Rochester City Newspaper, October 13, 2010, Wednesday

Rochester City Newspaper

October 13, 2010, Wednesday

Rochester City Newspaper

Labor's love lost

Jefferson Cowie traces the roots of blue-collar conservatism.

Interview by Ron Netsky

ILLUSTRATION BY MAX SEIFERT
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Jefferson Cowie. PROVIDED PHOTO

Two posters are prominently displayed in Jefferson Cowie's Cornell University office. The first, dealing with a workers' protest, is no surprise; Cowie is associate professor of labor history at Cornell.

But next to that is a poster promoting a 1970's Bruce Springsteen gig at New York's Bottom Line. For Cowie, the subjects are inexorably linked.

In his new book, "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class," Cowie weaves popular culture into the narrative of labor history.

The book traces the way some traditionally Democratic workers gravitated to the Republican Party as the left embraced minorities, feminists, and countercultural youth in the 1970's.

As the country braces for another election in which many workers appear poised to once again vote against what would seem to be their best interests, the reverberations of the 1970's continue to be felt.

The book also deals with the more liberal outlook on labor in the 1970's that made it possible for Congress to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978. The bill, sponsored by then Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative Augustus Hawkins (whose district included the turbulent Watts area in Los Angeles), called for the right to a job.

The bill called for local planning councils to map out community needs involving transportation, child care, housing, health care, and other areas that could be filled with public- and private-sector jobs.�

Even though the bill was greatly compromised by amendments before it passed, Cowie finds it fascinating that the discussion even took place. He believes the playing field regarding labor issues has shifted far to the right in subsequent decades. In his view, we now think within such narrow parameters that a bill like Humphrey-Hawkins would be unimaginable today.

Cowie, who serves as house professor and dean of William Keeton House, an innovative learning environment on Cornell's West Campus, was not born to privilege. He grew up in Crystal Lake near Chicago, the son of a janitor.

"When your dad works the nightshift at the same high school you're going to, you have a portal on how the world works that very few people have," Cowie says.

That's why one of the book's themes: the hidden injuries of class, is so important to him

In a recent interview, Cowie discussed his book and its relation to contemporary politics. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

CITY: One of the central themes of your book is that the 1970's was the decade that Democrats, the traditional party of unions and blue-collar workers, lost labor. What happened?

Cowie: The 1970's is kind of an inverse of the 1930's. During the 1930's, the Democratic Party is as close to a labor party as it's ever going to be. That continues for several decades through Johnson and then Nixon. Then what happens?

Scholars debate whether it was an economic crisis that liberals had no solution to in '73, '74, '75. Others have looked at the racial backlash, the rise of identity politics, and the decline of class politics. I look at it as a perfect storm: all of these things happening at the same time.

In terms of race in the 1970's, busing may have been necessary to integrate schools and level the educational playing field in cities, but it was not popular with many in the middle class.

The main character in the book, [autoworker] Dewey Burton - that's what drives him to vote for George Wallace in 1972. That's the axe that falls through the Democratic Party at that particular moment.

We may be shocked today by the popularity of the Tea Party and figures like Glenn Beck, but in the 1970's, Wallace, a segregationist, had a large following. If he hadn't been shot, who knows how far he would have gone?

He runs as an independent in '68, but he's a viable Democratic candidate in 1972. He won the Michigan primary the day he was shot.

To take the 1930's-1970's analogy a little farther, the 1930's put politics on an economic platform: the 1970's shifted it to a social and racial platform, which has pretty deep resonance in American culture.

So in some ways what's going on now with the Tea Party and the Glenn Becks and cultural politics, they're the descendents of Wallace.

Also in the 1970's, Democrats changed the presidential delegate selection process, bringing in more women, minorities, and youth. Meanwhile, Nixon sees an opening and embraces blue-collar workers, the majority of whom are white males.

Nixon is the greatest character in 20th century political history. He was a genius, he was crazy, he was paranoid, but he came up with the silent majority tactic after 1968: What can we do about workers?

Basically, he wants to re-create the Republican Party in such a way that it's a permanent successor to the [Franklin] Roosevelt Coalition. To do that he needs the working class. He brilliantly says we can't attack the unions, but we can win their hearts and minds on these cultural values, on the war, on patriotism, on machismo. He reaches out. There's a great campaign sticker, a picture of a hardhat in red, white and blue. It just says "Nixon," and it captures the whole campaign.

In the book you discuss the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which before it was gutted, would have guaranteed jobs.

On one hand it's like it's from another planet. But it was important enough for people to think they had to pass an empty shell of a bill.

The lesson today from Humphrey-Hawkins is one of political imagination. People at one point said, maybe the role of the state is not just to prop up corporations, maybe the role of the state is to actually insure that citizens have jobs. This will take care of poverty, this will create unity in a divided population.

We talked about that in a way we just don't anymore. Now economic policy falls along orthodox lines. We have a vicious debate within very narrow parameters. There's a possibility of having a discussion that's a mile wide instead of six inches wide. Humphrey-Hawkins represents that wide discussion.

That bill harkened back to the Works Progress Administration of the Franklin Roosevelt era. In dealing with our current crisis, we're putting stimulus money out there but not in the way Roosevelt did.

The New Deal had two phases. The first, the National Industrial Recovery Act, looked a lot like what we're doing now. Roosevelt basically organized business owners to solve the problem. And that didn't work. It was found to be unconstitutional and it didn't save anything. it was a disaster.

In 1935 we get a very different New Deal. That's when you see Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. That's when you see the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. That's when you see an approach where we're going to give money to people so they can stimulate demand rather than allow corporations further power to control a messed-up situation.

Is it simplistic to put together the fact that we have a need for repairs on infrastructure and a need for jobs and wonder why we don't have another Works Progress Administration-like program, putting people directly to work?

No. I completely agree. The infrastructure is falling apart. We need transportation. And why are we not leaders in the development of green technology? I'm a big proponent of the Apollo Alliance, an attempt to revitalize the rust belt by developing green technologies.

We're here talking in this one closet of the house called economic policy and we never get out when there are all these other rooms to explore.

The songwriter you believe consistently had his finger on the pulse of labor's problems is Bruce Springsteen.

If you look at Springsteen's career it captures the story extraordinarily well. There are these jazzy, crazy early albums and they're full of life and possibility and there's one line that really jumped out at me from "Greetings from Asbury Park." He says, "Dockworker's dreams mix with Panther schemes to someday own the rodeo." The dockworkers, the labor union, the Black Panthers; it's the blue-black alliance.

By mid-decade it's "Born to Run." Got to get out. He's in the car, ready to roll out of town, asking his girlfriend: are you with me or not? Then he does what no other artist of the day does, he goes back. In "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" Springsteen asks, who did we leave behind? Who are these people?

I think his own fame freaked him out and he went back and said, where did I come from? He looks into that darkness in those factory towns and finds an inescapable despair and claustrophobia that really concern him.

But when he puts out "Born in the USA," the song is co-opted -and misunderstood - by Ronald Reagan, who sees it as a patriotic rallying cry to use in his campaign.

I hated "Born in the USA" when it came out because I thought my guy had been co-opted by mainstream society and the frat boys were now playing his music. I was in college and into punk. But when I went back as an adult and a scholar and looked at that song, I was blown away by how much he captured the moment and how many layers.

You have this worker who fought in Vietnam, lost his job at the oil refinery, is this close to going to the penitentiary, and that story is absolutely dwarfed by the sonic chorus of this nationalist boom, boom, boom.

As poetry it's amazing, because even if you read it, it's "Born in the USA, born in the USA, born in the USA," then the story underneath all that chorus. So the workers are lost, lost in this reverberating sound machine of patriotism.

The latest incarnation of the far right is the Tea Party. But the movement is funded by the Koch Brothers, oil barons with their own agenda. The Machiavellian tactics seem to have changed. Have Nixon's dirty tricks evolved into stealth funding?

They're on steroids now. Nixon first figures this out and says we can't harm the institutions of labor because they'll bite us, so we're going to leave those. But in the meantime we're going to chip away.

Then Reagan comes along and one of his first acts is chop the unions, get rid of PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization). That's a green light to corporations to declare war. You erase that economic identity and what's left? Cultural politics.

You're right; a lot of this is Astroturf rather than grass roots. There are often institutions behind this stuff. But I do think the paradigm in which they're operating is an incarnation of what came out of the 1970's.

Why do working people vote against their best interests?

The Democrats tepidly represent working people's economic interests. Republicans aggressively represent their cultural interests. I don't think anybody aggressively represents labor's interests.

I agree with Rick Pearlstein when he says Democrats need a 16-year plan. It's not tomorrow, it's not next year. Think of Goldwater in 1964 and how Republicans got to Reagan in 1980. And you've got to be able to fail. It's all short-term calculus right now.

The other problem is somebody's really doing a really good job seeding conflict and division.

And because Obama is the fulfillment of the 1960's dream he becomes an easy target.

Yes, the whole multicultural embodiment that he is. Early on you saw the Roosevelt-Obama comparisons: Time Magazine had him in the open-air limousine with the cigarette holder. [Paul] Krugman called him Franklin Delano Obama. But in terms of economic problems, failed initiatives, and the disappointment of liberals, he might be looking a little more Carter-esque.

Today's issues of outsourcing and the implications of a global economy were not on the radar in the 1970's. What are the challenges for labor in the future?

If you look at the trajectory of organized labor, it's been downward since this one massive upheaval in the 1930's and 1940's. It peaked around 1955, went down slowly, and since the 1970's it's fallen off precipitously. Now we're in a situation where public-sector unions are the strongest, private-sector unions are weak, and the writing on the wall is not good because you can't support a unionized public sector on a non-union worker's wages.

I fear that we're at the end of our rope as an empire. And empires in decline are scary things socially, culturally, and politically. Whether we'll have the imagination to reinvent ourselves and rise to this challenge instead of rest on our bigotries as our laurels remains to be seen, but there's no reason we could not. As Thomas Friedman has suggested, there's a green economy to be built here. There's a vibrant possibility for us to be technological leaders.

America's got one thing on its side: we invented rock ‘n' roll. What I mean by that is there's a creativity that comes out of some of the cultural tensions in this country, and rock ‘n' roll is a product of that racial and class tension. If that energy and creativity could surface, what makes America great is that kind of thing rather than the rah, rah.

Cowie on pop culture:

"There are pieces of popular culture that are popular because they tap into something deep in the psyche of the country, and ‘Saturday Night Fever' was one of them."

"The idea that you start out in a small working-class community and one person is the chosen one, one person's going to get out and the future belongs to that person. All of these other people aren't going to get out: they're buried in the past. They're in Brooklyn and we're never going to hear from them. Tony's in Manhattan. It's like Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road": 'it's a town full of losers, I'm pulling out of here to win.'"

Cowie on the attacks on Obama:

Some of the far right have painted Obama as a Kenyan, Muslim socialist.

"The terms of debate are incredible," Cowie says. "I can almost not stand it. We have all of these problems and issues and we're talking about that? But that's where Republicans have been much more sophisticated than Democrats."

"The Democrats have selected to play on the Republican terrain. Reagan was such a shock that everyone in the Democratic Leadership Council said ‘we've got to shift to the right. Nobody wants liberalism anymore.' But if you're going to lose, you might as well lose with your own ideas and your own plans rather than losing with the other guy's plans. You might as well go out swinging."