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Joseph Gerteis, Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement.

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Joseph Gerteis, Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2007)

JOSEPH GERTEIS' BOOK is a valuable contribution to the massive, and still burgeoning, literature on race and class in American history. His subject is the Knights of Labor and the Populists, which he identifies as "at once the most important class movements of the Gilded Age and the era's most important vehicles for interracial organizing." (202)

There is a longstanding historiographic debate about these movements' complex attitudes towards race and particularly organizing across the colour line. In reassessing the Knights' and Populists' activity in the American South, Gerteis brings fresh perspective to this old question, and produces insights and modes of analysis that are significant for broader debates about labour, social history, and race relations.

He contends that most of the scholarly discussion about the Knights and the Populists has been driven by either a preoccupation with the "fluidity and gamesmanship surrounding race," or a given historian's own conceptions of race and class. (3-4) Gerteis insists that if we accept that race is socially constructed, then what matters most are the ideas of the historical actors, in this case the people and organizations that sought to change the social and economic conditions of their day. "Rather than try to engage in...

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