This is a top-notch book. “Stayin’ Alive” tells the story of
the 1970’s as a transitional decade for the working class, touching on all
aspects of the times, going in-depth into the songs and music, the economic
debates, and the intraparty wrestling at the Democratic conventions of 1968 and
1972. I’ve been blown away by the similarities to the current political moment
and the early 70’s and the story of the loss of class consciousness and the
beginning of the current culture war is very well told. Ultimately, it’s the
story of the change from the New Deal era to the current nameless era that
pivoted with Nixon and peaked with Reagan, emphasizing small government and the
lowering of working people’s wages. You can sum it up in one statistic: “The
weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers increased 62 percent between 1947
and 1972 before stagnating indefinitely thereafter.”
The book
starts with several case studies of work stoppages and strikes in the late 60’s
and early 70’s. It paints a picture of some really big potential for labor, as
there was huge consciousness of the need to fight as the decade began. One big
reason for this was that a new generation was working in the mines, the mills,
and the factories. These were no longer immigrants or “ethnic whites” who had
come desperate for any job. These were their sons, who after seeing the youth
movements of the 1960’s didn’t just want jobs but wanted good jobs. The new
generation fought to achieve union leadership but faced stiff opposition from
the union establishment, the worst of which was the murder of insurgent union
leadership candidate Jock Yablonski on December 31, 1969. The author clarifies
that this “reawakening” that occurred in the rank-and-file was not a renewal,
but a breaking apart of old bonds that had kept the New Deal society together.
Unlike the 1930’s, when there was unity, labor was just one part of many social
movements in the late 1960’s and quickly found itself torn apart by cultural
issues and foreign policy debates.
The
second chapter covers the nitty gritty of political machinations, focusing on
three men- George Wallace, the virulent racist who advocated for the working
class as an independent in 1968 and a Democrat in 1972, George McGovern, Bobby
Kennedy’s chosen heir and leader of the “New Left” (hippies), and Richard
Nixon. It really surprised me how suddenly the book changed in format and content,
but it did so really well. It covers not only how the Democrats were defeated
in ’68 after spending 28 of the previous 36 years in power, but how the
coalition of the working class fell apart. It began with Wallace’s campaign in
1968, that made a very strong 3rd party showing, taking five
southern states, though losing the urban north largely due to a labor campaign
against him. When the 1972 election came around, it was a heated three-way
battle between McGovern, Wallace, and a guy named Muskie, who was supported by
the unions. McGovern was able to secure the nomination, but significant numbers
voted for Wallace, drawn by his opposition to bussing programs, and labor hated
McGovern despite his impeccable voting record. This hatred was mainly cultural,
as McGovern was supported by more affluent hippie-types, while George Meany,
who hated Communists, golfed with Richard Nixon. The Republicans successfully
stuck McGovern with the 3 A’s: Amnesty (for draft-dodgers), Acid (confusing it
with Marijuana), and Abortion. It was very successful. The unions refused to
endorse a candidate and Wallace couldn’t run as an independent after being shot
and paralyzed by a would-be assassin. Wallace’s voters flocked to Richard
Nixon, as the busing issue tore the democrats apart. Busing was a big issue
because while liberal elites supported the integration of the races, it tended
to be implemented so that working-class families’ kids were the ones sent to
worse schools. Working-class people knew this and fought against it, partially
out of racism and partially out of being forced to lower their children’s
opportunities. It set white, blue-collar northerners with southerners against
blacks and upper-middle-class liberals. 1972 became a purely cultural contest
as the unions supported a Republican who wanted to destroy them to avoid the
social connections to the “New Left.” The failed McGovern campaign would make
cowards out of future Democrats, caving to Republicans on the economy and
criminal justice issues for the three to four decades that followed. Richard Nixon
lectured his advisors, “The real issues of the election are the ones like
patriotism, morality, religion—not the material issues. If the issues were
prices and taxes, they’d vote for McGovern. We’ve done things labor doesn’t
like. We’ve held wages down. But they’ll support us for these other reasons.”
Something
that shocked me in this chapter was how much labor hurt itself with official
support for the Vietnam War. George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, the biggest
union at the time, was chiefly responsible, as he was staunchly anti-Communist
and backed LBJ’s war all the way, even when it became Nixon’s war. He wasn’t
unopposed, but he wasn’t completely alone. Many union men were angry that their
sons were sent to fight a seemingly pointless war, but many others (with some
overlap) were also contemptuous of the hippies and draft-dodgers who opposed
it, especially when it came to the college deferment, as union men didn’t go to
college and rich kids did.
The
third chapter is titled “Nixon’s Class Struggle,” and moving on from the
failure of the McGovern campaign, covers the triumph of Nixon and his forging
of a new political coalition that would last at least until today. It’s an
age-old battle. While FDR rallied the people against economic elites who wanted
to form an “industrial dictatorship,” Nixon put the blame on a “liberal
cultural elite” who want to take your money and give it to someone who doesn’t
work. From reading this, I’ve learned a lot about how much of a political
workhorse Nixon was, spending, according to his close advisors, about 50% of
his time on policy issues and the other 50% on “nonsubstantial aspects of the
presidency,” AKA politics- stuff like proposing something popular he was
against so he could get Democrats to stop it and put the blame on them. He even
secretly had his people hurt the moderate Muskie campaign so he would get to
face McGovern, calling New Hampshire voters and telling them that they were
Muskie supporters from Harlem and spreading fake news alleging that Muskie supported
busing. He wanted to face McGovern to emphasize the culture war.
The
fourth chapter is called “I’m Dying Here,” and covers the culture of the New
Left that emerged from the 60’s and supported McGovern along with its failure
to build any real political power in the 1970’s. The fundamental issue was (and
still is) condescension. John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival said it
best (quoted in the book), “when it comes to doing the real crap that
civilization needs to keep going, who’s going to be the garbage collector? None
of us will.” The problem with
the hippies being in the same movement as labor is that the hippies looked down
on labor as doing meaningful tasks and living unfulfilling lives. It wasn’t
completely off—after all, nobody liked
to work in difficult, blue-collar jobs, but folks like it even less when you
look down on them for doing so. The hippies and a lot of the social left today
managed to achieve their enlightenment by leaving
the rest of the pack and separating from society, rarely acknowledging that it
is a privilege to do so. They were
and are college-educated and never worked with their hands. Why should a
working class person respect someone who thinks they’re stupid. It wasn’t the
working class that left the hippies, it was the hippies that left them. That
division is still strong today with Trump and the modern social liberals who
look down on his supporters as ignorant racists who are being fooled into
supporting someone who lowers the taxes on the rich and degrades the social
safety net. What they’re seeing isn’t people being tricked, but people showing
you the price they’re willing to pay for respect and dignity—for a political
leader who tells them that they matter. The New Left made a tremendous error
that forced them into submission to the true elites—the wealthy.
This
chapter also tells a short story about Carroll O’Connor who played the
resentful, working-class Archie Bunker on “All in The Family,” a hit TV show
where he was the conservative member of the silent majority in the family. The
irony was that when a strike broke out among the electrical workers on set,
everyone was willing to break the strike except him. All the other actors, who
were younger and more socially liberal, were fine breaking the strike while O’Connor
claimed to be incapable of making himself do so. He said, “I could no more go
into a building and work with scabs than I could play handball in a church.”
Chapter five is called “A
Collective Sadness,” referring to an essay written in 1974 decrying the failure
of the left against Richard Nixon and economic conservatives. It returns to the
conservatives and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, who began to force wages down
with their newfound power. The 1970’s witnessed two recessions and a lot of
inflation, for which the two rival explanations were external supply shocks
from oil or excessive wages. To this day people argue, but I think that
generally people take sides on this sort of thing based on what they already
thought, and not on evidence. It was the political opening that businesses were
waiting for. They put the blame on the unwillingness of the post-war welfare
state to allow its citizens to suffer, arguing that recessions were necessary
to keep inflation from running too high. Businesses and management were
reinvigorated and used the new Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1971 to
dramatically expand their presence in Washington, with the number of business
Political Action Committees quadrupling from 1974-1978 and corporations with
offices in Washington, D.C. quintupling from 1968-1978. GM only had three
staffers lobbying Congress in 1968—by 1978 they had 28. Business achieved total
control of the legislative process by the end of the 1970’s after labor peaked
in power in 1968 and squandered it. The first thing on the agenda was
explicitly stated by U.S. Steel’s Roger Blough, who said “The No. 1 domestic
problem of this country is the effect of the wage push on the total lives of
everyone.” It is hard to imagine a man so evil that he would ever describe the
number one problem in a country as people earning too much money for their hard
work. Well the plan worked, and you’ve seen the chart on the internet—since the
mid-1970’s, the top 20% of earners have gotten immensely rich and the rest of
us have had our wages stagnate at real 1970’s levels. That’s the cost of
failure in 1972. Over 40 years of stagnation.
The same chapter also covers the
New Left’s push for racial equality in the 1970’s and the problems it ran up
against. Despite the left succeeding in integrating the work force, they could
not save the working class. In 1974, there were 38,096 African-American steel
workers, but only 9,958 by 1988. In electrical trades, blacks increased in
representation from 5.3 to 8.4 percent, but in real numbers declined by forty
percent. This happened to women too, who gained in the amount of money compared
to what men earned, but largely from the fact that men were facing lower wages.
In the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)’s Bess F. Young case, an employer explicitly and successfully argued
that he fired two black employees not because they were in a union (which would
be illegal), but because they were black. 25 years later one could readily be
fired for union activities but discrimination was illegal (though still widely
practiced). This is another huge failure, as the trade resulted in major gains
for management, weakness for labor, and minor gains for minorities. The real
progress would be gains for both labor and minorities or at least maintaining
labor at the level it was. The culture issues would also split women in the
working class from more affluent, liberal, upper-middle-class women. For
example, 94 percent of pro-choice women worked outside the home, and half of
them had incomes in the top 10 percent of working women in the nation while 63
percent of pro-life advocates did not work outside the home and those that did
were unmarried. One researcher explained that, “A social ethic that promotes
more freely available sec undercuts pro-life women in two ways: it limits their
abilities to get into a marriage in the first place, and it undermines the
social value placed on their presence once within a marriage.”
Chapter
six deals with the Carter administration and its failure to do just about
anything. The major issue is that Carter conceded to the Republicans that wages
were too high and would not work with Democrats to strengthen labor. The Carter
years were a key opportunity for labor to bounce back but they couldn’t
convince their own president to help them. They tried to pass full employment
legislation, but Carter wanted to appear to be on labor’s side, not actually be
on their side. He allowed Republicans, who were more energized than ever with
big business on their side, to amend the bill into a meaningless, symbolic
paper and then, after all of that compromise, the Republicans, emboldened,
still shot down the bill. Very reminiscent of modern politics. In the late
70’s, the push began for lowering taxes that would become a rallying cry under
Reagan in the 80’s. The Democrats, points out the author, conceded the entire
economy to the conservatives, and the left wing produced no ideas to fight
with, allowing Republicans, Southern Democrats, and Conservative Democrats to
lower wages and reduce inflation, giving birth to today’s massive wealth gap.
None of this improved the economy quickly enough for Carter and cost him his
base, prompting Ted Kennedy to attempt to primary him in ’80 and for him to
lose the general election that year. Between 1949 and 1979, the inflation
adjusted average hourly wage for production workers rose 75 percent, but
between 1979 and 2005 it rose just 2 percent.
The
seventh chapter returns to cultural issues, like Saturday Night Fever and Taxi
Driver, the big movies of the time, as well as Disco and the anti-disco
movement. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but it is really
impressive how the author weaves together economic issues alternated with
cultural issues, because the shift of the working class to the Republican party
and its disappearance in the consciousness of America really relied on both.
One interesting point was that when Elvis died in 1977, America lost the last
cultural reference point that everyone agreed on. He was an icon of the working
class and of a better, more traditional time, so his loss was painfully felt.
The
eighth chapter points out that the working class is not dead, though the
industrial working class is much diminished. Today’s working class is in places
like Wal-Mart, people working retail in jobs that are safer (thanks to unions)
than those of the past but often equally boring and menial and this time
without union representation increasing wages. In the future, if there is to be
another working-class coalition to be formed, it cannot be based on one sector
of the economy, as it was based on manufacturing and industry alone in the
mid-20th century. It has to be a flexible and accommodating movement
with a “diversified portfolio” of people that it represents. It went
underappreciated in the book that labor was not just vulnerable because social
liberals left it behind, but because the American industrial job was at risk no
matter what from a globalized, free-market economy.
In
conclusion, this has been a really enlightening book and I feel like I just
finished a college course. This is such good reading for understanding today’s
politics and it really clarifies the details of what actually happened in the
70’s to give birth to the modern gilded age that was conceived under Nixon,
born under Reagan, came of age under neoliberals of both parties until we reach
what I hope is its senile end with Trump.
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