Lisa Fine's The Story of REO Joe exhibits the ways in which community, continuity, and collusion structure the formation--and even the scholarly interrogation--of identity. Lansing's persistent ethnic homogeneity throughout the early-to-mid twentieth century furnishes the author with near-perfect lab-conditions in which to observe a cultural group that often eludes scholars of class-relations in America--white, protestant industrial workers. Fine's history of the REO plant is fraught with tensions between labor and management; and yet, these struggles fit very awkwardly into a model that seeks to privilege the emergence--or even the possibility--of class consciousness. Ultimately, the sites of resistance in The Story of REO Joe are not within the community, but coterminous with its imagined boundaries; and the book's protagonists are shown to be actively involved in the preservation and extension of their prerogatives against the encroachments of unresponsive national bodies and cultural others.

Fine's account of Lansing's invulnerability to class-based analysis relies heavily upon the city's demographic peculiarities; and it is equally clear, from the historical record, that this  homogeneity is not a quirk of fate, but the realization of a conscious project. Through fraternal organizations like the Elks Club and the Ku Klux Klan, workers and bosses nurtured their ethnic and religious affinities, and formed a united front against "undesirables". Even the dubious narrative of assimilation is beyond the town's experience, at least until the 1960's. This is not the America of the "melting pot", but the "church militant". The author argues that

the business elite's participation in religious, educational, and civic organizations also created opportunities for social control, again through the appearance, and often the reality of mutual interests (32).  

In fact, this book demonstrates the futility of attempting to separate appearance from reality, and exposes the limitations of the social control model itself.

Fine devotes as much--or, quite possibly, more--space to labor/management strife as the written documents will bear. Her disappointment with the oral testimony of her informants is palpable, and The Story of REO Joe can be read as explicitly in tension with the stories told by "REO Joes" (and their female counterparts) themselves. However, even the hard facts embodied within the record of strike and union negotiations tend to support the survivors' memories of a familial atmosphere at REO, albeit a somewhat more dysfunctional family than the "children's" nostalgia constructs.

Even during the turbulent thirties and forties--and despite the inroads made into the company's ranks by the UAW-CIO at this time--REO employees do not appear to have seen themselves as a distinct group whose interests were hopelessly irreconcilable with management's. Throughout this period, and, needless to say, in the decades that followed, workers drew the line at demanding a "square deal" from their putative fathers, rather than a share in industrial governance itself. It is deeply ironic that men who made so much of their dignity as breadwinners and heads of households should yield so willingly to the paternal yoke tendered by corporate welfare schemes (even once these programs became subsidized by the federal government). Resistance to radical unionization in America has often been blamed upon a reactionary Lockean consensus produced by false consciousness. However, in Fine's subjects, this does not appear to be the case--or, at the very least, her analysis suggests that these terms are inadequate to describe the lived experience. The "REO Joes" were not kept artificially apart by an ideology of possessive individualism imposed from above. They were, in fact, united, in a deeply organic way (through ties of "blood" and cultural practice), upon a set of house rules that privileged "equitable" distribution over simple equality--and the definition, exhibited most dramatically in J.R. Connor's sketch from Fine's introduction (2-3), of who was (and who was not) entitled to a "square deal" was clear.

This does not mean, of course, that Lansing society remained static throughout the period under discussion. Fine's narrative details a very important shift in the Joes' self-understanding, as men, during the late forties and fifties. Viewed from this perspective, the "respectable labor militancy" (80) exemplified by Washburn takes on the cast of the fabled teen-aged boy's struggle to win certain concessions from a stubborn, but ultimately loving (and beloved), father. Indeed, the new "boys will be boys" attitude (135), characterized by paternally-indulged "hunting holidays" and workshop horseplay, emerged directly out of a familial restructuring occasioned by the strikes of the depression and war years. In effect, REO Joe accepted the role of permanent adolescent--which entailed a willingness to do certain chores, however grudgingly, in exchange for very jealously guarded entitlements.

Fine's suggestion that we cannot ignore this segment of the American population, which persists in this part of the country (and doubtless in other regions as well) in places like George Sztykiel's Spartan Motors (165-166), is an extremely important one. She offers compelling evidence that the narrow vision of community embraced by REO Joes and their descendants is less the product of ignorance than of conscious choice. In giving agency to these figures, she also delivers a warning to cultural and social historians--namely that community and identity are always forged at someone's expense, and that no group of people with presentist concerns can bear to look the facts of its history in the eye.

Works Cited

Fine, Lisa. The Story of REO Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown U.S.A. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004.