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.

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.