Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

by Jefferson Cowie

Overview

An epic account of how middle-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595585325
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	08/17/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	488
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jefferson Cowie is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. He is the author of Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (The New Press), which received the Philip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History for 2000, and a co-editor of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Editorial Reviews

The New Deal liberalism that led to prosperity for American workers crashed in the 1970s, certainly one of the bleakest decades for blue-collar workers. So claims Cowie (history, Cornell Univ.; Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-One Year Quest for Cheap Labor) in this edifying survey of the politics, labor movements, and cultural landscape of the times. By mid-decade, the recession of 1974 unleashed stagflation (a failing economy combined with inflation), which many economists and politicians blamed on higher union salaries. At the end of the decade, union membership declined sharply and gains made by minorities and women were largely moot owing to job losses from foreign competition. Cowie includes excellent investigations of how motion pictures, television, and popular movies portrayed the decline of the working class. Such real and fictional working-class heroes as Bruce Springsteen, The Band, Archie Bunker, and John Travolta as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever defined the Seventies' most tragic legacy: the time when the "republic of anxiety overtook a republic of security." VERDICT Along with Francis Wheen's irreverent Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia, this book will be sure to engross modern American historians and readers who enjoy serious contemporary history.—Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

Library Journal