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Rating: 
Summary: Disingenuous
Review: At the conclusion of his monograph of why white working-class Baltimoreans abandoned the party of the New Deal, Kenneth Durr comments "We should neither vilify the lawmakers, philosophers, and clergy who helped bring about social change nor the white working people who had the furthest to go in adjusting to it." Fair enough one would think, but this is just a last disingenuous comment on a book that has been consistently evasive. For throughout his book Durr has continually damned liberals as intellectual elitists who ignore the wisdom of the (white) common people. Building on the work of such persons as Jonathan Rieder, Thomas Edsall and Jim Sleeper, Durr argues that problems developed in the fifties over white resistance to integration. Although angry working class whites used a racist vocabulary and were often admittedly racist, Durr argues that they had real concerns over blockbusting that elitist liberals didn't deal with. As the sixties and seventies wore on, working-class whites became increasingly and justifiably annoyed over liberal perfidy over school prayer, crime, the Vietnam War, student unrest and affirmative action. They had moved beyond racism, but elitist liberals were too cowardly to recognize their legitimate concerns. What's wrong with this picture? A comparison with Thomas Sugrue's Bancroft Prize winning "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" reveals no shortage of problems. For a start, although Durr lists nearly two pages of archival sources, his work relies less on what working-class whites said than what they are quoted in major newspapers. Similarly, all of his working-class white subjects tend to sound alike, tend to think alike and tend to sound like Durr. This is in striking contrast to Sugure. Added to this is the fact that Durr often refers to "Baltimoreans" and "blue collar Baltimoreans," when he is clearly referring to whites only. Most striking of all this is a story about racial conflict in which we only really hear one side of the story. Durr admits that there was often discrimination against blacks, but he does not go nearly into the extent or depth that Sugrue did. On questions such as education or housing Durr looks only at the sacrifices working-class whites have to make and pays no real attention to the gross injustices black Baltimoreans had to face. This leads to the whole question of racism. It is all well and good to say that there was more to white protest than racism, but that is not the same as saying that white protest was just, reasonable or in good faith. Durr argues that whites were legitimately concerned about blockbusting and property values. But he concedes that they did not protest realtors or demand reform of the housing market. Instead they protested when black students entered schools or swimming pools or dancehalls. Durr quotes, and apparently agrees with, those Baltimoreans who thought that there was no moral difference between common criminals and people who used civil disobedience against segregated parks. Anti-war protestors break a few windows in Baltimore and Durr's subjects are appalled. Millions of people die in a pointless, unjust war, but their sensitivities don't matter. Of course Durr's story of urban decline does not include such factors as selfish urban machines or gross favoritism for the suburbs, which encouraged crime, poverty and a fiscal crisis that would be difficult for anyone to solve. It also does not include pollution, Republican campaigns against unions or redistribution of income to the very wealthiest. Johnson's Great Society programs and its many "middle-class" beneficiaries get only a grudging mention here. But let us suppose that Durr is right and that support for Wallace and Agnew did not reflect racist malevolence towards blacks. What then was the blue-collar white attitude towards African-Americans who, by the end of Durr's study, make up the majority of Baltimore? We don't know. Two to three centuries of malice just vanishes, and beyond that Durr fears to tread. What alternative did the community organizations offer to blockbusting, aside from trying to prevent blacks from moving? We don't know that either. Durr makes much of the unfairness of working class whites having to bear the brunt of integrating schools which suburban whites could escape from, but they hardly proposed county-wide integration or proposals to improve black schools. He speaks vaguely of some sort of "separate but equal" alliance between working class blacks and whites might have been possible had it not been, once again, elitist liberals, but he doesn't develop the point. Hardly surprising, really, since if whites do not wish blacks to live near them, work with them, sleep with them or go to the same schools, it is not likely that they will unite to the mutual benefit of both. Durr makes much of blue collar "realism" as opposed to the "abstractions" of liberal intellectuals, but he repeats their claims about welfare and dirty black quarters without any real analysis of whether that is true, or why. Durr prides his subjects for their sense of moral seriousness, yet this is a book where the most profound moral questions are evaded or the subject changed or other people blamed. As even Durr admits himself this is a working class political tradition that is often useless or ineffective or quietist when not directed about blacks. And starting with Jew-baiting against the CIO in the forties, Joe McCarthy's infamous doctored photograph against Senator Tydings, or enthusiasm for venial, shabby, dishonest people like George Wallace and Spiro Agnew, it is not a tradition known for its fine judge of character. The only way Durr can encourage our sympathy for this fundamentally demagogic practice is to adapt much of it himself.
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