Purpose – This assignment will develop further students’ abilities to assess and use the scholarship on the working-class, and will particularly challenge them to explore key questions in labour studies. To provide students with some direction in their research, the essay questions deal with subjects that are discussed at length in one of the articles in the coursepack. Hence doing an intensive examination of the arguments of labour scholars is also a key part of the assignment.Assignment – Write an essay that answers one of the questions below. Your essay should draw upon the relevant material in your coursepack, plus THREE (3) other sources. Part of the evaluation will be the quality of the material you find, ie. its relevance, whether it is sufficiently scholarly, etc. Your essay will also be judged on how effectively you build and argument by taking a position and supporting it with the material from your research. You may bring American examples and scholars into your essay, if and when appropriate, but be aware that the American context is different that the Canadian one!
“Pop culture pieces such as “Born in the U.S.A.” get a lot of attention, but in the end they tell us little about the problems of the working class in the 1970s and 1980s.” Do you agree with this statement? Explain your position.
Choose one or two kinds of work that are good illustrations of emotional labour and the toll it takes on workers. Explain why you chose them.
“What matters most about a job is how well workers are paid – focusing on precarious labour will tell us little.” Do you agree with this statement? Explain why or why not.
Is it fair to say that the Duty to Accommodate offers effective protection to some groups of workers but not others? Explain your answer.
Citations: Citations and a bibliography are required. You can use either footnotes (numbers in the text) or references in brackets. If you use the latter, include the author, publication year, and page number– eg. (Carson, 2017, 214).Plagiarism is a serious offence. Be sure that you know what it is. For your own protection, retain your rough work and a copy of your essay.Length: 4 to 6 pages double-spaced (not including bibliography)Those are the requirements, but I want to add that English is my second language, my English level is not high, so please write a little bit simple, not too complicated, college freshman level is good enough. Thx.The “Cowie – Dead Man’s Town.pdf” might be helpful.
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McMaster University
Labour Studies Program
LABOUR STUDIES 1AO3E
Essay Assignment
Purpose – This assignment will develop further students’ abilities to assess and use the
scholarship on the working-class, and will particularly challenge them to explore key
questions in labour studies. To provide students with some direction in their research, the
essay questions deal with subjects that are discussed at length in one of the articles in the
coursepack. Hence doing an intensive examination of the arguments of labour scholars is
also a key part of the assignment.
Assignment – Write an essay that answers one of the questions below. Your essay should
draw upon the relevant material in your coursepack, plus THREE (3) other sources. Part of
the evaluation will be the quality of the material you find, ie. its relevance, whether it is
sufficiently scholarly, etc. Your essay will also be judged on how effectively you build and
argument by taking a position and supporting it with the material from your research. You
may bring American examples and scholars into your essay, if and when appropriate, but be
aware that the American context is different that the Canadian one!
1. “Pop culture pieces such as “Born in the U.S.A.” get a lot of attention, but in the end
they tell us little about the problems of the working class in the 1970s and 1980s.” Do
you agree with this statement? Explain your position.
2. Choose one or two kinds of work that are good illustrations of emotional labour and
the toll it takes on workers. Explain why you chose them.
3. “What matters most about a job is how well workers are paid – focusing on
precarious labour will tell us little.” Do you agree with this statement? Explain why
or why not.
4. Is it fair to say that the Duty to Accommodate offers effective protection to some
groups of workers but not others? Explain your answer.
Citations: Citations and a bibliography are required. You can use either footnotes (numbers
in the text) or references in brackets. If you use the latter, include the author, publication
year, and page number– eg. (Carson, 2017, 214).
Plagiarism is a serious offence. Be sure that you know what it is. For your own protection,
retain your rough work and a copy of your essay.
Length: 4 to 6 pages double-spaced (not including bibliography)
Deadline: March 21, 2019
Late Penalties:
• First 3 days: 1% per working day. (This means 1% out of 100 on that assignment,
not 1% from the final course grade.)
•
After first 3 days: 2% per working day. (This means 2% out of 100 on that
assignment, not 2% from the final course grade.)
Dead Man’s Town: “Born in the U.S.A.,” Social History, and
Working-Class Identity
Jefferson R. Cowie, Lauren Boehm
American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 2, June 2006, pp. 353-378 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2006.0040
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/199136
Access provided by McMaster University Library (26 Jun 2017 20:50 GMT)
Dead Man’s Town | 353
Dead Man’s Town: “Born in the U.S.A.,”
Social History, and Working-Class Identity
Jefferson Cowie and Lauren Boehm
I
n the summer of 1984, America’s foremost working-class hero stood on
stage, dwarfed by an enormous Patton-like flag, pounding the air with his
fist as if it mattered. Tens of thousands of voices united to chant the chorus of the most popular song of the summer, the year, and the decade: “Born
in the U.S.A.” The audience’s repeated cries of the famous refrain sometimes
drowned out the E Street Band itself, bringing pitch to an event that was equal
parts rock concert, spiritual revival, and nationalist rally. In place of the skinny
greaser-poet of his earlier tours, Bruce Springsteen had been remade into a
superhero version of himself, his new pumped-up body covered in exaggerated layers of denim and leather, his biceps working his ’52 Fender Esquire
like a jackhammer. Fists and flags were thrown into the air at the first hint of
the famous melody as thousands of bodies shadowboxed the empty space above
the crowd to the rhythm of the song. Whether one chose to compare the
spectacle to the horror of a Nuremburg rally or the freedom of an Elvis Presley
show, the intensity of the 1984 tour made rock ’n’ roll feel almost powerful
again—more like a cause than an escape.
It is easy to understand why Springsteen’s 1980s performances are typically
seen as a continuation of backlash masculinity and whiteness that washed over
popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s. “Like Reagan and Rambo,” writes
Bryan Garman, “the apparently working-class Springsteen was for many Americans a white hard-body hero whose masculinity confirmed the values of patriarchy and patriotism, the work ethic and rugged individualism, and who clearly
demarcated the boundaries between men and women, black and white, heterosexual and homosexual.” Many saw Springsteen as a packaged commodity,
his performances little more than unthreatening nostalgia treats exuding the
glory days of “white working-class masculinity associated with Fordist regimes
of mass production and capital accumulation,” according to Fred Pfeil. Indeed, Springsteen’s politics, masculinity, whiteness, faith, patriotism, commercialization, and sense of community have been much discussed in both the
scholarly and popular literature.1
©2006 The American Studies Association
354 | American Quarterly
Beneath the fandom, the style, the reception, and all of what Christopher
Small calls “musicking,” however, “Born in the U.S.A.” can be read as something more profound and interesting than a genre piece.2 Through a close
reading of the song, we offer an intertextual and historically embedded analysis to make a theoretical contribution to both working-class history and class
theory. Rather than treating “Born in the U.S.A.” as a symptom or evidence of
populist backlash, nostalgia, or retro-masculinity, this essay examines
Springsteen’s biggest and most controversial hit as a narrative of the transformation of white, male working-class identity.3 We argue that this song—structured as fiction, crafted from reportage, and projected as anthem—can stand
as a compelling explanation of the redefinition of civic identity for white,
male workers from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. The tale Springsteen
tells, looking back from “ten years burning down the road,” works as a critical
examination and lament of the coming of age of post–New Deal workingclass politics.
Blue-collar themes permeated 1970s and 1980s popular culture—from
musicians such as Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, John Mellencamp, and
Billy Joel to films such as Saturday Night Fever, Blue Collar, Rocky, Norma Rae,
and Flashdance. Springsteen’s work is unique, however, as he began to engage
in the serious study of history and American letters through such works as Henry Figure 1.
belts out “Born in the U.S.A.”
Steele Commager’s and Allan Nevins’s pro- Springsteen
in Washington, D.C., en route to selling his
gressive History of the United States, the life 5 millionth ticket on a tour that dominated
culture in the mid 1980s.
of Woody Guthrie, country music—par- popular
© Bettmann/Corbis. Used with permission.
ticularly Hank Williams, the stories of
Flannery O’Connor, the novels of Walker
Percy, film noir, and Robert Frank’s photography, among other influences. In
the 1980s his rock ’n’ roll looked less to autobiography, his traditional source
material, and began to experiment with the intersections between local stories
and the forces of national history. As Mikal Gilmore argues, Springsteen began using music consciously and explicitly “as a means of looking at history, as
a way of understanding how the lives of people in his songs had been shaped
by the conditions surrounding them, and by forces beyond their control.” In
this sense, “Born in the U.S.A.” can be understood as the struggle of an organic intellectual to explain the transformations of the broader world around him.4
A close reading of the song’s narrative themes—and the cultural and political forces that gave rise to them—points toward an understanding of both
working-class identity and community under siege in what can best be understood as a guerrilla war at home and abroad. The song’s Vietnam/hometown
Dead Man’s Town | 355
356 | American Quarterly
metonymy is suggested through the song’s unique musical structure, the
anthemic chorus contrasted with the verses’ desperate narrative. Springsteen
reveals blue-collar America separated from an economic identity, sheltered
only by the empty shell of a failed social patriotism, contained in a hometown
under attack, and fighting in little but isolation and silence. The economic
foundations of the industrial working class were disappearing, and the politics
that once offered some protection had all but vanished. What remained was a
deafening but hollow national pride—“Born in the U.S.A.” The song helps to
make sense of what sociologist David Halle identifies as the three levels of
working-class identity: work experiences, neighborhood, and the nation state—
“a common bond between all Americans.”5 “Born in the U.S.A.” explores
working-class America stripped of civic outlets for the first two and abandoned only to third: the imagined community of nationhood. Only the residual damages of guerilla combat remain: an atomized and confused sense of
self lost in the endlessly reverberating chorus of a nation.
Identity in Transition
Working-class identity, like any other, is never a given. While it is always present,
its outlets vary and are constructed socially and politically in the historical
moment. Class awareness does not emerge from the shop floor, the union
hall, the neighborhood, the battlefield, or the voting booth in any automatic
or obvious form, even though the tensions of power and conflict over material
conditions remain very real. As political scientist Adolph Reed explains, those
attempting to understand workers need “to dispense with essentialist conceptions of working-class identity and recognize that there is no single route decreed by history, God, or any other force.” Working people resist any formulaic or singular representation of themselves, as Michael Frisch argues, “offering
instead a more seamless web in which worlds of family, neighborhood, and
community were woven together with work and workplace in their own identities.” When class identity becomes an inaccessible, illegitimate, or silenced
aspect of people’s lives, however, those tensions do not disappear along with
the dismissal of their discursive referents. Class expressions are always in a
practical dialogue with existing hierarchies, political regimes, and organizational outlets, but the shape that class does take in civic discourse often swings
the cultural and political balance of the nation.6
Blue-collar men once enjoyed a central place in both radical and mainstream political discourse that centered on the key questions of capitalism,
their roles as wage earners, and the justice due them. White workers even
Dead Man’s Town | 357
achieved a type of citizenship within the “culture of unity” of the 1930s as
they poured into the labor movement and formed the political backbone to
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. While that economic citizenship was
much celebrated by consensus Democrats and even many labor historians,
rank-and-file workers often found themselves in conflict with the stultifying
power of the labor bureaucracy. Further, the failure of labor insurgencies focusing on civil rights in the immediate postwar period left working people
enmeshed in a system that maintained skin privilege as a core aspect of working-class identity. Enter the new politics of the 1960s, when C. Wright Mills
threw down the gauntlet by urging the New Left to get rid of its “labor
metaphysic”—rejecting the idea that the power and will for society’s emancipation burned in the breast of the proletariat. The new social movements
flowered for minorities, for women, and against both liberal institutions and
the war they created. In so doing, the new social movements struck important
blows against white, male workers’ provincial and often racist cultural authority.7
In the 1970s, there emerged the possibility of combining the energy of the
new social movements with the old class politics. The biggest strike wave in
postwar history rocked the nation between 1968 and 1974, including a series
of wildcat strikes, democratization and reform movements within the unions,
revolts against automation, and new organizing efforts that frequently built
upon a promising base of women, minorities, and students. For white workers, anti-busing demonstrations and support for George Wallace and Richard
Nixon competed against the lure of multiracial rank-and-file insurgency. Both
backlash and protest often overlapped in their critiques of the liberal “consensus,” whether for reasons of unfulfilling work, declining economic opportunity, the protection of traditional morality, or simple racial retrenchment. By
the mid- to late 1970s, however, the energy crisis, inflation, globalization, and
deregulation crushed the strike wave—and much of the industrial heartland
along with it—ending hopes of a revival of a multicultural working-class agenda.
While the reality of the working class in the 1970s was increasingly multiracial and multicultural by any objective measure, the idea of the working class
in the popular idiom had, by the 1980s, devolved even further into a repository for patriarchy and racism.8
The new populist epithets for working-class white guys tended to be defined less by the profundity of structural need in deindustrializing America
than by national leaders who talked tough but offered little economic sustenance: Nixon’s “silent majority,” the “Reagan Democrat,” and, later, the
“NASCAR Dad.” So far had the white working class fallen from its place in
liberal thought that political strategists such as Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers
358 | American Quarterly
labeled them “America’s forgotten majority” in the 1990s. The authors spent
an entire book trying to legitimize their subject (“why the white working class
still matters” was the subtitle) as a potential progressive voice despite what
everybody thought they knew about them as rednecks and Archie Bunkers
out to roll back the gains of the civil rights and women’s movements. By the
1980s, “working class”—a term that had too long been defined as white and
male in popular discourse despite the much more complex reality—had evolved
into a label for a hardened form of white, male identity politics. The working
class became, in essence, negatively defined: an “other” dwelling outside of the
new politics built by and upon minorities, women, youth, and sexuality. By
the 1980s, even once militant workerists like André Gorz were penning tracts
such as his provocative Farewell to the Working Class.9
Just as the Left gave up, however, the New Right rushed in to try to fill the
political void, placing blue-collar men at the center of a new political strategy.
By the time Ronald Reagan was reelected in 1984, flags, God, guns, heterosexuality, and whiteness had eclipsed the economic politics of labor rights,
wages, unions, and working conditions as the focal points for enough of working-class identity to swing the balance of the nation. The short history of the
post-Vietnam working class, then, is the story of how blue-collar white guys
moved from a somewhat vague and highly contested class identity to one of
often militant cultural resentments. And as class was reified as a white, male
construct, the problems of women and minorities tended to be isolated outside of the economics of class, limited to issues specific to relatively classless
understandings of race and gender.10 It is easy to read Springsteen and his hit
as part of this transformation, but a closer examination reveals him trying to
explain it through the dichotomous structure of the song: half social realist
narrative and half national myth.
“Clearly the Words and the Music Didn’t Go Together”
Amiri Baraka declares that “Springsteen is an American shouter, like the black
country blues shouters from Leadbelly on, with an ear to James Brown and
Wilson Pickett.” No minstrel he, argues Baraka, Springsteen writes of authentic “victims, lonely, broke, and hungry” who are “yoked” to being born in the
U.S.A. Those shouts, however, are less connected to the African American
tradition of the “secular spiritual” that looks for grace in a mean world than
they are linked to challenges to social status and a search for a new sociological
and political footing. Most Springsteen songs hold the possibility of redemption; “Born in the U.S.A.” does not. It lacks the cinematic drama present in
Dead Man’s Town | 359
his other works—a narrative that typically delivers the characters to the crossroads, where at least one direction might lead to a better day. The song is
drained of all of the rich Catholic imagery that typically fills his lyrical world—
baptism, rebirth, flowing waters, community, hope, and faith are noticeably
absent. The song, according to Springsteen, is about “a working-class man” in
the midst of a “spiritual crisis, in which man is left lost.” He continues, “It’s
like he has nothing left to tie him into society anymore. He’s isolated from the
government. Isolated from his family”; his narrator has been driven “to the
point where nothing makes sense.” As loud as “Born in the U.S.A.” is, it is
actually more of a song about silence—both existential and political.11
The first twenty seconds of “Born in the U.S.A.” are all instrumental, structured around a straightforward rhythm and singsong tune that moves almost
relentlessly through the entire piece. But the song’s simplistic surface belies a
structure built upon a series of dualities. The keyboards compete with the
drums, and the vocals strain to be heard over the barrage of instrumentation.
Though Springsteen seems to scream his voice hoarse, he barely manages to
peek over the wall of sound, like a man caught in a musical cage, overpowered
by the anthem of his own country. It is at once potent but overwhelmed, loud
yet inaudible, compelling but as repetitive as an assembly line. The song’s
narrative, buried beneath the pounding music and the patriotic hollers of the
chorus, explores a working-class man burning in the despair of deindustrialized,
post-Vietnam America. Like the neopatriotism of the Reagan era itself, the
power of the national chorus conceals the pain below it. The narrative-chorus
contrast of the song has been much fought over by rock critics, activists, and
scholars. Was the song part of a patriotic revival or a tale of working-class
betrayal? A symptom of Reagan’s America or antidote to it? Protest song or
national anthem? Both sides assumed that the words and the music could not
go together, and in picking one over the other, each disregarded the song’s
unity for its individual parts.
Conservative columnist George Will fired the first shot in the Springsteen
wars, claiming him as a repository of Republican values in a September 1984
opinion column. George Will’s assessment of the song’s conservatism was a
product of his one-night stand with the E Street Band, a concert admittedly
heard through ears packed with cotton. “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s
politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts when he sings songs about
hard times,” Will explained. “He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed
factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful,
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