The Making of the American Creative Class
New York's Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism
Shannan Clark
Reviews and Awards
"This ambitious book explores the intersection of cultural industries largely based in New York City and environs, and the emergence of a vast middle class of salaried workers who often struggled to partake in the consumer capitalism their work celebrated... Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- J. Bekken, Albright College
"This ambitious book explores the intersection of cultural industries largely based in New York City and environs, and the emergence of a vast middle class of salaried workers who often struggled to partake in the consumer capitalism their work celebrated....Drawing on a diverse array of archival and secondary sources, the book addresses their often unglamorous wages and working conditions, but also workers' efforts to gain some measure of control over their work through strategies, from the creation of new agencies and media to political engagement (particularly through the Popular Front) and unionization....Bookended by the Great Depression and the deindustrialization and fragmentation of the 1970s, this is a narrative of discrimination and resistance, and of competing visions of consumerism and solidarity." -- Choice
"A rigorously detailed labor history of a particular subset of white-collar workers in the 20th century....Rich with a detailed accounting of both the internal political strife within white-collar unions and the pervasive anticommunist anxiety of postwar America, Clark recovers a set of significant accomplishments among white-collar labor activists in mass culture.... As the structural constraints of cultural production in media, namely the reliance on freelance labor, have become even more acute, Clark's recovery of the creative class as a nearly coherent labor movement has a renewed salience." -- Emily Holloway, The Gotham Center for New York City History blog
"Reasserting the radical history of this country's culture industries, The Making of the American Creative Class shows the far-reaching influence of labor law and politics on culture: Artists in the middle of the twentieth century flourished not because the economy was inherently favorable to them, but as a result of powerful economic winds and the groups that joined in an attempt to harness them. Together, creative class groups wielded the crowbar of politics in an attempt to pry some autonomy out of consumer capitalism." -- Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, The New Republic
"[A] thorough accounting of how media workers have historically gotten short shrift." -- Kirkus
"For media and culture junkies — and those who work in those industries — this is an interesting and heartening, if academic, look at the rise of the cultural industry and labour relations in the middle of the last century. As job losses in our media and cultural class continue to deliver body blows to tens of thousands of workers, it would seem there are parallels to be drawn." -- Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star
"This volume examines, in depth, an illuminating part of history that isn't taught much in schools or noticed in our popular media." -- Steven Provizer, Arts Fuse
"Shannan Clark has written an immensely comprehensive and brilliantly insightful history of the white-collar workers who created Popular Front culture in New York and sought to sustain it well into the postwar era. His understanding of the aesthetics as well as the political economy of the newspapers, magazines, advertisers, and radio and TV networks of that era illuminates a generation-long class struggle often obscured from our view. Clark's book therefore stands as a powerful, empirically nuanced rejoinder to the work of such iconic intellectuals as C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, and David Riesman." -- Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara
"In this remarkable book, Shannan Clark reveals the radicalism that coursed through the culture industries in mid-twentieth-century New York, showing how the political efforts and dissident organizing carried out by writers, editors, designers and other cultural workers helped to shape consumer capitalism. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Clarks reconstructs a political world that few have even known existed but which exerted a profound influence on New York City — and on the country as a whole." -- Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics
"This is the definitive history of the political economy of mid-20th century unionism among creative workers in New York. Based on prodigious archival research, it traces the rise and fall of unions among newspaper, radio, advertising writers, professional, technical, and creative workers in architecture, and design, among others. It explains how and why architects, ad agency employees, and office employees unionized, what their vision of creative autonomy, economic equity, and collective power was, and how business used law and economic power to destroy their unions, illuminating the consequences for us all in the contemporary era of unstable jobs and rampant economic inequality that render even the most talented of creative workers vulnerable." -- Catherine Fisk, author of Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue
