Half Changed World

Today’s book is The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan, by Samuel Freedman.  I picked it up after reading a recommendation for it on a blog (sorry, don’t remember who) as a useful attempt to explain the rightward shift in American politics.

The book focuses on three immigrant families — one Irish-American, one Italian-American and one Polish-American — and their shifts over three generations, from loyal Democrats in the 1930s to Republican party activists in the 1980s and 1990s.  (The families were picked by working backwards from the most recent three.)  The book is impressively researched and the stories are interesting.  Some aspects of the story were very familiar to me, but others were totally unknown — machine politics in 1930s Baltimore, blue collar environmentalism in the late 1960s.  I enjoyed the book, although sometimes felt it got bogged down in more detail than necessary.

Freedman’s argument is that the first generation were loyal Democrats due to a combination of party machines, unions, ethnic loyality (think Al Smith) and gratitude for the jobs programs that helped them survive the Great Depression.  By the second generation, the son-in-law of one of the families had made the leap to management at Montgomery Ward, and moved to solidly Republican suburbs, and he adjusted his politics accordingly.  (Freedman notes that the wife in this family remained a liberal Democrat.) 

Another family turned conservative in the face of the civil rights movement and the growing welfare state, feeling that both were coming at the expense of white working-class families.  The third, also still blue-collar, remained Democratic, with one member becoming a leader in the new environmental movement.  However, by the third generation, this family had also moved into the Republican column, driven by the cultural conflicts around the Vietnam war and the scorn displayed by anti-war intellectuals for the working class men who were fighting it.

I found the discussion of the third generation the least persuasive, in part because it was so hard to see the three members as representative of the zeitgeist.  They were college Republicans in the  early 70s, when the counterculture had become mainstream.  Freedman argues that they presaged the Reagan revolution of 1980, and the Contract with America, but I’m unconvinced.  They were all New York Republicans, fiscally conservative (and true believers in Reaganomics and the Laffer curve) but socially moderate.  (One of them became a conservative hero for protesting the American Bar Association’s support of abortion rights, but also argued in favor of gay rights.)  It seems bizarre to tell a story about the rise of Republicanism in recent years in which the Christian right is totally missing.

I also found myself wondering "what about the Jews?"  In the early 20th century, Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the US didn’t look that different than the Catholic ethnics that Freedman follows.  (German Jews had been in the US longer and were better off and more assimilated.)  The needle trades were full of both Italians and Jews — members of both groups died in the Triangle Fire — and both groups were key in forming unions.  Why did Jews then take such a different political trajectory, such that they’re still one of the most reliable elements of the Democratic voting bloc?  Freedman’s book doesn’t offer an explanation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Books, US Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.