Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s
By the early years of the Great Depression, corporate-controlled national radio networks, Hollywood-centered motion picture producers, and large-circulation daily newspapers appeared to dominate the means of ideological and cultural production in the U.S. Labor, progressive, and radical leaders correctly perceived the mass media as an integral part of the larger social and economic relations of production. Echoing the insights of Karl Marx, they warned of how the nation’s dominant propertied classes would seek to control society’s “governing ideas and motives” by manipulating the mass media to justify, among other things, “great inequalities in wealth in the community.” Edward Nockels of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), for example, protested that network radio reinforced the luster of consumption, the holiness of the marketplace, and the infallibility of business. The Socialist Party contended that commercial radio programs were as standardized as anything rolling out of a Ford factory. Nockels described such shows as bland entertainment “when not outright propaganda or delusive special pleading.” Such criticisms foreshadowed the arguments of émigré European intellectuals who, by the late 1930s, would denounce mass culture for its bourgeois “consumerism, intellectual vapidness, and political complacency,” and contend that ruling groups used it “to manipulate, pacify, and control” the general public. In recent decades, historians have come to comprehend popular culture as a complicated arena of social, political, and cultural con ict. One component of this reconceptualization of popular culture has been an emphasis on the active role that workers and working-class organizations themselves played in “consuming” and “producing” cultural goods. Michael Denning has gone the furthest in arguing that the decade of the
American Communist History Bibliography 2001
The American Communist History Bibliography continues, with expanded coverage, the work of John Earl Haynes’ “Writings on the History of American Communism,” which appears in the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism. This informal, selective and annotated compilation itself both preceded and continued the more extensive work of Haynes’ Communism and Anti-Communism in the United States: an Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (New York: Garland, 1987, 321 pp.; 2,086 entries). The subject of this annual Bibliography is American Communist History. The level of coverage is extensive. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics—comparative and international communism, the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of American radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items relevant to American Communism. Coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/www discussion lists, etc.) is highly selective, and largely avoids partisan commentary and exchanges. The continuing HOAC Newsletter provides more extensive and timely coverage of current reportage, as well as announcements, items of topical professional interest, etc. Items cited are from the calendar year in the Bibliography’s title, with two exceptions—Internet/www items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate (however, the date of bibliographer’s site visit will always be provided), and older items not cited in previous years’ ACH Bibliographies. Selected informational annotations are provided, principally where a work’s title does not convey essential (chronological, geographical, name or subject) information. The Bibliography is organized into 10 formatbased sections, listed below (within these, the citations are arranged alphabetically). There is no index. Suggested entries are always welcome, especially those for archival, electronic, non-print, and unpublished materials, and for those more ephemeral,
Industrial Relations in 1988
Undoubtedly, the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983 marked a turning point in Australian industrial relations. To a large extent industrial turbulence receded, helped along by global econ omic instability and the influence ofthe Prices and Incomes Accord between the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Council of Trade Union (ACTU). Arguably, the apparent success of the Accord owed something to a widespread concern within unions that the election of a Liberal-National Party government at the federal level would have resulted in a major pro gram of economic regulation, especially in relation to the institutions ofthe labour market. During 1988, despite an increasingly buoyant economy, the continuing influence of these economic and political conditions ensured that the level of industrial disputation remained subdued by historical stan dards, though those opposed to the nascent corporate state or centralised wage fixing may have been heartened by signs that wage restraint was fraying at the...