Rights Of Men, Rites Of Passage: Hunting And Masculinity At Reo Motors Of Lansing, Michigan, 1945-1975 [1]

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Lisa M. Fine

Towards the end of Ben Hamper's Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line, there is an important episode which provides a clue into the sources of gender identity among male autoworkers. Hamper had started to receive attention for his columns in Michael Moore's Michigan Voice. "It all ran smoothly until the fateful day that I allowed my editor to talk me into writing a piece about deer hunting, the most sanctified of blue-collar blood rituals." Hamper did not partake or even approve of the sport and his article, "celebrated the fact that these yahoos often ended up shootin' each other's brains out in their orgasmic frenzy to go boingin' some Bambi ... To hell with 'em. I liked deer just fine. The whole idea of slingin' a deer carcass over the hood of your Buick seemed rather unhinged." Hamper featured a co-worker named Polson, a white, six feet two inch, 245 pound former Marine and member of the NRA in his article. When Hamper caught wind of the fact that someone had brought the journal with his article on hunt ing into the shop, he decided to make a preemptive strike and present Polson with a copy. After twenty minutes of reading Polson confronted Hamper, "I should kick your worthless faggot ass! ... I bet all your candy-ass writin' pals think you're clever. Let me tell you what I think. You're nothin' more than a dumb cunt with diarrhea mouth. The only way you can get your garbage printed is by suckin' up to commie assholes who've got nothin' better to do by sit around, all doped up, tearin' this country down." Round two came after lunch. "Where the hell do you get off writin' that I rented my wedding tux from Outdoor Life? ... And what about this part where you state that the NRA stands for Nuts Run Amuck? Where do you come up with this crap?" Hamper replied that it was just a joke, to which Poison informed Hamper that hunters keep the deer population down and healthy. Hamper suggested, foolishly, "I think you just enjoy killing things." And Polson exploded, "And faggots are at the top of my list!" [2]

Hamper's antipathy notwithstanding, the activity of hunting does need to be explored as an important non-work activity of male autoworkers (and certainly a large group of white men of all classes in Michigan and elsewhere) and a source of this group's evolving identity as white, male, worker-citizens. Even though workers hunted both before and after World War II, the war represented a watershed for the popularity and extent of this outdoor activity for auto men. Through the United Auto Workers Union and as individual, private citizens, autoworkers pushed for and enacted their own rights to the public lands and the game those lands contained. Poison represents an important constituency in auto factories in Michigan that needs to be addressed and understood. That a man like Poison had so much invested in his identity as a hunter and gun owner and the gendered language he used to disparage those not like him (faggot, dumb cunt), speaks to the importance of these activities to the masculine identity of many of t hese workers.

Even though I intended my project on the history of the workers, community, and management of the Reo Motor Car Company to be sensitive to gender, I was caught off guard by the constant refrain on hunting in the materials in the archives, company journals, personnel records, grievance reports, and union materials. These materials concerned the opening and closing of various hunting seasons, information about places, gear, and weather conditions, the arrangement of time off for these various seasons, the accounts of humorous or dangerous hunting trips, controversies over unauthorized vacations always around hunting time and reports about behaviors related to hunting (drinking, card playing.) The frequency of these accounts increased after World War II and through the 1950s and 1960s. Individually, these were prosaic scraps of daily life; together, they began to take on meaning. Two informants of the Reo Oral History Project, Otto and Layton Ayes who came from Reo families (their grandfather, father, and vario us other relatives all worked at Reo) and worked for Reo between the 1940s and 1970s both talked about their yearly excursions to their hunting camp up north with male co-workers and relatives. As they both insisted, farming was better than working in the factory, and hunting was better than farming. Their eyes sparkled and their voices became animated when they talked about hunting pheasant or deer. [3]

The three areas of scholarship that might address the issue of autowork and hunting (or even the general issue of masculinity and hunting in the twentieth century) masculinity studies, autowork/labor history, and work culture/leisure studies are virtually devoid of any discussion on this relationship. In the new area of "men's studies" or masculinity studies, working-class men are relatively understudied; yet, when hunting is considered, it is presented as a throw-back, a carry-over of a primitive male behavior; the discussion is a historical. Peter Stearns, in his important Be A Man! Males in Modern Society asserts the fundamental relationship between early man, hunting, and war and suggests that a great deal of the history of modern masculinity is some version of recreating the challenges, skills, bonding, and values associated with this activity. Ancient "hunting societies provided models for personal identification that long survived their economic basis and remain valid simply because models are needed. " Because we live in a "post-hunting" society other forms such as war, sports teams, secret societies took the place of hunting as a site for the enacting and transmission of these characteristics and values. Perhaps because Stearns focuses on primarily European working class men, the actual activity of hunting itself is not explored as an enduring, if changing, source of masculine identity; [4] however, recent works on manhood in U.S. history are similarly silent on hunting and the working class in the twentieth century. [5]