One of the most significant and flawlessly executed works of history/political analysis I've read in a long time. Dividing his attention roughly equally between economic, political and cultural history, Cowie tells the tragic tale of the demise of the American working class from the late 1960s to th ...more
I had often felt that the Democratic party received a 100 year reprieve from the loss of its Southern wing in the 1970s. Now I have an idea why. The thesis of this book, in my opinion is that the labor movement lost steam for three reasons: 1 they failed to include minorities and women among their r ...more
To be brutally honest, the first two chapters of this book put me to sleep. I despised the beginning, it wasn't even that bad, I believe that the flow of it and myself were not jiving. And just when was ready to write it off, this book completely hooked me. I've met junkies that were less addicted ...more
Unemployment is high, gas prices are kinda high, a reactionary political movement is afoot, and there’s a Democrat in the White House, so by the conventions of lazy historical analogy it must be the late 1970s again with Barack Obama reprising the role of Jimmy “Malaise Forever” Carter. Except these ...more
3.5 stars rounded down. Cowie writes a fairly dense book about the working class during the time period from 1968-1982. There is a major focus on the relationship between the workers and their views of the Unions that are protecting their rights.
There are a few things that I really liked in this bo ...more
Reading like the operational outcome of Perlstein's _Nixonland_, this study follows the breakup of the old New Deal Coalition through economic pressure, internal problems of the unions, identity politics and generational fractures and the deliberate leveraging of those issues to push working-class w ...more
"It is August 1974, the month of Nixon's resignation. An old-fashioned labor-liberal refuses to cross a picket line at his workplace, single-handedly shutting down production for a month. "It's a matter of principle for me," he says. "I simply refuse to work with anybody who takes money to do a unio ...more
Extremely relevant, especially today, the book took some effort to find, but is worth it.
It is important to understand the history of how the economic climate we live in came to pass. Whenever the current state of the economy or culture is brought up, it is not long before the "industrialized, labo ...more
Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class provides an incisive look at how the cultural ferment of the '60s and '70s drove the white working class to the Right. Traditionally supporters of the Democratic Party, America's blue-collar whites were increasingly al ...more
This was a pretty good book. He makes a strong argument that the 1970s were a period of transition between the New Deal and the current one – New Gilded Age? – with a lot of emphasis on culture, presidential politics (and organized labor's role), and white blue-collar workers (union and not). The ea ...more
"Workers lost their union cards in the seventies just in time to pick up their credit cards for the eighties." "By shifting to the right, [the Democratic Party] gave ideological ground to the opposition, especially by conceding that high wages, full employment, and deficit spending caused inflation. ...more
Brilliant book. Starts slow, with a lot of inside-baseball detail about the coming apart of the labor movement in this country in the 1970s, against the shoals of post-60s cultural fractures on the Left (in a hutshell: white working class hatred for hippies and blacks), macroeconomic crisis (stagfla ...more
I'm torn with this book. I want to like it far more than I do...but it gets far too bogged down in its historical labour analysis for its own good. It makes for one hell of a fantastic thesis, but an occasionally trying read. I'm fascinated by the decade in which I was born, and several books have a ...more