Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s

by George Lipsitz

Rainbow at Midnight details the origins and evolution of working-class strategies for independence during and after World War II. Arguing that the 1940s may well have been the most revolutionary decade in U.S. history, George Lipsitz combines popular culture, politics, economics, and history to show how war mobilization transformed the working class and how that transformation brought issues of race, gender, and democracy to the forefront of American political culture. This book is a substantially revised and expanded work developed from the author's heralded 1981 Class and Culture in Cold War America.
 

Genres: Labor, History, Nonfiction, Music

368 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book looks at both the rank and file labor movement of the 1940s and how working class culture was eventually transformed into mass culture by the end of the decade. It looks at wildcat strikes throughout the war and beyond that eventually broke out into the mass strikes across the nation. Lipsitz argued that eventually these strikes resulted in huge income gains but came at the cost of labor leaders giving up on the aim of worker democracy at the job site, trading income gains for complete management control, as opposed to social democratic setups. He makes the claim that Taft-Hartley actually had the opposite effect that its conservative crafters had (who assumed workers were being controlled by demagogueic labor leaders) and ended up helping centralize unions into the hands of labor administration at the cost of lively rank and fileism of the 1930s-47, that by the 1950s would see union meeting attendance plummet. 

Union leaders further cemented that control over the workforce by pushing through generous pension plans that discouraged workers from quitting those jobs when they could, meaning labor leaders became the controller of wildcat strikes for management. Lipsitz sees that as a huge defeat for labor that became clearer 30 years later when corporations decided to break the pact and launch offensives against unions and the most unions could do was to push for buybacks. Lipsitz tends to downplay the efforts of Communist labor leaders, who he sees as good unionists but not understanding labor, which I'm not sure I agree with for shop-level Communists, since they really were just radicals who had joined the latest radical organization, as opposed to hardcore central committee Stalinists. I think that really misses a lot of the Popular Front culture that extended far beyond party membership or even its official period of 1935-39, as Denning demonstrated. 

Some really striking chapters really get at exploration of culture, such as the first chapter that looks entertainers of the 1940s in the life of Hank Williams Sr., Marilyn Monroe, and Chester Himes, and how they each represented working class struggle and efforts to climb forward. Finally, the last two chapters looks again to culture by exploring how working class themes come through in movies that finally culminated in Hollywood efforts at suppressing class notions or struggle, and actually blacklisting Salt of the Earth. The last chapter moves to how Rock n Roll was created by multiracial working class cultures that came out of work music traditions of slavery and crop sharing, as well as mountain blue grass tunes that mixed all together to become a larger popular music. Elvis was the white man who made it explode, but made it possible for other black musicians to gain national acclaim (a sort of double edged sword) that saw "race" music become r&b and "hillybilly" become "country" and "folk" become "western".

Good work, thick stuff.

[Anthony Schein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favourite Lipsitz book, but still very good.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this many years ago. The discussion of film noir is
quite eye-opening