A Short Q&A with the Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power Contributors
Today’s interview is with Joseph M. Thompson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Virginia.
1. Tell us a little about your essay, “Pens, Planes, and Politics: How Race and Labor Practices Shaped Postwar Atlanta”?
My chapter compares the history of labor organizing at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Marietta, Georgia with the Scripto, Inc. pen and pencil factory in downtown Atlanta during the last half of the twentieth century. Lockheed employed a predominantly white male workforce who benefited from the company’s longstanding contracts with the Pentagon, while Scripto employed a majority of black women whose jobs were never as secure as those with steady funding from the Defense Department. I bring these factories together because they shared a common boss in business booster James V. Carmichael, and I use his career to tell the story of labor and management conflict at these two employers. This comparative history ultimately reveals how unionization, civil rights protests, and Cold War defense spending remade the political economy of the postwar South.
2. I know we can find out more at your website, but what sparked your interest in labor history?
Both of my parents and my grandmother were members a school teachers’ union, and I grew up in an area of north Alabama where hundreds of people worked at the local General Motors plant. The local news always covered labor negotiations, and my parents received raises and increased benefits thanks to the power of their union. For those reasons, my father always stressed voting for candidates who supported organized labor and public school teachers in particular. I think that taught me, at a very basic level, how socio-economic class matters can impact political and social identities, as well as paychecks. I also credit my father for introducing me to labor history at an early age through the music of Pete Seeger. That intersection of music and politics has carried over into who I am as a scholar. As a historian of race, culture, and political economy, I write about the ways class and culture shape each other and the fact that the job of making music deserves study as labor.
3. Why do you think that the study of labor history is important today?
I think labor history is vital for a current political moment. For at least the past 40 years, we’ve seen corporations and private wealth erode so many aspects of our nation’s public life – schools, infrastructure, and the power of the franchise in our democratic process to name a few examples. When historians ignore labor history, we ignore some of the best strategies for pushing back against that erosion of the public good and stopping the destruction of democracy. Studying labor history is also fundamental to creating an inclusive profession. So much of what we bring to our jobs as historians is formed by personal experience. If we don’t study the lives of working people and value their history of organizing, then we risk signaling that those stories don’t matter to our students and other prospective historians.
4. What are you working on right now?
I’m finishing my dissertation, “Sounding Southern: Music, Militarism, and the Making of the Sunbelt.” This project analyzes the economic and symbolic relationships between the Department of Defense and Nashville’s country music industry to understand how white southerners learned to embrace big government in the form of the military-industrial complex. I focus on the Pentagon’s investment in country music recruitment campaigns from the 1950s through the 1980s to argue that this economic influence on Nashville transformed the genre into the sound of white allegiance to U.S. militarism.