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Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front . By Matthew L. Basso.

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/whq/whw015

1939-8603

Ken Fones‐Wolf,

Canadian Identity and History

The copper mining and smelting communities of Montana were among the most vital war production centers but also bastions of white male independence. How did patriotic demands reshape masculinity? Deeply researched and engagingly written, Meet Joe Copper wrestles with this question and the continuities of particular gender identities. Contrary to the popular notion that “the greatest generation” obliterated the dominant Depression-era, blue-collar ideal of manliness, Matthew L. Basso argues that home front industrial workers maintained much of their gender identity in the face of wartime demands for obedience to production and against the ideal of military service. In the end, he provides a longer look at the persistence of local gender and racial orders that preceded the Depression and weathered the challenges of government propaganda and popular media during World War II. One of the most important revelations of Meet Joe Copper is the attention to local context. Although mining and smelting communities shared much, the particular work processes, social organizations, ethnic and racial mixes, and employer strategies developed in Butte, Black Eagle, and Anaconda (outlined in the first three chapters) demonstrate that copper men did not construct their manliness in identical fashion. Still, a sense of independence, a degree of control over the labor market, and the exclusion of racial minorities infused the masculinity of men in each community. World War II upset that formula. In the popular culture, military service eclipsed blue-collar work as the epitome of masculinity, threatening to recast home front industrial workers as unmanly shirkers. Meanwhile, labor shortages endangered the hard-won gains that virile industrial unions (in copper country, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers) had won during the Depression.