Paul Robeson research paper for African American Studies course: AASP 201 at UMUC

268 / L ABOUR/LE TR AVAIL 66

organized labour. The authors are care-

ful to point out that Hawkins’ experi-

ence was not uniformly characteristic of

the black experience at Staley. Still, it’s a

wonder that Hawkins, and by extension,

African Americans, African-American

women, and white women, for that mat-

ter, could ever support a union campaign

for anything, considering the level of ra-

cial and sexual harassment that Ashby

and Hawking document. But they do.

Even more surprising, Hawkins joins the

Road Warriors and ends up serving on

the negotiating team, becoming the first

African American to serve in union lead-

ership. That’s a measure of how trans-

formative the anti-lockout movement

became.

As much as any organizational or tac-

tical question, the alteration of working-

class consciousness through collective

protest is at the centre of the book. The

lockout, the mass rallies, the organized

civil disobedience, the unfettered po-

lice brutality, the instruction in labour

history, the corporate campaign, the as-

tonishingly ambitious solidarity drive,

the linkages formed with other striking

unions, and the mobilization of religious

support transform the conflict from

an exercise in picket-line protocol to a

grassroots social movement. What this

remarkable demonstration of working-

class solidarity could not transform was

the sclerotic bureaucracy, territorialism,

and timidity of the afl-cio. The Staley

workers’ desperate, and ultimately futile,

effort to enlist the afl-cio leadership in

what had become the defining struggle

of the era is a sobering and indispens-

able chapter in this important book. The

questions it raises about the future of la-

bour in a country where the Democratic

Party pays it lip service, and where major

labour organizations expend millions on

electing presidents while leaving millions

unorganized, are that much more com-

pelling when set against the backdrop of

this momentous fight.

Michael Dennis

Acadia University

Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul

Robeson, Quest for Freedom, 1939–1976

(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons 2010)

When Paul Robeson sang and spoke,

thousands of working people in the

United States and Canada listened. His

popularity was worldwide and his name

remains revered amongst an older gen-

eration of political/cultural activists. His

recordings still sold 34 years after his

death.

While rock stars today are often ad-

mired for their work on issues of social

justice, the esteem that Robeson earned

at a time when he was so openly politi-

cal and identified as a communist was

offset by his vilification by the official

media and government, and by his ex-

periences as a black man when the co-

lour bar reigned supreme. What is it

that drew so many working people to

his performances when his repertoire

included African-American spirituals,

freedom songs, Russian folk songs, op-

eratic themes, songs of the Spanish Civil

War, and union songs, hardly the stuff of

popular culture?

Paul Robeson Jr. provides us with not

only a biography of his father from 1939

to his death. He places Robeson’s person-

al life, struggles, work, and study within

an historical context. This was the era of

the Cold War and the civil rights move-

ment, and an era when labour struggled

to make gains despite rabid counter-at-

tacks by the bourgeoisie and the state in

the name of anti-communism.

The biography goes beyond the too

common understanding of the Cold

War as a struggle between two emerging

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS / 269

superpowers. Growing anti-colonial

struggles in Asia and Africa provided an

essential dynamic. Important too were

the political struggles within the US.

Anti-communism was not just a singular

attack upon the Communist Party and

worldwide communism. It was a con-

tinued attempt from the era of the First

World War to rid the labour movement

of all radicalism and to reimpose indus-

trial discipline upon the US working class

after the industrial union insurgency of

the 1930s. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947

was a milestone in that anti-union battle.

The working class meanwhile was chang-

ing with the rise of an African-American

industrial working class and consequent

rising demands from that community

after World War II. Robeson became a

symbol of communities defined by class

and race that were under attack.

While Robeson was regarded by many

on both the left and right as singularly

owned by the Communist Party of the

US, Robeson Jr., who himself became a

party member, records the complexity

of his father’s political thought. Robeson

characterized himself as an anti-fascist

and anti-colonialist. Fascism existed not

only as Nazism, but also in Jim Crow laws,

racism in the US, and colonial attitudes

of white European powers to developing

countries. In conversation with his son he

spoke of himself as “a human being first,

a Negro second, and a Marxist third. But

all three of those levels are inseparably

connected.” (56) As an artist, educator,

and activist, he was not only a precursor

to the forthcoming civil rights movement

but also prefigured the division between

the more conservative elements of that

movement, and the rise of independent

and militant Black self-organization. He

advocated the need for such independent

political action of “his folk.”

J. Edgar Hoover and the fbi judged that

Robeson was an internal threat to the US.

Working from files released from govern-

ment sources, Robeson Jr. shows the in-

tricate attempts to silence, marginalize,

restrict, and even jail his father through

a network of spies and informants, as

well as the deliberate smear campaigns

in which the fbi passed on fabrications

of his speeches to a press that then con-

demned Robeson as a traitor and a tool of

Kremlin policy. His freedom to work and

travel were restricted in a constant battle

to secure a passport.

Robeson Jr. also reports on his father’s

years of sickness and depression that un-

dermined his ability to carry on activity.

While the strain of constant work and po-

litical battle took a heavy emotional and

physical toll, Robeson Jr. suggests that US

officials, in an effort to render him inca-

pable of work and public life, may have

knowingly played a part through coin-

telpro by having doctors administer

hard drugs and shock treatment that ex-

acerbated his disabling condition.

Although not a focus of the biography,

Robeson Jr. does reveal the organization-

al abilities of the left despite the intense

attack against it. Surmounting extraor-

dinarily difficult restrictions, the left was

still able to call out immense public sup-

port for Robeson’s constant challenges to

the government’s efforts to restrict his

freedom to work and travel, to challenge

those who vilified him in the official me-

dia, and to gather the audiences to hear

him perform so that his work and mes-

sage could continue.

Robeson Jr. gives us a portrait of an art-

ist as a cultural/political activist, organiz-

er, and symbol. The biography examines

the critical juncture and dynamic links

between social class and race, revealing

important issues of political organization

and strategy that pitted radical and con-

servative elements within both the labour

and civil rights movements against each

other nationally and internationally, and

270 / L ABOUR/LE TR AVAIL 66

explores the role of state policy in exac-

erbating such disputes. It importantly re-

veals, through the focus on the work and

personal beliefs of Robeson, the intrinsic

relationship between cultural/artistic

work and political work, treating cul-

ture not simply as an adjunct to politics

but as a critical method of politics. In the

person of Paul Robeson they truly were

inseparable.

Len Wallace

University of Windsor

Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work:

Harnessing Power in Industrial America

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press

2008)

Charles Elton, one of the founders of

the discipline of ecology, once noted that

when an ecologist exclaims “there goes a

badger,” he has in mind some reflective

idea of the animal’s place in the commu-

nity to which it belongs, just as if he had

said, “there goes the vicar.” What Ann

Norton Greene has done in this book

is say “there goes a horse” and has then

shown us the horse’s place in broader so-

ciety. She presents nineteenth century

North America not simply as a society

that used horses but rather as a society

of horses and humans living and working

together.

Any ecologist would also point out the

other ingredient in understanding an or-

ganism’s place in society – be it the vicar,

a badger, or a horse – is understanding

its competition. In this case the horse’s

competition has been seen conventional-

ly as the machine. Greene demonstrates,

however, that this was not the case in the

nineteenth century. It was undoubtedly

the Age of Machines but it was also the

Age of Manure. The average horse pro-

duced 20 to 50 pounds of manure and a

gallon of urine daily. So, by the end of the

nineteenth century, the 131,000 horses in

New York City, for example, were produc-

ing 1,300 to 3,300 tons of manure a day or

5/12 tons per square mile. Greene’s focus

is on draft horses’ traction power in cities

like New York, and on farms and facto-

ries, in which horses were ubiquitous (a

small point that might rankle, however,

is the sweeping use of “America,” in the

title, to mean regions of the United States

– the Northeast and Midwest).

The book does not locate itself in “ani-

mal studies” but rather in the nexus be-

tween energy studies and classic social

history, drawing on work from environ-

mental history and the history of sci-

ence. The author shows that, in a sense,

energy history is environmental history,

as developments transformed the socio-

physical landscape. The key to the argu-

ment is that technology does not exist in

isolation but as part of the “wider com-

munity,” each influencing the develop-

ment of the other. Much of the focus is

on the history of social choices about

economic growth. Greene deftly argues

that such choices were not simply ratio-

nal selections by a coldly logical Homo

economicus. Instead, they were vested in

very emotional ideas of national pride.

She contends that the deployment of

horses had to fit “into a pattern of beliefs

about technological change... tying en-

ergy consumption to national prosper-

ity and progress.” (9) Greene shows that

the very model of American life, “the en-

ergy landscape of horse power,” became

a template for “American expectations

about energy abundance.”(82) Thus the

draft horse performed not only physical

labour but also “cultural work.” (39) In

this way, Greene delineates the replace-

ment of horses by mechanical power as a

non-linear, uneven process and teases out

the complexities of change. By the end of

the century, she notes, “Americans pon-

dered the meaning of the horse” as they

“sought to become self-consciously mod-

ern.” (243)

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