Blue-Collar Conservatism
Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
In Philadelphia, on the first day of the protests against police brutality and the murder of George Floyd, some activists focused their anger on the ten foot tall, 2,000 pound bronze statue of Frank Rizzo that stood across from City Hall. For liberals and people on the left, Rizzo, the city’s police commissioner from 1968-1971 and then a two term mayor, personified the racist and homophobic misrule of law. He died in 1991, while campaigning for another term as mayor, and eight years later, the statue was erected.
Today’s liberal mayor, Jim Kenney, had pledged to remove the statue sometime in 2021, but as the demonstrations grew, he moved the deadline up to “a month or so.” Then, in the early morning after day three of the protests, city workers took it down. One final photo, however, published in the city’s Inquirer, pictured eight white police officers, four on each side of the statue, posing seemingly in tribute to Rizzo. It’s a reminder of the polarization that Rizzo evokes, in his time, and today.
A well-researched and timely book by Philadelphia native and historian, Timothy J. Lombardo, brings us back to Rizzo’s time and the rise of Blue-Collar Conservatism. Not a biography per se, Lombardo details how Rizzo gave voice to a beleaguered white working class that saw any gains by poor African Americans as their loss, at a time when federal urban funds and blue-collar jobs were in decline. It’s not a simple story, and Lombardo gives it the depth and analysis that it needs, arguing that it’s not just one city’s story, but a national one. Published in the second year of the current administration, the book also provides insight into Trump’s base, its perspectives and needs.
What are the origins of blue-collar conservatism? What led the Northern white working-class, once the bulwark of the New Deal Democrats, to turn to the right, to support mayors like Sam Yorty in Los Angeles, Richard Daley in Chicago, Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia, and to become, in many cases, Reagan Democrats? Lombardo rejects the “once-dominant backlash narrative” that explains the shift as a simple reaction to growing liberal cultural forces, manifested in the civil rights, women’s and gay rights movements. That narrative “obscures the perception of economic hardship that played a related and equally significant role in blue-collar Americans’ reevaluation of their political allegiances.” White blue-collar Philadelphians saw their standard of living and job prospects in decline as the sixties waned, and they worried that liberal programs in housing, education, and employment would leave them behind, as African-Americans and other minorities moved ahead.
In housing, working-class, blue-collar resistance to neighborhood integration, which turned violent at times, was abetted by white-collar realtors who knew whom to sell to. Their efforts kept the city’s growing post-World War II black population, confined to an already crowded North Philadelphia, from moving into the more spacious Northeast, where both housing and jobs were available. This reality is borne out by the astounding fact that of the more than 150,000 new homes built in Philadelphia in the 1950s, only 1,022 went to African-Americans!
Fear of the other, out and out racism, was certainly part of the mix, as white ethnics refused to bend. But the role of economic anxiety for a population that saw a future with a declining blue-collar, middle class, job market, cannot be denied. Lombardo argues that blue-collar conservatives differ from the religious right, whose political motivation emanates from their moral posture, and they differ from the libertarian right who advocate small government and cutbacks in social programs. Philadelphia’s white blue-collar ethnics (who proudly identify as Italian and Catholic) chose law-and-order conservatism, and while rejecting much of welfare liberalism, they earnestly and openly demanded state and federal programs for their own needs. They championed an ethic of hard work, toughness, and tradition Some of those traditions, however, such as marching in the annual New Year’s Day Mummer’s Parade, were exclusionary –both racist and sexist– and here, for example, tradition conflicted with a growing national liberal political tolerance.
The first part of Lombardo’s book (“From Liberalism to Law and Order”) covers the reign of two reform Democrats in Philadelphia in the 1950s and ‘60s, mayors Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth, and their successor, James H. Tate, who served from 1962 to 1972. Through several case studies, the author shows how the reformers were stymied by neighborhood resistance and in one key struggle, by blue-collar trade unions that fought the Philadelphia Plan, an early affirmative action hiring plan. The more conservative Tate sides with the blue-collar neighborhoods and it’s during his rule that Rizzo, an 11th grade dropout and the son of a Philly cop, moves up through the ranks of the city’s police department. Respected and liked by his fellow officers, Rizzo earned a reputation as a tough guy, and enjoyed saying that he liked to crack the heads of criminals, or in Italian, “scappo il capo.” Too often, though, the “criminals” that Rizzo went after were black activists, members of SNCC or the Black Panther Party, and even black teenagers protesting school board policy
In 1965, three years into Tate’s mayoralty, Rizzo made his reputation city-wide in a standoff with NAACP president Cecil B. Moore, who led daily protests against the segregationist policies of Girard College. While Rizzo nearly always framed his actions in “law and order” language, he “made his loyalties clear” by “repeatedly club[bing] young African American protesters”. Two years later, now acting police commissioner, Rizzo led his forces to break up a crowd of 3,500 students at school board headquarters, protesting the board’s failure to hire more black teachers and design a curriculum that included African American history. Rizzo always claimed he wasn’t a racist, but in this case he slipped and famously ordered his men to grab two protesters on top of a police cruiser, shouting, “Get their black asses!”
By now, as Lombardo moves into Part II (“The Rise of Blue Collar Conservatism”), Rizzo rides his wave of blue-collar popularity to run for mayor, winning in 1971, with the support of white ethnics and much of blue-collar labor, but not the Negro Trade Union Leadership Council and the Jewish Labor Committee. The city remained polarized, but for his supporters, Rizzo affirmed their blue-collar, hard identity, as the trove of adoring letters that he received demonstrates. He ran for reelection in 1975 and won, but furious that he had been challenged in the primary, he vowed that what he would do to his enemies would “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”
He wanted a third term, but lost a vote on a city charter change that would have allowed him to run again. Politics had shifted in the city and his opponents registered 170,000 new voters, including 90,000 African Americans. His receipt of 52 percent of the white vote wasn’t enough, especially with the new voters, and with 96 percent of black Philadelphians voting against him. This led a popular Inquirer columnist to write that “race is more an issue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania than in Philadelphia, Mississippi.”
Ironically, while Rizzo liked to personify himself as blue-collar Philadelphia, the city lost 140,000 jobs during his mayoralty, many blue-collar, and its population dropped by 260,000, which meant much of his base had adopted suburbia. Capitalist deindustrialization had made its mark, and the new areas of employment focused on health care and pharmaceuticals. Blue-collar culture still had energy, but seemed most pronounced in films like “Rocky” and the city’s sports teams like the beloved Eagles and the Flyers, aka the “Broad Street Bullies.” The former mayor tried three more times to regain his office, but by now he had lost much of his organized labor base and faced an energized and united black community. In 1983, he lost in the Democratic primary to the city’s first African American mayor, Wilson Goode; in 1987, now as a Republican, he fell to Goode once again; and, with the Republican nomination in 1991 and facing Ed Rendell, Rizzo succumbed to a severe heart attack during the campaign.
Lombardo moves to national politics in his conclusion, noting that blue-collar conservatives turned up as Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and later backed Bill Clinton in his move to the right, as he promoted the carceral state and welfare “reform.” The author then fast forwards to Donald Trump, not at all as authentic as Rizzo, but carrying on the blue-collar populist and law and order image. Trump capitalized on racial resentment as well as economic anxiety to win in 2016. For blue-collar Philadelphians, it was that anxiety, the fear of a declining standard of living, that helped shape their behavior in the decades that Lombardo writes about.
Although the author skips over the Obama presidency, we know that many blue-collar conservatives who voted for Trump had not once but twice voted for our first African-American president. For most blue-collar Americans, Obama didn’t deliver a better economy, but rather continued the Clintonian neoliberal policies. When Hillary Clinton proved unable, or unwilling, to speak to blue-collar anxiety in 2016, Donald Trump -inauthentic or not- stepped into the breach. If the Democratic candidate doesn’t offer real solutions to blue-collar economic woes, 2020 could be a repeat, one very important lesson we should take from Blue-Collar Conservatism.
Reviewed by Maynard Seider, author of The Gritty Berkshires: A People’s History from the Hoosac Tunnel to MASS MoCA and Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (North Adams)