Creating the New Right Ethnic in 1970s America
Creating the New Right Ethnic in 1970s America

Author: Richard Moss

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-03-15

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1611479363

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This work analyzes the "New Ethnicity" of the 1970s as a way of understanding America's political turn to the right in that decade. An upsurge of vocal ethnic consciousness among second-, third-, and fourth-generation Southern and Eastern Europeans, the New Ethnicity simultaneously challenged and emulated earlier identity movements such as Black Power. The movement was more complex than the historical memory of racist, reactionary white ethnic leaders suggests. The movement began with a significant grassroots effort to gain more social welfare assistance for "near poor" white ethnic neighborhoods and ease tensions between the working-class African Americans and whites who lived in close proximity to one another in urban neighborhoods. At the same time, a more militant strain of white ethnicity was created by urban leaders who sought conflict with minorities and liberals. The reassertion of ethnicity necessarily involved the invention of myths, symbols, and traditions, and this process actually served to retard the progressive strain of New Ethnicity and strengthen the position of reactionary leaders and New Right politicians who hoped to encourage racial discord and dismantle social welfare programs. Public intellectuals created a mythical white ethnic who shunned welfare, valued the family, and provided an antidote to liberal elitism and neighborhood breakdown. Corporations and publishers embraced this invented ethnic identity and codified it through consumption. Finally, politicians appropriated the rhetoric of the New Ethnicity while ignoring its demands. The image of hard-working, self-sufficient ethnics who took care of their own neighborhood problems became powerful currency in their effort to create racial division and dismantle New Deal and Great Society protections.

Rightward Bound
Rightward Bound

Author: Bruce J. Schulman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2008-03-15

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780674027572

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in which the conservative movement became the motive force driving politics for the ensuing three decades. Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved the way for Reagan’s America. They reveal strains at the heart of the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes, and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs, and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies. A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It helps us understand how, despite conservatism’s rise, persistent tensions remain today between its political power and the achievements of twentieth-century liberalism.

Making Hispanics
Making Hispanics

Author: G. Cristina Mora

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-03-07

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022603397X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation. Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.

Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign
Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign

Author: Amber Roessner

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2020-05-20

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0807173614

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With the rise of Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor and a relative newcomer to national politics, the 1976 presidential election proved a transformative moment in U.S. history, heralding a change in terms of how candidates run for public office and how the news media cover their campaigns. Amber Roessner’s Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign chronicles a change in the negotiation of political image-craft and the role it played in Carter’s meteoric rise to the presidency. She contends that Carter’s underdog victory signaled a transition from an older form of party politics focused on issues and platforms to a newer brand of personality politics driven by the manufacture of a political image. Roessner offers a new perspective on the production and consumption of media images of the peanut farmer from Plains who became the thirty-ninth president of the United States. Carter’s miraculous win transpired in part because of carefully cultivated publicity and advertising strategies that informed his official political persona as it evolved throughout the Democratic primary and general-election campaigns. To understand how media relations helped shape the first post-Watergate presidential election, Roessner examines the practices and working conditions of the community of political reporters, public relations agents, and advertising specialists associated with the Carter bid. She draws on materials from campaign files and strategic memoranda; radio and TV advertisements; news and entertainment broadcasts; newspaper and magazine coverage; and recent interviews with Carter, prominent members of his campaign staff, and over a dozen journalists who reported on the 1976 election and his presidency. With its focus on the inner workings of the bicentennial election, Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign offers an incisive view of the transition from the yearlong to the permanent campaign, from New Deal progressivism to New Right conservatism, from issues to soundbites, and from objective news analysis to partisan commentary.

Redirecting Ethnic Singularity
Redirecting Ethnic Singularity

Author: Yiorgos Anagnostou

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0823299732

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner: Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies Promotes the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions. Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation contributes to U.S. ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and Greek American studies in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The work moves beyond the “single group” approach—an approach that privileges the study of ethnic singularity––to explore instead two ethnic groups in relation to each other in the broader context of the United States. The chapters bring into focus transcultural interfaces and inquire comparatively about similarities and differences in cultural representations associated with these two groups. This co-edited volume contributes to the fields of transcultural and comparative studies. The book is multi-disciplinary. It features scholarship from the perspectives of architecture, ethnomusicology, education, history, cultural and literary studies, and film studies, as well as whiteness studies. It examines the production of ethnicity in the context of American political culture as well as that of popular culture, including visual representations (documentary, film, TV series) and “low brow” crime fiction. It includes analysis of literature. It involves comparative work on religious architecture, transoceanic circulation of racialized categories, translocal interconnections in the formation of pan-Mediterranean identities, and the making of the immigrant past in documentaries from Italian and Greek filmmakers. This volume is the first of its kind in initiating a multidisciplinary transcultural and comparative study across European Americans.

New Hollywood and Countercultural Whiteness
New Hollywood and Countercultural Whiteness

Author: Till Kadritzke

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-11-18

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 3111436667

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the late 1960s, the white counterculture enters the screens with Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider; in 1976, a backlash seems to have taken place with white male protagonists such as Travis Bickle, Howard Beale, and Rocky Balboa being surrounded by non-white and female others. But these films cannot be neatly identified as left-wing or right-wing, liberal or conservative; in their politics of affect, they rather express important affinities. This study proposes the New Hollywood as an entry point into a cultural history of the postwar era sensitive to the intersections of affect, race, and gender. Following a narrative that spreads from the immediate postwar years to the 1970s, the study examines how New Hollywood films were part of a discursive and affective reconfiguration of white masculinity: the emergence of a subject position of countercultural whiteness and its affective style of expressivity. Examining affective affinities between films of the era complicates the narrative of polarization that shapes commentary on the history of American politics, emphasizing instead the shared racialized and gendered politics of the white counterculture and those reactionary forces that allegedly lashed back against it.

Roots Too
Roots Too

Author: Matthew Frye Jacobson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2006-02-17

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 9780674018983

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, whites sought renewed status in the romance of Old World travails and New World fortunes. Ellis Island replaced Plymouth Rock as the touchstone of American nationalism. The entire culture embraced the myth of the indomitable white ethnics—who they were and where they had come from—in literature, film, theater, art, music, and scholarship. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration. In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.

Blue-Collar Conservatism
Blue-Collar Conservatism

Author: Timothy J. Lombardo

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-05-07

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0812224833

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Blue-Collar Conservatism examines the blue-collar, white supporters of Frank Rizzo—Philadelphia's police commissioner turned mayor—and shows how the intersection of law enforcement and urban politics created one of the least understood but most consequential political developments in recent American history.

The Forgotten Borough
The Forgotten Borough

Author: Kenneth M. Gold

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0231557515

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What sets Staten Island apart from the rest of New York City? The island’s identity has in part been defined in opposition to the city, its physical and cultural differences, and the perception of neglect by city government. It has long been whiter, wealthier, less populated, and more politically conservative. And despite many attempts over the years, Staten Island is not connected by the subway to any of the other four boroughs. Kenneth M. Gold argues that the lack of a subway connection has deeply shaped Staten Island’s history and identity. He chronicles decades of recurrent efforts to build a rail link, using this history to explore the borough’s fraught relationship with New York City as a whole. The Forgotten Borough ranges from when Staten Island first contemplated joining the city in the 1890s to the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, highlighting pivotal moments when the construction of a subway appeared possible. The economics and engineering of tunnel construction, the difficulty of uniting Staten Islanders around a single solution, competition from the other boroughs, and resistance from powerful corporations and public authorities all undermined a rapid transit connection. Gold demonstrates that the failure to establish a rail link during this period caused Staten Island to diverge culturally, demographically, and politically from the other four boroughs. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Forgotten Borough shows how transportation infrastructure and politics shed new light on urban history.

Starving the Beast
Starving the Beast

Author: Monica Prasad

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2018-12-05

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1610448766

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s, Republicans have consistently championed tax cuts for individuals and businesses, regardless of whether the economy is booming or in recession or whether the federal budget is in surplus or deficit. In Starving the Beast, sociologist Monica Prasad uncovers the origins of the GOP’s relentless focus on tax cuts and shows how this is a uniquely American phenomenon. Drawing on never-before seen archival documents, Prasad traces the history of the 1981 tax cut—the famous “supply side” tax cut, which became the cornerstone for the next several decades of Republican domestic economic policy. She demonstrates that the main impetus behind this tax cut was not business group pressure, racial animus, or a belief that tax cuts would pay for themselves. Rather, the tax cut emerged because in America--unlike in the rest of the advanced industrial world—progressive policies are not embedded within a larger political economy that is favorable to business. Since the end of World War II, many European nations have combined strong social protections with policies to stimulate economic growth such as lower taxes on capital and less regulation on businesses than in the United State. Meanwhile, the United States emerged from World War II with high taxes on capital and some of the strongest regulations on business in the advanced industrial world. This adversarial political economy could not survive the economic crisis of the 1970s. Starving the Beast suggests that taking inspiration from the European model of progressive policies embedded in market-promoting political economy could serve to build an American economy that works better for all.