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2. Revolt of the Joe Six-Packs: Charles Stenvig and the White Ethnic Revolt
- The University Press of Kentucky
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2 revolt of the Joe six-Packs Charles Stenvig and the White Ethnic Revolt in 1970, Milwaukee’s white ethnics ended Donald Peterson’s electoral career . ironically, ten years prior, these very same Beertown southsiders proved crucial in another hotly contested campaign with national implications. in 1960, JFK and hubert humphrey squared off in the Wisconsin primary. Unlike 1970, when Peterson ignored working-class Poles, Kennedy and humphrey vied for these voters.1 With little policy differences separating the two, Catholic Democrats opted for their coreligionist. As in 1968, humphrey also came up short in 1960. Proving their significance, white ethnics made the difference in all three elections, 1960, 1968, and 1970. new Politics liberals, nevertheless, simply discarded them. For decades, the north’s white working class served as the new Deal coalition’s linchpin. Dominating organized labor and nonunion blue-collar jobs, white ethnics brought their unions’ heft and manpower to the Democratic Party. hailing from eastern and southern europe, by 1970 upward of forty million white ethnic Americans lived in fifty-eight scattered industrial cities across the northeast and the industrial Midwest.2 Alternately called blue-collar or the overly generic working-class, by the late 1960s white ethnics suffered from an identity crisis.3 spawned from economic threats, burgeoning crime, and an indifferent Democratic Party, this group’s existential predicament helped produce a conservative political realignment. one leading italian-American activist captured his community’s popular sentiment toward the major political parties : “nobody has done anything for ethnics since social security.”4 When liberals offered an ally, hubert humphrey, unions rallied to the party of FDr. in the months prior to the 1968 election, unions registered 4.6 million voters, delivered 115 million pamphlets, founded 638 phone banks, and dispatched 72,000 canvassers and 94,000 election Day volunteers.5 Charles stenvig (courtesy Minnesota historical society) [18.118.0.240] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:39 GMT) Revolt of the Joe Six-Packs 39 though organized labor possessed proven clout, liberals deemed it redundant . As far as new Politics activists were concerned, a new coalition of the educated middle class, intellectuals, minorities, youth activists, and the elderly promised to free Democrats from a reactionary working class. the economist and political gadfly John Kenneth galbraith termed the group a “sociological artifact” of the past. Claiming that “intellectual” laborers already outnumbered the working class by nearly eight million, galbraith predicted that middle-class professionals would soon dominate the American workforce and electorate. Meanwhile, according to him: “trade unions [would] retreat, more or less permanently, into the shadows.”6 it was not just galbraith proffering these opinions. in one of the bestselling books of 1970, Future Shock, Alvin toffler declared that Americans had managed “to throw off the yoke of manual labor” and reduce the working class to a relic of the past.7 Certain intellectuals not only convinced themselves that white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar laborers; they routinely pronounced the entire white working class racist. Following this meme to its logical extreme, many liberals equated working-class issues, such as law and order, with pure and simple bigotry. the new Politics activist Adam Walinsky put it bluntly: “there are now only two identifiable ethnic groups—blacks and those who hate them.”8 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, new Politics liberals made it clear which category they placed white ethnics in. The Law-and-Order Issue By the 1960s, African American males had become the face of violent urban crime.9 in this way, racism and bigotry surely constituted a significant part of the gumbo that was the law-and-order issue. Fear of crime and lawlessness , however, scarcely emanated from bigotry alone. After all, between 1960 and 1980, violent crime jumped by 367 percent.10 More specifically, from 1965 to 1970 crimes against property increased by 147 percent, violent felonies jumped by 126 percent, while the numbers of murder, rape, and assault doubled.11 Adding to the problem of spiraling crime rates, the white working class could not afford to flee crime-ridden neighborhoods for the suburbs. thus, not only did crime rise precipitously, but working-class neighborhoods were also far more likely to be at the wave’s epicenter than were middle-class suburbs. While new Politics activists pursued their issues, they ignored work- 40 Losing the Center ing-class concerns about escalating lawlessness. indeed, even establishment liberals remained remarkably obtuse. Until the later 1960s, Democrats, generally , rejected crime statistics as false. even when...