What's the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was

290 Pages·2012·0.947 MB·English

by  Joan Walsh

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What’s the Matter
with White People?
Why We Long for a Golden
Age That Never Was
Joan Walsh
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Copyright © 2012 by Joan Walsh. All rights reserved
Cover Image: Color photo © Richard Newstead/Getty Images; Black and White photo © George
Marks/Retrofi le/Getty Images
Cover Design: Wendy Mount
Lyrics on page 17: From Fairytale of New York by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer. Copyright © 1987
by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer. Used in the United States by permission of Anderson Literary
Management.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Walsh, Joan, date.
What’s the matter with white people?: why we long for a golden age that never was / by Joan Walsh.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-14106-9 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22544-8 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-23724-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26358-7 (ebk)
1. United States—Politics and government—20th century. 2. Political culture—
United States—History—20th century. 3. Democratic Party (U.S.)—History—20th century.
4. Irish Americans—Politics and government. 5. Walsh, Joan, 1958– I. Title.
E839.5.W34 2012
973.91—dc23
2011053473
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For my father John Patrick Walsh,
who taught me to debate,
with love.
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Part I Fact-Checking a Fractured Irish
Fairy Tale 15
Part II Growing Up in Nixonland 61
Part III The Loneliness of the Reagan-Era
Do-Gooder 117
Part IV Some of My Best Presidents Are Black 177
Part V What’s the Matter with White
People? 235
Acknowledgments 255
Index 261
v
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Preface
A few days after the Occupy Wall Street movement began to stir in
September 2011, I walked the narrow streets of the world’s fi nan-
cial hub in a light rain, looking for a protest still too small to fi nd.
During the next few weeks, OWS would change the national
conversation. The slogan “We are the 99 percent” did what years
of complaint by economists and liberals could not: it focused
attention on staggering income inequality and “the top 1 percent”
who’d enriched themselves phenomenally during the past thirty
years. “I am so scared of this anti–Wall Street effort. I’m fright-
ened to death,” Frank Luntz, the GOP’s master of spin, told a pri-
vate meeting of Republican governors at the end of 2011. “They’re
having an impact on the way Americans think about capitalism.”
Suddenly, cable news shows that had been obsessing over the
defi cit “crisis” and President Obama’s latest poll numbers were
explaining how decades of tax cuts and deregulation unrav-
eled the social contract established in the New Deal. It had been
accepted by every American president for thirty years afterward,
until Richard Nixon brilliantly divided the New Deal coali-
tion, largely around race. In the early days, polls showed that the
Occupy movement’s grievances were broadly shared, even by
the white working class, which Nixon and then Ronald Reagan
had lured to the GOP. Yet how long before the 99 percent would
vii
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viii preface
cleave back into the 51 and the 48 percent? I couldn’t know. For
the moment, though, it was amazing to see such broadly shared
political discontent surfacing at all.
As I headed down the dark canyon of Wall Street itself, I
decided to climb the steps of Federal Hall to get a better view
of blue-helmeted cops behind barricades, waiting for trouble
that never came that day. With the famous statue of George
Washington to keep me company—our fi rst president gave his
fi rst inaugural address on the site—I found myself thinking, and
not in a good way, about another historic gathering on those same
steps, one that offered important lessons for any American politi-
cal movement: the Hard Hat Riot of 1970. The violent but little-
known skirmish marked the ultimate fracture of the Democratic
Party of the twentieth century, a fracture still unhealed in the
twenty-fi rst. Would today’s protesters be mindful of the sad les-
sons of protests past? Probably not, because nobody younger than
sixty remembers the Hard Hat Riot today.
But I do, even though I was just a kid at the time. My father
talked about it for years afterward. An unlikely corporate peace-
nik, my dad wandered from his offi ce near Wall Street at lunch-
time on May 8, 1970, to join a protest denouncing the killing
of four antiwar Kent State University students by the Ohio
National Guard a few days earlier. Just as he got there, the
peaceful gathering was interrupted by fl ag-wielding construc-
tion workers, marching over from the grounds of the World Trade
Center they were building a few blocks away. Chanting “All the way,
U.S.A.” and “Love it or leave it,” they broke up the Kent State pro-
test, charging up the steps of Federal Hall to plant American fl ags on
George Washington. Everyone else was rebelling; now the hard hats
were, too, paradoxically trying to use disorder to restore social order
to a country that had been torn apart by forces nobody entirely
understood. Horrifi ed, my father headed back to work, but as he
left, he thought he saw one of his brothers, a steamfi tter employed
on the World Trade Center site, among the angry workers. A few
used their iconic hard hats to beat up antiwar students, smashing
the remnants of the New Deal coalition at the same time.
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