The proposal was a bold one, and it came from an unlikely source: a November 1969 report to the United States Catholic Bishops' Conference on Urban Problems called for a new movement of the nation's poor and working-class populations, united across racial and ethnic lines. The author, civil rights veteran Monsignor Geno Baroni, placed the emerging grievances of Polish, Italian, Slavic, and Irish immigrants, their children, and grandchildren—known collectively as “white ethnics”—at the center of progressive politics. “If we are to develop a new agenda for the 1970s, we must go beyond the civil rights struggles of the 1960s,” Baroni informed the prelates. “We must stop exploiting the fear of the ethnic middle American and consider his legitimate needs.” This recognition, however, was merely a prelude to unifying “the blacks, the Appalachians, the Indians, the Spanish-speaking and the white urban ethnic groups.” His stirring message had the feel of 1930s style industrial unionism grafted on to group identity politics. “We must bring together a new coalition to press for new goals and new priorities for all the poor and the near poor,” he urged.Footnote ¹

Baroni's melding of civil rights advocacy, ethnic politics, and support for the poor and working-class—what I call “ethniclass progressivism”—challenged prevailing liberal and conservative wisdom. Liberals, he argued, were too simplistic in their belief that the fundamental divide in the United States was racial. For Baroni, the words of the much-quoted 1968 Kerner Commission Report—that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white—separate and unequal” failed to account for the continuing discrimination against white ethnics. As for conservatives, they were deluded in their belief that white ethnics were simple tools of reaction; the New Right failed to appreciate the deeply rooted support in ethnic communities for more, not fewer, government programs. For Baroni the level of animosity between white ethnics and racial minorities was not high or irreversible. These two segments of society, he proposed, “should not be enemies … [T]hey are allies because they share a common oppression.” The precise policy details and ideological framework, Baroni believed, could be worked out later: The important thing was to organize and agitate. The government and academics would play crucial roles, but neighborhoods would be the site of real organizational power.Footnote ²

Ethnic leaders, unionists, academics, and clergy were already debating the nature of this new coalition by the time of Baroni's report. The “First National Consultation on Ethnic America,” held at Fordham University in June 1968, included representatives from the American Council for Nationalities Services, the American Jewish Committee, the International Union of Electrical Workers, and US Catholic Conference's Social Action Department. They focused on “issues around which whites and Negroes might form alliances.” These included “challenges to the burdensome tax structure, high credit rates, rising medical costs, inadequate educational and recreational facilities and threatening aspects of automation.” Baroni took up their challenge to form an ethnic alliance committed to such goals. In 1971 he became the first head of the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (NCUEA). The group's officers and staff worked with local politicians and activists in developing and funding workplace and community programs in nearly sixty cities, primarily in the Northeast and Midwest. In 1970 Newsweek magazine dubbed Baroni “the chief strategist for the nascent ethnic movement.” From its Washington, D.C., headquarters the NCUEA nurtured allies in Congress and the executive branch and served as a significant force in politics in the first half of the 1970s.Footnote ³

This essay explores the history of white ethnicity in the early 1970s to demonstrate that the complex and contradictory expressions of working-class ethnicity cannot be contained by easy generalizations or as a singular phenomenon. First, I focus the claim by many white ethnic leaders that white ethnics were “disadvantaged” and, thus, deserved to be included in social welfare programs of the period as an indication of the shifting and varied sense of ethnic and class identities. Some ethnic leaders, especially in American Jewish organizations, defended color-blind conservatism; others were suspicious of idealized equality and sought, not to end such policies as affirmative action, but, to be included in race- and gender-sensitive programs.

The second part of this essay examines how Geno Baroni, NCUEA staff, and leaders of constituent groups strove to construct an economic vision beyond the declining industrial cities from which mainstream liberals seemed disconnected. They rejected as well conservatives who believed that white ethnics would serve as foot soldiers in the surging reaction against perceived liberal excesses. The significance of ethniclass progressivism lies less in legislative or policy gains and more in what it tells us about the way differently situated white ethnics reacted differently to changes in race and class relations. If Baroni himself was ultimately unable to move beyond the question of race and ethnic conflict and craft cross-racial solidarity as the central objective, constituent groups that depended on NCUEA funding were more successful. The support they garnered demonstrates that, despite its powerful effects in the corridors of power, the ascending color-blind conservatism of the period failed to capture the full spectrum of white ethnic beliefs specifically and white Americans generally.

Those writing on white ethnics at the time focused on the twin themes of resentment and insularity, not on ethniclass progressivism. The white ethnic revival was an unwieldy phenomenon whose participants both celebrated immigrant success and complained of a continuing lag in economic progress for second- and third-generation ethnics. Scholars and journalists (often part of what anthropologist Michaela di Leonardo calls “the ethnic industry”) wavered between shoring up the old “melting pot” assimilationist model and exploring newer claims of ethnic distinctiveness, popularized in movies like The Godfather, and in books with titles such as Blood of My Blood, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, and The Decline of the WASP. There was, in fact, no single entity known as “white ethnics”: The experience of a middle-class, third generation white ethnic attending one of the multitude of new ethnic festivals was markedly different from an urban working-class ethnic who struggled in the face of increased neighborhood crime and deindustrialization. The former, a kind of “symbolic” ethnicity, grabbed the attention of immigration and cultural historians who have emphasized the uses—usually to conservative ends—of ethnicity.Footnote ⁴

The nation's blue-collar workforce, on whose behalf ethniclass progressives advocated, were in the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods since the Great Depression. Unlike the mass organizing of the 1930s, however, the labor movement lacked a dominant narrative in the 1970s. It was a decade marked by economic recessions and white, working-class gravitation away from the Democratic Party and toward the cultural conservatism espoused by the Republican Party. But it was also a decade marked by a significant jump in unionization rates for service sector workers and the founding of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. As the staid leadership of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) with George Meany at the helm maintained the public face of “Big Labor” from its Washington, D.C. offices, a new generation of black, Hispanic, and working-class white men and women lashed out against workplace alienation and diminished opportunity.

“[A]n amalgam of politically complex, and at times quite contradictory, forces defined the blue-collar revival of the 1970s,” notes Jefferson Cowie. In 1970 alone a resurgent rank-and-file rebellion against both management and intransigent union hierarchies brought talk of labor militancy and class conflict to a level not seen in three decades: strikes against General Motors and General Electric, a tri-state wildcat strike of 40,000 coalminers, and national wildcat strikes by postal workers and Teamsters. The press frequently trivialized this phenomenon by focusing on the wide spread rates of absenteeism, long hair, and drug use, but the dramatic surge in strikes put startled employers and labor officials on the defensive.Footnote ⁵

Many of the best-regarded studies of this growing worker alienation from the political establishment, corporate America, and large union bureaucracy generally failed to incorporate fully into their accounts the fact that a large percentage of industrial workers were white ethnics. In The Working-Class Majority Andrew Levison argued for renewed attention to the neglected “labor question.” Levison wrote that “American workers are a class apart with real and legitimate problems and discontents,” but he did not acknowledge the effect of the white ethnic revival, then at its peak. Some scholars were surprised to find that workers even had an ethnic identity. While researching a book on daily life at a working-class bar, E.E. Masters observed the multiple ways white ethnic culture manifested itself: “It is interesting to note that this ethnic flavor … persist in spite of the fact that most of the customers' families arrived in America several generations ago.” The general practice of these scholars was either to give a passing nod to ethnicity or to ignore it altogether. “The whole concept of ethnicity is hazy, and there is little proof that it has had a recognizable impact on overall blue-collar attitudes and behavior patterns,” explained the authors in a collected volume of essays on blue-collar America.Footnote ⁶

Some observers understood the multiple ways white ethnicity expressed itself. “[T]here is a close correlation between ethnicity, class, work, community, and an individual's attitude towards all of them,” wrote a pair of social scientists in a volume about ethnicity in Detroit. This “heterogeneity of American experience,” as City University of New York professor Colin Greer put it, invalidated the “lyrical history” of scholars such as Oscar Handlin who extolled “the magnificent triumph of some individuals over great adversity.” Celebrating the ascent of whole ethnic groups also “serve[d] to perpetuate the illusion of classlessness and the legend of equal opportunity and mobility.” True, ethnicity informed how people imagined their world, it conditioned their expectations, and it expanded or restricted their options. But it did not operate in isolation nor was it static or insular.

For Greer, “what we must ultimately talk about is class. The cues of felt ethnicity turn out to be the recognizable characteristic of class position in this society.” Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb observed in The Hidden Injuries of Class that “ethnic workers are now coming to grips with their true position in American capitalism: they are powerless in the hands of economic and political forces controlling the cities.” The wave of working-class protests of the early 1970s, chronicled by Sennett and Cobb, “would appear as a groping to find a political voice as workers, rather than as Irishmen or Poles, a search that at first errs in choosing the wrong targets, like Blacks or radical students for its anger.”Footnote ⁷

Historians in the past fifteen years have tended to work within the confines of “whiteness studies” in analyzing white ethnicity. They focus on how white ethnics formed a “white” identity and how the privileges accrued to them in the form of economic and psychological benefits. For “whiteness” scholars, ethnic support for housing and employment programs were ham-handed efforts by whites to benefit from civil rights and feminist activists' hard-earned gains. In her study of equal employment opportunity since the Second World War, Nancy MacLean characterizes the “growing clamor” of white ethnics as “ranging from ‘me-tooism’ to outright backlash.” For Matthew Frye Jacobson the rise of “overdetermined ethnic consciousness” masked white privilege and created a “politics of white grievance that pitted itself against unfair black privilege.”

White ethnicity is so toxic to some scholars that they do not consider it as part of working-class American history. “The so-called ‘white ethnics’ … itself a mystified category invented in the early 1970s” was really nothing more than “a dense web of plebeian whites,” proclaimed two historians in the Radical History Review. As for the possibility that “whiteness” might be checked by cross-racial unity along class lines, historian Bruce Nelson argues that, “given the ways in which race is encoded in working-class identities and definitions of self, there can be no economistic cure for the malady that is ‘whiteness.’”Footnote ⁸

The recent appearance of books on the rise of “color-blind conservatism” makes peripheral the role of white ethnics as well. This “color-blind” ideology emphasized market forces and individual meritocracy rather than what rising conservative legal scholars, politicians, and activists viewed as unconstitutional products of discriminatory public policies. Middle-class professionals and their embrace of consumerism, home ownership, and support for bans on de jure discrimination—not southern white vigilantes or sullen northern white workers—determined the shape and character of opposition to liberalism. “[T]he historical amnesia of color-blind meritocracy,” as historian Matthew Lassiter characterizes it, provided an intellectual basis for opposition to bussing and affirmative action. When they do appear, white ethnics represent what Jacobson calls “Ellis Island whiteness”: As a complement to color-blind constitutionalism they offered the “romantic icon of yesterday's European immigrant—downtrodden, hardworking, self-reliant, triumphant” as commemorated by President Ronald Reagan during the rededication ceremony of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. Reagan's comments at the time were meant to underscore the fundamental unfairness of race- and gender-sensitive programs championed by liberals. White ethnics served as objects, not subjects, in a kind of conservative morality tale.Footnote ⁹

The Disadvantages of Being a White Ethnic

The story of ethniclass progressivism begins with activists seizing on the capacious notion of “disadvantage” employed by politicians, policymakers, and economists in the 1960s, not with the white ethnic backlash brought on by racism, cultural anxiety and economic insecurity. It was not clear, however, exactly who belonged in this category. Some experts focused on refining the concept of “poverty line” and the “culture of poverty” and on identifying geographical poverty zones in the nation's urban centers and rural outposts. For Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, the disadvantaged were “nonwhite minorities … the aged, the migrant workers, the industrial rejects, children, families with a female head, people of low education.” They hesitated to equate the disadvantaged only with minority group members. “[T]he answer to the question ‘Who are the disadvantaged?’ is more complicated than it seems,” noted the Ford Foundation's Mario Fantini and Columbia University's Gerald Weinstein. “The disadvantaged cannot be defined by race, residence, jobs, or behavior alone.” Doxey Wilkerson and Edmund Gordon, two African-American scholars and the authors of a 1966 study on compensatory education, defined the “disadvantaged” as individuals handicapped by depressed social and economic circumstances. “In many instances, they are further handicapped by ethnic and cultural caste status,” they wrote. Wilkerson and Gordon applied this definition to “[p]redominantly Negro, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Southern rural or mountain whites.” Supporters sought to include as many Americans as possible in these early years of compensatory programs. In their encyclopedic study of higher education published at the time, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman argued that equal opportunity could best be achieved by “deliberately favoring applicants from working-class or lower-class backgrounds regardless of race.”Footnote ¹⁰

Ethnic leaders rushed forward with data to prove their disadvantaged status. Since the federal government did not conduct surveys on the economic and educational status according to ethnicity, there was little comprehensive data. Many ethnic organizations funded studies. In a study of New York City's 1.7 million Italian-Americans, the Congress of Italian-American Organizations, Inc., found that, in predominantly Italian neighborhoods, the average resident in 1970 had 9.4 years of schooling compared to the overall city rate of 11 years. Nationally, the education gap between the white suburbs and urban dwellers was considerably greater than the gap between white and black urbanites: sixty percent of suburbanites held high school diplomas, while only thirty-three percent of black urbanites and thirty-one percent of white urbanites were graduates. Only 8.1 percent of New York's Italian-Americans held professional or managerial positions, compared to 8.5 percent of African Americans (and 21.5 percent of Jewish Americans and 22 percent of white Protestants). Even among New York's economically successful Jewish American population there existed pockets of poverty; these mostly elderly residents told the Village Voice in 1972 that they suffered from the “virtual exclusion of ‘Jews without money’ from the war on poverty.” In 1969, 1972, and 1977 the Polish-American Congress and the Joint Civic Committee of Italian-Americans in Chicago released findings that showed that, in the upper-echelons of 106 top Chicago business firms, Poles, Italians, Latinos, and African Americans were significantly underrepresented. Catholic priest and University of Chicago sociologist Andrew Greeley summarized the uneven progress of the nation's immigrant and minority population: “American society has bestowed economic, occupational, and educational success on its Jewish, British Protestant, and Irish Catholic populations. German and Scandinavian groups have done moderately well, the southern and eastern European Catholic groups less well, and the blacks and Spanish-speaking rather poorly.” In this scheme white ethnics could not easily be folded into the category of white and privileged.Footnote ¹¹

Ethnic activists and sympathetic academics laid the blame for the elusiveness of success at the feet of the media, government, and corporations, whom they often grouped together as “elites.” “The Ethnic American is forgotten and forlorn,” complained Baltimore city council member (and future US Senator) Barbara Mikulski. “We are ‘near poor’ economically. No one listens to our problems.” According to Greeley, white, middle-class professionals held a double standard. “Those social classes which seem so committed to expiating guilt for injustices done to blacks are quite unconvinced about injustices and exploitations worked upon white ethnics and upon their ancestors,” he argued. What was needed, urged the University of Minnesota's Rudolph Vecoli, was “sympathy and empathy” for white ethnics. Ethnic leaders, not willing to settle simply for symbolism, moved purposefully to revitalize old ethnic organizations and to establish new ones. Stephen Adubato, a thirty-eight-year-old former civics teacher and head of Newark's Cultural and Education Center, created “Displaced White Ethnics” in 1970 and supported the city's black candidate over his Italian-American opponent. The next year he became the director of Newark's NCUEA chapter; Adubato developed plans with local unions, the Chamber of Commerce, and the National Alliance of Businessmen to combat discrimination against white ethnics. “We want no slowdown in the advancement of blacks or browns, but we don't want their advancement at the expense of the white ethnics,” he assured his listeners. “Let's all share in the advancement with the same equality.”Footnote ¹²

Adubato and like-minded ethnic leaders pushed for enforcement of existing antidiscrimination laws and lobbied for additional legislative and executive orders. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was particularly important: It banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, sex, and national origin. The Columbian Coalition, an organization of Italian-American professionals and business people formed in 1972, retained counsel to prepare legal briefs on behalf of coethnics who claimed to be discrimination victims. When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—created to enforce Title VII—rendered a favorable ruling on national origins discrimination, ethnic activists and politicians noted the action with approval. Congressman Frank Annunzio, a Democrat from Illinois, argued that a 1970 EEOC decision in support of a Polish immigrant's complaint was instructive: “Italian-Americans across the nation must be alerted to this decision … because the immigrant who has long been the butt of ridicule, exploitation, or discrimination … has the door of redress open to him.” The percentage of complaints charging discrimination on the basis of national origins, however, remained small compared to race and sex discrimination complaints. Annunzio explained this was a result of a “myth” that Title VII was “passed only for the purpose of eliminating racial discrimination.”

A few of the aggrieved pursued their claims into court. For John Lucido, a junior attorney in a large Manhattan law firm, his lawsuit came about as a result of his employer's unfair treatment of him due to his ethnic identity and religion. “It is clear that the lawsuit has struck a deep responsive cord in a great number of Catholic ethnics, many of whom … have encountered bias but have been too proud to admit it or too hurt to fight it,” he wrote the president of the Polish-American Congress.Footnote ¹³

White ethnics challenged color-blind conservatism most dramatically in their calls for inclusion in affirmative action programs. Scholars have emphasized how Republicans courted the white ethnic vote, but politicians were often reacting to ethnic demands as much as engaging in preemptive electoral realignment. Richard Nixon's supposedly masterful manipulation of blue-collar and white ethnic culture and social defensiveness was as much a product of ad hoc policymaking as it was a purposeful plan to destabilize the Democratic Party's New Deal coalition. At one point the administration considered dropping Asian Americans from such plans but ultimately allowed them to continue as recipients; on another occasion they forgot to include them but hurriedly added them at the last moment. Nixon himself was unclear as to who “belonged” in these programs: sometimes he considered white ethnics and Mexican Americans as a single group. (This was not far-fetched: As late as 1980 over fifty percent of Latinos listed themselves as “white” in the federal census.) Baroni argued that equal employment measures “make clear that ‘minority racial’ interests … are obviously the primary aim of the law,” but he went on to note that lawmakers included a national origins clause, and white ethnics “have suffered by virtue of such identification especially at the decision impacting level of the corporate and philanthropic worlds.”

Nixon faced direct lobbying. “This ethnic thing continues to plague us as more and more letters come in from various unhappy groups,” Nixon aide Tom Lias informed the president's special counsel and political strategist Harry Dent in 1970. “The head Pole went away from here mad last week, etc. etc. … With all this smoke there must be fire.” Some Nixon advisors and cabinet members such as Charles Colson and Labor Secretary George Shultz pushed for white ethnics' affirmative action eligibility from inside the White House.Footnote ¹⁴

In December 1971 government officials offered white ethnics some affirmative action consideration but it fell short of mandating hiring goals or timetables. The watery policy language, however, did acknowledge that white ethnics suffered acute discrimination: “Experience has indicated that members of various religious groups, primarily Jews and Catholics, and members of certain ethnic groups, primarily of Eastern, Middle, and Southern European Ancestry … continue to be excluded from executive, middle-management, and other job levels, because of discrimination based on their religion and/or national origin.” Under this directive, employers were required to undertake various activities to “remedy the underutilization of that particular religious or ethnic minority group.”Footnote ¹⁵

This was largely a middle-class, not working-class, white ethnic concern. They took their lead from civil rights activists and feminists and began filing lawsuits to demand affirmative action consideration. Albert Maise, a rejected applicant to the University of Colorado Law School and an Italian American, argued to the court that he be given the same consideration as black, Native American, and Mexican American applicants. The national chairman of the Italian American Foundation called for compensatory racial preferences for white ethnics. Some legal actions, lodged by opponents to affirmative action often contained arguments in defense of proportionality and attention to applicants' racial or ethnic backgrounds. When Columbian Coalition attorneys filed discrimination charges against CUNY on the grounds that the institution denied two Italian American faculty members promotion to permanent rank, for example, they noted that, if they had received the promotions, they would have been the first Italian Americans to hold such positions in their departments. In the case of one of the professors, the lawyers argued that Italian-American students constituted over twenty-five percent of the department in which he taught. Other ethnic leaders expressed similar sentiments. Aloysius Mazewski, president of the Polish American Congress, for example, told President Jimmy Carter in 1980 of his disappointment that none of the seventy-nine minority judicial nominees had Polish surnames. “I abhor quotas but if that is the case, 5 per cent of the population of the United States are Americans of Polish descent,” he reminded the president.Footnote ¹⁶

American Jewish leaders were especially alarmed by this development. Most major Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress, and American Jewish Committee, were vocal opponents to the “hard” affirmative action of numerical goals and quotas. They defended color-blind meritocracy and rejected government efforts to collect individual racial, ethnic, and religious data. Much of this opposition was rooted in their historical experience in the United States and elsewhere of governments and higher education institutions practicing discrimination on the basis of one's identity. The source of their opposition came as well from a growing rift between African Americans and American Jews after 1965 over the causes of and solutions to urban crime, differing views on the policies of the state of Israel, and the clash over competing claims of collective and individual rights, which came to a head in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school crisis in 1968 when black activists sought to violate the seniority rights of a disproportionally Jewish teaching workforce in order to assert community control over schools.

Their stance was similar to those of neoconservatives (many of whom were Jewish), but Jewish leaders—and a significant majority of American Jews in general—were committed to the “soft” affirmative action of improved recruitment of minorities, compensatory education, and better financial assistance of underrepresented groups. The American Jewish Committee's legal director warned the organization's president in 1972 that, “recent indications are that white ethnics (the Italians, for example) are also seeking to get into the act.” This development came as jarring news at a time when two major Jewish organizations, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, supported affirmative action, especially in the nation's colleges and universities. “Breaking the white community into subgroups is the beginning of the end,” reasoned the United Synagogue's Social Action Committee chairman, “because every ethnic group has its ‘quota’ and Jews, who are only 3% of the population [will] find themselves back where they were 30 or 40 years ago with Jewish quotas closing education and professional doors in their faces.” The neoconservative response was to denounce ethnic revivalism as “dangerously tribalistic” in the words of Queens College's Richard Gambino, and to argue that ethnicity was not a compelling influence in the lives of second- and third-generation Americans. “We are a nation of immigrants, but we are not a nation of ‘ethnics,’ ” concluded neoconservative Nathan Glazer.Footnote ¹⁷

The fears of affirmative action supporters and opponents were unrealized: In 1973 the federal government released revised—and weaker—regulations covering white ethnics. These new guidelines required employers to “take affirmative action to insure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their religion or national origin.” This was to be accomplished through “outreach and positive recruitment” and with “[a]ccomodations to religious observance and practice.” They did not, however, contain the word “underutilization” and enforcement was left to employers. Affirmative action supporters were largely unsympathetic to white ethnic appeals. “The plight of the white ethnic is not the result of discrimination … and should not be raised in the context of Title VII,” the general counsel of the New York City's Commission on Human Rights told the New York Times. There were few other attempts to draw white ethnics back into the fold of affirmative action coverage, but by the mid 1970s most ethnic organizations had joined neoconservatives and Jewish organizations in filing amicus curiae briefs before the US Supreme Court arguing for color-blind constitutionalism most publicly in DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).Footnote ¹⁸

Ethniclass Progressives in the Workplace and Neighborhood

The ethnic progressives affiliated with the NCUEA were concerned less with affirmative action and more with making a case for cross-racial solutions for the urban poor and working-class. Baroni's passion was in coalition building, and he avoided the intense workplace, political, and legal struggles between blacks and whites over equal employment in a period of scarcity. His own background illustrates his embrace of liberalism's support for racial equality. Baroni was enthusiastic about broad constituencies organized around collective solutions that fit a more 1960s, not 1970s, sensibility. The son of Italian immigrants and coalminers, Baroni served in parishes in western Pennsylvania before transferring to Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s. He was a passionate liberal at the height of postwar liberalism's power. Baroni became, in quick succession, the director of the Washington, D.C. archdiocese's Office of Urban Affairs and then director of the US Catholic Conference's Urban Task Force. In the same period he helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, participated in the Selma-Montgomery March, inaugurated the National Neighborhood Coalition, and began what would become the Catholic Church's Campaign for Human Development. Baroni rejected the right-wing strain of the ethnic revival: He and representatives from Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Jewish organizations, along with the National Urban Coalition, met in November 1971 to denounce a handful of ethnic groups that they claimed were anti-black, anti-Semitic, and unrepresentative of most white ethnics. “Their fixation with old world politics is clearly out of step,” he stated at the time.Footnote ¹⁹

There was a certain degree of imprecision about exactly who ethniclass progressives represented. They spoke more confidently about the poor than they did about the working class. Baroni struggled to identify the working class, describing in a typical fashion in one document, that most white ethnics were “the near poor, lower middle class, and middle class” and as “predominantly working class.” NCUEA staff member Arthur Naparstek used similarly indecisive language; he called the organization's constituency as “the non-poor, non-affluent”and “sub-affluent citizens.” They tended to provide descriptions of typical occupations and communities in which white ethnics lived instead of conceptualizing them in class terms. Gus Tyler, International Ladies Garment Workers vice-president, bunched the “worker,” “the forgotten man,” “urban villager,” and “white ethnic” together, explaining that “he” (the white ethnic was nearly always a man) “is a blue or white collar employee with a family income of between $3,000 and $15,000; he lives in a predominantly white neighborhood of ethnic homogeneity in an urban-metropolitan area; he probably pays union dues to a union and homage to the Democratic Party.” However fuzzy these notions of class were, they trumped ethnic identity. “If you organize around ethnicity,” warned Barbara Mikulski, “you then constantly have to worry about the differences among people. You have to worry about ethnic pride, ethnic consciousness, and ethnocentrism … [It] will sow the seeds of our own defeat and our own divisiveness.”Footnote ²⁰

Still, significant racial and ethnic divisions would have to be overcome. Despite polling data that indicated that Catholic ethnics were more sympathetic to the civil rights movement's goals than white Protestants, they were at sharp odds with African Americans over access to jobs, neighborhood and school integration, and cultural politics. White ethnics refused for the most part to accept responsibility for the public and sometimes violent ways this opposition manifested itself. According to the American Jewish Committee's Murray Friedman at a 1968 meeting in Philadelphia, white ethnics were “increasingly restless” and viewed with “envy and fear” the progress of blacks. He chastised the Kerner Commission's approach to racism, which “constantly rubs the nose of the ethnic group into the ground and keeps saying ‘You're guilty.’ ” One area Catholic priest assigned to an urban parish seized on Friedman's observation: “Solutions are not easy. But the fact that whites do not like Negroes is not something that is not completely one that can be pointed to ethnic groups.” Baroni thought that neither blacks nor white ethnics were to blame for the discord. Rather, in a dubious reading of the history of race relations, he charged real estate speculators who, beginning in the mid-1950s, “exacerbated the socialization process” through “block busting” and other tactics for the acceleration of “white flight.” In addition to realtors, the heads of large foundations often “place[d] the needs of minorities and white working class ethnics in a competitive framework.” Before realtors and foundation directors, he claimed, “racism rarely existed along ethnic-Black lines. Friction—often quite heated, certainly—but racism—no.” Baroni's solution to poor urban conditions was mobilization of “a broader constituency than … those of the 1960s.”Footnote ²¹

The civil rights establishment was wary of the white ethnic revival. Baroni himself cut a puzzling figure for many: “Before 1968 I was considered ‘liberal’ if I advocated more assistance for housing, healthcare, and education for minority groups. Since 1968 some of the very same foundations would call me ‘divisive’ because I have tried to sensitize public and private institutions to the legitimate need of heavily ethnic communities.” His defenders assured liberals and civil rights activists of Baroni's continuing sympathies; they were, in the words of the Ford Foundation's Basil Whiting, “excellent” and the NCUEA head was a “moderate and responsible voice” (Republican Party chairman George H.W. Bush called him one of the “more radical ethnic people … with very liberal views”). In a period of Republican rule and diminished resources many African-American leaders were suspicious of addressing the claims of even those non-black recipients of affirmative action and other social programs. Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League articulated this zero-sum mentality in 1972 when he complained that “[t]he establishment is striving to accommodate the needs of the new minorities at the expense of blacks.”Footnote ²²

Ethniclass progressives faced a quandary: how could they affirm white ethnics' feelings of alienation and address their economic grievances and, at the same time, reassure African Americans that they understood the magnitude of racism's effects? Their solution was to reshape the “Ellis Island myth” by changing the ending to be not about the rewards of hard work and self-sufficiency, but, rather, one of continued marginalization. In this version the villains were WASP elites and unresponsive government policy makers, not lazy minorities and wasteful government spending.

“Our people came to this country seeking a home and a job that no king, czar, Hitler, or Stalin could take from him,” Baroni recounted. “Now we find that economic and power aristocrats are ignorant and hostile to our basic social needs.” White ethnics had become, in effect, the pawn of the racists. “Politicians have dabbled in the divisive lie of pitting us against other people. But racism is not our intention; we did not bring it with us; we found it here.” Mikulski echoed Baroni's message reminding New York Times readers that “there was no racial prejudice in our hearts when we came. … The elitists who now smugly call us racists are the ones who taught us the meaning of the word.” The result was that blacks and white ethnics were reduced to “angry confrontations for tokens.”Footnote ²³

White ethnic consciousness, therefore, was a necessary but insufficient step to obtaining justice. Baroni envisioned a kind of postethnicity: “We began to recognize that if ethnic was beautiful, if Black was beautiful, if Brown was beautiful in the singular context of the word, they became, when coalesced, not only beautiful but powerful instruments for the initiation and implementation of programs aimed at problems which affected them all.” The trouble with the white ethnic revival for them was that it was narrow and parochial. It failed to set a clear path toward racial harmony between minorities and white ethnics that would not otherwise be difficult since they shared a common class-defined perspective. “The black experience differs in the extreme degree to which blacks inherit that condition—not the condition itself. Whites and blacks of all ethnic origins continue to be poor in America today,” explained Colin Greer. White ethnics, Baroni stated, were just as receptive to social policies meant to address poverty and disadvantage as racial minorities. “I always knew that working-class people like my family, were not negative when it came to social programs,” he told one interviewer. “Go ahead and put everybody's grandmother on health care; just don't leave [mine] … out.”Footnote ²⁴

Unions, with their formal commitment to equality and the organization of its members according to industry and skill, not race and ethnicity, seemed particularly well-suited to produce this coalition. “Labor has no urban ethnic priorities—as such,” said American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) president George Meany in 1972. “Yet union members are heavily urban and heavily ethnic.” In a rare nod to ethnicity's significance, Meany, an Irish-American and member of a New York plumbers' local, acknowledged that “[e]thnic traditions and life-styles abound at union gatherings from one end of the country to the other.” Ethnics and unionists—“interchangeable in terms of the lexicon of social principle”—both faced criticism from “the wellspring of progress and enlightenment … found among the affluent suburban, college-educated professional classes.” Like Baroni and Mikulski, Meany believed that “the ultimate unity of labor has required the transcendence of ethnic—as well as racial—regional and generational particularism.”Footnote ²⁵

A meeting of NCUEA staff, community organizers, and United Automobile Workers (UAW) union representatives held over the course of two days in July 1974 underscored the importance of this relationship. The authors of a report on the meeting explained the logic of the gathering: “The Center organizes within working class neighborhoods around issues of concern to the worker's home environment. The UAW organizes around job security. A joint effort seemed … to be an ideal arrangement.” Unionists listened as participants from Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and elsewhere told them that the UAW “has some difficulty holding rank and file support for general social change concerns.” The solution, they argued, was to address union members “from within the worker's own perspective and in conjunction with his own personal needs beyond the workplace.” By all accounts the meeting was a success and participants agreed to identify the concentration of UAW members in specific neighborhoods in order to create labor-neighborhood projects on leadership, fundraising, and research. “The Cleveland meeting was an important opportunity to expand the base of support of our organizing efforts,” noted the NCUEA's Jerome Ernst. “It took numerous meetings and many months to set up the session [and] we do not want to lose the opportunity by not responding to this UAW initiative.”Footnote ²⁶

NCUEA leaders, however, did not focus their efforts on the labor movement. It is not clear why. They may have tried to avoid duplicating antidiscrimination efforts already long underway in unions. It may have been, as well, their realization that unions were institutions with uneven records of fighting racial and gender inequality and they did not want to yoke ethniclass progressivism to seemingly intractable problems in the labor movement. These problems gave rise in the early 1970s to rank-and-file militancy in the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and other organizations. The vexing question of whether the traditional seniority principle of “last hired, first fired” should stand in the face of a staggering number of layoffs, especially of those recently-hired affirmative action recipients, threatened to weaken cross-racial efforts even further. This was an uncomfortable issue for Baroni, who avoided weighing in on this thorny issue, as it was for liberal unionists, including members of the Coalition of Labor Movement and Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, who offered qualified support for race-sensitive programs that did not violate union principles. When he did register an opinion, such as in 1975 when the conflict between the white-dominated police officers' union in Detroit and the black-led city government centered on furloughing senior police officers, Baroni avoided taking sides and offered full employment policies as the solution: “The working person of whatever heritage believes in two things: there should be a job available for those who wish to work, and our society should provide those jobs.” This became a kind of default position for Baroni and unionists living in a political and legal system attentive to individual rights but who hoped for class-defined economic solutions.Footnote ²⁷

Ethniclass progressives' real passion was in revitalizing neighborhoods and communities. To Baroni, the nation's center cities were not the one-dimensional “cultures of poverty” as described by “overly zealous anti-poverty advocates,” but he admitted that they were in deep trouble. Although white urban flight accelerated over the course of the decade, many white ethnics did not leave old neighborhoods. Those that remained “defended” their neighborhoods, often by organizing associations to keep racial minorities out. Sometimes they resorted to violence. NCUEA staff wanted no part of this and focused instead on what they saw as the cause of such behavior: the practice of “redlining” and “urban disinvestment” as particularly destructive. “Depository institution regulations and practices are still grounded in the assumptions that ‘old’ and ‘non-white’ are bad,” wrote two staff members in a 1972 report. The NCUEA produced an impressive amount of research on urban problems but offered little specific guidance from their headquarters on how to transform urban America. Baroni fixed on his call for a “new urban populism” and welcomed opportunities to deliver his pep talks at conferences. The most significant of these events occurred in March 1972 when 1,600 representatives of black, Hispanic, and white ethnic community groups convened the “National Housing Conference” in Chicago. In highly charged sessions held in a Catholic school on the city's troubled West Side speakers rose to denounce the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), real estate brokers, and lending and insurance interests. Their complaints ranged from the government's unwillingness to stop speculators from selling dilapidated or destroyed housing identified as “FHA Approved” to the exorbitant automobile insurance rates for urban dwellers. “The FHA is not responsive,” Baroni told the gathering. “We need a whole new instrument to deal with the housing problems of the central city.” Along with the set of passed resolutions many participants cheered the newly established solidarity. “We have a new enemy now,” announced one black leader for Chicago's West Side Coalition as an elderly white man stood by and nodded.Footnote ²⁸

Much of the NCUEA's resources went into funding community initiatives that would create this “new urban populism.” The new groups that popped up invoking the centrality of white ethnicity origins were diverse. Some came out of religious, usually Catholic traditions, but there was considerable support from liberal Protestants and Jews; others were rooted in local union or political initiatives. Most were a combination that depended less on Baroni's message and more on local economic, residential, and political conditions. Detroit's Black-Polish Conference, for example, was the result of a contact between John Conyers, a black US congressman from Detroit and members of the Archdiocese of Detroit's Priest Conference for Polish Affairs, a group of about 100 Polish-American priests. The announcement of its establishment in June 1969 came as a surprise to many of the city's residents: They assumed that Poles, who constituted about twenty percent of Detroit's total population, were too socially conservative and hostile to black demands to join forces with African Americans who were quickly becoming the majority population and who would soon control the levels of political power. One sociologist focusing on a Polish neighborhood on the east side reported that his subjects were suspicious of even a handful of Albanians who had recently moved into a closely-knit community. The Black-Polish Conference, however, was about practical coalition building. “Most people think there has to be love before there can be a coalition … There just has to be respect for each other's political power. Love can come later,” an unnamed local politician commented.Footnote ²⁹

An infusion of NCUEA funds in 1972 bolstered the Black-Polish Conference's ability to hire staff, hold community meetings, and develop new programs. The group engaged in a mix of cultural and policy activities; these included support for an “Afro-American Festival,” sponsoring a trip to Poland, establishing a senior citizens' program, children's lunch program, youth summer program, and publishing a newsletter. In addition, they met with the United Black Trade Unionists, federal housing officials and a plaintiff in a lawsuit charging race discrimination, and coordinated efforts with other Detroit community groups such as the Chrysler Community Development Council and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In an attempt to draw more residents into the organization, Black-Polish Conference leaders attempted to create a community-based Health Maintenance Organization for the uninsured.Footnote ³⁰

The largest and most well-known NCUEA-supported organization was the Calumet Community Congress (CCC), a group led by white, working-class ethnics in northwest Indiana's industrial corridor and staffed by community activists from Saul Alinsky's well-known Industrial Foundations Training Institute in nearby Chicago. They were part of a groundswell of rank-and-file labor militancy in the region that drew the support of residents of modest neighborhoods dotted with churches, bars, and factories that employed fewer of them each year. “There's a certain consciousness, an anti-company consciousness,” a young South Chicago steelworker told a sociologist studying the new labor activism and local communities. The traditional factors that scholars look to in accounting for earlier generations of labor activism—the proximity of workplace and home, distinct neighborhood cultural and religious institutions, and inter-generational employment patterns—were still significant in the early 1970s. One Indiana steelworker explained that his father's commitment to the labor movement (“He came from the old country in 1918 and spoke broken English but he went to every union meeting he could”) spurred him to activism. This was not a case of blind allegiance to the union leadership: Edward Sadlowski, past president of US Steel's South Works local led a rank-and-file rebellion against United Steelworkers of America's District 31 incumbent president. Sadlowski won by a two-to-one margin with the help of black and Hispanic members (he lost his subsequent bid for the union's international presidency but carried the Calumet region comfortably).Footnote ³¹

The CCC's origins lay in a February 1970 strike at an East Chicago chemical plant. The strike leaders, John Smrekar and Ken Tucker, argued for a union role in helping to set company pollution policy and demanded a clean up of the Calumet River. Their efforts caught the attention of Alinsky organizers James Wright and Mike Barnes, as well as a local parish priest, Father John Sedlak, who came together to propose a new organization to compliment the work of the labor movement. By the time of the CCC's founding convention in December 1970 they had gathered the support of 143 organizations and secured statements of support from such national figures as US Senators Edward Kennedy and Edmund Muskie. According to the local press, the 1,500 delegates at the convention elected to their leadership board, “mainly white, union members, ethnic oriented wage earners who earn from $5 to $11,000 a year.” They listed the occupations of those elected: two union officials, two welfare workers, two truck drivers, two housewives, two working college students, two clergy members, one cook, one roofer, one secretary, a Gary city employee, and an hourly steelworker. A Washington Post editorial noted that the CCC could become “a powerful force for rational social change.” The paper's editors were pleased that the new organization's objectives were “not to back a Wallace or an Agnew figure, or to advance the so-called hardhat philosophy, but for social change.”Footnote ³²

CCC members moved aggressively to address a multitude of neighborhood concerns and to build community institutions that would stave off the effects of deindustrialization. They fought against noisy truck stops with a petition campaign, lodged formal complaints to protest an electrical rate increase for the region, and demanded an end to slum-like conditions at a mobile home park (CCC leaders rented a unit in the park in order to carry out their struggle). They confronted local employers as well. In May 1971 organization volunteers distributed 10,000 leaflets at the gates of Inland Steel to publicize the fact that the government had under assessed the company's property by $220 million. When CCC staff wrote to the NCUEA in mid-1972 for additional funding, they included a list of current areas of interest for the group: elimination of unmanned railroad crossings, the establishment of neighborhood health clinics, transparent civil service procedures for the hiring and promotion of police officers, and the demand that the US government withdraw armed forces immediately from Vietnam. In addition, they held dances that included folk-rock and “ethnic” music bands and began to develop a youth center. To Obadiah Simms, a Gary activist in the African-American community, the CCC's founding in December 1970 would lead to cross-racial organizing “because once they start working they'll begin to smoke out the common enemies.” In their plea for NCUEA support a year and a half later, the CCC was able to report that his group “has allied itself with the black community of Gary, and with the Latin Americans of East Chicago.”Footnote ³³

In northwest Indiana and elsewhere, however, ethniclass progressivism faded after the mid-1970s. The CCC's demise came quickly, not from racial conflict, but from a divided leadership and sustained attacks from the political right. Even before CCC leaders approached the NCUEA for additional money in 1972, George Sullivan, the organization's president, and Barnes, who had become the executive director, faced off over Sullivan's wish that the group curb its ambitious goals in order to focus on battling local political corruption. Sullivan left to form the “Calumet Action League.” The remaining CCC members faced criticism of political radicalism from John Krupta, Lake County clerk and Democratic Party chairman. Krupta and his supporters—some from a local John Birch Society branch—had criticized the Catholic bishop and priests in the diocese from the CCC's inception for backing the organization's “godless, atheistic form of communism.” They turned out a force of 250 protestors to disrupt a CCC planning meeting just a few weeks before the December 1970 convention and the Catholic priests who visited community groups to explain the CCC's values “were objects of profanity.” Krupta zeroed in on activist Staughton Lynd, a historian, civil rights advocate, and community organizer who gained national attention for joining other anti-Vietnam War activists on a trip to North Vietnam in the mid-1960s. Krupta charged that Lynd practiced a politics that was “an obvious threat to the American system of government.” It is difficult to determine how serious a threat this attack was on the health of the fledgling organization but the departure of key staff members for other organizing work positions, the Sullivan-Barnes factionalism, and the right-wing attacks took their toll on the CCC. By mid-1972 attendance at some meetings numbered in the single digits; in 1972 area churches pulled their funding for the group.Footnote ³⁴

Detroit's Black-Polish Conference's end came more slowly and followed the political and economic trajectory of the city's decline and the growing alienation of some Polish Catholics from the city's liberal Catholic hierarchy. Despite the flow of optimistic rhetoric and ambitious community programs meant to unify the city's working class, the combination of continued white flight, high unemployment, and rising crime stopped the momentum of an organization predicated on the need for new resources and cross-racial cooperation. With the election of Coleman A. Young in 1973, the city's first black mayor undertook a series of high profile and mostly unsuccessful efforts to revitalize the city with splashy riverfront projects, not the neighborhood initiatives the Black-Polish Conference supported. The city's remaining Polish residents resented the Catholic leadership's decision, due to falling enrollments, to close many parochial schools in historically Polish parishes and to redistribute funds to inner city black parishes. One letter writer refused to provide financial support to the Catholic Church because it “discriminates against older clergy and clergy of ethnic backgrounds and groups of ethnic peoples like the Poles, the Italians, etc., while at the same time telling us not to discriminate against the good Negro people.” The final blow came in 1980 when General Motors, in cooperation with Mayor Young and other civic authorities, announced the planned leveling of “Poletown,” a working-class neighborhood of mostly older Poles and younger black residents, in order to construct a new automobile plant. Not a single institution in Detroit—not the Catholic Church, labor unions, or liberal groups—rallied on behalf of Poletown residents who had organized themselves into the Poletown Neighborhood Council with the assistance of Ralph Nader. The Black-Polish Conference had long since ceased to exist.Footnote ³⁵