White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era by Joseph O. Jewell (review)

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• White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era by Joseph O. Jewell
• Michael Frawley

White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era. By Joseph O. Jewell. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 210. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.)

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In White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era, the author, Joseph O. Jewell, defines "White man's work" as "work that provided clear social and economic advantages to those who performed it" (p. 9). Through his work, Jewell explores the boundaries of "White man's work" and the blurring of racial and social lines through the push of minority groups to gain the advantages that White Americans had from the work they were doing. The author does excellent work in his introduction about both the state of the field and his research methods, grounding his work in the historiography of social mobility and explaining why this book was very much needed.

In his first chapter, Jewell reviews the overall ideas of what made up the middle class during the Progressive Era and how racial and social boundaries developed. A combination of changes in the economy that created new jobs above the working class, mostly filled by White workers, and new groups either finding freedom for the first time, such as African Americans, or experiencing immigration, such as Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans, resulted in the creation of shifting boundaries and small gaps that allowed others to try to achieve the American Dream. Jewell uses the work of social scientists to define the terms appearing in his book and to create a framework for understanding the different ways that racial and social boundaries are created and how they function. This excellently framed the rest of his book, especially around the ideas of brightening and blurring boundaries.

Jewell then moves on to case studies of middle-class mobility in three cities—Atlanta, San Antonio, and San Francisco—while focusing on the same three groups attempting to move up into the middle class: African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans. Jewell argues that in urban areas such as these, lines were drawn around race and social structure, and they became battlegrounds for the debate over social mobility. As he states, "Within the racial context of the late nineteenth century, the visible effort of Black, Mexican, and Chinese men to secure both middle-class jobs and middle-class lifestyles became the subject of intense public debate among White populations" (p. 7). Whites believed that their lifestyle and place in society was being threatened by the attempts of other groups to gain the same level of achievements.

As Jewell writes, "Our use of the past to shed light on current racial situations requires a careful and systematic examination of historical cases. Used thoughtfully, it offers insight" (p. 15). This book does just this. It is an excellent addition to the scholarship on this subject, the archival research is solid, and the use of newspapers in the text, especially the copies of the articles embedded in the chapters work well to support the arguments made. Overall, for anyone who wants to understand the racial and social issues of this era, this book is important to read. [End Page 110]

Michael Frawley University of Texas-Permian Basin Copyright © 2024 The Texas State Historical Association ...