Anaconda ─ Labor, Community, and Culture in Montana's Smelter City

Mercier depicts the vibrant life of the smelter city at full steam, incorporating the candid, sometimes wry commentary of the locals ("the company furnished three pair of leather gloves . . . and all the arsenic [dust] you could eat"). She documents the early history of the town and the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism that residents fostered in the 1930s and 1940s. Ultimately, their solidarity and discontent with the company converged in the successful 1934 strike and sustained five decades of devoted unionism.

During the cold war years, Anacondans held to their communal values and to unions in the face of antilabor and anticommunist pressures, embracing an "alternative Americanism" that championed improved living standards for working people, rather than unlimited corporate power, as the best defense against communism. Mercier chronicles the bitter struggle between two rival unions--the anticommunist United Steelworkers of America and the red-tainted International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers--that undercut the town's labor solidarity in the postwar years. She also explores how gender definitions--especially the male breadwinner ideology and the limits placed on women's political, economic, and social roles--shaped the nature and outcome of labor struggles. Mercier carries her investigation through the closing of the smelter in 1980, covering debates over the environment and the community's transformation into a deindustrialized, nonunion town.

Underscoring the role of the community in molding working-class consciousness, Anaconda offers important insights about the changing nature of working-class culture and the real potential for collective action under the midday sun of American industrial capitalism.

Laurie Mercier is a professor of history at Washington State University at Vancouver.
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