Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Protesters demonstrate in support of President Donald Trump, April 15, 2019, near the former Bethlehem Steel Plant, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
At a pace that can only be described as glacial, the Democratic Party seems finally to have realized that the decline in union membership has cost it the allegiance of much of the nation’s working class (the white working class in particular), and with it, any number of elections. Given that unionized voters invariably vote more Democratic than their non-union counterparts, this should have been clear many decades ago. (I made this argument in a cover story I wrote for The Nation 38 years ago.) Ignoring the handwriting on the wall, Democrats failed to amend labor law to bolster workers’ right to unionize every time since the 1970s that they controlled the White House, the House, and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate (that is, in 1979, 1994, and 2009).
Losing such blue-wall states as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to Donald Trump in 2016, plus the current erosion of working-class support for Joe Biden that shows up in every poll, has at least sounded a fire bell in the night to Democrats and people who love or merely put up with them. Even critics who fault the Democrats for alienating much of working-class America through their embrace of what they term radical social policies (like John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their newish book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?) also lay much, perhaps most, of the blame on the anti-labor and pro–Wall Street economic policies (free trade and anti-Keynesianism in particular) of the Carter, Clinton, and Obama administrations.
A more granular look at the pre-Biden Democrats’ abandonment of working-class America is presented in a less-heralded book also published last year: Rust Belt Union Blues, by longtime Harvard sociologist and political analyst Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman, whose senior thesis Skocpol was overseeing. A Pittsburgh native largely confined to home during the COVID pandemic, Newman began an ethnographic survey of Western Pennsylvania, looking at the decades-long decline in the numbers and power of the United Steelworkers of America and the concomitant turning away of its members and former members from the Democratic Party. Together, the authors have turned Newman’s research into a book that illuminates the decline of an economic, social, and political world that once bolstered progressive and Democratic prospects.
Numbers first: In 1960, the 20 counties that comprise Western Pennsylvania were home to 143 USW locals. A half-century later, the number of locals had fallen to 16. Nine of those counties had voted for John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960; in 2020, only two of those counties—Allegheny and Erie, home to the only two large cities (Pittsburgh in Allegheny) in the 20, and the only two with diversified economies—voted for Biden over Donald Trump.
Central and Western Pennsylvania are terrains of hills and hollows, and many of those hollows on the west side of the state once had steel mills, which centered a host of now largely aging and abandoned towns: Johnstown, McKeesport, Aliquippa, and dozens more. Those 143 locals were the very hubs of those towns, along with a host of ethnic lodges reflecting the steelworkers’ ancestries. (The 1978 Michael Cimino film The Deer Hunter, which won that year’s Oscar for Best Picture, provides an impressionistic portrait of one such community, much as the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1941, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, presents a kindred one of a Welsh mining community disintegrating under the pressure of early global capitalism.)
Inside those hollows and those towns, union membership and camaraderie were at the center of community and individual steelworkers’ lives. The ultimate demonstration of that centrality and camaraderie came during the great 1959 steel strike, which saw 500,000 USW members, at least half of them in Western Pennsylvania, stay out on strike for 116 days without a single member crossing the picket line. (That strike is wonderfully documented in another insufficiently heralded book, Jack Metzgar’s Striking Steel.) In all those little steel towns, churches and other civic organizations helped the workers navigate those very difficult 16 and a half weeks without paychecks, while members who had enough to get by, sometimes just enough, helped fellow members and their families who didn’t.
Long before the Democrats embraced allegedly “radical” social policies, they had effectively told millions of working-class Americans that their occupations were expendable.
Those local unions had their own hunting, bowling, and baseball clubs; their newsletters provided information on new state hunting regulations; their union halls were often the sites of weddings and other celebrations. (Newman’s interviews and research of local union archives has turned up the stuff of more possible movies on the worlds of pre- and post–Deer Hunter steel towns.)
This steelmaking and union-centered world shaped the politics of a couple of generations of nonmetropolitan Pennsylvania voters. They and their peers saw, and in most cases, imbibed the union’s stance on economic issues and political concerns more generally. Those viewpoints were sometimes echoed from the pulpits of the local Catholic church; they were the common parlance of working-class neighborhoods at a time when most of those towns consisted chiefly of working-class neighborhoods.
The smelters and the local unions are long gone today from those mill towns; those neighborhoods are both smaller, older, and lack most other community organizations as well—with the crucial exception of gun clubs (most of which have to affiliate with the NRA to qualify for consumer and other benefits). The discourse surrounding today’s steelworkers and former steelworkers still in Western Pennsylvania now comes from right-wing, nonlocal media (both mass and social) and from those gun clubs. To be a Democrat in the few remaining mills today is to be an exception. On several occasions, Newman spent days documenting the bumper stickers in the employees’ parking lots of three unionized Southwest Pennsylvania steel mills. Thirty-four percent of the bumper stickers were those of gun clubs, 27 percent were from and/or for the Republican Party and its candidates, 13 percent were from motorcycle clubs, 12 percent from the union, and a bare 1 percent from and/or for the Democratic Party and its candidates.
The change in political orientation follows that change in the socioeconomic environment, and most importantly, in the politics of one’s peers. For one of the first union-related stories I wrote, reporting on how the national AFL-CIO’s 1984 pre-primary presidential endorsement of Walter Mondale played out in the various states’ Democratic primaries, I focused in part on New Hampshire, where Mondale not only lost to Gary Hart, but also, according to the exit polls, narrowly lost among the state’s unionized voters. In most of the state, the unions’ pro-Mondale campaign had consisted of a robocall from AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland to union members, virtually none of whom had any idea who Lane Kirkland was. The outcome was different, however, in Berlin, an isolated paper-mill town in the far north of the state. There, the union stewards in the paper mills had repeatedly spoken one-on-one with their fellow members, and in Berlin—a mill town with a mill town culture as distinct as those of the steel towns in Pennsylvania—what your union peers said and thought mattered. Berlin went heavily for Mondale.
Working-class union towns are few and far between these days. The closest we have to one is probably Las Vegas, where the hotel union, more than 50,000 strong, is a pervasive presence in a city dominated by the hotel-casino industry. Like the Steelworkers of yore, the hotel union (Culinary Local 226) delivers for its members, and creates a discourse of peers that has made it the most dominant political force for Democrats in Nevada.
Long before the Democrats embraced allegedly “radical” social policies, they had effectively told millions of working-class Americans that their occupations were expendable and their livelihoods a matter of indifference. The Republicans had always believed that, of course, but when it took the shape of the trade and tax policies that the post–New Deal Democrats embraced, and the industrial policies they refused to embrace, it was a matter of betrayal. Some Democrats from the nation’s industrial centers (David Bonior, Sherrod Brown) and elsewhere (Bernie Sanders, Paul Wellstone) understood that and tried to prevent it, but not until Joe Biden has there been a Democratic president who’s repudiated those policies and sought to reverse them.
To today’s steelworkers and those who once worked in the long-shuttered mills, however, Biden will have trouble getting his message through. The worlds that millions of working-class Americans now inhabit don’t have many points of entry for messages from the first president in half a century who’s actually working to better their lot.
