Meet Joe Copper : masculinity and race on Montana's World War II home front / Matthew L. Basso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-342) and index.

Introduction: Rosie the riveter and GI Joe, meet Joe Copper! -- White labor, 1882-1940 -- Butte: only white men and dagoes -- Black Eagle: immigrants' bond -- Anaconda: husky smeltermen and company boys -- Copper men and the challenges of the early-war home front -- Re-drafting masculinity: breadwinners, shirkers, or soldiers of production -- The emerging labor shortage: independent masculinity, patriotic demands, and the threat of new workers -- Making the home front social order -- Butte, 1942: white men, black soldier-miners, and the limits of popular front interracialism -- Black Eagle, 1943: home front soldiers, women workers, and the maintenance of immigrant masculinity -- Anaconda, 1944: white women, men of color, and cross-class -- White male solidarity -- Conclusion: the man in the blue collar shirt: the working class and postwar masculinity.

"I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun." So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived -- on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us 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. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era."--Provided by publisher.

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