Passing Antitheses of the Seventies: Levon Helm (1940-2012) and Chuck Colson (1931-2012)

I found it an odd but telling juxtaposition when two figures from the seventies, representing completely divergent dimensions of the American experience, died within days of each other. One was the son of an Arkansas cotton farmer who felt the emergence of rock and roll and whose voice carried the weight and complexity of history itself; the other an anxious Ivy League educated hatchet man, a political and religious fundamentalist, who felt he could control politics like his personal marionette. Levon Helm, drummer and singer for the The Band, and Chuck Colson, self described "toughest of the Nixon tough guys"(if a rather a dough-faced one), both point to the messy possibilities for US working class history in the early seventies: one narrow and fundamentalist, the other wide open and adventurous. 


Levon Helm and The Band's vision was capacious and open, flowing with the currents of history, feeling the soil of a complicated nation, playing rhythms of black and white, and expressing vocals that ached of tragedy, loss, and hope. Greil Marcus, for one, heard in The Band's music "a sure sense that the country was richer than we had guessed; that it had possibilities we were only beginning to perceive. In the unique blend of instruments and good rhythms, in the shared and yet completely individual vocals, in the half-lost phrases and buried lyrics, there was an ambiguity that opened up the world with real force."

In The Band's "King Harvest,"as I wrote in Stayin' Alive, you can hear "the confusion of the present and the search for roots in the mystics of working-class history." Although not a a song that features Levon's vocals prominently, listen to his voice come in, burdened with the entire American topography. Hardly a blindly "pro-union" song, this carries the feel and longing for another time and place. As Robbie Roberston put it,  this song is about, unions, yes, but really about "the quiet revolution when people ent from being separated to something making them feel that they were all part of something in their livelihood." "King Harvest" is musicially complex, almost sprialing apart, but it is Levon Helm's drums and vocal interventions that hold it together. 

In searching for the closing of that open cultural space that Marcus heard in The Band, we only need to turn to Chuck Colson's simultaneous efforts to narrow, manipulate, and mine the resentments and pettiness ever-present in American political culture. Colson's boss, Richard Nixon, loved him as much as he could love anyone, because, as the President described him, he was "positive, persuasive, smart, and aggressively partisan" with an "instinct for the jugular." And so he fueled the great Nixonian project of capitalizing on who hated whom, dividing the tenuous Democratic coalition with his expanding bag of dirty tricks, and reigniting the darkest dimensions of American populism before soldiering off to jail for his crimes. Once in the joint after Watergate, Colson found another fundamentalism--this one religious--that helped him place religious dogma over the painful complexities of being American. 

I guess it's not hard today to see which set of early seventies principles prevail upon our own time.

Nixon assigned Colson the task of tearing up workers' economic identity and drawing them into the Nixon coalition based on their cultural resentments rather than economic needs. His "New Majority" coalition, they believed, would replace the Roosevelt coalition. And it did--eight years before Reagan took office. Most every domestic piece of politics of Nixon's administration was calculated toward building this coalition--and the white working class was its foundation. Listen HERE to a phone call between Nixon and Colson as they discuss reactions to the appointment of backlash building trades leader Pete Brennan as Secretary of Labor as part of their efforts to build the "New Majority." 

Thoughts on Springsteen's Wrecking Ball

I was stuck in the Detroit airport having missed my connection, and I finally had time to give Wrecking Ball, the new Springsteen album, a listen (long after everyone gave up asking me what I thought about it). Here are my cranky and poorly-edited thoughts from an uncomfortable seat in the C Terminal of DTW.

One of the things that made the great Bruce records great was Springsteen’s ability to evoke and inhabit an extraordinary array of characters. In the classic albums, who can forget the guy waiting for Mary (and destiny itself) in “Thunder Road” or those restless souls driving toward adulthood in Darkness on the Edge of Town?  I’m still haunted by the young men contemplating a life of claustrophobic resignation in “Jackson Cage” or the guy who gets Mary

Elizabeth Warren at UC Berkeley

I found this lecture to contain the whole other--more private--side of what I was trying to explore in Stayin' Alive. While I sought to trace the collapse of the working-class idea in civic life, she gets into the new demands on the family wage economy in subtle and detailed ways. Few changes were more important in the seventies. If I could write a second volume to this book, it would cover the issues Warren explores here. Absolutely worth a view.

Global Angles: Noam Chomsky gives Stayin' Alive a Shout Out

In my first book, Capital Moves, I intentionally sought to place US history in a global framework. When I began Stayin' Alive, in contrast, I began to think about the enduring significance of national identity and politics despite (and because) of globalization. A couple of recent happenings that have projected the issues I'm trying to raise in the book beyond the national borders of the U.S. have therefore been gratifying

In a recent lecture on "Arab Spring, American Winter," Noam Chomsky gave the book a nice shout out, comparing the flowering of democracy in the Middle East with the eclipse of democracy in the United States. The whole lecture is worthwhile, but his mention of the book is around 17:50.

Funny story on Noam and Stayin' Alive. During my book tour, I was staying at a cool bed and breakfast in Buffalo called the Elmwood Village Inn. When I checked in, they asked me when I was going to check out the following day because Noam Chomsky needed my room next. Hmm, says I, Noam Chomsky, eh? So, that night at the book signing after my lecture, I bought a copy of my own book from the cool independent book dealer staffing the auditorium (I hadn't brought any besides my

New Republic: Thoughts on Public Sector Collective Bargaining Vote in Ohio

In this piece for The New Republic on the vote on Senate Bill 5 in Ohio, I suggest that public sector workers will be politically vulnerable until there's a more powerful private sector working class, which, of course, is complicated by the immensity of the struggles there. The situation is not good and really complicated, but I hope it offers some clarity:
Beyond Ohio: Why Public Sector Unions Need To Show Solidarity For Private Sector Workers | The New Republic

Happy Labor Day

Haven't posted for awhile, as the reviews and news on the book have slowed down to a bit of a trickle. Today, though, in a fabulous and mournful Labor Day op-ed called "Last Labor Day?," E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post gave the book a wonderful shout out.  I also had another chat with the ever-sharp and well-informed Ian Masters at Pacifica's KPFK, which you can listen to here (I'm on part three of the show for about 20 minutes).  Most of the popular press reviews on the book are long out, but the scholarly reviews, moving at the glacial speed of the academy, have yet to appear. That is, except for the predictably testy review from Judith Stein in the Journal of American History last spring. I've declined many chances to review her Pivotal Decade, since I didn't want to get into a smack down on an old debate over structure and culture. Suffice to say, that I believe it to be cultural questions that prevented a more coherent response to the structural crisis of the 1970s. For me the question is never: will business struggle to get the upper hand? It's: what prevents or fosters a more coherent response?

Writing History in an Age of Inequality (Parkman Prize speech)

The acceptance speech I gave for the Francis Parkman Prize at the annual meeting of the Society of American Historians, which took place at New York City's Century Club on May 16, has been published by the good folks over at HNN.

The speech touches variously on writing, working class history, inequality, democracy, and, of course, the seventies, among other themes. As I concluded, unless something changes in how the world works, this may be one of the last times a janitor's kid receives such a prestigious award. Check it out here: Writing History in an Age of Inequality | History News Network.

Francis Parkman Prize goes to Stayin' Alive

The 2011 Francis Parkman Prize for the best book in American history will be awarded to Stayin' Alive by the Society of American Historians at the Society's annual meeting in May. The prize supports literary distinction in historical writing. Here is more: The Shape of American Culture. 

Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011

'nuff said:

Two Critiques from the Left

Mark Dudzic--labor activist, Labor Party engine, and heir to the mantle of the great Tony Mazzocchi--does not write that much stuff, but what he does produce is always worth reading. His review of Stayin' Alive is one of the most scathing I've read, but I pretty much can't argue with too much of it. He's serious,

Stayin' Alive a Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize in Nonfiction

The Lukas Prize Project announced its awards today, and Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class is a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. The prizes are administered jointly by the Columbia University Graduate 
School of Journalism in New York and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

     Since the prize's namesake wrote the phenomenal Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, which remains a central book for any understanding of the seventies, and his humane style was so influential on my own, this prize is truly an honor. It tends to go to journalists and writers, not academic types, and covers all of nonfiction writing so that's pretty thrilling, too.
     The prize committee said of Stayin' Alive:

Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class will long stand as the finest and most sophisticated portrait of politics and culture in the American 1970s, and also as a model for how to talk about both political and cultural transformations without shortchanging either. Ranging from Brooklyn to Lordstown, Ohio and from “Saturday Night Fever” to “Born to Run,” Cowie traces how “a republic of anxiety overtook a republic of security” in the United States. Combining empathy with passion, Cowie makes understanding his goal and condescension his enemy. Americans living in 2011 will understand themselves far better because of Cowie’s brilliant excavation of the 1970s.

The winner of the prize was 
Eliza Griswold for Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The other finalists were: 
Paul Greenberg for Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (Penguin) 
Siddartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner).


The 2011 Lukas Book Award jurors were:
Katherine Bouton: former New Yorker Writer who has had a subsequent distinguished career at the New York Times, including as an editor at the Book Review, and as Deputy Editor of the Times Magazine, and editor of the Arts Section. 
E.J. Dionne:  Washington Post columnist; Brookings Institution fellow; professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown U., author of several books including the bestselling Why Americans Hate Politics. 
David Finkel: Pulitzer prize winning Washington Post reporter.  Author of The Good Soldiers, which won the 2010 J.Anthony Lukas Book Award.
Prize Ceremonies will be on the evening of May 3 at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. 

Dancing on the Grave of the Working Class

Recent dispatches from the one-sided class war suggest that the rich have taken to not just walking over the working class but dancing on its grave.

TARP, for instance, has turned out to be little more than socialism for the rich, with the needs of everyday folks nowhere to be found (even though they were in the original plan). With the interests of homeowners and others ignored, TARP has become "little more than a

UALE Best Book Award goes to Stayin' Alive

The United Association for Labor Education, an organization of labor educators from unions, community-based organizations, universities, colleges, and worker centers, gave Stayin' Alive its prize for best book of  2011 at their recent conference in New Orleans. These are the folks who are most directly tuned into the concerns of working people, so this is particularly meaningful honor.

OAH's Merle Curti Prize goes to Stayin' Alive

This press release on the Curti Prize is noteworthy, because it may be the most sophisticated summary of the book I've ever read--little hyperbole and lots of comprehension. Hats off to the prize committee for what may be one of the rarest of things these days: a close read!

Gender and Seventies Working Class--Revisited

The wonderful journal Democracy published a modified version of my response to Jennifer Klein on questions of gender and class in the seventies. It's polished up and ready for prime time. Check it out here, along with all of the other great stuff in this issue: Jefferson Cowie for Democracy Journal: Red, White, and Blue Collar.

Thoughts on Wisconsin with Joan Walsh at Salon

I've been watching the Wisconsin scene with some excitement--along with concerns that people were reading too much into it. I've deflected media requests because I didn't want to be a downer about the movement's long term impact while so many hopeful short-term victories were at stake.

When Joan Walsh of Salon.com contacted me wanting comment about those exact concerns, however, I decided to weigh in a bit.  As last time we spoke, it turned into a good conversation:  What comes after Wisconsin?

Diet Soap

Had a long, wild, discussion with host Doug Lain on his podcast show Diet Soap. Good time was had trying to keep up with this theory head and challenging the nature of each other's politics. Check it out: Diet Soap #89: Stayin Alive 

The Unmaking and the Making

“As a work of history, [Stayin’ Alive] might be the most groundbreaking and original national history of a working class since E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class....for its humanity, its memory, its reminder that political agency can change outcomes, and most of all for reminding us that 'those steel mills and their surrounding communities may be gone, but the workers are still out there — part of the new Wal-Mart working class' this book is required reading for anyone looking to revive working class hopes and alternatives to America’s disastrous love story with capitalism.”


Steven Colatrella, “Is a Dream a Lie if it Doesn’t Come True  (or is it something worse)?,” New Politics Winter 2011. 

Lovely Letter of a Dying Age

I often get nice letters from readers, but this one really moved me. It's posted with permission:

Mr. Cowie,

My father worked at the Ford Motor Company Casting Plant in Brookpark OH.  My mother was a stay-at-home mom until she and Dad built their own home in 1950-51 in an out-lying suburb south of Cleveland.  She went to work at the local grocery chain to make ends meet and to finish

We Can't Go Home Again--Rethinking the New Deal and Its Legacy

I've been working on a short book with Nick Salvatore called The Long Exception: An Interpretation of the New Deal in American History for Princeton University Press that grew out of some lectures and an article we wrote for the journal International Labor and Working Class History (and a small firestorm of responses). For a scholarly project, it's already whipped up a surprising amount of interest in places like The Nation and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. People immediately, almost viscerally, feel like they have to figure out where they stand on our argument. There is, I admit, a lot at stake.

I boiled our thinking down to its very essence--just a couple thousand words--for New Labor Forum's "On the Contrary" section. You can read this readily-digestible version of our argument here: Why We Can't Go Home Again: Why the New Deal Won't be Renewed.