That Seventies Struggle: Jefferson Cowie's Stayin Alive

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1970s have come to be seen as a pivotal time in the transformation of American society. In Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, the 1970s were “the last days of the working class” because the social compact that had brought unprecedented affluence to American workers since World War II was demolished to clear a path for more cutthroat forms of neo-liberal capitalism. Cowie also presents a superb class analysis of the music, movies, and popular culture of the 1970s, and thus Stayin’ Alive stands among the most innovative books to have developed from the intersection of cultural studies and labor history, exemplified by the scholarship of Stanley Aronowitz, Lizabeth Cohen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and George Lipsitz.

The early 1970s was a time of great promise for the American labor movement, particularly as younger workers had been influenced by the counterculture and the movements for peace and racial justice. Cowie discusses a series of strikes and upsurges of the rank and file led by younger, more anti-authoritarian workers, like the Lordstown autoworkers strike of 1972 that was called an “industrial Woodstock.” The movements for racial and sexual equality presented an especially significant opportunity to connect identity politics with social class, and Cowie identifies several moments when these possibilities could be glimpsed in the insurgencies of farm workers, textile workers, and office workers.

However, these political alliances based on the interrelations of class, race, and gender would not endure. As chronicled in the second chapter, their failure was encapsulated in the McGovern campaign of 1972, which never received the full support of organized labor, with many union leaders taking umbrage at the delegation’s racial and sexual diversity and countercultural spirit. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon had been courting white working class voters by emphasizing cultural values in place of economic interests, employing the “new southern strategy” to attract George Wallace supporters along with those besieged by anti-war protests and social deviance. Nixon further exploited working class populism by representing himself in opposition to the stereotypical image of Northeastern liberal elites, as the champion of hard-working taxpayers who are victimized by a coalition of parasitic underclasses and privileged know-it-alls.   

            A key strength of Stayin’ Alive is Cowie’s discussion of how popular music and Hollywood films did not simply reflect the social changes of the 1970s but became objects of struggle in their own right. Country music, for example, moved to the center of political struggle as forces from both the Left and the Right sought to be aligned with the authenticity conferred by the white working class. Countercultural musicians including Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead had begun recording country-themed albums in the late 1960s, and the hybrid of “country rock” was a key component of the record industry’s expansion during the 1970s.  Just as some New Left radicals had been trying to infiltrate factories and proletarian neighborhoods, musicians like Jackson Browne and The Band romanticized the historical struggles of working class America in song.

            Nonetheless, these progressive, countercultural sentiments did not stick as signifiers of working class authenticity, which would be more effectively pulled in the rightward direction of nationalism and patriarchy. Cowie begins his fourth chapter with the story of Merle Haggard’s performance at the White House for Pat Nixon’s birthday in 1973, a somewhat awkward cultural collision between the administration and an ex-felon turned country star, but one where Haggard performed his reactionary anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee” to the great enthusiasm of the Republican elite. In turn, if some progressives did symbolically align themselves with white working class culture, many others on the Left have accepted these reactionary images of intolerant hardhats and ignorant Joe Six-packs, whose ideological development is traced by Cowie from the anti-hippie killing spree in the 1970 film Joe to the definitive symbol of working class bigotry in the character of Archie Bunker.    

            Scholars of public policy often remark that the Nixon Administration now looks surprisingly liberal, as new legislation and federal agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were created for the protection of workers, consumers, and the environment. In the later years of the 1970s, however, labor would be knocked into a defensive position with the beginning of a protracted campaign to undo the economic democracy established during the New Deal and after World War II. This reversal of fortunes in the class struggle is covered in the fifth and sixth chapters in great, if sometimes tedious, detail.

            Cowie is at his best in the seventh chapter, which returns to the analysis of music and popular culture. Here we find Bruce Springsteen singing about racing in the rustbelt’s de-industrializing streets at the same time that emerging punk bands like the Ramones and Devo were personifying delinquency and social decline from the blue-collar environs of Queens and Akron. Meanwhile, on screen we see a disgruntled cabdriver scowling at the signs of social decay surrounding him in Times Square, an Italian-American boxer who miraculously arises from the mean streets of Philadelphia to stand toe-to-toe with the cocky African-American champion, and a disco dancer who flees the confines of his ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge for the glamorous Saturday nights of Manhattan. In the last of these, whose signature soundtrack gives Cowie’s book its title, the lead character’s escape was a prophetic microcosm of the direction that American society would take as factories closed, finance capitalism grew, and working-class urban neighborhoods were remade into post-industrial playgrounds of commercial leisure.