Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (review)

The “working class” died in the 1970s. As a cultural and political force, Jefferson Cowie argues that the relatively short-lived phenomenon of a unified idea or ideal of the working class came undone in the 1970s from not just external factors but also its own inner struggles. Replete with engaging cultural references, political discussions, and a continual emphasis on the social realities for working Americans, this is an important book for historians of labour, the working class and postwar politics more generally. Stayin’ Alive is a tour de force in realms of American social, political, and cultural history.

Cowie’s two-part approach convincingly demonstrates that the decade was profoundly important for the working class. Part One, roughly stretching from 1968 to 1974, is replete with engagement with the working class by political leaders and cultural producers with the working class as they recognized its potential power and emphasized its significance for better or worse. The Democratic Party struggled for a sense of identity, with big labour dominating during the 1968 primaries after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, but overreaching in 1972 and seeing the afl-cio’s opponent, George McGovern, win. This campaign infighting saw working people split their votes between McGovern and Nixon, weakening the traditional relationship between labour and the Democratic Party. Exemplifying Cowie’s mastery of both cultural and political history, the narrative then shifts towards the contemporaneous Nixon effort to capitalize on working-class confusion by rallying the working class around the Republican Party behind social and cultural issues, as well as patriotism rather than the economic and material policies of the Democratic Party. Nixon reached out to labour leaders and the rank-and-file by rallying the “Silent Majority,” seizing on the famous Hardhat Riots in New York City in the wake of the 1970 Kent State shootings, backing and signing the landmark Occupational Safety and Health Act, as well as inviting George Meany over for a symbolic Labour Day dinner. While the afl-cio broke with him over wage freezes, the policies delivered a large number of votes and helped propel him to a second term. This strategy continued in the cultural sphere. The image of country-music-hating Richard Nixon and his staffers listening to a literally haggard Merle Haggard “bang” through his backlash hit “Okie from Muskogee” epitomizes the rise of working-class cultural concerns over economic, material issues. Binary opposites like Woodstock and Muskogee set up a chapter that demonstrates the condescension held by middle-class cultural producers and audiences towards workers (Easy Rider, Joe, All in the Family), with few exceptions such as Syndey Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. The cultural examples are woven well into Cowie’s overall argument, bringing them alive – and will probably send many readers down to their local video or music store!

While the importance of the working class, both as a political and cultural force, is apparent in the first section, the second part focuses on the despair and destruction of the working class as a unified idea in the late 1970s. The contrast adds to the rhetorical power of Cowie’s argument. Labour was increasingly scapegoated by academics and the media as the source of economic malaise and inflation; as elites looked more towards Friedman than Keynes, the ascendant New Right chipped away at the working class. Equal opportunity legislation and pressures resulted in opportunities for women and minorities at the same time as the economy gasped. “[T]he idealism of affirmative action dwindled to a vicious logic,” (241) Cowie notes, as the labour market then saw a zero-sum battle between those struggling to hold on to increasingly insecure jobs and those trying to enter these jobs. An attempt to garner a “New Deal” with the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which in its initial version sought to genuinely enforce a right to employment at prevailing wages, was ultimately adopted as a watered-down bill without substance due to very tepid support...