Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Rankled by mid-Fifties media cant that characterized American blue-collar workers as essentially and happily middle class in situation and outlook, radical novelist/labor journalist Harvey Swados wrote an angry retort entitled "The Myth of the Happy Worker" (The Nation, August 17, 1957). Therein Swados sardonically noted that "there is one thing the worker doesn't do like the middle class: he works like a worker. The steel mill puddler does not yet sort memos; the coal miner does not yet sit in conferences; the cotton mill-hand does not yet sip martinis from his lunch box. The worker's attitude toward his work is generally compounded of hatred, shame, and resignation."
Repository Citation
Niemi, Robert. "Dirty Industrial Dawn: Alienation and its Discontents in Harvey Swados' On the Line." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–8. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/33