Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo Ian Toller-Clark Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 328 pp. $37.50 (cloth). Donald Trump’s electoral college victory in the 2016 presidential election achieved in part through wins in the so-called Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shocked seasoned political observers and everyday Americans. However, the political culture of all three states has been shifting for well over two decades. Journalist Dan Kaufman’s The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018) argues that Trump’s Wisconsin victory “merely heralded the final stage of Wisconsin’s dramatic transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive, democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy’s unraveling” (4). Meanwhile, political scientist [End Page 183] Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016) contends that a “rural consciousness” among Wisconsinites forged a politics of resentment that powered both Walker and Trump to electoral success. She defines “rural consciousness” as “a perspective that is at its core rooted in place and class” and imbued with “a sense that rural folks don’t get their fair share” (12). Cramer’s work underscores an important part of contemporary politics that influences both Rust Belt and national politics: the polarization between rural and urban communities. Still, the focus on rural or even White middle-class suburban politics has obscured the crucial role of urban politics and the “urban crisis” in conservatism’s resurgence across the Midwest and the nation. Historian Timothy Lombardo’s deeply researched and insightful Blue-Collar Conservatism offers a powerful intervention to our understanding of contemporary political culture and the popularity of Trumpism in the city of Philadelphia. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the political transformation of White working-and middle-class Philadelphians from blue-collar Whites to blue-collar conservatives between the 1950s and 1980s. White working-and middle-class Philadelphians of the 1950s had been foundational members of the city’s postwar reform coalition. Along with African American voters, White working-and middle-class voters powered the rise of Democratic mayors Joseph S. Clark and Richardson Dilworth, who promised to bring the prosperity of the postwar United States to Philadelphia through urban and industrial renewal projects. These projects, however, could not reverse the structural changes to Philadelphia’s economy. Moreover, they reified the racial and class inequalities of that segregated city. These inequalities produced tensions, especially between the predominantly White police force and the city’s burgeoning African American population. The result was a three-day urban rebellion during the summer of 1964. Lombardo, however, is careful to show that Whites did not engage in a simple backlash against the failures of postwar liberalism. From the mid-to-late 1960s, White working-and middle-class Philadelphians, who included police officers and their families, crafted a colorblind argument that “differentiated the right to entitlements by making the clear distinction between hard work and handouts” (132). In their telling, opposition to public housing, school integration, and even “law and order” liberalism was not about keeping African Americans and other minorities out of their neighborhoods but rather about preserving what they had earned for themselves. [End Page 184] This argument obscured the ways that “Blue-collar whites benefited from and cheered liberal plans like urban renewal and federal spending for construction” (131). Meanwhile, Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo effectively used the argument to win the mayoralty in 1971. As mayor, Rizzo became the champion of Philadelphia’s blue-collar Whites. He made their causes his own, including state funding for parochial schooling and preventing the construction of public housing in Whitman Park. In these ways, Rizzo reflected blue-collar Whites’ selective rejection of postwar liberalism. That rejection was based on a colorblind, racially obfuscating ideology—one divisive to Philadelphians and Americans more broadly—that pitted people who saw themselves as hardworking against those who accepted so-called handouts. As Lombardo provocatively concludes, “Blue-collar conservatives did not view the liberal governance of...