Dead man's town: "Born in the U.S.A.," social history, and working-class identity

American Quarterly

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 353-378

  Cowie, Jefferson ^a   Boehm, Lauren ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950295928     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2006.0040     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. Bryan K. Garman, Race of Singers: Whitman's Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 225
2. Fred Pfeil, While Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (New York: Verso, 1995), 88
3. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998)
4. Mikal Gilmore, Nightbeat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 212
5. Bruce Springsteen, Songs (New York: Avon, 1998), 65-69, 136, 163-67
6. David Halle, America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics among Blue Collar Property Owners (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 203
7. Adolph Reed, "Reinventing the Working Class: A Study in Elite Image Manipulation," New Labor Forum 13 (Fall 2004): 26
8. Michael H. Frisch, "Prismatics, Multivalence, and Other Riffs on the Millennial Moment," American Quarterly 53-2 (June 2001): 214
9. For an outline of the centrality of the "labor question," see Steve Fraser, "The Labor Question," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989)
10. On the culture of unity, see Lizabeth Cohen Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
11. for postwar labor and civil rights, see Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost," Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 786-811
12. Wright Mills, "Letter to the New Left," New Left Review 5 (September/October 1960): 22
13. See Jefferson Cowie, "'Vigorously Left, Right, and Center at the Same Time': The Crosscurrents of Working-Class America in the 1970s," in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 75-106
14. Ruy A. Teixeira and Joel Rogers, America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
15. André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (London: Pluto Press, 1982)
16. Dorothy Sue Cobble, among others, argues for a much more vibrant labor-based women's movement; see Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 180-222
17. Amiri Baraka, "The Meaning of Bruce," Spin Magazine, (November 1985), 51, 80
18. James H. Cone, "The Blues: A Secular Spiritual," in Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader, ed. Steven C. Tracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 231-51
19. Chet Flippo, "Bruce Springsteen: A Rock 'n' Roll Evangelist for Our Times," Musician 73 (November 1984): 54-55
20. Jefferson Morely, "The Phenomenon," Rolling Stone, October 10, 1985, 74-75
21. Dave Marsh, Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 232-33
22. Jim Cullen, in Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 5
23. Ironically, given the song's departure from Springsteen's often-used cinematic structure, the song was originally supposed to be for a Paul Schrader film called "Born in the U.S.A.," the title of which Springsteen, took from Schrader. See Springsteen, Songs, 163
24. Marsh, Glory Days, 102
25. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism, in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14-15
26. David W. Noble, Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 234
27. Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country: A Novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)
28. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 7-8, 30
29. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 35
30. On workers' attitudes toward the war, see Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 46-63
31. Frank Koscielski, Divided Loyalties: American Unions and the Vietnam War (New York: Garland, 1999), 5-13
32. Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1990), 40
33. O'Brien, Things, 58-59
34. Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July, 72, 93, 126-27
35. Michael Herr, Dispatches (London: Pan Books, 1978), 103, 163
36. Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 17, passim
37. Barry Bluestone, "Deindustrialization and Unemployment," in Deindustrialization and Plant Closure, ed. Paul D. Staudohar and Holly E. Brown (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1987), 13
38. for a broader historical perspective, see the essays in Jefferson Cowic and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003)
39. Jonathan Rieder, "The Rise of the Silent Majority," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980, ed. Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 244
40. Seth Sanders and Mike O'Flaherty "44,000,000 Ronald Reagan Fans Can't Be Wrong! Rock and the Backlash," The Baffler 15 (2002): 81
41. For further development of problems with, "rights consciousness," see Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 207-11
42. Jefferson Cowie, "'A One-Sided Class War': Rethinking Doug Fraser's 1978 Resignation from the Labor-Management Group," Labor History 44.3 (2003): 307-14
43. Richard Scammon and Benjamin J. Wattenberg, The Real Majority (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970)
44. and Jefferson Cowie, "Nixon's Class Struggle: Romancing the New Right Worker," Labor History 43 (Summer 2002): 257-83
45. Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 125
46. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 29
47. George Lipsitz, "Dilemmas or Beset Nationhood," in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 255, 260
48. Arlie Hochschild, "Let Them Eat War," Mother Jones, October 8, 2003, published online at www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2003/10/ WE_558.01.HTML
49. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Metropolitan, 2004)
50. Dean Bakopoulos, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 184-85
51. Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, Homeland (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 156
52. Springsteen used these words in many campaign appearances, as well as in an op-ed, New York Times, August 5, 2005