Boys and their Toys

Masculinity, Class and Technology in America

Roger Horowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135304553
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Negotiating the divide between "respectable manhood" and "rough manhood" this book explores masculinity at work and at play through provocative essays on labor unions, railroads, vocational training programs, and NASCAR racing.

PART 1

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Manhood in the Workplace

Work, Play, and Power

Masculine Culture on the Automotive Shop Floor, 1930–1960

STEPHEN MEYER

This is a small article on an enormous topic—the masculine realm of workplace culture. Although it raises some questions about the general nature of working-class masculinity and of leisure-like activities or play at the workplace, some of its major themes concern how workers fabricate a multiplicity of masculinities, how these are fashioned and refashioned, how workers bring male leisure or play activities to a thoroughly controlled shop floor, and how this masculine culture operates within the context of workplace relations of power. Specifically, it distinguishes a rough masculine culture originating in the unskilled laborers' world and a respectable one arising from skilled craftsmen's traditions. Moreover, it heavily relies on a previously neglected labor history resource—the grievances that workers filed about their situations and conditions on the shop floor. These are important windows into the workplace that reveal much about the day-to-day activities and actions of auto workers in their shops and departments and the social relations of power in the American automobile industry.

Though we possess a growing body of recent and suggestive work on the history of masculinity and manhood,¹ Ava Baron pointedly reminds us that “the history of working-class masculinity has yet to be written.” In order to write this history, she continues: “we must understand men's and women's efforts to construct and to defend a collective gender identity.”² Also important, she asserts, is “the significance of gender regardless of women's presence or absence.”³ Although many situations and settings generate, fashion, and nurture masculine culture, this essay focuses on the workplace worlds that men made and remade, and how these functioned for them on the automotive shop floor. From my perspective, two labor scholars, Joshua Freeman and Steven Maynard,⁴ point toward a historical analysis based upon the important distinction between rough and respectable working-class masculine cultures.

Discussing the “vigorous subculture” that existed among “working-class youth,” Peter N. Stearns cites an anonymous worker who recalled the broad outlines of his rough manhood: “‘When I was eighteen I knew it took four things to be a man: fight, work, screw, and booze.’“⁵ Except for the fighting, the young Frank Marquart, an autoworker and later labor radical, seemed preoccupied with these masculine traits. Recalling how he “became increasingly conditioned to the ways of a young factory hand” in the 1910s, Marquart wrote in 1975 about his youthful “peer group” at the Metal Products Company in Detroit. From work, they went home to eat and then later congregated at a bar, Pre-mos on Jefferson Avenue. Though a minor, he was proud to look old enough for the bartender to serve him. “In the saloon,” he recalled, “men gathered in groups and usually talked shop. Each tried to impress the others with how important his particular job was, how much skill it required.” On Saturday, “the big night,” the young workers played a few games of pool at Curley's Poolroom, “went downtown to take in the burlesque, either the Gaiety or the Cadillac,” and then went to the Champlain Street “red-light” district. For Marquart and his circle, manhood meant work (especially skilled work), daily drinking, and the weekend foray to what they nicknamed “Joy Street.”⁶

This regressive manhood possessed many forms and emerged from many settings. The relations of social class, gender, race, and ethnicity influenced and shaped male attitudes, values, and behaviors. Young working-class boys learned to become men from their families at home and in their relations with other people—women, men, girls, and boys—in the larger world. Generationally, fathers taught their sons, craftsmen their apprentices, and senior workers their younger workmates how to become and “be” men. Most important, boys becoming men, young men, and adult men fashioned and refashioned their manliness in a variety of all-male settings—in the schoolyard, on the playing field, or in the locker room; on the hunting field, in the army barracks, in the saloon or tavern, in work camps and, of course, at the workplace.⁷

To be sure, other personal relationships and other social institutions softened the rough edges and mixed up the messages of masculine identity. Also important were the home, the church, the classroom, the fraternal society or lodge, and even the union hall. Also, whenever and wherever men came into contact with women, they had to negotiate and to renegotiate their manhood, sometimes in positive and sometimes in negative ways.

The workplace was central to the forming, nurturing, widening, and deepening of masculine culture. Stan Gray, a Westinghouse worker in the early 1980s and a sympathetic witness to a “female invasion” of the shop floor, describes the workplace as “the last sanctum of male culture.” The male world of the shop floor, he continues: “was away from the world of women, away from responsibility and children and civilized cultural restraints. In the plant, they could regale in the rough and tumble world of a masculine world of physical harshness; of constant swearing and rough behavior, of half-serious fighting and competition with each other, and more serious fighting with the boss.…” It was “full of filth and dirt and grease and grime and sweat—manual labor, a manly atmosphere”; the talk was “vulgar and obscene” and “about football and car repairs.”⁸

Generally, working-class masculine culture has surfaced in two distinct forms—a respectable culture and a rough one. Though analytically quite discrete, these two contradictory forms might result from either personal disposition or social position. Yet they sometimes coexisted with, overlapped with, or blended into each other. Some men certainly carried elements of both the rough and respectable cultures within their individual masculine identities. On the one hand, the respectable masculine culture corresponded with the attitudes, values, and behaviors associated with the craft traditions of skilled workers. David Montgomery, perhaps unwittingly, inaugurated the historical discussion of working-class manhood when he described the aggressive and respectable “craftsmen's ethical” code that demanded a “‘manly’ bearing toward the boss,” connoting “dignity, respectability, defiant egalitarianism, and patriarchal male supremacy.”⁹ On the other hand, the rough masculine culture correlated to the traditions and values of unskilled laborers and certainly countered the respectable values of the craft tradition. The rough laborers' world formed a lifestyle that, Montgomery observed, “made a mockery of social reformers' efforts to promote habits of'thrift, sobriety, adaptability, [and] initiative.’“¹⁰ Clearly this rough masculine culture contrasted sharply with both respectable middle-class and working-class virtues.

The rough masculine culture, Joshua Freeman suggests in his examination of construction workers, was one of “aggressive, crude masculinity” or “swaggering masculinity.”¹¹ In his discussion of steel workers and bush workers Steven Maynard adds that: “dangerous conditions… reinforced a rugged masculinity.”¹² Peter Way's study of antebellum canal workers outlines the basic elements of rough manhood and suggests its deep roots in the North American past—the rough work world of unskilled manual laborers. These unskilled workers, Way observes, were “a swearing, drinking, brawling, hurting, dying mass” shaped by a harsh climate, difficult toil, meager economic resources, and a social life of heavy drinking.¹³ These crude male communities were characterized by religious and ethnic identity, vice and violence, alcohol and drinking, brawling and roughhousing, physical prowess and risk-taking, sport and gambling, female dependency and subordination, and a belief in strong egalitarianism coupled with an opposition to employers.¹⁴

In contrast, the respectable masculine culture emerged from the work skills, social pride, and economic security of the craft tradition. For late-nineteenth-century construction workers, Freeman asserts: “manliness meant independence, mutuality, and pride in craft.” The skilled workers' masculinity also contained a “political construct” that rested on “respect, manhood, and citizenship.” Craft workers' monopolization of skilled men's work established their economic security and economic independence, “which was seen as the fruit of skill, hard work, sobriety, and organization.”¹⁵ For this reason, craftsmen's social construct of manliness was “firmly attached and even subsumed to ideas of respectability and domesticity.” Though “not immune from the temptations of drink, gambling, and extra-marital sex,” these respectable workers “sought to temper themselves, to control such impulses, and thereby disassociate themselves from the ‘rough working-class culture’ dominated by less-skilled, more poorly-paid workers.”¹⁶ In his investigation of early-twentieth-century auto workers, Wayne Lewchuk suggests that through their monopolization of skilled work, the respectable craftsmen socially and culturally established and constructed their manhood through “social norms that identified control, independence, and the ability to make decisions as inherent masculine traits.”¹⁷ If the laborer's sense of crude manliness emerged from the roughness of physical strength and dangerous work, the respectable craftsman's manhood arose from refined values of control, skill, autonomy, and independence.¹⁸

Throughout the nineteenth century, working-class men, depending on the individual predisposition or their social location, selected, blended, or fashioned their male identities from disparate values of the rough and respectable masculine cultures. But as the century progressed, the rise of industrial capitalism altered the social boundaries, and ultimately the cultural possibilities, of working-class men. As Maynard indicates, the newly emerging industrial and economic system “not only altered class relations, but also shifted gender relations, precipitating a crisis in masculinity.”¹⁹ Moreover, this crisis of masculinity saturated an industrializing American culture, as indicated by the social creation and construction of the late-nineteenth-century immigrant and labor problems. In turn, these social fears fostered assertive and aggressive middle-class identities.²⁰

For working-class men, Maynard asserts, “the ‘crisis of the craftsman’ was… both a crisis of work and masculinity, of class and gender.”²¹ Effectively, the internal forces of the American Industrial Revolution emasculated both the physical and the intellectual bases of working-class male identities. They broke the “very explicit connections” that working men made “between their work and their gender identity as men.”²² These forces undermined the rough masculine identity through the elimination of brawn and strength from unskilled work and subverted the respectable identity through the removal of independence and control from skilled work. As Lisa Fine notes about autoworkers, “All the hallmarks of masculinity at the workplace… were eradicated by automation, machines, [and] time clocks as well as new management practices, repressive and paternalistic.”²³ Furthermore, the continuous and growing movement of women and children into formerly all-male terrain reinforced this deep sense o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Manhood in the Workplace
• Learning to Be Men
• 3 Manhood at Play
• List of Contributors
• Permissions Acknowledgments
• Index