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Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jar096

1945-2314

Jordan Alexander Stein,

American Political and Social Dynamics

Jefferson Cowie has written a critical and at times compelling history of the American working class in the 1970s. The decade began with a vibrant labor movement and ended with “injured pride and diminished material hopes” (p. 364). Although Cowie does not situate his book within a historiographical tradition, Stayin’ Alive is a good example of the post-1980 cultural turn in the writing of U.S. history. After Ronald Reagan's presidential victory and the onset of neoliberalism, historians attempted to find explanations in the past. Many reexamined the working-class and union movements, discovering imperfections—racism, sexism, bureaucracy—that explained Reagan's victory. Cowie writes in that tradition. He argues that the working class “died of many external assaults upon it, yes, but mostly of its own internal weaknesses” (p. 18). Cowie divides the long decade into two periods, 1968–1974 (an era of hope) and 1974–1982 (years of despair). Still, during the first period the fate of the insurgencies he celebrates prefigures the bad ending. Cowie never states this directly because he believes that “the history of class in America reveals the profundity in the nothingness of the decade, a wholesale transformation without a narrative” (ibid.). Without narrative there can be no agency, but there is agency lurking on the pages. Cowie begins with a series of dissenters in the mine workers, steelworkers, and autoworkers unions, adds Hispanic farm workers and garment workers, black trade unionists, female unionists, and finally New Left union caucuses. His choices reveal his critique. The (white male) American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) could not address issues of race, gender, and democracy. Cowie's sources yield his conclusions. He has relied on the papers of insurgents rather than the unions they opposed. We get the prosecutor's indictment without a defense lawyer.