Joan Walsh - Whats the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was

Contents

Copyright 2012 by Joan Walsh. All rights reserved

Cover Image: Color photo Richard Newstead/Getty Images; Black and White photo George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images

Cover Design: Wendy Mount

Lyrics on page 17: From Fairytale of New York by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer. Copyright 1987 by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer. Used in the United States by permission of Anderson Literary Management.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions .

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. For more information about Wiley products, visit us at www.wiley.com .

Library of congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Walsh, Joan, date.

Whats the matter with white people?: why we long for a golden age that never was / by Joan Walsh.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-14106-9 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22544-8 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-23724-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26358-7 (ebk)

1. United StatesPolitics and government20th century. 2. Political cultureUnited StatesHistory20th century. 3. Democratic Party (U.S.)History20th century. 4. Irish AmericansPolitics and government. 5. Walsh, Joan, 1958 I. Title.

E839.5.W34 2012

973.91dc23

2011053473

For my father John Patrick Walsh,

who taught me to debate,

with love.

Preface

A few days after the Occupy Wall Street movement began to stir in September 2011, I walked the narrow streets of the worlds financial hub in a light rain, looking for a protest still too small to find.

During the next few weeks, OWS would change the national conversation. The slogan We are the 99 percent did what years of complaint by economists and liberals could not: it focused attention on staggering income inequality and the top 1 percent whod enriched themselves phenomenally during the past thirty years. I am so scared of this antiWall Street effort. Im frightened to death, Frank Luntz, the GOPs master of spin, told a private meeting of Republican governors at the end of 2011. Theyre having an impact on the way Americans think about capitalism.

Suddenly, cable news shows that had been obsessing over the deficit crisis and President Obamas latest poll numbers were explaining how decades of tax cuts and deregulation unraveled the social contract established in the New Deal. It had been accepted by every American president for thirty years afterward, until Richard Nixon brilliantly divided the New Deal coalition, largely around race. In the early days, polls showed that the Occupy movements grievances were broadly shared, even by the white working class, which Nixon and then Ronald Reagan had lured to the GOP. Yet how long before the 99 percent would cleave back into the 51 and the 48 percent? I couldnt know. For the moment, though, it was amazing to see such broadly shared political discontent surfacing at all.

As I headed down the dark canyon of Wall Street itself, I decided to climb the steps of Federal Hall to get a better view of blue-helmeted cops behind barricades, waiting for trouble that never came that day. With the famous statue of George Washington to keep me companyour first president gave his first inaugural address on the siteI found myself thinking, and not in a good way, about another historic gathering on those same steps, one that offered important lessons for any American political movement: the Hard Hat Riot of 1970. The violent but little-known skirmish marked the ultimate fracture of the Democratic Party of the twentieth century, a fracture still unhealed in the twenty-first. Would todays protesters be mindful of the sad lessons of protests past? Probably not, because nobody younger than sixty remembers the Hard Hat Riot today.

But I do, even though I was just a kid at the time. My father talked about it for years afterward. An unlikely corporate peacenik, my dad wandered from his office near Wall Street at lunch-time on May 8, 1970, to join a protest denouncing the killing of four antiwar Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard a few days earlier. Just as he got there, the peaceful gathering was interrupted by flag-wielding construction workers, marching over from the grounds of the World Trade Center they were building a few blocks away. Chanting All the way, U.S.A. and Love it or leave it, they broke up the Kent State protest, charging up the steps of Federal Hall to plant American flags on George Washington. Everyone else was rebelling; now the hard hats were, too, paradoxically trying to use disorder to restore social order to a country that had been torn apart by forces nobody entirely understood. Horrified, my father headed back to work, but as he left, he thought he saw one of his brothers, a steamfitter employed on the World Trade Center site, among the angry workers. A few used their iconic hard hats to beat up antiwar students, smashing the remnants of the New Deal coalition at the same time.

Later that month, the head of the rioters union coalition, Building Trades Council chief Peter Brennan, presented President Richard Nixon with his own hard hat; in 1972, Brennan bolted the Democratic Party to endorse Nixons reelection. He became Nixons ineffectual labor secretary in 1973, the same year the World Trade Center opened for business. Labor began a sharp decline that year, as did liberalism. You couldnt blame it all on the Hard Hat Riotthe Democratic Party had begun to unravel years before that eventbut the clash further divided the party and the country, and my family, too. Mine wasnt the only working-class Irish Catholic family split that way. A year earlier, New York magazine writer Pete Hamill had written a long, anguished feature, The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class, about the growing alienation and paranoia of a group he claimed as my people, even as he grappled with their misplaced rage and racism. Yet the violence of the Hard Hat Riot horrified Hamill, and he attacked it in the New York Post , writing with a kind of anger that is often borne of shame. I recognized it.