American Made, Hollywood Spin: A Wider Angle on the American Working Class | Aimee Loiselle | Beyond Norma Rae

Introduction & welcome

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Clio Dialogues, the podcast that links history with the present to help us better understand the world we live in today. I am your host, Jennifer Robin Terry.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:14

Who is the American working class? If your image comes from the media or a Hollywood movie, you're likely missing a big part of the story.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:24

My guest today is Dr. Aimee Loiselle, Associate Professor, and the Stuart and Joyce Robbins Distinguished Chair of History at West Virginia University. She is the author of Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:45

Welcome, Aimee. It is so nice to meet you, and I'm glad you're joining me here on the Clio Dialogues.

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 0:51

Thank you so much for inviting me. When I saw a podcast about how history connects to contemporary issues, I had to jump at the chance.

Hollywood and the Making of Norma Rae

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:59

I'm so excited about this conversation. Your book is labor history, it's a Hollywood history, it's a media critique. I want to start with the film Norma Rae, because as a historian, and I'm sure this may be familiar to many historians, that when I watch a movie that's based on a true story, I am constantly asking, did that really happen? And then I go down these rabbit holes where I'm searching and, you know, looking for these things. So the 1979 Academy Award-winning film Norma Rae was based on Crystal Lee Sutton's story, right? The story of a Southern textile worker. But the film is called Norma Rae and not Crystal Lee. Can you talk a little bit about why the filmmakers deliberately changed not only the title character, but many things in the story?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 1:44

Once we start from the idea that nothing Hollywood makes in television or in movies is going to be accurate, then it frees us up to think about why did they break from certain accuracies or from certain literal historical moments. When I started diving into why they made the changes, it was incredibly illuminating. And I developed this idea: oh, there's creativity and then there's creative business decisions. And Hollywood, since these are products that cost millions and millions of dollars and they want to make tens of millions of dollars, it's heavy on the business and lighter on the creative side when the director has to make certain choices. Crystal Lee was contacted because it was based on her biography. She didn't write it. The journalist who had done a story about her found her activism with the textile workers' union really interesting. So he then interviewed her and did a book. Some women producers in Hollywood thought this is great. And they're some of the first independent women producers really emerging out of women's liberation. They contacted her because they wanted her feedback, but right from the get-go, they said, we're not offering you any money. So they were like, this is going to be unpaid, and we just want your feedback. And Crystal Lee was willing to do it, but her feedback was, I don't like your script. You make it seem as if I started the labor organizing. And I didn't. It was already going on for years before I joined. And it was mostly the black workers who had broken segregation after the Civil Rights Act who were driving the early union. And the producers and director didn't like that. Hollywood, if it wants to make a big story, wants a hero and an underdog hero, even better. And in the 1970s, during women's liberation, a woman underdog hero, they really thought that was going to be marketable. So they just stopped talking to her and changed all the names, and it became Norma Rae.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 3:42

Wow. Well, that is crazy. They just cut her out. Did they keep anything from her life?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 3:48

They kept a lot of details. And like most movies based on a true story, they have to compress a lot. So they did compress time, and she'd actually been married twice by the time she joined the labor organizing. They compress it, and you just meet her second husband. He worked at the paper mill. She met him after her older sister. They were like, Well, we need her to meet this guy, but we don't have the time for a sister who knows his friend and introduces them, and he works at a paper mill. So they just compressed it all down to one location. They met at the job where she works, and his name was changed to Sonny for the movie. And like in real life, Sonny gets annoyed at Norma Ray's organizing that she's not around the house enough and she's not cleaning and she's not cooking for the kids and he's having to make them sandwiches and he doesn't see her. So all of that is accurate to history, but they changed the union organizer, which I found really indicative of the director's thinking because the real organizer came from West Virginia. He was older in his like late 60s. He'd been a union organizer for the United Mine Workers. He's married, he's from West Virginia, he's got kids. This union organizer in the movie becomes a Jewish New York intellectual organizer who is young, often wears like his shirt unbuttoned, is kind of made into a union hunk. And he's not married. He's got a feminist girlfriend who is a leftist lawyer in New York City. He meets Norma at a motel where she's having a liaison with a man, and she says she wants to break it off with this guy. He's a traveling salesman. He slaps her and calls her all these names. Reuben, the New York organizer, hears it, and it's the start of this weird sexual tension between Norma and Ruben that drives the story. And none of this happened. So none of the stuff around the union organizer happened. It was about creative business decision. The director openly said a little sexual tension between these lead characters was going to make it a more sellable and a more appealing movie to a lot of people.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 6:08

Can you tell us about the iconic scene? Sally Field, who plays Crystal Lee, jumps up on the table with this handwritten sign that says union. She stands up there for a long time. Is this something that really happened?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 6:18

Yes, and that to me is really interesting. Crystal Lee does do that. There's a letter posted on the company bulletin board that said to all the black workers in this mill, you are being sold promises by the union that you will get to dominate the mills by joining the union, and that's not true. And companies did this all the time to try to create racial tension between the black workers and the white workers in these mills. So it was this false letter. Crystal Lee does copy it just like in the movie, and she's told that she's gonna get fired if she keeps doing it. She keeps doing it. They compress time in the movie because, in historical reality, Crystal goes back to her workstation, she works for another hour, then there's this big supper outside, a big picnic to celebrate safety in the mill. And she goes to that, and all these workers are talking to her because they know a bunch of workers were trying to copy this letter and that she was the only one that stood up to the boss men and finished it. So all these workers know, and all the union members are like, You got it, you got it word for word, so we can send it into the National Labor Relations Board with a grievance. And she's like, Yeah, but they said I'm gonna be fired. So it's this whole collective shared moment. And then when she goes back in after the supper, they're like, go to the supervisors. They tell her to call her husband because it's the patriarchal setup, and they're like, go get your husband and have him come and pick you up. Instead, she goes back to her workstation. She does not work in the weaving room. She actually works packing at the end of the line. She takes towels and gift sets and puts them in boxes. She writes on one of the pieces of the gift set boxes. Union stands on the table until the police show up and then they do drag her down and take her out. What they change with the movie is they take out a lot of that collective stuff. There's Norma and one other woman trying to copy the letter. They seem to be the only ones that know about it, when in reality, dozens of people in the mill knew about this letter and had been talking about it. Norma finally copies it, but what she doesn't go to a supper. Again, they have to compress time to make it a 90-minute movie. So she goes right back to her workstation and they have Norma working in the textile weaving room because they felt that was more like a southern mill vibe. And they actually pumped extra lint into it to make it even lintier and dustier. And then Norma does write union on a piece of cardboard, but again, it makes it seem as if like she alone, and this isn't to take away from the dramatic. Sally Field does an amazing job portraying Norma and capturing the disappointments and complexities and the fear that a woman would have in one of these towns getting up like this, knowing that you're going to be arrested and dragged out. So, you know, you knew that was going to happen if you stood up to these bosses. So she did do a great job capturing that. My concern as a historian of labor history is more that the director and producers made the decision to make it seem like Norma and Ruben started this campaign. Norma was the only one that really understood this letter and what she was doing, and that she's then dragged out, and it's only Ruben and her husband that are involved in trying to help her, when in reality, dozens of workers were involved.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 9:36

So it

Having a “Norma Rae Moment”

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 9:37

takes a collective story and turns it into an individual hero's journey.

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 9:41

Yes. You have Norma Rae, this individual hero, and what happens is they crop and crop and crop that image down, the one that you talked about of her standing on the table with the union sign, and they crop out everything. They crop out the factory, the workers, and it just becomes this little still image of Norma standing by herself with the union sign. And this, and people start calling it a Norma Rae moment or going Norma Rae for people just standing up for anything. It could be that somebody was mad that their boyfriend didn't take them out for Valentine's Day and she yelled at him and she had a Norma Rae moment. On a website, somebody was like, I wanted Nila wafers in my office snack room, and nobody would let me use the office budget to buy Nilla wafers. And so she took the Norma image and put Nila instead of union. I'm looking for all of these references to Norma Rae. None of them refer to labor unions. None of them refer to worker organizing. And I said, something in this image and this idea of going Norma Rae for a moment is capturing this neoliberal individualism, this hyper attention to that the individual, if they just did the right things and if they just stood up for themselves, the individual will save the day or make their life better or get what they want. And I thought to myself, wow, that's really different than Crystal Lee's message. Crystal Lee's message is you have to have a union, you have to have worker organizing. Bosses will never listen to us if we're not in a big organized group.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 11:13

You don't

Including Puerto Rican Women

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 11:14

actually begin the book with the film. You begin by talking about Puerto Rican women who worked in the textile industry. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why we cannot understand Norma Rae without understanding the experience of Puerto Rican women?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 11:29

This was a decision as a women's historian. I did not want to perpetuate the erasure of Puerto Rican women. There was this kind of fascination in the 60s and 70s with Southern people and poor Southern workers. You saw it in like the Andy Griffiths show and Beverly Hillbilly's and Waltons, foregrounding white characters, and then particularly white working characters, usually men, really eliminates the fact that Puerto Rican women were recruited into the textile and apparel industry as soon as the United States occupied Puerto Rico in 1898.

Puerto Rico, US Colonization, and the Textile Industry

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 12:05

Can you tell us a little bit about that history? Because I think listeners may not be fully aware. How does Puerto Rico become part of the U.S.?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 12:13

In the late 1800s, the United States reaches kind of continental capacities from the Atlantic to the Pacific to immediately start talking about offshore expansion. Many politicians and trade executives and business people are aware that the Spanish Empire is collapsing. It can barely hold itself together in Europe, let alone hold on to its possessions in the Caribbean. So there's this ongoing debate about whether the United States should take those. Some people say we don't want to fully absorb them into the United States because they're people of color. So there was a lot of tension between policymakers and business executives and military leaders about what should happen. Then in 1898, there's an explosion of a U.S. ship near Cuba. Many historians have made different arguments about whether that was an actual bomb or some type of problem in the engine room. But the United States uses it as the opportunity to go down and occupy Cuba and then by extension Puerto Rico in order to get control of this area because the Spanish Empire can't control its colonies anymore. It's becoming dangerous. So the U.S. military occupies Cuba and Puerto Rico at the same time. They also in the Pacific occupy Guam and the Philippines. This is all part of these larger conversations that they've been having about what is U.S. expansion going to look like past the continent. So Puerto Rico initially doesn't really fight when the U.S. military comes because they think, as many people have thought when the US military arrives, that they were going to help them as a people get rid of their Spanish empire oppressors and then give them independence. And that doesn't happen. Instead, the US occupies and is still the overseer of Puerto Rican government, the economy. Puerto Rico remains a colony of the United States to this day. And in 1898, businesses immediately are like, what's our opportunity here? So they go down there and they see, wow, there's these amazing seamstresses that are doing embroidery and sewing, and they're doing it on hand machines or foot pedal machines. Imagine if we came down here and brought materials to them, or in a couple of years, they start actually building sweatshops down there with electricity and the ability to produce even more items. They start at the same time as the New South. So the New South is being heavily recruited in the 1890s into doing more textile work. Big investors in the South start building mills and selling them into big conglomerates and you have big corporations forming. As that's happening, Puerto Rican women at the same time are being used, but they offer a different option. Companies are always looking for options. Like what's going to be the cheaper situation? And when there's easy shipping from Puerto Rico, they like that because Puerto Rico is exempted from certain business taxes and banking regulations because it's an offshore colony. So Puerto Rico becomes an experimental area where companies lobby the US government to say you should exempt Puerto Rico from all these things. And then we'll modernize Puerto Rico as if they're doing them a favor, even though what they're actually doing is using skilled labor at a cheaper cost. So that's why I wanted to start with them. And I had two friends, Irma Medina and Maria Salgado, who their mothers worked in the mills and factories that eventually open in like New York and Massachusetts and Connecticut into the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and even as late as the 1980s. Puerto Rican women are being recruited from Puerto Rico to come up to these remaining factories and mills into the 1980s.

Puerto Rican Women and Union Activism

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 15:55

And so how do Puerto Rican women get involved with union activism?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 15:59

The union that goes down to Puerto Rico is the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. So the ILG, which is very active in New York, starts meeting Puerto Rican, but also some uh West Indian women in New York who are being recruited into the apparel factories up there. They start then sending ILG representatives down to Puerto Rico to meet with women down there. The Textile Workers Union of America is the one that's active in the South that Crystal Lee joins. Crystal Lee did not know any Puerto Rican organizers, and Puerto Rican organizers did not know Crystal Lee. These are very segregated labor markets, and they're intentionally segregated by U.S. trade offices, U.S. colonial offices, and by the businesses. But these unions are very much aware of each other and they're very parallel and trying to organize. And Puerto Rican women are in the ILG in Puerto Rico, in New York, in Connecticut. They are active union members, they're organizers. There's a big walkout in the 1950s in New York City, and Puerto Rican women are a big part of that walkout. I wanted to make sure that their work, their labor organizing gets told, and how they tried to tell their own story. Just like Crystal Lee tried to tell her own story. Puerto Rican women did interviews and there was a big public history project in the 80s where a lot of them interviewed and they said, We want our stories to get out. Like they were aware that they were telling their story and they wanted to be heard. These women were savvy.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 17:29

And one of those women was Gloria Maldonado. Can you tell us about her?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 17:33

So she became the counterpoint to Crystal Lee. It was much harder to find a Puerto Rican woman who appeared consistently through the archives. There were many hundreds of names, but Gloria Maldonado appeared in a variety of archives, in a variety of collections, and in some newspapers because she was so active. And I loved that both women were often called loudmouth and pushy. I love loudmouth and pushy women. Because that just means it's a woman who is speaking her mind and sharing her conclusions and making suggestions. Gloria Maldonado, because she was very assertive, union leaders, men, white men, recognized that and thought we need to get her up out of the factory floor and get her into some leadership position. So she was part of the New York Labor Council, the Hispanic Labor Council. She worked at a workers' studies program at Rutgers University that was not geared towards college students, but was geared towards working people. She was part of the Smithsonian 1976 display. So she was very active beyond just the traditional union organizing or shop floor action. She wanted to carry the message out to a bigger audience.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 18:50

Was she ever featured in a film or a documentary or anything like that?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 18:54

So the Public History Project did create a radio documentary, and it also won awards for best like regional documentary, and it played in New York City, which is a large market. Maldonado was one of the key featured characters because she was assertive and spoke confidently. So the producers loved her. She did challenge them, just like Crystal Lee challenged the producers of the Crystal Lee script. Maldonado felt that they had taken some of her words out of context. And she wrote them a letter and said, I'd like you to edit the show because you make it seem like I'm critiquing Puerto Rican people or the unions when what I was really saying was we just need more Puerto Rican people in union leadership. But I wasn't critiquing the union. Because unions get criticized all the time in the mainstream press. So Crystal Lee and Maldonado were both fully aware that they wanted to get a positive message out and say, unions are good.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 19:54

Gloria

Deportation, a Union Busting Tactic

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 19:55

Maldonado noted that employers often use the threat of immigration enforcement to discourage women from union organizing. How did that work?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 20:05

After the 1965 Immigration Act, which changes the quotas, increasingly you have people coming from the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, Barbados, the West Indies, but also Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and that creates an increasing flow of people who are undocumented. So you have family members that become established in New York City, and then their niece or nephew from the Dominican Republic or from Ecuador wants to come to the United States and they come undocumented. What Maldonado as a labor organizer is seeing is that these sweatshops are happy to hire undocumented women. But as soon as the undocumented women start joining with women that have citizenship to start organizing a union, then the sweatshop owners or the factory managers will say, Well, we're going to call immigration if you keep doing this with the union. So Puerto Rican women have citizenship, but a lot of these other Spanish-speaking, but also English-speaking from the British West Indies are not. So Maldonado says that that starts to become a really effective anti-union tactic in the 70s because the undocumented people coming in are rightfully terrified of having a raid what they would have called INS. It wasn't ICE then. So now it's ICE, but they would have called it La Migra or INS.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 21:28

There's a longer history to this. It's not just started with Trump and ICE.

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 21:32

Yes. It's um rough.

Bad Bunny, Who Counts as an American, & Why it Matters

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 21:34

Recently there was a lot of conversation around Bad Bunny's halftime performance at the Super Bowl. There seemed to be a lot of confusion about Puerto Rico as part of the United States. Does that suggest that the idea of who is American is still unsettled?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 21:52

I think who is American is the great project of the United States. In the 1890s, as the United States starts to Taking over places like Puerto Rico and Guam and the Philippines. The United States has to determine who are citizenship, who does not. And initially, none of those colonies had citizenship in 1917. So it was, you know, almost 20 years later, Puerto Ricans get US citizenship. But when they're in Puerto Rico, they don't have any ability to participate in national elections. But when they come to the continental US, then they can participate as citizens in all aspects of elections and electoral politics and property ownership. But I also think Bad Bunny does a little twist on this, and he really does this very well in that halftime show. He links Puerto Rico out of the United States. So he claims his citizenship. Like he's very much like I am a U.S. citizen, but he links Puerto Rico out into the Caribbean and the greater Central and South America. He has the part where they're all waving flags of all the different Caribbean nations in South America. That's Pan-Americanism or Pan-Latinidad, where there's this idea of we might be part of the United States or we might have been part of the Spanish Empire, or maybe they still have strong ties to like France or England, but we're not necessarily underneath that umbrella. So Bad Bunny is quite savvy, and you know, he's clearly politically engaging this concept of we're citizens of the United States and we are members of the larger Caribbean and the larger South America. And I'm not going to compromise on either of those. Many people in the lead up to that said, How are we having somebody who is not a US citizen perform at the greatest like US sports event? There were people on social media posting sting, U2, entire lists of performers that were not US citizens. And then and he is a US citizen. There is why we need intersectional analysis because race and gender and ethnicity, religion, all of that intersects to have people perceive who is a real American. And according to citizenship laws, Bad Bunny is a real American, and so are all Puerto Ricans. I think the project of who is an American continues as part of the ongoing project. You know, we still we're in massive debates right now with the deportations and changing of asylum laws, and that is really sparking again this very public, popular debate about what is an American.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 24:31

So legal citizenship is one thing, but cultural recognition as an American really is something else. And that brings us back to the working class. Why does it matter who we picture when we think of the American working class?

Guest, Aimee Loiselle 24:43

So a school of thought really emerges in the late 20th century of this idea that culture is critical to forming the meanings and understandings of the world. Yes, finances, economics, and politics matter. But what became increasingly clear, especially with the explosion of popular culture in radio, television, movies, and now streaming and social media, is that the way people understand finances, economy, and politics is completely framed or explained in their mind through their cultural experience. And so somebody can understand that a union would be good for them at their job. But if they've heard repeatedly that unions are corrupt and get these pop culture messages of Jimmy Hoffa and unions are just obstacles and they just take money out of your paycheck, that there's this cognitive dissonance, but the emotional power is in the culture. So they're going to lean into making decisions through their cultural understandings. When policymakers don't address the understanding of who is the American working class and they just try to force through legislation, then they often bump up against people's misunderstandings. So for example, the majority of farm workers are immigrants and many of them undocumented. But there's that perception that they're not the American working class, right? So the American working class in movies and television, and even standing behind Trump at his rallies, are men in hard hats. He might have a few women, but they're men in hard hats, construction caps, trucker caps. And so the conception of the American working class, it's still that it's mostly white, maybe some men of color in masculine industries. And she always advocated for that bigger idea of the American working class. Both Maldonado and Crystal Lee said, all people in all factories and plants and farm work and whatever, they're all part of the working class. And so they really understood globalization from a worker's point of view and really wanted a larger labor movement for all workers. We need an updated version of the American working class that addresses the fact that many of them are immigrants, many of them are not in these old nostalgic factories and what they do for our society. These women knew what they were talking about.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 27:20

To learn more about this and any book featured on the Clio Dialogues, read Clio's book reviews at www.cliodialogues.com. This has been the Clio Dialogues. Please like, follow, and subscribe. And join me again next time because history isn't finished with us.