The grand building, with its elaborate stonework, also provided a fitting home for a man two local journalists called “the cop who would be king,” Frank Rizzo, who occupied the mayor’s office from 1972 to 1980.

Few figures have ever loomed as large over a time and place as Frank Rizzo did over Philadelphia. Like the statue of Penn high atop City Hall, Rizzo cast a long shadow—figuratively and literally. “Big Frank” stood 6 foot, 2 inches tall, and towered over most contemporaries. More important, he was the quintessential “backlash” politician of the late 20th century, an emblem of urban, white ethnic populist conservatism.

Rizzo opposed public housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, and other liberal programs he deemed “unfair advantages” for people of color. He had a combative style and a penchant for divisive and offensive comments. And he defied partisan politics; Rizzo was a Democrat when he campaigned for Republican Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972.

Rizzo’s controversy-stoking positions and personality attracted a significant base of support in white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphia. But he and his Philadelphia supporters were more than products of a specific time and place. They were harbingers of a broader shift in American politics—blue-collar conservatism—that remains a potent political force today.

Rizzo and his brand of blue-collar politics developed at a critical point in modern U.S. history. He owed his rise to the most powerful social movement of his era: the push for African-American civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s. Protests against segregation roiled northern cities like Philadelphia every bit as much as their Southern counterparts—and spurred the rise of a conservative response that proved just as transformative as the civil rights movement it opposed. In Philadelphia, this response grew out of a white, working- and middle-class effort to safeguard “neighborhood” and white ethnic institutions and traditions. As civil rights activists sought to integrate neighborhoods, schools, and work sites, white Philadelphians—many first- and second-generation Americans of European ancestry—fought back, treating African-American advances as a zero-sum game they were losing.

As civil rights protests intensified, blue-collar white ethnics joined a nationwide clamor for “law and order.” Rizzo personified “law and order” and promised to restore it in Philadelphia.

Born in 1920 to Italian immigrants, Rizzo had grown up in a row house in a heavily Italian-American section of South Philadelphia. Blue-collar, white ethnic Philadelphians liked that Rizzo was no “egghead,” as they put it. He had dropped out of high school and followed his father’s footsteps into the Philadelphia Police Department. Starting out as a beat cop, he later earned promotions—and a reputation for taking on vice and illegal gambling, and for leading raids on hot spots favored by gay people.

Fellow officers loved him, calling him “a cop’s cop” or “Cisco Kid,” after a popular television cowboy. He rapidly rose through the ranks of the police department, to deputy commissioner in 1963, acting commissioner in 1966, and, finally, police commissioner in 1967.

As Philadelphia’s top cop, Rizzo was fond of saying that the way to treat criminals was “scappo il capo,” an Italian phrase he translated as “crack their heads.” Critics, especially African-Americans, argued that his aggressive policing and “Gestapo tactics” went too far. In 1970, to choose just one example, he ordered police raids on Black Panther Party headquarters throughout the city, allowing police to conduct strip searches in full view of the media. But Rizzo’s admirers never wavered in their support for the controversial police commissioner, and enthusiastically backed him when he resigned his position to run for mayor as the “toughest cop in America” in 1971. When he won, he became the first former police commissioner elected mayor of a U.S. city, and he quickly placed his supporters’ concerns atop his agenda.

Responding to demands for neighborhood sanctity during his campaign, Rizzo promised he wouldn’t allow new public housing in any neighborhood that didn’t want it. In office, he followed through, fighting the construction of several planned public housing projects and either killing them entirely or delaying their completion for years. Rizzo was also a vocal opponent of “busing”—a widespread euphemism for opposition to school desegregation—and he personally intervened to stop state-mandated public school integration efforts. The city halted all student transfer plans in favor of something called “voluntary desegregation.” As a result, Philadelphia’s public school system became one of the most segregated in the nation. It remains so today.

These controversial policies made Rizzo incredibly popular with his base, which supported him through scandals and political fights. Charges of misappropriating public funds and using the police as a personal spy ring, along with frequent public gaffes, made Rizzo a target among liberals in his own Democratic Party. Rizzo survived a primary challenger in 1975 and coasted to his second term in the mayor’s office, but he was enraged by his liberal critics and promised retaliation, telling reporters that he would “make Attila the Hun look like a f****t” when dealing with his political enemies. The comment became one of the most famous of his entire career—an incendiary statement typical of his aggressive masculinity.

None of the controversies around Rizzo ever jeopardized the support he received from white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphians. They applauded his inflammatory remarks as the mayor “speaking his mind” and “telling it as it is.” They cheered his opposition to public housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, and other liberal programs they perceived as “unfair.” These voters helped Rizzo overcome a recall drive in 1976. They even supported his 1978 campaign to change the city charter to allow him to run for a third, consecutive term as mayor—an effort that only fell apart after the mayor told an audience to “vote white” for charter change, mobilizing a new anti-Rizzo coalition.

Rizzo served out his remaining two years in City Hall before being termed out. But he made several more attempts to regain the mayor’s office, first as a Democrat in 1983, and then as a Republican in 1987. He lost both of those races to W. Wilson Goode, who helped pull together the anti-Rizzo coalition and Philadelphia’s first African-American mayor. Rizzo ran his final mayoral race as a Republican in 1991, but he died after suffering a heart attack on the campaign trail.

Rizzo came to exemplify a larger movement of white working- and middle-class Americans away from liberal politics. In Richard Nixon’s America, for example, Rizzo was a key part of the president’s efforts to wrest white, blue-collar voters away from the Democratic Party. While Nixon employed the famed “Southern strategy” to attract white voters in the South, he similarly considered Rizzo essential to his “urban strategy.”

Racism and resentment fed Rizzo’s political appeal and usefulness to Nixon, but there was also a positive, affirmative aspect to his supporters’ enthusiasm, based on a cultural identity built on shared values of hard work, sacrifice, toughness, pride, and tradition. Rizzo’s backers saw a bit of themselves in an immigrants’ son who had dropped out of high school and worked his way up to the highest position in the city. He often played up his humble ethnic roots, especially as he grew wealthy. As one supporter said when Rizzo ran for mayor in 1971, “He’s one of us. Rizzo came up the hard way.”

There is another way to understand this support. Working- and middle-class whites of the time were engaged in a newly emergent form of identity politics—which amounted to white racial identity politics, cloaked in the language of class pride. Rizzo’s supporters used class identity and class-based rhetoric to avoid accusations of racism. When white neighborhood activists in South Philadelphia fought the construction of the Whitman Park public housing project that Rizzo halted in 1973, they never publicly mentioned race. Rather, they argued that public housing tenants would not take the same pride in their homes as homeowners.

Similarly, Philadelphia’s building and construction unions, which also backed Rizzo, vehemently opposed the U.S. Department of Labor’s so-called Philadelphia Plan, which guaranteed equal opportunity hiring on federally backed construction projects in the Philadelphia area. But they avoided explicitly racial arguments, contending instead, that new policy of affirmative action threatened hard-won labor and seniority rights.

These white identity politics, combined with the politics of relatability in Rizzo’s “one of us” populism, transferred easily to the national stage. Ronald Reagan was especially adept at making appeals to blue-collar whites. In the 1980s, the press dubbed the white working- and middle-class voters who responded to Reagan’s appeals blue-collar values “Reagan Democrats.” But back in 1970s Philadelphia, these same voters had already been “Rizzocrats.”

The post When Philadelphia’s Foul-Mouthed Cop-Turned-Mayor Invented White Identity Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My life is steelmaking too—I worked as a laborer, a supervisor, and a manager for over 40 years. I’m also a devoted student of the history of steel, an interest that was spurred by my family story and my work, and then fueled by my deep desire to answer a single question: How was it that in the latter half of the 19th century it was Pittsburgh—not Chicago or any number of well-positioned metal-making centers in the U.S. and Europe—that somehow became the world’s largest steel manufacturing center?

Pittsburgh’s ascent is often attributed to the region’s vast coal supply, extensive river system, and burgeoning railroad network. Of course, these are factors, but I wasn’t convinced that they were reason enough. Numerous cities in America and Europe had similar attributes, and manufacturing regions in England had the added advantage of originating modern mass-produced steelmaking. So what brought Pittsburgh to the forefront?

The author’s grandfather, Vid Salopek (far left) and grandmother, Amanda (Vucic) Salopek,
both immigrants from Croatia (Yugoslavia). Vid worked for the Carnegie Steel Company. Photo courtesy of Ken Kobus.

The answer, in my opinion, primarily revolves around the actions of one man, Andrew Carnegie, and his singular ability to marshal the forces of science, technology, and innovation to consistently make his plants the most efficient and advanced in the world. Many choose to believe that Carnegie’s fortune was won through his abusing of employees and cutting their wages to the bone. Initially I, too, assumed this was true. But years of study and research were full of surprises, which led me to write a book on the subject, and to a very different conclusion.

In addition to writing, I’ve taught at Carnegie Mellon University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. In one of those classes I focused on the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892, in which the trade union workers of Homestead Steel Works faced off against the Carnegie Steel Company in a wage and policy dispute. It ended badly—nine people were killed. So it might surprise you to learn that I presented the material from the perspective of the Carnegie Steel Company.

In my experience, I’ve found that most people despise Carnegie. I’m not saying he didn’t do his share of things that many consider ruthless or immoral—he pushed long hours and low wages—but they don’t understand who he was or his incredible life and contributions. Carnegie was born in Scotland, the son of a weaver whose family was driven into poverty when the mechanization of looms made hand-weaving obsolete. After immigrating to the U.S., the young Andy worked as a bobbin boy in a textile mill, as a telegraph messenger, and as a telegrapher, eventually working his way up through the Pennsylvania Railroad to Pittsburgh Division Manager before turning his attention to steel. He assembled his steelmaking empire around three smallish integrated plants, located on several hundred acres of land, distributed over approximately a five-river-mile length of suburban Pittsburgh. Their combined output often rivaled or exceeded that of the world’s major steelmaking nations, including that of England and the rest of the United States.

Duquesne Works of Carnegie Steel Co., circa 1901. Photo courtesy of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.  

The mill has a certain music. I grew up in the shadow of Carnegie’s mills and have sensory memories starting from when I was a small child. Back when they were steam-driven you could hear the rhythmic chug, chug, chug of the mill engines and the hiss of the steam releasing. Also the boom and the clang of metal and chains, the whirling of gears and motors, the dull thud of striking a humongous red hot ingot, and the warning sounds of sirens. There were the odors too—if you’ve ever heated a metal pan with nothing in it, that’s the smell. And all day every day there were fireworks throughout the mill. When charging molten iron in through the open door of a furnace it’s like the Fourth of July, with thousands and thousands of sparklers flying, quite spectacular. There may be 40 tons of seething liquid iron in the ladle and 300 tons in the furnace. Some modern plants were miles long; mine was one of those. I would feel like a peewee ant in this gargantuan surrounding. It was awe-inspiring.

Sometimes the things that went into creating that spectacle and improving upon its efficiencies were quite modest—the Carnegie Company often made simple adjustments to the routine, such as adding a chemist on the shop floor. In modern analyses of the industry, small changes like this are often overlooked, but these departures from conventional practices often enhanced links or forged new ones among the three fundamental approaches to making steel: ironmaking in a blast furnace and steelmaking via either a Bessemer converter or an open hearth furnace.

The author’s father, John, and two older brothers, Regis and Jerry, in 1945. John worked as a first helper on open hearth steel furnaces at Jones & Laughlin Steel Company Pittsburgh Works starting in 1937. Photo courtesy of Ken Kobus.

In the production of iron with the blast furnace, a business that Carnegie entered in 1872, his men reinvented the industry three times in three consecutive decades. Important changes included chemical analysis and adjustments to air flow volume and temperature, as well as installing more efficient stoves, construction materials, and high-quality blowing machinery. These sorts of changes, coupled with automation, increased production many times over. It was during that time that ironmaking was first recognized as a science, a change attributed by industry experts to the work at Carnegie Steel.

Another important contributor to Carnegie’s success were the men who helped him run the business. Carnegie’s partner, Henry Frick, was perhaps the finest executive manager in the world. Bill Jones, a preeminent steel man and inventor known as Captain Jones, helped elevate the company to record levels of both iron and steel production. Among his numerous patents was the mixer, which eliminated two steps in the steelmaking process. He developed an esprit de corps among the workers, partly by convincing Carnegie to introduce the three-turn, eight-hour day in the late 1870s (though the company reverted to a two-turn, 12-hour day in 1888).

If Carnegie’s unrivaled inventiveness and driving ambition were essential to Pittsburgh’s rise, so was the sense of pride in sweaty, back-breaking labor that inspired the steelworkers themselves, including my relatives. When I think about Jones I am reminded of the American folk heroes of my childhood like John Henry, the “steel driving man.” There was also Mike Fink, a hero of local folklore who ran boats down the Ohio River to New Orleans and was known as the king of the keelboaters. And also Joe Magarac, a man who—I was told as a young child—was literally made of steel. Here’s this mythic figure and all he cares about is making steel—the strongest of the strong, a man to be emulated. But in Eastern European languages, magarac means donkey. People would laugh at him. Yet he’s a hero because he loved making steel. This local steelmaking lore, however romanticized, is another thing that made Pittsburgh stand apart from its rivals.

When I started out, I was in the strip mill—a laborer with a shovel. Then I got married and moved to the coke plant, where it’s easy to get a job because it’s very dirty work. But it was steady, and I worked in one for the rest of my career. When I was 26 I started studying mechanical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh and working swing shifts. It was during the course of my studies, as I was reading about steel and the history of the industry, that I learned that Pittsburgh was not the most natural place to be the center.

One of the things I discovered was Carnegie’s brilliance in the utilization of scrap. Bessemer steel plants generated large volumes of scrap, but Bessemer furnaces generally could not or did not use scrap for a number of different reasons. In economic terms, this commodity had a value, but little utility; it lacked usefulness. Carnegie changed that.

Charging a Bessemer Convertor with approximately five to 10 tons of molten iron prior to
conversion to steel. Presumably Pittsburgh, PA, circa late 19th century. Photo courtesy of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

He approached basic steelmaking through the use of open-hearth furnaces, which used scrap metal and pig iron, also called cast iron, to make steel. An acid open hearth required the use of very high-quality scrap, which made its operation expensive. When Carnegie developed the capability to produce basic steel in open-hearth furnaces, he was able to use lower-quality scraps that were contaminated with phosphorus, so it was cheaper to make.

Carnegie could use this material in basic furnaces and convert it into steel—he was the first in the United States to do this. Carnegie owned two of the most productive Bessemer plants in the world, so in essence he could get the scrap for free. Not only that, he used it to make armor plate, boiler plate for locomotives and steel beams. He now had a plant, unique in the country, where he could take large volumes of low-utility scrap or even purchase it from others at low cost, and make high-value products that had high utility. That was one of Carnegie’s big breakthroughs, an important one that helped secure Pittsburgh’s place as the steel capital.

During this era, America was changing from an agrarian to an industrial society. The steel industry—and Carnegie himself—played a major part in that transformation. Propelled by Carnegie’s impetus, the United States became the largest iron-producing nation in the world. Shortly after his exit from business in 1901, it surpassed England as the largest steel-producing nation as well. With steel affordable and in ample supply, railroads could be rapidly constructed across America’s vast expanses and skyscrapers could reach toward the heavens. Later, a number of other new steel plants were established in the Pittsburgh region, solidifying the city’s position as the major steel center in the world.

The author at work adjusting the pressure on a unit of coke ovens, Pittsburgh Works Jones & Laughlin Steel Company. Photo courtesy of Ken Kobus.

Carnegie’s wealth is well known. However, what is not so well known or understood, and worth noting, is that Carnegie did not amass his great fortune until after he sold his company to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million—by some estimates about $13 billion in today’s money.

Then he gave almost all of his share away—today, there are no wealthy Carnegies. The list of beneficiaries of his philanthropy is long, and includes, among many others, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute of Technology—now Carnegie Mellon University—Carnegie Institution of Washington (Science), and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the largest endowment for advancement of education and knowledge.

The hardest work I have ever done was being a third helper on an electric furnace. It was hand charged, the hottest heat, and the hardest work. Your clothes would get soaking wet. The sweat would run into your shoes, so you’d be squishing around in your own sweat. You simply work until you’re spent, sometimes until you feel you can’t move. So it was primarily Carnegie and his genius managers who made Pittsburgh the steel capital, but it was the men in the mills who made his awesome accomplishment possible—an accomplishment later perpetuated by my grandfathers, my father, and so many others.

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