July 14, 1970
Page 24126
FORTY MILLION AMERICANS AND A BROKEN ODYSSEY
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, at a time when politicians are beginning to focus on America's white ethnic minorities, when the Labor Department files a report on the problems of blue collar workers, and when civil rights leaders like Father Geno Baroni speak up for millions of Americans rich in their cultural heritage but uncertain about their prospects, the article by Colman McCarthy in this morning's Washington Post takes on special significance.
I commend this article, which is entitled "Forty Million Americans and a Broken Odyssey," to the attention of the Senate and ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
FORTY MILLION AMERICANS AND A BROKEN ODYSSEY
(By Colman McCarthy)
Hard hats. Super patriots. Flag wavers. Wallacites. Pigs. Supposedly included by these quick-mix brand names, mostly dreamed up or whispered along by far-off liberals, are some 40 million lower middle class white workers. They live mainly in the 58 major industrial cities of the Midwest and North, either direct immigrants or first, second and third generation descendants from the old – and what for some increasingly seems a better – world. Their roots are in Italy, Poland, Lithuania and other European countries. Because a few of them beat up antiwar marchers on Wall Street and St. Louis, or stone black civil rights workers – Cicero, Ill.; 1966 – or vote for George Wallace, the ethnic Americans are viewed by many non-members as war-fiends, racists and slobs.
They aren't. Before the sociologists, behaviorists and other missionaries set their compasses to search out the true meaning of this group, the ethnics are doing their own self-defining, free of catch-phrases and caricatures. At a recent meeting in Washington called by the Urban Task Force of the U.S. Catholic Conference, Barbara Mikulski of the Southeast Community Organization in Baltimore, spoke out: "The ethnic American is sick of being stereotyped as a racist and dullard by phony white liberals, pseudo black militants and patronizing bureaucrats. He pays the bill for every major government program and gets nothing or little in the way of return. Tricked by the political rhetoric or the illusionary funding for black-oriented social programs, he turns his anger to race – when he himself is the victim of class prejudice.
"The ethnic American is overtaxed and underserved at every level of government. He does not have fancy lawyers or expensive lobbyists getting him tax breaks on his income. Being a home owner, he shoulders the rising property taxes – the major revenue source for the municipalities in which he lives. Yet he enjoys very little from these unfair and burdensome levies."
Miss Mikulski went on to list other hurts and losses suffered by ethnics. At the conclusion, Miss Mikulski called for a new alliance of "white and black, white collar, blue collar and no collar" workers based on mutual need, respect and interdependence. At the end of the week-long meeting, it was clear that ethnic Americans see themselves as an alienated and threatened people, bypassed by the larger society and now blamed by this same society for much of what is dragging the country down.
Except for an occasional article such as a recent piece in The New Republic – and a government report on blue collar workers made public two weeks ago, few people, especially those farthest away in attitude, have gone beyond the jargon words to understand the ethnics – their culture, emotions, economics and future.
Culturally, many ethnics originally allowed themselves to be fertilized with the notion of the American dream, only to find parts of their European heritage ploughed under: From this buried necessity, it is common to find ethnic children named Rodney Raziano, Kimberly Grotowski, Kelly Walszak. "The parents of those kids are trying to blend in,"says Monsignor Geno Baroni, "but it only increases the feelings of isolation more. Seeking acceptance in America shouldn't mean denying or disowning the culture of your ancestry, including ethnic names like Rocco or Stanislaus. There are other ways of being accepted, which ethnics already do – like paying taxes, community service, voting, obeying laws."
Baroni, who recently left a black inner-city parish in Washington to work at the U.S. Catholic Conference and organize ethnic strength, insists that man's cultural roots cannot be torn up arbitrarily. "I remember as a kid in a mining town in Pennsylvania, my teachers, white middle class Presbyterians and Methodists, taught me ways of becoming Americanized. Give up strong smelling salami, they said, and start eating homogenized cheese. So I gave up. I thought that was how you became a real American.
"If a kid denies enough things from his culture and heritage, even something small like salami, soon he has little to hang onto that tells him he's different. The well educated and middle class have other securities available to tell them who they are. So they don't need things like music, art, literature, food, or legends in the way that an ethnic does."
As a partial remedy, Baroni believes the schools should teach ethnic culture. If this idea comes about, it will be an extension of what many schools are already doing – offering courses in African culture. "The blacks who study their heritage," said Baroni, "aren't doing it to return to Africa. Neither are the ethnics planning on going back to Europe. Both groups just want to celebrate some of the same things their fathers did. This is cultural awareness, not cultural division. If all kids learned their own heritage, as well as learning others, you'd have a lot less groping for identity. A man who has cultural roots cannot be blown around by every breezy fad or idea or come-on."
Two bills, proposed by Rep. Roman Pucinski and Sen. Ralph Smith, have recently been introduced in Congress for the formation of ethnic heritage centers. "The bills have a good chance," said Pucinski. "I am amazed at the huge response we have gotten around the country. Not just from ethnics, but from all groups. People want to know about themselves and about each other."
The emotions of ethnics currently flash like electric sparks between poles of anger and fear. Since many have come from, and perhaps have relatives in, countries like Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and others in East Europe where communism rules, ethnics rise with anger against liberal intellectuals and many of the young for whom anticommunism is now a bore.
Because the Vietnam war was and is advertised as a free-world-against-communism struggle, ethnics know whose side they are on. The sight of students marching against the war, supported by universities and liberals, is enraging; moreover, not only have the ethnics fought bravely in past wars with no questions asked, but today it is largely their sons and the blacks – not the affluent, often deferment-protected students – who have been disproportionately drafted first for Vietnam.
The fear of the ethnic is felt most in the potential of what is called the black revolution. Again, liberal and intellectual reformers are involved. For many of the latter, the black revolution is just a handy phrase, stronger than the old cause of civil rights, but essentially the same old things they have always been talking up: black capitalism, equal opportunity, social programs for the ghetto.
Since many of those who most want to reform the inner city live safely and conveniently in the outer city, the ethnics see themselves locked in a box tied with pretty social-reform ribbons, plus a glued-on message from the liberals: you carry out in practice the ideas of brotherhood that we will keep on preaching in theory.
The ethnics see it differently. It is their jobs up for grabs as more blacks are trained, their neighborhoods where racial tension is worst, their families who will be victims of a high crime rate. None of this is an excuse for ethnic bursts of racism, of which there have been many. But it is reason to wonder whether the spontaneous and emotional racism of an ethnic in Gary, Indiana, is more easily excused and cured than the calculated and rationalized racism of, say, a WASP in Montgomery County.
With the average industrial worker making $8,632 a year (in 1968), money is perhaps the main worry of the ethnics. According to HUD Secretary George Romney, $27,000 is now the going rate for a house; on the average, a family would need an income of nearly $14,000 to build and keep a house, a sum few in the working class can raise.
Living just above the poverty level, ethnics are ignored by federal assistance programs designed for the ladder-rung below. Few wives can work because baby-sitters are beyond the budget; adult education is not widely available. Small irks like rising bus fares only increase the pinch. The ethnics are victimized by inflation – his money buys less – and by anti-inflation moves, because layoffs hit him first. "Manufacturers," said Barbara Mikulski, "with their price fixing, shoddy merchandise and exorbitant repair bills, are gouging him to death. When he complains about costs, he is told that it is the 'high cost of labor' that is to blame. Yet he knows he is the 'labor' and that in terms of real dollars, he is going backwards."
The recent report from the Labor Department on the working class says that economically the ethnic is squeezed in another way – his earning capacity levels off just when family expenses continue to rise because of costs like teen-age and college-bound children, car and home improvements, and medical expenses for aging parents. As a result the ethnic pressures for higher and higher wages, exactly what union after union is doing. Even here, as with the Cleveland bus drivers recently, the workers often strike not only management but also their own leaders, when the latter give in too soon.
The future of ethnic Americans, as with the blacks below and the middle-class above, is not their own to decide. Three sources of cooperation could begin to reach out; the intellectuals, the church and the government.
During the last decade, the intellectuals, social reformers and the men of wealth and power who back them were preoccupied with the problems of the blacks and the students in a coalition to end racism and the war. Aside from the question of whether this reaching out by the intellectuals was genuine concern or mere dabbling, the ethnics were seen as untouchables; they were both antiblack and pro-war. A dialogue between ethnics and intellectuals is urgently needed, but it can only happen on two conditions. First, that the intellectuals drop their arrogance toward people who earn their living by using their muscles, not their minds; and second, the intellectuals must realize that the ethnics are not lashing out from hate but from fear.
The ethnics’ side of the dialogue must be based on the realization that the war is hurting them perhaps more than anyone; they should not need more inflation, unemployment or lack of community services to convince them that Vietnam has gone on too long. At home, the ethnics ought to begin seeing that the peace movement is more than Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; supporting peace doesn't mean supporting long hair or the Viet Cong flag or mouth-offs.
As for ethnics and racism, the intellectuals must explain that the blacks and white working class are actually in the same urban fix together. Instead of letting them fight each other for useless inner-city leftovers, the intellectuals could act as a referee, creating a black-white coalition based on hard, mutual needs, not any sentimental notions of integration.
The opportunity for the church to assist ethnics lies not in starting anything new but with continuing and strengthening old ties. The church was standing up for immigrants long before the government, through its social teachings and priests like Charles Owen Rice of Pittsburgh. If the seminaries can turn out more priests who care about social justice for ethnics, and not priests who want to play games with new liturgies or fight the bishops about birth control, the dynamics of the parish offer considerably more than symbolic hope.
The recent government report on ethnics is little more than a first puff of air into a trial balloon. Many are suspicious that the Nixon administration is only making the appearance of a move, with no substance. In fact, the confidential report reinforces this suspicion by saying candidly that the ethnics are "overripe for a political response." Realizing the report would cost impossible billions to carry out, the President is advised to do cheap things like making national awards for outstanding craftsmen, issue ethnic postage stamps and other items from a summer clearance sale.
It will take a little more than a report and public relations gimmicks to con votes from the ethnics, however. On July 1, two days after the report was leaked, Leonard Woodcock, the new president of the United Automobile Workers, said in Cincinnati that the Nixon administration seemed to be "dedicated to tearing the nation apart," that its policies had set "region against region and race against race." Many have been saying this all along, but predictably it came from chronic dissenters. It may even have surprised the White House that a spokesman for the working class would add his voice so vigorously to the disillusioned chorus.
The recent speeches and sayings of Spiro Agnew are seen by many ethnics, including Msgr. Baroni, as stirring the fears, not the hopes, of the working class. In taking the low road, the administration is no better than George Wallace, who is also using ethnics for his own political ends.
Which of these three groups – the intellectuals, the church or the government – steps forward first is not as crucial as the need for all to respond simultaneously. There is no doubt that the ethnics hold a great balance of power, and that it will be used one way or the other. What still needs to be made clear is that ethnics have a strong culture, a deep commitment to country – this one – and a solid sense of fairness. These are also assets of great value.