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.

Two New Radio Interviews

WSKG's book program Off the Page did a wide-ranging hour-long program on Stayin' Alive, complete with some Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, and Bruce Springsteen. It's archved here: Stayin' Alive on Off the Page with Bill Jaker.

Doug Henwood, of Left Business Observer fame, did an interview for his show "Behind the Headlines" for Berkeley's KPFA (and syndication). You can listen to it here or find it as a free podcast on iTunes. Choose the January 15, 2011 show--Stayin' Alive is covered in the second half of the hour.

Some New Reviews

I think one of the most intelligent reviews of Stayin' Alive thus far has been Kim Phillips-Fein's in the Winter 2011 issue of Dissent ("Decisive Decade: Re-evaluating the Seventies"--not online except with library databases). As has become typical, this is a comparative review essay with Stein's Pivotal Decade and Kalman's Right Star Rising (these collective reviews do wear thin). 


It's not just that she says nice things: "the book that gives the best sense of the way that it felt to live through the decade—the confusion, desperation, and anxiety, but also at times the exhilaration—is Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive" or "Cowie’s book captures the contradictory nature of 1970s politics better than almost any other ever written about the period." That's nice. Very nice. But what makes this one stand out is her command of the subject matter, that quality of her prose, and the sharpness of her thinking. Her own excellent book on conservative, anti-New Deal, thought, Invisible Hands, has also made her aware of the dangers of naturalizing liberalism. As she says in the review, there is a risk of "making conservatism appear to be an accidental choice, instead of something deeply rooted in American politics." Couldn't agree more.

Stayin' Alive on Huffington Post and Mother Jones 2010 Best Book Lists

Stayin' Alive is on Huffington Post's list of 2010 Best Books on Social and Political Awareness. Mother Jones' blogger Kevin Drum put it on his top five (technically top two) books. Check it out at HuffPo and Mother Jones.

On Gender and the 1970s Working Class (long post)

The talented Yale historian Jennifer Klein, in an otherwise quite supportive review, took me to task for having an "exclusively male" definition of culture in Stayin' Alive in her recent review for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. She even called my use of masculinity and class a "tautology." Klein's critique--and the many other similar critiques I predict will come--was foreordained. Since Klein and I agree on a lot, I'd like to use her review as a chance for a long and indulgent explanation of what it is that I'm trying to say about how gender and class mixed--or failed to--in the 1970s. 


Klein's point, I think, is that I fall into the trap of talking about white guys as a false

Droppin' g's for the Unemployed

Official unemployment went up, again, getting that much closer to a solid ten percent. And don't even get me started on the unofficial rate and the amount of despair that goes along with it. The AFL-CIO did a moving video piece on people running out of unemployment benefits. Made me wonder when the administration is going to turn its attention away from Goldman Sachs long enough to think about working people. 

Oh, I meant "workin' people." I forgot that we now show our solidarity with wage earners not by putting them to work or distributing the national bounty their way, but by dropping our g's. Watch Obama. Ever since the debates, he has been doing some linguistic slumming, proving his working class cred on terms defined by the populist right: by being on the side of strugglin' and hard workin' people facin' an uncertain future. When he addresses other subjects, however, the g's magically return to his Harvard-trained gerund pronunciation. 

Randy Newman on Jackson Browne (on Everyman)

Jeff Helgeson sent this along when Stayin Alive helped him put some Randy Newman puzzle pieces together: 

After reading Stayin’ Alive, I now know why Jackson Browne matters to Randy Newman. Newman’s song, “Piece of the Pie” was always an enigma. The main point is hard to miss: “Jesus Christ it stinks here high and low,” Newman sings over a carnival of piano and wind instruments, “The rich are getting richer/I should know/While we’re going up/You’re going down.” 

Blogging for Michael Moore about David Frum

When I first saw Roger and Me in 1989, I could barely hold it together. It was as if someone was giving voice to everything I had felt for much of the 1980s. He not only re-invented a film genre, he shattered a growing silence about working people. I've been a fan, a critical one perhaps, ever since. I know he tools with his narratives,  plays with facts, and inserts a lot of needless film tricks, which makes him an example of "left wing irrationality" for some as Kevin Mattson called him in Dissent (and for which I wrote a defense of Moore).

Rust on Rust

The Cleveland Plain Dealer put Stayin' Alive on the cover of its book section, calling it "an engrossing new book" by someone with "an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech." That's nice. The reviewer gets a couple of details about the book wrong, but nails the spirit of the thing right on the head. The introduction quotes Dwight Yoakam ("And after all those years of payin' union dues / It sure didn't seem to count for much when we got our layoff news") and the cover image is of Born in the USA, which together make everything OK. The text is here: 'Stayin' Alive' by Jefferson Cowie charts how it all went wrong for the U.S. working class. 

Never Made it as a Working Class Hero

My ten year old son Aidan is a big Green Day fan. While I'd never confuse Green Day's stadium rock with punk (as the band seems to want us to do), I've grown mildly interested in their sound. When their song "21st Century Breakdown" came out last year, however, I was pretty astounded as it appeared that writer and lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong had gotten his hands on advanced copy of Stayin' Alive. The energy and ideas of the song aren't derived from academia, however, but from Armstrong's autobiography, his politics, John Lennon, and maybe a little Bruce juice. Armstrong, born in '72, was

Higher in Education does not mean Higher in Thought

Perhaps there is an inverse relationship betwen the quality of ideas and how far up the education pyramid one goes. I don't really believe that, but a few recent comments and reviews of Stayin' Alive may suggest as much. 

We begin with an innocent blue-collar blogger who wrote an angry letter to the editor after an interview I did, about which he voiced disdain at Mr. Ivy League Professor claiming to speak about "the working class" (especially by talking about disco).  It's a wonderful expression of animosity toward a group of people, those in the higher ed racket, who have done absolutely nothing for him or his people besides trying to count the number of footnotes that can dance on the head of a pin. Some quality populist rage here. He said he wanted to read a book my dad, who worked hard for a living, would have written--not me. All fair enough. Ironically, I think the tone of his arguments can be explained by what happened in the 70s. Nonetheless, I believe he was a little surprised when I commented on his blog, urging him to give the book a try. You can read more here: Rock and Confusion.

Our Hand in the Next Guy's Pocket

The economic recovery could not be going better. The government reports that real wage and salary income during the first quarter of 2010 shot up by a massive 20 percent. It’s simply a great time to be a worker—if, that is, you’re a financial “worker” in Manhattan.

Most financial institutions pay their bonuses in the first quarter of the year, and those numbers recently became available. The average financial industry employee in Manhattan made $100,000 in the first

The Nation: Perlstein's golden words on the polyester decade

Nearly lost at the end of a massive, witty, high speed tour in The Nation that must include a drive-by look at every book on the seventies written since the dawn of the new era, is Perlstein's take on Stayin' Alive. I'm humbled by it. After screeching through the historical landscape, he manages to pull the sticky tranny of his supercharged Hunter S. Thompson word machine out of overdrive and pull over for a minute to say simply: read the damn thing.

Here are the pull quotes:

"I've struggled so long trying to figure out a way to summarize Cowie's new book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, that I started worrying I was losing my critical mojo. I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature. Some books, however, are not easy to encapsulate. Often that means the author doesn't know what he or she is doing.

Stayin' Alive in the Wall (Pink Floyd-Bee Gees Mash Up)

My friend and colleague Rob Vanderlan sent this video mash up of Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees to me, which I dismissed immediately in a way that I now see rooted in being a smart-ass adolescent in the 1970s. Perhaps the 70s recovery process is longer than I thought. Back then it was easy to make a name for oneself as "smart" by being contemptuous and dismissive. Clearly, though, smart ass is different than

History for the Future--radio show

With the mainstream media beyond repair--choked with money and dammed (and damned) with slobbering hyperbole--hope can be found in the smaller streams of the media wilderness. One hopeful streamlet is Kevin Brown's show on WRCT-Pittsburgh 88.3 called History for the Future. We had a lovely chat for half of an hour on his show. You can list it to it here: History for the Future - Jefferson Cowie on the 1970s and the Working Class.  He's also on iTunes (for free) if you want to get it on the iPod. I really admire Kevin's undertaking here.

great cover story with Rochester's City Paper

I had no expectations when artist and journalist Ron Netsky asked for an interview for the remarkably high quality alternative weekly, the Rochester City Paper. By the time we were finished with the interview, my faith in journalism, rustbelt cities, independent media, and public intellectual life had all been renewed. Ron read--and absorbed--the book quite deeply. I didn't want the interview to end. Moreover, his journalism is clearly a labor of love. He didn't phone it in but motored down to Ithaca from the Flower City for an in-person chat. But when did I start speaking in the present tense about past events? And talking like my children? Ugh.

Check the piece out here: Labor's love lost Rochester City Newspaper.

and all I gotta do is act naturally.....

as Ringo would put it about fools hitting the big time. I think I blew this opportunity on CSPAN a bit. I was interested in getting at some of the writing (which I worked hard on), exploring some of the interiority of working-class psychology, and getting away from the big arguments, so I read more than I should have. I'm usually animated to a fault but ended up subdued. Audience was pretty quiet in response. Oh well.

Here's a link to a tiny, oddly distorted, but playable version of the C-span book talk here. 

CSPAN broadcast this weekend

See CSPAN's page for the BookTV broadcast on Stayin' Alive here.

Times are:

• Saturday, October 9th at 4pm (ET)
• Sunday, October 10th at 2:45am (ET)
• Sunday, October 10th at 6pm (ET)
• Monday, October 11th at 7am (ET)

Ghost of Full Employment (Am Prospect Op-Ed)

The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of the 1970s was a down-right strange piece of legislation. I've been intrigued with its improbability, on several levels, since I first heard about it. In the book I use it to talk about the hollowing out of liberalism and the brittle remnants of New Dealism. In this piece for the American Prospect, however, I use it to show how far we've drifted into doctrinaire waters in our economic thinking: The Ghost of Full Employment | The American Prospect.

Try Before You Buy

Alternet asked for an excerpt from the book, and we provided this section on disco and Saturday Night Fever: How America's Working Class Died on the Disco Dance Floor.  Despite the dorky title someone chose, I do like that particular section. The title of the book was not selected randomly--both the song and the movie contain the argument of the book.

Then, I opened up Alternet on a random day not long after, and there was yet another section of the book,