Kirkus Reviews

“Jeter, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent, examines the fraught history of race and class in America.

“What is to be done now,” asks the author, “as the country disintegrates into political chaos and those of us who are fully awake wait anxiously for the rest of the nation to join us in reclaiming this land from the bloodsucking capitalists who have robbed us blind?” In these pages, Jeter presents readers with a far-ranging survey of American history to trace tangled and interconnected stories of race and class relations going back to before the U.S. Civil War. The author refers to his project as “a journey through time” undertaken to “assess what has been wrought by this ferocious, 150-year class war between the Americans who built the country and those who own it.” Focusing on racial issues, Jeter looks at incidents such as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which “white supremacists overthrew the progressive, interracial government on the pretext of Black male predation despite a lack of any evidence.” On the labor relations side, he walks readers through events like President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1935 signing of the Wagner Act, recognizing the right of employees to bargain collectively with their employers, which, among other things, was a signpost moment in the long “antagonistic relationship” between the American Federation of Labor and Black American workers.

Jeter’s narrative skill is remarkable; he writes with both passion and clarity about the ways “the white settler elite has historically deployed…false accusations to stir up murderous passions, creating a smokescreen for dispossession.” The picture he paints of America’s ruling capitalist oligarchy constantly pitting workers against each other along racial lines is vigorously convincing, even when he lapses into over-generalizations: “White workers typically respond to financial uncertainly by abandoning the class struggle to instead punch down on African Americans, who they invariably see as a threat to their racial identity and the privileges afforded to it.” His narrative’s main weakness is its sprawl, which blunts its focus. The book bounces all over the last 150 years, from the death of Ethel Rosenberg to the murder of Emmett Till to the Korean War to the Montgomery bus boycott to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling to President Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to Charleston mass shooter Dylann Roof—Jeter even makes a detour to discuss a dispute he had with an acquaintance over a personal loan he was late in repaying. The author manages to draw connecting threads between most of these subjects, but the sheer number of data points may leave some readers yearning for more focus. Still, the power of Jeter’s insights is consistently stunning, and his rhetoric is often thrillingly sharp, as when he describes “Black respectability politics increasingly promoted by an African American bourgeoisie that, however well-meaning, operated from a misguided understanding of Black laborers as a defeated people whose best chance was to obey white folks and hope for the best.” All of these insights are enlisted in the cause of exposing the “the gaping spiritual wound left by a battery of invectives, bullying, and profiling.”

A bracing and thought-provoking study of race and class clashes in American history.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS

David Simon, creator of THE WIRE

“With his CLASS WAR IN AMERICA, Jon Jeter has fired a broadside from the left that will, in this utterly divided society, spark its share of argument and counter-argument. But one central theme of this book is beyond debate: Jeter’s historical rendering of the American labor movement and capital’s incessant misuse of race as a means of dividing workers from each other is carefully and definitively chronicled. Race hate and racial fears have long been the most valuable weapon in keeping working people disorganized, alienated and, in the end, cheated.” –David Simon, creator of THE WIRE

Matt Sedillo, Author, Poet

“Viewed as a Biblical allegory, this forgotten firefight on a Godless swath  of grassland at the nation’s edge is a crucifixion, or an overwrought  imagining of a Dantean underworld, Cain battling Abel to the death on  the banks of the River Styx, between the fortresses of Damnation and Hell,  with the sulfuric stench of burnt earth and rotting flesh wafting in the air.  But the Battle of the Crater, as it’s come to be known, is far more useful as  a metaphor for the Republic’s rise and fall. America’s Big Bang cleaved  from a Virginia knoll the epicenter of an enduring class war every bit as  gaping and grotesque as a fistula, from which was shat a disfigured body  politic in all its myriad contradictions.”

Had Edoardo Galeano been born in Indianapolis Indiana in the 1960s rather than the Uruguay of the 1940s and had he fixed his eye on the historic white supremacist mangling and deformation of class struggle in the United States his name may very well have been Jon Jeter.

In Jon Jeter’s latest masterwork Class War in America the tone is prophetic and prose upon the pages read like poetry. Jeter here as a writer stands tall at the height of his craft leaping from various points in history united by theme. In this way Jeter is less bound by period than theme. Jeter will span across centuries to draw out the heart of matter to elucidate a reoccurring pattern. In many ways in this fashion he operates more akin to a great muralist than a traditional historian or journalist. And it is brilliant.

As a thinker and writer meditating upon historic junctures some well-trodden some obscure Jeter charts the long frayed history of this blood soaked tragedy and its greatest barrier, its seemingly insurmountable hurdle towards class struggle and ultimately class victory: the scourge of white supremacy.

In the passage above torn from the pages of this collection of grand betrayals Jeter writes of the Battle of Crater. Here was a battle during in the Civil War in which after a Union Victory the white union soldiers turned their bayonets against their Black compatriots. According to historian Richar Slotkin “it seems likely that more  than 200 Blacks were killed after they had ceased fighting.”  It is difficult to imagine for most such unending terror, such a hopeless field of murder, and yet Jeter describes this slaughter as an act of solidarity, as an act of solidarity between white soldiers on both sides of the Civil War against the possibility of a different kind of America.

Trump and his January 6th crowd is an obvious manifestation of this tendency, however  Jeter writes, “The problem, however, did not begin with Trump, who is a stock  character in the denouement of a classic film that unspools from an  antiquated movie projector, its images flickering hypnotically against a  billowy tableau to depict the misfortunes of an extended American family  over a span of seven generations, and counting. Much as Southern  aristocrats deployed Jim Crow to put down a proletarian intifada, and  Ronald Reagan schemed to undo the New Deal’s rainbow mutiny nearly a  century later with dog-whistle racial appeals, Trump is merely one of the  latest—and loudest—in a long line of carnival barkers cast in the role of  the Redeemer, climbing down from the mountaintop to sow the seeds of  division and cleanse the land of heresy—by bloodshed if necessary—in an  attempt to discredit the messengers of working-class solidarity.”

Jeter is arguing that this indeed is an old story wedded to the very foundations of this country which echo again and again. Jeter is no partisan political hack though. He writes as an equal opportunity proletarian voice he raises his pen against the so called party of lesser evil as well. Jeter writes of Clinton, “ Clinton’s contention that he was a ‘different kind of Democrat’ belied his inauguration of the Third Klan. The only difference is that while Simmons’ mountaintop trek occurred in the context of deepening industrialization, Clinton’s Stone Mountain stunt heralded the beginning of the post industrial era.”

Here Jeter is at his best leaping across time and period showing how even under shifting means of production the underlying uniting themes and basic idea of America remains in tact. A great crucible where the races of Europe meld into one at the exclusion of those who fit only the description of suspect and cannon fodder.

Jeter does not let off Black politicians or some of his contemporaries for that matter who have made careers for themselves nestling up to power off the hook either. Jeter writes,  “And so it goes in post-racial America. Talented Tenth defend white supremacy, but each other as well. Black pundits like Angela Rye, Bakari Sellers and Andrew Gillum urge African Americans to vote for the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris despite their extensive records of racist law enforcement policies and praxis. In his hagiography of Obama We Were Eight Years  in Power, the celebrated Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote ridiculously:…”

To read Jeter citation and skewering of Coates you will have to purchase the book. I cannot give away all these pages secrets and delights.

In the passage on Clinton Jeter cites a retired union worker who ties his shift from the Democrats to the Republicans with the rise of Ronald Reagan. Saying “the Democrats give too much away.” And this is at the crux of the matter. It is a Republican talking point that for the majority of the history of this two party system it was the Democratic Party that was the far more racist of the two. And that is a fact. But it is also a fact that of the two the Republican Party has always been the more openly embracing of big capital. That is also a fact. It is also a fact that there is little difference in how these parties act in matters of war, incarceration and relationship to capital. That is also a fact and perhaps the most central fact of US life and until that is reckoned the prospects of class struggle remain dim and remote. But in all of this, as a matter of sale, as a manner of a con it is true that the Democrats have always sold themselves as the party of the so called working man. The disaffection with the party began when the party began to open itself perhaps in tokenism alone to more than just the working white man.

This shared anxiety of a white supremacist nation against the threat of tomorrow beats at the heart of the American politic as it always has. These days however  it does seem to be ticking just a bit harder with the threat of demographic shift looming. The path forward however is not through a rainbow coalition of death to confront the white supremacist apocalypse at our doorstep. If there is any hope to be found for class struggle in America it will come not from above but from below. And if then it is to do so, a section of America must contend with the brutal reckoning of what America truly is and has always been. And we must all fight for something different, for something better.

Power to the people. Workers of the world unite.

-Matt Sedillo is the Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and author of MOWING LEAVES OF GRASS (FlowerSong Press, 2019) and CITY ON THE SECOND FLOOR (FlowerSong Press, 2022).

David Roediger, Author

“As learned as it is spirited, Jeter’s engaging book delivers on its promise to produce an arresting new history of labor in the US. Refusing to separate race and class and attending to the most exhilarating moments of solidarity alongside the most horrifying instances of white terror, CLASS WAR draws deftly on its author’s career as one of his generation’s leading journalists.” –David Roediger teaches American Studies at the University of Kansas. His recent books include THE SINKING MIDDLE CLASS and CLASS, RACE, AND MARXISM.