ABOUT THIS BOOK

In the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters empowered poor immigrants who had grown up in the crowded blocks of the central city to move upward and outward to comfortable suburbs. It delivered unprecedented benefits to workers—especially to those in retail, services, and light manufacturing—locking in hourly pay that bought the patio furniture sets, the pontoon boats, and the station wagons that defined the consumer culture of the decade. Yet suburban comfort came with strict, new institutions that defined the middle-class culture of the era: the nuclear family, heterosexual monogamy, the husband breadwinner, and the dependent wife. Many workers yearned for the pleasures they left behind in the core of the industrial city, even as poor people, people of color, and queer people were locked out of the suburbs.

Teamsters Metropolis argues that the union achieved unprecedented organizing success in the immediate postwar period precisely because its members defied bourgeois cultural standards. They wore overly flamboyant clothes, instigated jarringly violent confrontations, used aliases, extorted money, flouted the law, and often blended friendship, sex, and love in a way that challenged the boundaries of heteronormativity. Perhaps no one exemplified this freedom more than Jimmy Hoffa, who delivered better pay and worker conditions to marginal workers while also using coercive tactics, embezzling money, and colluding with the Mafia. Rather than impeding the union’s growth, unruly organizing, illicit business techniques, and dissident cultural practices appealed to prospective members and offered an opportunity to circumvent some of the suburban regulations, helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters become the largest U.S. union of the mid-twentieth century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ryan Patrick Murphy is Associate Professor of History at Earlham College. His book Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice received the 2017 David Montgomery Award for best book in Labor History from the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working Class History Association.

REVIEWS

“In Teamsters Metropolis, Ryan Murphy uses the tools and methods of queer history to brilliantly recast mid-twentieth century union culture. Whereas the historical literature has tended to link unionism during this period with suburbanization, domesticity, conformity, mass consumption, and cultural conservatism, Murphy argues the opposite. The appeal of the Teamsters, in fact, can only be comprehended by examining what was in fact countercultural, unruly, and even transgressive about them, and the ways that the Teamsters challenged both domesticity and self-denial to emphasize pleasure, indulgence, and flamboyance. Written with an almost novelistic flair, this daring and highly original book will have a profound impact on labor history.”— Margot Canaday, author of Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America

“Teamsters Metropolis is a shaken, not stirred, history of labor, queerness, suburbia, gender, federal policy, consumerism and organized crime. Murphy has taken what we thought we knew about Teamsters unionism, and revealed entirely new layers of unruly contradictions. For all who seek a fuller understanding of labor’s past and present, this is required reading.”— Lane Windham, author of Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a N

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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