Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company.

Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company. By Michael R. Botson Jr. Kenneth E. Montague Series in Oil and Business History. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 265. $43.00, ISBN 1-58544-438-3.)

In the century after oil was discovered at nearby Spindletop, Houston developed a distinctive profile built on staunchly conservative, laissez-faire foundations. The Hughes Tool Company (HTC), producing drill bits for the petroleum industry, functioned throughout that period as a linchpin in the powerful anti-union constellation directing Gulf Coast industrial relations. Noting a dearth of serious scholarship on Texas labor history, the author describes his work as "the first book-length study of the intersection between Houston's organized labor and the civil rights movement" (p. 9). Bringing to bear an array of research materials, Michael R. Botson Jr. sets out to explore the jagged terrain of race and class relations in the strategically important but anomalous workplace setting at Hughes.

The complexities shaping HTC from its founding in 1908 make for a potentially rich and illuminating study. Before Jim Crow began to give way in the early 1970s, the Hughes plant was host to chronic multiparty disputes involving a relentlessly despotic management cadre, sympathetic "community" leaders, company unions, federal officials, American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizers, and a racially mixed but segregated and divided workforce. Constructing a reliable and coherent narrative from this muddle requires close attention to the fluctuating contours of labor and race relations and an analytical framework that can identify the common threads in a story of labyrinthine complexity. Faced with such a daunting challenge, Botson manages to broach a number of intriguing problems but is ultimately unable to offer readers a credible resolution.

Two major deficiencies stand out: Botson's rendering of the CIO's attempt to organize the workforce in the late 1930s and his confusing treatment of company "unions." Espousing Herbert Hill's critique of white labor racism, the author blurs the distinction between the segregated company "unions" financed and directed by Hughes management and the CIO--which promoted biracial cooperation and fought to raise the wages of its black members but "failed to dislodge racial discrimination" (pp. 7, 154). His assertion that "African Americans had little to celebrate" in the CIO's victory since "the Independent Metal Workers and the CIO both discriminated against them" sits uneasily with evidence elsewhere that the CIO drew its greatest support from among black workers, that African Americans were prominent in attendance at interracial strike meetings, and that it was black CIO veterans who launched the legal assault on segregation after management succeeded in having their union decertified (p. 121). Nowhere does the author follow up his fleeting assertion that wartime militancy "temporarily transcended race and galvanized white members into solidarity with their black [CIO] brothers," and in the end he is unable to demonstrate the basic proposition that labor agitation and the local civil rights movement ever, in fact, "intersected" (p. 138).

The discerning reader will find in this study a number of important leads for depicting black and white workers' experience at Hughes Tool Company, and, with more analytical rigor, Botson's impressive research might have delivered valuable gains for ongoing discussions about race and class in the twentieth-century South. Unfortunately the very substantial potential in the Hughes story remains largely undeveloped.

BRIAN KELLY

Queen's University Belfast