| Chapter : | Introduction |
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where labor costs were significantly lower. Oil, as it was again in the summer of 2010, was in the news. An oil embargo spurred a dramatic rise in inflation, which destroyed any gains the working class had made on the labor front, precipitating calls for energy independence, calls that are still being heard in Washington. In an uncertain economic time, the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1970s were considered threats to the jobs of white men and an attack on the sanctity of the family. In the 2010s, some attach those same fears to illegal immigration and gay marriage. Finally, at that time, just as in the first years of the Obama Administration, an unpopular war was continuing to claim working-class lives. In Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class, film theorists Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich describe the historical moment of the 1970s:
John Bodnar puts it more succinctly: “In the 1960s Roosevelt’s party fell apart over its war policies in Vietnam and its plan to promote racial justice” (xxxi).
The white working class was losing its tenuous foothold on the ladder to the middle class. Encouraged by conservative politicians and perhaps by some conservative commentators, members of the working class found people to blame for their plight—and that blame was not directed at the corporate leaders or politicians responsible for the war.3 If blue collar workers were being laid off from jobs in factories and mills, African Americans and affirmative action were to blame. If working-class men were losing control at home, the women’s movement was at fault. If working-class sons were dying in a war in Southeast Asia, the sons and