. Thus when ILWU activists tried to organize African American dockworkers in New Orleans, they encountered resistance among blacks in the ILA's "separate but equal" Local 1419. ILWU organizers saw Local 1419 as a relic of segregation, but African Americans thought it "embodied the black community's enduring preference for autonomous, and racially separate, organization" (p. 136).

Nelson turns to the history of steelworkers in Part Two. Despite the United Steelworkers of America's reputation as one of the CIO's most centralized and undemocratic unions, Nelson finds that rank-and-file workers exercised enormous influence in shaping the industry's and the union's racial practices. The union may have been committed on paper to "absolute racial equality in ... membership," but the white majority proved unwilling "to countenance more than token changes in steel's occupational structure," leaving union officials to advocate "glacial incrementalism" (pp. 185-86). As a result, black unionists enlisted the resources of the NAACP to attack discrimination in hiring and promotion, prompting whites to accuse them of breaking solidarity. Throughout the civil rights era, then, organized labor "failed to draw on the ... moral authority of the Civil Rights movement" (p. 294).

Unlike other whiteness scholars who rely on discursive analysis, Nelson informs his work with empirical evidence that enables him to provide a welcome focus on worker agency. At its most provocative, this book captures the importance of localism in fragmenting the allegiances of American workers, suggesting that the social world beyond the shop floor and the union negotiating table shaped the evolution of America's racialized division of labor. But Nelson offers only glimpses of that social world because his sources--union records, union newspapers, interviews with former unionists--drive a compelling but rather conventional institutional labor history. If Nelson is right about the importance of the interplay between the community context and the workplace, then we need to adopt the broader methodology of social history to build on his insights and make sense of what he recognizes as a tale of "enormous complexity" (p. xxxix).

STEVEN A. REICH
James Madison University