Labour
When Blue-Collar Pride Became Identity Politics
By Joan Walsh, Salon 5/9/10
Sep 8, 2010 - 7:50:05 AM

The great political failure of the 1960s was the New Left's inability to bring the labor movement into its great liberationist tent. There were lots of reasons for that, one of them being that most big union leaders didn't want to be in that stinky tent with a lot of hippies, feminists, dashiki-wearing black militants and "fags." (That last comes from AFL-CIO leader George Meany's description of the New York delegation to the disastrous 1972 Democratic convention: "They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO representatives!") Also, not a small matter: The New Left opposed the Vietnam War; again, most labor leaders supported it.

Still, the inability to forge a political movement that was as much about class as race and gender rights haunts the United States today. We saw the shadows of that struggle even in the 2008 presidential campaign, as supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama traded charges of "racism" and "sexism," but few paid attention to the increasing openness of white working-class voters, especially men, to pick a Democrat again in a time of profound economic crisis. We see it today in the hostility of many Democrats, and the resistance of the Obama administration, to backing aggressive government action to address the continuing unemployment disaster. The decline of the labor movement hobbled the Democratic Party, and so far nothing has come along to replace it, to represent the great majority of Americans who are disadvantaged by the ever-increasing power of corporate America and the wealthy.

If you want to understand how we got here -- how the Democrats' New Deal coalition shattered in the 1970s, and why progressives are still picking the shrapnel out of their political hides -- you must read Jefferson Cowie's "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class." If you missed the 1970s entirely, or only remember it as a child or teen (as I do), you'll learn a lot. If you lived through it, you might come to think about it all very differently -- the missed opportunities, and what they say about our own time. Plus, this isn't an eat-your-spinach review, it's a fun read with cultural insight that makes connections I hadn't, from "Saturday Night Fever" to "Dog Day Afternoon," Bruce Springsteen to

Telling the story of how the New Left clashed with Big Labor to bring about the end of New Deal liberalism, Cowie is impossibly fair. Some accounts stress the conservatism (and racism and sexism) of labor bosses; others emphasize the New Left's contempt for mainly white union members and its preference for what came to be called "identity politics," the struggle of women, minority groups and gays for equal rights. Cowie reveals the extent to which both narratives have some truth.

"Stayin' Alive" also makes clear that the roots of intra-Democratic Party strife in the '60s can be found in the glorious New Deal of the '30s, which, to win the support of Southern Democrats, excluded agricultural and service workers from its new protections, including the National Labor Relations Act, leaving out many blacks as well as women. That led to strange inequities, such as a firm legally and successfully arguing it laid off workers because they were black, not because of union activism (the first was OK, the second was prohibited by federal law).

And once industrial unions were forced, whether by upstart organizers or federal intervention, to bring blacks and women into their ranks, the decline of industries like steel, mining and auto manufacturing created a zero-sum agony in which the worst nightmares of white unionists came true: Integration often came at the expense of white guys, as the number of overall jobs began to contract nationwide. But nobody won: While the percentage of black steelworkers, for instance, climbed during the '70s, the overall number of black steelworkers actually declined. Cowie in no way suggests the push to integrate those industries was a mistake (nor do I); it just suggests that the paranoia of the white working class, that minorities and women would take away their jobs, in some cases came true. As Cowie puts it: "Diversity arrived to American industry just as industry was leaving America."

With their cultural and material standing on the wane, blue-collar workers drifted to the Republican Party, which came to represent a kind of identity politics for white working-class men. Cowie traces the story of Dewey Burton, an autoworker outside of Detroit who made the transition from Hubert Humphrey Democrat to George Wallace Democrat to Reagan Democrat in just about a decade. Frustrated with his job and his union, angry at Democrats for supporting mandatory busing to integrate the public schools, Burton became a symbol of the rightward drift of the white working class, profiled repeatedly by the New York Times. Nixon went after men like Burton in 1972, with a strategy of "cultural recognition" of their grievances while paying little attention to their economic travails. By the time of the notorious "hard-hat riots" of 1970, when construction workers beat up antiwar protesters near New York's City Hall, Nixon saw the promise of a blue collar-GOP alliance. The head of the building trades, Peter Brennan, did too; he went to the White House and presented Nixon with his own hard hat, and became secretary of labor in Nixon's second administration. While George Meany flirted with Nixon, he refused to endorse him -- but he did everything in his power to make sure George McGovern lost in 1972. As Cowie explains, "The majority of white working class voters [selected] Nixon by wide margins over the most pro-labor candidate ever produced by the American two-party system." The New Deal coalition was dead.

Just as voting Republican became a kind of identity politics for white working-class men who felt abandoned by Democrats, 1970s pop culture also detached the blue-collar worker from hoary notions of group pride and solidarity. On television and in movies, they were increasingly depicted as left-behind losers, whose only heroism derived from escaping their doomed brethren. Cowie contrasts that with the populism of Frank Capra, whose films always had heroes, but their heroism consisted in standing up for their family, friends and neighbors against attempts to abuse them, whether by government or business. In the late 1970s, working-class heroes from "Saturday Night Fever's" Tony Manero to the Bruce Springsteen of "Born to Run" could only prevail by leaving their roots behind ("It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win," Springsteen sings to his lady in "Thunder Road," though later he would intentionally strive to represent and celebrate his working-class roots, not renounce them). Cowie's got an odd, funny meditation on disco, which actually managed to pull together the coalition the New Left never did -- blacks and women and "fags," as well as white working-class kids aping John Travolta. (I was the only one of my friends back in the day who loved disco and Springsteen.)

With Labor Day approaching, and President Obama preparing to make his annual bow to the labor movement, speaking at an AFL-CIO picnic on Monday, I had a long phone conversation with Cowie about his book, the Democratic Party's unraveling, and potential hope for the future. I asked him if he could pick the most disastrous single decision, by either a labor leader or a New Lefty, in the '70s, and he surprised me by doing so. Read on, and find out what it was