Meet Joe Copper

“The best book of the history of U.S. labor, and one of the best on masculinity, to appear in years.”

"This well-written book centers on the historical experiences of workers, women, and people of color in a regional home-front context during WW II. As such, it meets the need for more scholarship on the home front during the war. Recent trends in US social history regarding the relationship between identity formation and relations of power greatly influence the book. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to WWII, and shows how it thrived on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity."

“A sophisticated, ambitious, well-written book.”

“Meet Joe Copper provides a rich glimpse into the formation of masculinity in a time and place where white male prerogative came under challenge at local, state, and national levels. Basso’s analysis of the mining communities of Montana displays the interaction of race and gender and charts competing elements that formed a mutating masculinity.”

“Meet Joe Copper makes an important contribution to our understanding of the home front experience in the United States during World War II by showing that the received national narrative was more complex than commonly believed, at least in some places and some industries.”

“Matthew L. Basso’s evidence and interpretations regarding the significance of masculinity to the values, actions, and concerns of working class civilian men in Montana’s copper industry substantially revise our understandings of the middle decades of the twentieth century.”

“Rosie the Riveter, move over! Here comes Joe Copper in a theoretically sophisticated, widely researched, and ever-engaging history that uncovers the making of gender and race. In this powerful labor and community history of the mines and smelters, Italian, Croatian, and Irish men struggled with management over the hiring of nonmales and nonwhites as much as over their workload and pay. After Matthew L. Basso, ‘the greatest generation’ must include home front men—their representations as well as actions, their subjectivities along with their prejudices. World War II will never look the same again.”

“Meet Joe Copper is an impressively detailed labor history that engages with recent theory about whiteness and masculinity. Its importance to American mining history is clear; although women on the home front have gained much attention in popular narratives about WWII, seldom has anyone analyzed male production workers like Montana’s ‘copper commandos.’ . . . Basso manages to craft a story that is both careful in its attention to detail and sweeping in its implications.”

“Basso successfully traces a narrative of World War II gender and race politics that runs contrary to the national narrative and demonstrates that wartime and postwar power relations were rooted in decades-old gender and racial-ethnic hierarchies.”