Plain Dealer, November 9, 2010, Tuesday

Plain Dealer

November 9, 2010, Tuesday

Plain Dealer

'Stayin' Alive' by Jefferson Cowie charts how it all went wrong for the U.S. working class

By Bill Eichenberger

When Youngstown Sheet & Tube closed in 1977, the employees simply walked out behind the mill and threw their work gear into the Mahoning River, hard hats, boots and all.

"And all those years of payin' union dues / didn't count for much," in the words of country singer Dwight Yoakam, "when we got our layoff news."

Cornell University historian Jefferson Cowie revisits such moments in his engrossing new book, "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class." He traces the rise and slow descent from 1935, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the labor guarantees of the Wagner Act, through 1982.

Mostly, Cowie focuses his political, social and cultural history on the Me Decade, with particular attention to Dewey Burton, a more authentic and original version of 2008's Joe the Plumber.

Burton worked at the Wixom Ford plant outside of Detroit and customized race cars in his spare time. He was a dyed-in-the-wool union man whose father voted for and adored Roosevelt. By the early 1970s, though, the son had become furious with the status quo.

Pete Hamill wrote a vivid New York Magazine profile of Burton in 1969, headlined "The Revolt of the White Lower-Middle Class." The Michigan workingman would weigh in on national politics several times during the decade, at the end of which he became a "Reagan Democrat."

Burton is joined in Cowie's book by an assemblage of working folk, blue-collar guys -- at the time, in the unions, they were mostly guys and mostly white -- for whom the historian demonstrates great empathy.

Cowie also has an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech. When Jimmy Carter invoked the Taft-Hartley Act in an attempt to break a 1977 strike by the United Mine Workers of America, one miner in West Virginia, writes Cowie, declared, "Taft can mine it, Hartley can haul it, and Carter can shove it."

Because "Stayin' Alive" tells the story of the rust belt, its rise and fall, it is a part of the story of Cleveland and Detroit and Youngstown. When Cowie takes off his historian's hat, he turns to cultural markers to illustrate and promote his argument.

He proves more than a dilettante in cultural matters, not only discussing the obvious: say, Bruce Springsteen or the movie "Norma Rae," but also the importance of director Paul Schrader's "Blue Collar" or the Akron post-punk band Devo.

"For Devo," Cowie explains, "the working class people of Akron were much like the evolutionary disasters in the [sci-fi horror film] 'Island of the Lost Souls.' 'Those mutants were [bleeped] with,' the band explained. 'They looked like people from Akron.' "

He dates the decline of unionism to the 1969 murder of labor leader Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter in western Pennsylvania. W.A. "Tony" Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers, was later convicted of ordering the hit on his political rival.

By then, the unions had become largely undemocratic, overly hierarchical, even despotic, Cowie writes. They had begun to fracture from internal fissures and to succumb to external pressure.

Those focuses included the successful lobbying of the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972; the outsourcing of jobs to the developing world; the influx of minorities and women into the labor pool; and, unsympathetic presidents, which included, perhaps surprisingly, Jimmy Carter.

Labor pinned its hopes for relevancy and rejuvenation on the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. But Carter's support of the bill was tepid, and by the time it was signed into law in 1978, it was a laughable shadow of its former self.

By the end of that year, Cowie writes, "one could hear the death rattle of American working-class political power." And as this fall amply illustrates, the working class has never recovered that power.

Bill Eichenberger is a critic in Columbus, Ohio who blogs at thebookserf.blogspot.com