Stayin’ Alive Quotes

“From a policy perspective, the Democratic Party faced a dilemma that it could not solve: finding ways to maintain support within the white blue-collar base that came of age during the New Deal and World War II era, while at the same time servicing the pressing demands for racial and gender equity arising from the sixties. Both had to be achieved in the midst of two massive oil shocks, record inflation and unemployment, and a business community retooling to assert greater control over the political process. Placing affirmative action onto a world of declining occupational opportunity risked a zero-sum game: a post-scarcity politics without post-scarcity conditions. Despite the many forms of solidarity evident in the discontent in the factories, mines, and mills, without a shared economic vision to hold things together, issues like busing forced black and white residents to square off in what columnist Jimmy Breslin called “a Battle Royal” between “two groups of people who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.”10”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“Lost to listeners on the Right and the Left was the fact that “Born in the U.S.A.” was consciously crafted as a conflicted, but ultimately indivisible, whole. Its internal conflicts gave musical form to contradictions that grew from fissures to deep chasms in the heart of working-class life during the ’70s and their aftermath. The song was first written and recorded with a single acoustic guitar during the recordings for Nebraska (1982)—a critically acclaimed collection of some of Springsteen’s starkest and most haunting explorations of blue-collar despair, faith, and betrayal during the economic trauma of the early Reagan era.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“The core theme that spans much of Springsteen’s working-class studies is the disconnection—real and feared—of working people from the things that ground them: job, family, home, and community. “I live now only with strangers,” he sings in “Streets of Fire,” “I talk to only strangers / I walk with angels that have no place.” As Springsteen explained, “I think what happened during the seventies was that, first of all, the hustle became legitimized”—and he did not mean the disco dance. By the time of his follow up The River (1980), when his character receives his “union card and a wedding coat” for his nineteenth birthday, that union card was a symbol of a failure to get out, a source of entrapment. What was a source of material liberation in the 1930s, membership in a trade union, had become a symbol of those not chosen, those left behind.49”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“The full employment advocates’ optimism, even if genuine, could not possibly have been more misplaced, as the context of the Carter administration’s other actions in the fall of 1978 quickly revealed. Almost simultaneous to the passing of the full employment bill, Carter announced a three-part anti-inflation strategy that included restrictive fiscal and monetary policy, voluntary wage-price guidelines, and regulatory reform—almost all of which cut against the spirit of the original Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. Congress, for the first time since it went Democratic in 1932, passed a tax cut not to redistribute wealth but to give relief to the upper middle class, suggesting a very new mood among Democrats more broadly. With inflation climbing into the double digits in 1979 (topping out at 13.5 percent in his last year in office), Carter had, according to Herbert Stein, “assumed the look of a conservative in economics.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“Many could see that placing affirmative action onto a world of declining opportunity was little more than a zero-sum game—and most likely a fast track to further racial resentment. The problem, as Bayard Rustin put it in 1974, was overcoming the divisiveness of “Affirmative Action in an Age of Scarcity.” As Andrew Levison made the connection between the future of racial progress and the limits on economic opportunity in the New Yorker in 1974, “until progressives deal seriously with the idea of full employment and government guaranteed jobs, black representation in skilled jobs will remain a question of throwing a white carpenter out of work in order to employ a black, or making a Pole with seniority continue to tend the coke ovens while a black moves up to a better job.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“Much of the cultural divide over abortion grafts readily, but not perfectly, onto tensions over class. Of a large survey of pro-life and pro-choice activists, 94 percent of pro-choice women worked outside of the home, and half of them enjoyed incomes that placed them in the top 10 percent of all working women in the nation. Many were in the most affluent percentiles in the country. In contrast, 63 percent of pro-life advocates did not work outside of the home (and those that did were unmarried). The personal income of pro-life women activists was very low, if there was any at all. The story was similar in terms of education and occupation. Where pro-choice women tended to be well-educated professionals, pro-life activists tended to be housewives or in traditional female occupations. For working-class families, “ family values” was not a political slogan but a belief in sacrifice, fate, belonging, character, and the sanctity of parenthood.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“Among the dismissive was writer Tom Wolfe, who divined the zeitgeist of the era when he dubbed the seventies “The Me Decade” in his famous 1976 essay. Wolfe appropriately defamed the era as a time in which individual emancipation trumped the idea of the civic good, in which decadence looked liked politics, and glitter could be mistaken for substance. If the political revolution could not be realized in post-sixties America, Wolfe argued, the only thing left was the “alchemical dream” of revolutionizing the self. As if to confirm Wolfe’s analysis, the seventies would often be symbolized by a spinning mirrored disco ball reflecting a mosaic of “hundreds of little me’s”—swirling fragments of individualism that made a mockery of the antediluvian dream of solidarity.9”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“There was no greater indictment of working-class patriarchy and violence than Martin Scorcese’s feminist outing, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Alice’s husband is little more than another mean-spirited, violent, seventies redneck son of a bitch who cannot be pleased. Their bed is cold, and even when he comforts her from the pain she feels, he merely grabs her breast. Alice discusses with her friend whether she could live without a man—establishing the theme of the film—just before she learns that he has had an accident in his delivery truck and died. With Alice suddenly liberated from the terror of her life, viewers get to see not just Alice but other working-class women she meets struggle to get out from under blue-collar patriarchy. But every male relationship she stumbles across is tainted with violence. “Don’t ever tell me what to do—I’ll bust your jaw!” one potential (adulterous) mate tells her when she tries to escape him. When she finally finds a job at Mel’s café after striking out on the road to start a singing career, she finds working-class pain everywhere.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“For All in the Family and the many shows it spawned, the generation gap merged with class distinctions as the new generation seemed less held back by class than by culture. Mature white working-class men in popular culture, therefore, would be hard-pressed to have values in any enviable sense. This came to the fore in August 1974, when actor Carroll O’Connor refused to show up on the set while replacement workers did the jobs of striking electrical equipment operators at CBS. His nearly month-long show of solidarity single-handedly halted production of All in the Family, earning him the wrath of the producers, television critics, and fans alike. Meantime, his otherwise politically progressive co-stars saw little wrong with going to work in the midst of a strike and treated O’Connor as a bit of an oddity. “I don’t think he has any support anywhere,” remarked Jean Stapleton who played Edith; “It was very noble-sounding, but not, uh, wise.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“Although McGovern initially appeared as a likely candidate to pull off RFK’s political balancing act, the legacy of his campaign grew to become a damning metaphor for any form of Democratic boldness. Despite his commitment to real material concerns of working people, a long-standing intellectual interest in labor issues, and an exceptional pro-labor voting record, McGovern’s candidacy created an enduring, if distorted, political template for what the white, male American working class was not: radical, effete, movement-based, anti-war, and, perhaps most profoundly, Democratic.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“As one staffer remarked, “McGovern’s preoccupation with the youth cult led him to accept unquestioningly Fred Dutton’s opinion that the new 18-year-old vote would control this election and that we would win simply by registering millions of new voters.... He so jealously guarded his position on the left that he never noticed no one else was there—except his staff.” Campaign strategist Frank Mankiewicz later admitted that the basic mistake of the campaign was that “We were always subject to this pressure from the cause people. We reacted to every threat from women, or militants, or college groups.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

“Of all the tactics brought to bear upon the growers in the sixties, the most important was the United Farm Workers’ (UFW’s) ever-resourceful grape boycott. Here, ironically, the weakness of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLR A), which had left agricultural workers out of its purview as a sop to southern political interests, proved beneficial. The Taft-Hartley amendments had eliminated the secondary boycott, which otherwise would have allowed unions to boycott firms who did business with an employer that was being struck—that is, boycott the secondary handler of a good. For the farmworkers, not being covered by the act meant that they could take their struggle from the fields to the secondary sight of the supermarkets that sold grapes. Working outside of the New Deal order, in essence, proved to be the workers’ best hope and most successful strategy.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class