We've heard about two earlier twentieth-century strategies for aestheticizing American labor, both of which were rooted

in the formal techniques of their period, ones which we might characterize (I'm a literary historian, so I do) as naturalist and modernist (See if I think that Barb's is naturalist). These techniques enable a mediated understanding of labor, one that promotes a partial and complex identification between workers and consumers that crosses boundaries of class and ethnicity. The texts that I discuss bring inter-regional identification into the mix, positing some provisional bonds between Alabama workers and Chicago linen supply salesman. They also suggest an emergent postmodern aesthetic, or at least a postwar aesthetic, in the depiction of the factory and the factory worker. We see traces of the modernist industrial sublime where distanced viewers take in the factory's sights and sounds as a self-contained spectacle that celebrates what David Nye calls the power of the corporation and the intelligence of its engineers (126). This vision is often in tension with one of the factory as a metonym for the capitalist network of production, consumption, and distribution in which the viewers themselves are implicated. The play of identification and distancing is the focus of my talk because it gives us a model for thinking about labor as spectacle in contemporary American culture without drawing an easy division between labor and management. My talk deals with several texts that promote the Opelika Manufacturing Company, a former textile mill still standing in Opelika, Alabama. It was a smallish but otherwise typical mill in a typical Alabama mill town: founded by locals, bought and run by Northerners in search of cheap labor, ringed by modest houses built by the owners and rented by the workers. It was purchased by the Chicago textile corporation M. Snower and Company in 1935, and later by the Leshner Corporation out of Ohio (1986) and Pillowtex, the NC textile manufacturer that closed the plant in 1998 and went bankrupt in 2003.This factory is familiar to me because it still stands in the town next to Auburn. It might be familiar to you as the shooting location for the 1979 Sally Field movie Norma Rae, another important text and perhaps the most popular contemporary one that deals with the witnessing of labor. The cotton textile industry played a central role in the economic growth of East Alabama from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Pepperell Manufacturing Company also made its home in Opelika; Tallassee Mills could be found about 35 miles west and West Point Manufacturing about 20 miles northeast. There are a number of documents in the Auburn library (and I'd imagine in libraries around the Southeast) that were produced as promotional material for these mills. Perhaps the most hagiographic and ridiculous is a glossy 48-page pamphlet called The romance of Pepperell : being a brief account of the career of Sir William Pepperrell, soldier, pioneer, American merchant and developer of New England industry, for whom the Pepperell Manufacturing Company was named, and the towns of Saco and Biddeford in the state of Maine, wherein the first manufacturing unit of the Pepperell Company was established. There are documents like this all over, and they have much to tell us about how titans of business saw themselves and how they constructed a corporate image. I'll be discussing two more ephemeral promotional forms: an 18-minute industrial film about the mill produced in 1948 called Half Century with Cotton and a presentation given by Herbert Snower at a sales conference in 1950. Half Century with Cottonshould be of interest to scholars of cinema as well as scholars of labor history. It was produced by noted cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who is perhaps best known for his 1969 cinema verite film Medium Cool, which juxtaposes the fictional story of a newsman played by Robert Forster with the real-life events surrounding the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. (Get a quick show of hands anyone in the audience who has seen this?).

These two texts draw interesting parallels between the workers being depicted and the salesmen watching and listening. Half Century with Cotton the life of rural and working-class Americans as a mechanized one, with a mill village operating as the ideal vertically-integrated production system. But the film presents the mill workers there as experts who operate more in a supervisory capacity than they do as physical laborers. In Snower's talk to the salesmen two years later, the same rhetorical move is made in reverse. His lecture called Textile Recognition and Quality Analysis suggests that the urban, middle-class sales force should reject the cult of expertise in favor of common-sense appeals to tradition. In what remains of my time, I consider how these two texts share the same desire to make work visible and erase postwar class stratification in order to help the bottom line.1 Both of these texts were addressed to the same audience, namely Snower's customers. The film's opening credits end with a dedication to the Linen Supply Industry of America which M. Snower & Company has served exclusively for the past fifty years. The linen supply industry, now known as the Textile Rental Service Association, provides butchers' aprons, restaurant tablecloths, hotel maid uniforms, and the like. Snower supplied the textiles that the Textile Rental Industry rented. Because we are dealing with a different audience than either Barbara or Megan discussed, the stakes are obviously different. I'm going to take a moment to unpack what I would assess as the three intended messages of the film, since they are all equally present in Snower's talk as well. All of them address the issue of labor's visibility in different but overlapping ways. I'd assess the intended consequences of the film as to sell, to inform, and to affiliate in that order. First and foremost, Snower wants to ensure that his products are visible: screening an early cut of the film, Snower reportedly fumed at Wexler's inclusion of scenes with a mill operative's family around the breakfast table. In an interview, Wexler reports that Snower saw it and said, 'What's all this shit about the kids in school and the breakfast stuff? I want to see my mill. I've got 52 carding machines that cost $4,800 apiece and I want to see them In this way, the film is approximately equivalent to a catalog or a sales brochure, though it does have the benefit of showing those mills in motion. Wexler's first cut had abstracted the actual process of production in another way, shooting in what he called all close shots, just the beginning and end, the raw cotton and the finished product. Snower was unhappy, so Wexler went back to Opelika for a reshoot and lost a lot of money in the process. Only secondarily, this film holds a value to a broader audience as a demonstration of an industrial process. Here, we can think about the film in relation to fair exhibits on industry and factory tourism. An article in the Linen Supply News oversells this appeal a bit perhaps with the following review (on your handout): The film gives in vivid March-of-Time style an account of the manufacturing processes from the time a bale of cotton arrives at the mill until it appears as finished garments, towels, table linens, etc. So concise, understandable, and dramatic is the presentation of the story of how cotton is transformed into cloth that the film is valuable for presentation in schools, as well as an entertainment feature for business programs. As I said, it's a bit much for a movie that's basically a commercial for the mill. But we can see a development of the aesthetic that made Snower want a reshoot, a documentary style that sacrifices context (the breakfast table) in favor of thorough presentation of a process. Here we see the celebration of one kind of visibility, the visibility of the machine, over another kind, the
1 In Homeward Bound, Elaine Tyler May characterizes reliance on expertise as one of the most striking developments of the postwar years (30).

visibility of the mill workers. These two types of visibility both jibe with contemporary thinking about business culture and its desire to erase labor, to eliminate workers from the landscape of production, as David Nye suggests of the turn of the century technological sublime (123). Yet the most interesting part of this film to me, and of Snower's speech, uses the visual skills of the workers and the salesman as a way of suggesting an affiliation between them. Visual focus and visual skill elevate workers to the level of managers and bring salesmen into the realm of skilled workers. As with the appearances of mill village life only at the beginning and the end of the film, physical labor only brackets the manufacturing process. In part, this is a result of the films insistence that the factory is ultra-modern: the words automatic, efficient, and mechanized are repeatedly used; sometimes machines are highly mechanized and in one case efficiently mechanized. The appeals to tradition which you might expect in a film called Half Century with Cotton mitigated almost immediately with the description of a factory as a kind of technological utopia. Cotton spinning itself is almost as old as history, the narration states. However, workers have little to do except kept these high-speed machines supplied with cotton and make certain that nothing interferes with the smooth, efficient operation of the equipment. With machines doing all the work, the only thing left for humans to do is survey the machines labor. Here, we see the physical labor transmuted into a visual surveillance that nevertheless displays the worker's expertise: every inch is inspected by trained operators, who can spot the tiniest flaw. The films focus on the factorys equipment effectively elevates them to the position of manager. With each change in shift, the operators exchange information about the machines under their supervision, we are told. Workers become supervisors, and machines become workers, almost human machines that nevertheless keep running day and night, week after week, month after month. The film thus uses the relationship between worker and machine to make an implicit argument about factory labor: textile workers in the south are not unionized, it seems to suggest, because they are not workers at all. Yes, there are certainly other reasons for suggesting the workers at the Opelika mill were not workers, the most prominent one in recent memory being the textile workers strike of 1934.2 Yet read in concert with Snower's 1950 speech, we can see something more complex coming to light a kind of mutual leveling of postwar classes through an appeal to vision. Snower delivered a kind of cultural history cum pep talk at the Steiner Sales Clinic for linen supply salesmen in 1950, one that seems to with quite a similar rhetoric to that of A Half Century with Cotton. Before moving into a description of industry standards in classification and describing the different types of cotton cloth produced at his factory, Snower contextualizes his mission. He notes that [m]uch is heard these days of rayon, nylon, and other synthetics, but it is not conceivable that cotton will ever lose its place of dominance in our industry at least not in the lifetime of anyone in this room (1950). Alluding to the rise of synthetic fabrics in the 1930s and 40s, especially after World War II (Meikle 1995), Snower pushes aside the associations of synthetic fabrics with science and progress and futurity. Instead, he appeals to shared tradition and invokes the collective, assuring the salesmen that cotton will remain king while they are around. What places Snower's talk in the same realm as his company's industrial film is the appeal to the visual expertise of the salesmen His lesson is aural, visual, and tactile: in his speech, he describes passing out samples of different grades of raw cotton and different weaves
2 This strike did not reach the Opelika area. Salmond, General Textile Strike of 1934 194-196 discusses strikers from Georgia and militant anti-union mobs surrounding Pepperell mill in Opelika.

of cloth. He also refers to two different grades of cloth, noting that The difference is immediately discernible. He later states, Anyone can pretty well determine this by the appearance of the grey, unfinished cloth without being a mill expert or making extensive tests. Snower, then, works against a popular postwar discourse that united textile production with scientific experimentation. Instead, he appeals to a common-sense approaches couched in rhetoric of the visually obvious and the experiential. So what should we make of this connection between blue collar and white collar workers in the textile industry? There are a few possible lines of inquiry that I plan to pursue, and I'd love to hear more ideas. First, these materials suggest that concerns central to postwar American business culture such as bureaucracy, mechanization, and the cult of scientific expertise reach across classes and regions. Leigh Ann Duck's work on the temporality of the South is incredibly germane here: the depiction of Southern textile mills in promotional materials of this era tries to mediate between a vision of the South steeped in tradition and one of a region where modern labor is being performed. Second, I suggest that we think of promotional materials like these as a front line way of thinkign through the relationship between visuality and embodiment in postwar American business culture. The year this documentary came out was also the year that Death of a Salesman was written, and I think both tap into a sense of loss that comes with no longer being a country of men who work with their hands. The attention to the look and feel of fabric samples in Snower's talk hints at the kind of dissociation from the job that Miller's play deals with more directly. And finally, we need to develop a more complex language for discussing the relationship between artist's work on promotional materials and more ostensibly artistic ones. Although this film is the genesis of Wexler's documentary aesthetic and raises important concerns that recur throughout his body of work (such as labor, the relationship between city and country, and the lure of voyeurism), it has been discussed only by Wexler himself, and then only as a costly mistake he made before his real film career.3 The best way to develop our understanding of labor as a spectacle, not surprisingly, is to inspect it more closely. Thank you.

3 He did this film setting out as an assistant cameraman on The Living City, a short documentary on Chicago that
won an Academy Award. Wexler has won won two Academy awards for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and Bound for Glory (1976). As you might suspect from his work on the latter film, Hal Ashby's biography of Woody Guthrie, Wexler is a committed leftist. He had served as cameraman for many of John Sayles's films; he has also shot many of his own documentaries on subjects ranging from public transit to labor relations to conscientious objection. As such, the film exists in approximately the same realm as the commercials that he produced with Conrad Hall, another well-known cinematographer. So in addition to the major question that I address in this paper how does post-war business culture imagine the relationship between labor, management, and customers, I'd like to add a similar question about Wexler's career how can we think about the relationship (political and aesthetic) between ostensibly artistic and ostensibly commercial work by the same person?