While Gingrich is more of a hard scrabble upstart when it comes to his family story, he certainly belongs to the inner circle of the super rich today. And if you have been following Rachel Maddow’s coverage of Gingrich, you know that she has successfully argued that he is little better than a scam artist, using his run for president to sell books written by himself and his wife Calista and using his consulting firms as tax write-offs, for example. But whatever Gingrich’s millions or his ethical problems,  he has been able to paint Romney—with Romney’s considerable assistance—as the only nervous, goofy, out-of-touch super rich guy in the race.

As the Republican primary continues on its strange course, I am convinced that Occupy Wall Street deserves a great deal of credit for our ability to see Romney as a purveyor of “vulture capitalism.” While the idea of the 1% wasn’t even on the radar during the Iowa Straw Poll in August, since then the Occupy movement has shifted the conversation, and the blame for our current economic crisis, to the wealthy.  Even now that the Occupy movement has been forced into hibernation for the winter, it has resurrected the grammar of the iconic rich dude in all of his manifestations—a visual grammar with a rich and complicated history.  That image of the 1% has been applied most effectively in this campaign season to Romney. We’ve seen this hundreds of times, in articles and blog posts, and perhaps most iconically in this disturbing photo taken when Romney was the head of Bain Capital.

Given the pervasive use of the super rich caricature, I thought it might be useful to take a look at its cultural history. One of the oldest negative 20^th century stereotypes of the rich is the fat cat. The term in its current usage, as an insult for wealthy businessmen, was first coined by Frank Kent writing for H.L. Menken in The American Mercury. By the 1930s the term was used to insult specifically those wealthy businessmen who bankrolled politicians. The fat cat in political cartoons is usually represented as an obscenely fat orange tabby cat standing on two legs. He is always masculine, humanoid, and he towers over everyone else in the image—all the while wearing a dark suit, a cigar, and a sneer. In recent years the fat cat has been used by political cartoonists and activists in the US and around the world. Wisconsin-based cartoonist Mike Konopacki has a nice fat cat, and here’s a larger-than-life inflatable fat cat strangling a worker at a protest in front the World Bank. The fat cat is not to be confused with the black cat, an image used by Progressive Era IWW cartoonists to symbolize worker sabotage and resistance which has been making a comeback by way of Occupy Wall Street.

The robber baron is a close cousin of the fat cat. He is always male, top-hatted, holding a cigar, usually fat, and often very tall in scale compared to other figures in the image. The modern day iconography dates back to the 1870s era cartoons of Thomas Nast, poking fun at Andrew Carnegie and Jay Rockefeller, but the term is much older. According to Wikipedia the term dates back to Germany in the Middle Ages, when powerful Catholic bishops were allowed to collect tolls from passing ships on the Rhine river, sometimes stringing iron chains across the river. At times they overstepped their boundaries, and were perceived as “robbing” more than their fair share of tolls.

The Monopoly Man got his start as “Milburn Pennybags,” the capitalist icon of the best selling Parker Brothers Monopoly game in the 1930s. Mr. Pennybags is in considerably better shape than his fat cat/robber baron brethren. He is trim, agile, and more benignly comic. Like them, he does wear a top hat and a tux coat, but he usually holds a cane and has a monocle. In recent years Milburn Pennybags has become a counter-revolutionary icon, especially in the hands of LA street artist “Alec.” The New Yorker seemed to be channeling a rioting horde of Milburn Pennybag-types with its cover mocking the 1% last Fall. According to internet rumors, Mitt Romney always chooses to be the top hat when he plays Monopoly.

When it comes to animated comic images of the super rich, we have many figures to choose from, including Scrooge McDuck, Mr. Magoo, and Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. But one of more unusual icons is that of the child millionaire Richie Rich. He was born out of the comic series “Little Dot” in 1953, and, according to Wikipedia, he was Harvey Comic’s most popular character for much of the 1960s and 1970s. Richie Rich is usually dressed in blue short pants, an Eton collar, and a large red bow. Unlike his adult counterparts Richie Rich likes to give away his millions. He was turned into an animated television cartoon in the 1980s, and a live action film starring McCauly Caulkin in 1994. In 2011 Ape Entertainment re-licensed Richie Rich, making him into a globe-trotting do-gooder.

There are almost no animated icons of the super rich in feminine form, except perhaps Cruella De Vil. She was created in 1956 by British novelists Dodie Smith (the daughter of a bank manager) whose novel about Dalmations was adapted by Disney in 1961. In the original story Cruella was a London heiress with a 6 million pound fortune (or 1 billion dollars today, according to Forbes Magazine). As a school girl she was expelled for drinking ink. It has been argued that some of De Vil’s extravagances were based on those of the actress Tallulah Bankhead. In the original story, she is married to a furrier who comes off as a hen-pecked husband, but in the Disney version she is definitely a single lady. Her name can be easily parsed. Cruella stands for “cruel,” and “De Vil” is “devil.” She is something of a fashion icon, copied recently by Lady Gaga, and for some inexplicable reason there is a facebook page called “people who think that Nancy Pelosi looks like Cruella De Vil.”

There are many more icons of the rich, of course, and some personal favorites include Thurston Howell, III from Gilligan’s Island, Bruce Wayne (Batman), Willy Wonka and Jed Clampett. But I was surprised to see that the idea of the filthy rich fictional character has become so embedded in our culture that for the last ten years Forbes Magazine has been tracking the fortunes of the 15 wealthiest rich icons. Daddy Warbucks, Santa Claus, Laura Croft, and Jabba the Hut have all appeared on this tongue-in-cheek list.

All this leaves me with more questions than answers. On the one hand I believe that attention must be paid to these burlesques of the super rich, if only to acknowledge that Americans have a penchant for ridiculing both the higher and lower orders in our comedic traditions. It is not just the blue collar bus driver (Ralph Kramden), or the nuclear plant worker (Homer Simpson) that is the butt of the joke in American culture. But for all the laughs we might have at the expense of the super rich, how is that they still have so much power? Is the comedic icon a mere distraction, like everything else in our culture, drawing our attention away from the streets and the voting booth? Or can the representation of the banker as ogre have genuine political impact on the American electorate? If Newt Gingrich becomes the nominee, will his status as a secret member of the “Van Dough” family finally be revealed?

What is your favorite icon of the rich and famous? And what do you think it means?

Kathy M. Newman

I spent many hours thinking about that confluence this past summer and fall, as part of a community book group reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The strongest theme in our discussions was the persistence of racism.  Across different races, ages, professional backgrounds, and personal histories, we shared a deep frustration that decades of conversation, activism, policy-making, and education had not eradicated racism.  Instead, we agreed, as Alexander argues, it had become more indirect and therefore even harder to fight.

Alexander traces how the war on drugs established and legalized discriminatory practices that have permanently disenfranchised and economically marginalized tens of thousands of African-Americans, mostly men. According to Alexander, more black men are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850.  They are targeted, mistreated by the “justice” system, sent to jail in disproportionate numbers, and legally discriminated against when they are released. She explains that it’s now practically impossible to appeal or challenge this discrimination, because the standard of proof is intentional, conscious behavior, and in a world where we’ve all learned that colorblindness is the ideal, most people are convinced that they are not racist.

Her critique of the war on drugs and the mass incarceration of black men is convincing in itself, and the book is well worth reading.  (For a quick take, you can listen to my interview with Alexander on Lincoln Avenue). But as someone who studies social class, I’ve also been thinking about why the problems Alexander lays out are issues of economic justice as well as racial justice.

Both Alexander and Heather Ann Thompson, a historian who has been studying mass incarceration through the lens of the Attica uprising, point out that the war on drugs took aim at African Americans because Republicans were trying to garner support from southern white Democrats, including many in the working class.  Going back as far as the Nixon administration, but especially under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, conservatives used racial imagery to foster a culture of fear and blame, defining African-Americans as criminals (think Willie Horton) and setting more stringent sentencing guidelines for crack than for powder cocaine. As both Alexander and Thompson point out, urban areas and especially African Americans were targeted in the war on drugs even though clear evidence showed that they were not the ones most involved in drug trafficking. Sadly, this strategy worked politically in part because it tapped into the same white working-class racial resentments that Nixon had successfully leveraged in his presidential campaigns.

Though some white working-class voters thought they were protecting their interests by supporting the war on drugs, the effect was quite the opposite.  Thompson argues that the mass incarceration of blacks contributed to the decline of the labor movement over the past four decades.  She writes, “prisons have long been some of the most exploitative workplaces in America, and thus, the fate of American workers and the history of the American justice system are inexorably linked.” As incarceration rates rose, regulations limiting the use of prison labor were overturned in many states, allowing companies to hire prisoners for far less the minimum wage.  So not only were prisoners exploited as workers, but jobs that might have yielded something close to a living wage in the community were moved into prisons.  As Thompson claims, “There was clear evidence that free-world wages had been cut and jobs had been eliminated as a result of prison labor.”

The expansion of prisons did create some jobs, especially for white workers in the largely rural areas where the new prisons were built.  Of course, those jobs were usually not unionized, nor did they pay well.  In Youngstown, the escape of six prisoners from a medium-security Corrections Corporation of America prison on the edge of the city was tied, in part, to the low wages paid to guards, who were easily bribed to look the other way as a hole was cut in the fence.  When guards at that prison organized a union, CCA temporarily shut it down.  Certainly, the Youngstown story shows that the prison economy does not, in the long run, yield significant numbers of good jobs.

Of course, mass incarceration has the most direct, dramatic impact on economic conditions in African-American working-class communities. Blacks have the highest poverty rates in the U.S. – 27.4%, compared with 9.9% for whites, according to 2010 data from the Institute for Research on Poverty. High rates of imprisonment among African-American men, often for relatively minor offenses that would yield little or no prison time for whites, don’t just undercut household economies while someone is in prison.  Being convicted of a felony creates long-term economic marginalization. Once labeled as a felon, an individual’s chances for employment of any kind are severely limited.  Nor do most ex-convicts qualify for any form of public assistance, and in many cases, they cannot even return to their families, because public housing bans residents with criminal records. Alexander notes that with so few economic options, becoming more involved in the drug trade becomes the only reasonable option for many ex-convicts – an option that makes them vulnerable to a return to prison or a violent death.

As many in working-class studies have argued, though, class is not only a matter of economics.  The working class has historically developed and relied upon strong communal ties that help individuals and families get through hard times and that create the conditions for collective action for social and economic change.  Perhaps the most moving part of Alexander’s book is her discussion of how individuals, families, and communities struggle to deal with the shame of imprisonment.  Families don’t speak openly about their relatives who are in prison, she writes, and those who have been in jail often break ties with old friends and relatives. Alexander writes that the stigma associated with criminality “has turned the black community against itself, destroyed networks of mutual support, and created a silence about the new caste system among many of the people most affected by it.”

Alexander closes The New Jim Crow with a call to action: we need a new civil rights movement, she writes, bringing together people of all races and classes, who will fight against mass incarceration on the basis of human rights and justice.  Such a movement will not succeed, she argues, if it involves only African Americans, nor can it succeed if whites and others are encouraged to participate solely on the basis of their self-interest.  Just as with the marches and voter registration drives across the South in the 1950s and 60s, the efforts we commemorate with this week’s MLK holiday, people of conscience must come together to fight injustice simply because it’s wrong.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

I thought about that conversation recently at a meeting at the pithead of the long defunct Snowdown Colliery, between Canterbury and Dover in East Kent. I met with a varied set of people interested in saving what remains of the pithead buildings – including the local MP and councillor, a representative of the historic buildings trust, and three former miners. The site offers the last remaining above ground evidence that there was ever a Kent coalfield. When coal extraction was ended in the mid-1980s, the winding gear was destroyed but many of the ancillary buildings were left intact. The passage of time has not been kind to them; saplings have sprung up across the site, birds nest in exposed rafters and brambles, and ivy cling to the walls. However, the plan is to purchase them from the coal authority and create a mixed use development, which would, in part at least, memorialisethe local coal industry.

Industrial heritage projects like this can be controversial; for some they represent ‘smokestack nostalgia’ or even ‘ruin porn’ – the uncritical celebration of traditional industries while ignoring their numerous negative legacies.  During the 1980s, some on the left in the UK lined up to attack the growth of the heritage industry, a Disneyfied version of the nation’s material past.  They argued that  the sentimental, conservative, and largely uncritical preservation of the built environment glossed over more critical aspects of history, including evidence of working-class life.

Lately, this concern has lighted on the contemporary publishing trend of coffee table books that offer beautiful images of on industrial ruins. Shelves in the fine art sections of certain bookshops groan beneath the weight of this deindustrial aesthetic.  While critics don’t always say so, I think the objection is, at least in part, to the absence of labor both substantively and rhetorically in the text. These books celebrate beauty in decay and the grandeur of decline, but most mention little or nothing of the people who once toiled in the buildings or their fate since closure.

When the group was assembled at Snowdown colliery, we set off for a quick tour of the site. The various buildings were pointed out, their original purpose explained, and their projected use outlined. After a time the discussion turned to a rather involved debate about the legal issues which beset the ownership of the site and might still scupper plans for its restoration. As the discussion extended and became more specialised, I felt a tug at my sleeve as George, one of the former miners present, invited me for his own tour of the site.  We walked around the pithead and talked about the mine in its heyday, and about the village and community it had supported. This mine, along with much of the Kent coalfield, had been populated by miners looking for work who travelled down from the north of England after the Great War in 1918. He talked about the way these incomers had been distrusted by the local population and the way that legacy still persists at times, including in the way  the Kent coalfield dialect still carries traces of northern influences, reflecting the relative isolation of coalminers in this area.

As we walked among the decaying buildings, we reflected not so much upon the architecture, impressive though that was, but on the skill of the craftsmen who had rendered material the architect’s plans — a pediment here, a perfectly executed circle of brick there. Towards the end of our informal tour, I asked George why he wanted to see the buildings saved.  It was, he said, because so many of his friends and family members had worked there, been injured or killed in the pit, “good men” he said. He wanted something physical left to invite people to pause and think about one aspect of Kent’s industrial past and the part played by working-class people.  When I told George about my former student, he laughed and agreed this generational amnesia was common even in his own village where children and young adults, who in former times would have themselves made their way into colliery employment, were now almost entirely ignorant of the purpose of the site’s buildings.

This, then, is the real the value of our industrial past. Former factories and other buildings cannot all be saved of course, but some should, and historical sites should include the stories of labor – both in the sense of the work itself and the trade union movement — and of working-class people. Without physical reminders of previous ways of living and being in the world, our ability to read the past is impoverished. Their mere existence elicits memory and debate. Importantly, such remembrance is not simply nostalgic. Rather, I believe, it reflects a more complex desire for recognition for working-class life, the acknowledgement that something important went on here that others should know about now and in the future. The desire to preserve industrial heritage sites does not idealise the past — the deaths and injuries George spoke of surely negate that. Rather,  it speaks to a simple desire for dignity. George and his former workmates became involved in the preservation project due to a sense of debt they feel towards their work and comrades. They seem to feel  a moral responsibility, a custodianship for their industry, even though it is long deceased.

Kent is a county that has seen more than its share of industrial loss. However, traces of this legacy are often difficult to find. The County is known as the ‘Garden of England’ a phrase that highlights the agricultural landscape but masks the once extensive industrial and manufacturing aspect of the region including chemicals, gunpowder production, paper-making, ship and submarine construction, and electrical engineering. This history is sometimes marked, a plaque here or possibly a heritage trail there, but it is all too easy to lose the bigger picture of the rich and vibrant working-class cultures and communities that were created as a by-product of industrialisation. That is why projects like Snowdown should matter to us.

Tim Strangleman

Strangleman is a Sociologist at the University of Kent and co-author of the  textbook, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods

They had long bragged about the Youngstown 2010 Plan, which argued that Youngstown could thrive as a smaller city.  The plan called for rezoning, neighborhood stabilization, making the city more attractive to business, and downtown redevelopment.  It drew positive national attention to a community that has been an icon of urban decay ever since the steel mills began closing in the late 70s.  In 2005, the Ohio chapter of the American Planning Association awarded Youngstown its outstanding community planning award. In December 2006, the New York Times Magazine listed the 2010 Plan as one of the 74 best ideas in America in the 6^th Annual Year in Ideas awards, and the American Planning Association gave it an Excellence Award for Public Outreach in 2007.

Youngstown has succeeded in revitalizing its downtown and becoming more attractive to business – so much so that it has been named one of the best cities in the country to start a business. The city has been profiled in Inc., Entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal. The Youngstown Business Incubator has generated a modest number of high-tech jobs downtown, new restaurants and shops have opened, and several developers are renovating old office buildings into apartments.

But despite these signs of progress and growth, we were troubled by the response of city leaders to the Brookings report.  The director of Youngstown’s Community Development Agency said he was “stunned” by the report and found it “hard to believe we’d be classified as the poorest in the nation.”

Perhaps he needs to get out of downtown.  As the Brookings Institution’s report makes clear, the situation in Youngstown’s neighborhoods looks nothing like what’s happening downtown.  According to Brookings, 49.7% of Youngstown residents live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of at least 40%.  The Ohio Department of Development reports that 32.1% of Youngstown residents live in poverty, and between 1999 and 2009, the poverty rate for the broader metro area increased from 12.5% to 16.7%.

Given the effects of the Great Recession, the rate of poverty here is almost certainly even higher today.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the area lost 20,000 jobs between 2007 and 2010.  In other words, the Mahoning Valley lost as many jobs in that period as in any three years during the late 70s and early 80s as the mills were closing.  Worse, 20,000 jobs today represent a larger proportion of the area’s workforce, which has shrunk over the past three decades.

The Brookings Institution report came as no surprise to most Youngstown residents, who see every day how little has been done to alleviate unemployment and ongoing social problems, evident in high rates of crime, poverty, housing vacancy, and blight.  While the city, with aid from the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce and state economic development funds, has attracted new businesses to downtown and cut a deal with a French corporation to expand one of the remaining local steel mills, it has done little to address the problems in the city’s neighborhoods.  Demolition of abandoned property has increased, although at a rate that struggles to keep up with new vacancies resulting from the recession and foreclosure crisis. The city also working on a new zoning plan, but the bulk of the work of neighborhood development has fallen to volunteers and community organizations.  They have been increasingly vocal in their frustrations with what many see as the city’s inertia when it comes to developing neighborhoods other than downtown.

A major local foundation helped establish two thriving non-profit groups, one focused on community organizing and political activism and another on economic development in the city’s neighborhoods.  Energetic, committed organizers from the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative have helped develop more than a dozen new neighborhood associations, and those groups have funneled their energies into issues such as access to healthy food, the quality of housing, human trafficking, voter registration, and other political issues that resonate both locally and nationally.  The MVOC played a key role in founding a statewide group, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which is starting to leverage neighborhood-level work across the state into effective political action.

The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation takes a different approach, focusing its attention on economic issues in targeted neighborhoods.  Working with the neighborhood association in one of the city’s struggling areas, the YNDC developed an urban farm, invested in improving housing stock, mobilized an array of residents and volunteers in a range of community projects, and rehabilitated homes that are then marketed to low-income residents through an affordable housing program.

These efforts are inspiring, but while they are improving the quality of life in Youngstown’s neighborhoods and empowering residents to take action on their own behalf, they do not address the root problem: the lack of good jobs in the city.  That presents a challenge to city government and the regional chamber.  They need to focus their energies on creating jobs in the city, jobs that suit a population with relatively low levels of education, are accessible via public transportation, and pay a living wage. Most of the new jobs in the Valley are being created on the edge of the metropolitan area, in places that city residents can’t get to without reliable private transportation – one of the resources many lack.

Of course, job creation never comes easy. Industries that promise hundreds of new jobs too often either don’t deliver or bring new problems.  Both seem to be playing out in the latest economic development “opportunity” in the Mahoning Valley: hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of the  Marcellus shale.  While the shale industry has already brought some jobs to the area, it also seems to have brought real problems.  On New Year’s Eve, Youngstown experienced a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that seems to be related to a wastewater injection well, and experts are divided on whether fracking threatens the safety of local water.  15 years ago, Youngstown leaders claimed that private prisons would be the answer to the city’s economic woes, but the Corrections Corporation of America created relatively few jobs and a number of local problems, including deepening the city’s image as a crime center.  We hope that local and state officials will be more cautious about fracking.

The Mahoning Valley needs a broad, diversified approach to economic development and serious efforts to strengthen the city’s neighborhoods. Without secure, well-paid jobs, without stable neighborhoods, and in the absence of any political vision to address these issues, urban redevelopment can never truly succeed.

John Russo,  Center for Working-Class Studies

James Rhodes, University of Manchester

But there is another reason I love Christmas that has little to do with my personal traditions. I love it because during this season iconic Christmas characters (like Santa, Rudolph, and Frosty) as well as pundits, preachers, and journalists engage in some surprisingly frank discussions of work, capitalism, and the working class.

Let us start with Bass/Rankin classic, Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer, which first aired in 1964. Some have argued that it is an allegory for the Cold War, with the Bumble representing the Soviet Union, who is tamed by the ultimate American Yukon Cornelius. Others have argued that Rudolph represents the “Red Scare,” which is interesting, because Burl Ives (the show’s narrator, Sam the Snowman), was blacklisted in 1950 in the anti-communist smear pamphlet Red Channels. Unfortunately, Burl Ives cooperated with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) when he told them that he used to attend union meetings with Pete Seeger in order to “stay in touch with working folk.”

My recent viewing of the Christmas classic suggests a slightly different take. The elves in Rudolph are apparently happy on the job. They sing: “We work hard all day/But our work is play.” Hmmmmm. This is the essential myth of the Christmas elf, right? Making Christmas toys is work, but the work is play.

On the other hand, not everyone who wants to work is allowed to work in Rudolph’s world. Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer is a story about workplace discrimination. Hermey the elf, played with what we now interpret as a “gay” voice, doesn’t fit in with the other toy-making elves. Is he discriminated against for being gay? Or because wants to be a dentist? In his signature song he says, “You can’t fire me, I quit.” Rudolph is similarly cheated out of a chance to work for Santa, and all because of his shiny red nose.

Workplace discrimination in Rudolph has a gendered component as well. Rudolph’s mother and his girlfriend Clarice are told by Donner and Santa that looking for Rudolph is “man’s work.” The misfit toys are also deprived of a chance to serve as joy filled bundles on Christmas morning because they have manufacturing defects. Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius rescue the misfit toys by convincing Santa to give them as gifts. Even the Bumble is simply an underutilized employee. When Yukon Cornelius tames the Bumble he explains: “I’ve reformed the Bumble. He wants a job! Look what he can do!” At the sound of these magic words the Bumble tops the Christmas tree with a star.  Indeed, conflicts over imports and fair trade (the embargo on toy imports in Santa Claus is Coming to Town), work stoppages (Santa’s “sickout” in The Year Without a Santa Claus), and working conditions (the life of a clockmaker in The Night Before Christmas) are at or near the center of almost every one of the Bass/Rankin holiday productions.

And how about Dicken’s A Christmas Carol? If ever there was a workplace holiday tale, this is it. Scrooge is a miser who nearly drives his clerk’s family to the poor house. My favorite adaptation of the tale, Scrooged [1988] starring Bill Murray, hits all the right working-class themes. Murray plays a television executive who fires one of his employees, Eliot Loudermilk, in the first scene. Loudermilk goes on to become homeless and comes back to terrorize Murray’s Christmas Carol production with a shot gun. The character of Bob Cratchit is transformed into the character “Grace Cooley,” Murray’s executive secretary. The awesome African American actress Alfe Woodward plays Grace as a single mother who brilliantly makes up for her boss’s shortcomings.

In recent months the character of Scrooge has been called upon to describe the “1%” who control much of the wealth in the US, as identified by the Occupy Wall Street movement. When Jay-Z marketed OWS t-shirts but declined to share any those profits with the movement, a group of artsy jokesters made a statue of Jay-Z in the form of Ebenezer Scrooge.

After Scrooge, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is most often associated with the figure of the miserly malcontent. Just last month President Obama told a rally in Ohio that he hoped Congress would extend the payroll tax rather than play the role of “Grinch.” Shockingly, the now extremely beloved original animated version of Dr. Suess’s popular children’s book, animated by Chuck Jones, was turned down in 1966 by 25 potential television sponsors. Jones remembers that even he was surprised when the show was finally sponsored by the Foundation for Commercial Banks. Jones speculates that the bankers must have missed the moment when the Grinch realizes that “perhaps Christmas doesn’t come from a store.”

Each of these Christmas stories highlights the plight of the downtrodden, the outsider, or the misfit, what Jones called the “slave” or the “reindeer dog” in the Grinch tale. But how far does that critique extend? While Scrooge and the Grinch eventually realize that the “true meaning” of Christmas cannot be bought, when these tales are rebroadcast on television they are sandwiched between dozens of commercials for cars, cell phones, diamonds, slippers, gloves, and video games. Linus may end The Charlie Brown Christmas Special with a passage from the Bible describing the angel telling the shepherds about Jesus’s birth, but you can buy the Deluxe Peanuts Christmas Holiday Specials at Costco right now for under $30.00. I did last month.

In the end, though, the icons of Christmas are highly plastic and can be easily mutated to call for social change. In Denver this month Occupiers were invited to participate in an “Elf Revolt.” The facebook page Occupy Christmas has been active since early November. References to Christmas elves on strike, Scrooge, and the Grinch abound in humor blogs and labor coverage during the holiday season.

And, as much as Fox News broadcasters worry about the “war on Christmas,” the rest of us know that the real war on US soil is being waged by the super rich on the working and middle classes. And we know that on December 26^th it is back to work for those of us who still dream of a merrier, more equal society that could bring us glad tidings and figgy pudding 365 days a year.

Kathy M. Newman

Edsall is a highly respected member of the political punditry who has made a good living covering and analyzing American politics for more than 30 years.  So you’d think he’d know that three items in his lead paragraph are spectacularly false:

• The “Democratic operatives” referred to as hatching the abandonment plan, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, are not employed by the Democratic Party and are, in fact, part of a diverse group of independent Democratic analysts who are seeking to influence the party’s, and especially President Obama’s, 2012 election campaign.  They are influential, but their views are countered by many others, most of whom pay no attention whatsoever to a “working class.”
• Teixeira’s and Halpin’s new paper, The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election, not only does not advocate that the Dems abandon the white working class, but systematically weighs the importance of the white working-class vote in the 12 most important battleground states in next year’s election.  Indeed, as Edsall must surely know, Teixeira, writing with various co-authors over the past decade, has done more than any other political analyst to call attention to the existence of a “working class” in our supposedly “middle-class society.”
• Finally, there is this howler:  “For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters.”  How could Edsall not know how wrong that is? According to his own newspaper’s  comprehensive report of exit polls since 1972, while us white folks have been strongly Republican in presidential elections for decades, we are substantially less so than we used to be.  From 1972 through 1992, for example, whites voted for Democratic presidential candidates only 36% on average, but from 1996 through 2004 the average was 42%, and Obama got 43% in 2008.  Indeed, in the ten presidential elections from 1968 through 2004 white men (the most Republican of demographic groups) on average voted 35% for Dems, but gave Obama 41% of their vote in 2008. Continuous electoral losses for sure, but the opposite of “increasingly severe.”

These are all pretty big mistakes for a political pro.  Edsall’s misreading and mischaracterization of Teixeira and Halpin is probably willful – in order to argue against a straw man or, cable-news style, simply to get attention.   The confusion about white voters, on the other hand, is likely the result of sheer ignorance shared by many in his craft.

In their new study Teixeira and Halpin break down the projected 2012 electorate into three parts:

• People of color (blacks, Latinos, Asians & self-identified “others” of all classes), an increasingly large proportion of the electorate that should constitute 28% in 2012.  This group gave Obama 80% of their vote in 2008, thereby overcoming a 55 to 43% McCain majority among white voters.
• The white middle class (whites with at least a bachelor’s degree), also a growing portion of the electorate that should be 36% of all voters next year.  47% of this group voted for Obama in 2008.
• The white working class (whites without a bachelor’s degree), a declining group in the electorate that should also be 36% in 2012 – the first time in American history that these two groups of whites will make up equal proportions of voters.  In 2008 the white working class nationally gave Obama only 40% of its vote.

Teixeira and Halpin are optimistic about the long-term future of Democrats as we move toward a “majority minority” population by 2050, with people of color (the strongest Dem group) increasing their share of the electorate with each election cycle and the white working class (the strongest GOP group) decreasing its share.  Another demographic reason for optimism, according to Teixeira and Halpin, is that the “millennial” generation (people now aged 10 to 33) has been a strong Democratic group thus far and will also grow over the next several election cycles.  Whites aged 18 to 29 in 2008, for example, were the only white age group that gave Obama a majority – 54%, while whites aged 30 and up voted Dem in the 41-42% range.

While long-term demographics favor Democrats, stagnant economic growth and high unemployment go strongly against them in 2012.  Getting to 270 measures these demographics against economic conditions and Obama’s approval ratings in the 12 battleground states.  This is the part of their analysis that is the most complex and interesting, as each state is perversely unique in how these variables play out.  Michigan, for example, has one of the largest white working classes in the country (52% of the electorate in 2008), but they voted against the national trend, giving Obama a majority of their votes in 2008, but the white middle class in Michigan did not.  Today Michigan has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country (11.1%), but people in Michigan (all classes and colors combined) give Obama a well-above average job approval rating of 50%.

Going state by state and region by region, you get a different picture of the white working class and of the white vote in general.  It turns out that whites, including the white working class, are a lot more diverse politically than the national numbers indicate.  All national numbers – including everyday poll numbers — are distorted by just how one-sidedly Republican white voters are in the South.  Since 1980 white southerners have voted in the low 30s for Democratic presidential candidates, while white voters in the rest of the country have been trending up toward the high 40s.  Indeed, whites in the Northeast have given Dems a majority in the last four presidential elections, while whites in the Midwest and West voted 47% and 49% respectively for Obama.

For an extreme example of how diverse white working-class voters can be, consider this: in 2008, 57% of them voted for Obama in Massachusetts compared with only 9% in Alabama.   Besides Michigan and Massachusetts, 12 other states had white working-class majorities for Obama in 2008: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington.

The broad patterns that Teixeira and Halpin assert do apply in most states, and the terms of their analysis are interesting and insightful in every state.  They do not do enough, in my view, to emphasize the diversity among white voters and especially among working-class whites – by state and region, by age, by religion, and by whether they are in a union household or not.  But their state-by-state analysis illustrates again and again what a wildly, quirkily diverse group working-class voters are.  And unlike the various pundits who have been commenting on their work, they never purport to guess at what “the white working class” thinks and feels because they know they’re not all Archie Bunker and his wife Edith and that some folks have been a-changin’ in the past 30 years.

Jack Metzgar, Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies

For a long time we wait in the cold, not really moving, and she has to be at work by 11:00 AM.  She rarely calls, so I want to share the morning with her no matter what she’s doing. Regularly, my husband takes food to our small town’s pantry, but I’ve never been there.  I don’t go.  I don’t offer to work there either, and I could.  I really could.

Inside this whale’s belly my daughter and I struggle to speak.  These days everything I   say makes her feel defensive.  I believe she has depression, maybe she dislikes her life and displaced anger is not uncommon.  What mother wants to see her child’s arms flailing?  It is difficult for both of us.

My eyes are open and looking into the faces of America.  The elders are here.  Some with their scarves and hats and mittens, and others, like me, dressed wrong for this weather.  At the parking lot’s perimeter, there are odd pieces of cast-off furniture: a brown corduroy couch, loveseat, mismatched dressers, and a nice old-lady chair letting the shade sit there first and then the sun.  To our left there’s a box of knit caps – in Appalachia, we called them toboggans — for babies.  Off to the right, there’s a table of coats with a “one per family” sign printed with a black sharpie on a piece of cardboard.  A big swell of odd clothing lies on a picnic table by the shed, and folks constantly look sideways as they pick through it.  Milling around there’s a heavyset woman with her little boy in a toboggan with a red-face and camo sweatshirt, which is not nearly warm enough for this morning.  A small boy in a tan raincoat carries a pair of white tennis shoes he found on the table to his mother, and there’s a bag of broken glazed donuts being passed down the line.  Everyone is welcome to eat as many as they want.  It feels like communion.  Yes.  Our faces shine in the light, and we are, however slowly, making our way to the altar.

My daughter knows she must not miss work.  I point to the man who seems to be in charge.  I say, “Go tell him you have to go to work, and ask if I can stand for you and get the food.”

All this time she has struggled to think of things to say to me.  I’m just sort of numb.  Up since 6:00 AM, I’ve already scrubbed floors, started laundry and picked up a house suffering from clutter.  She tells me, “Did you hear about the boy on his bicycle at the lake last night?  He was hit and killed.  They are reopening Natalie Wood’s case after thirty years.”  Really?  I want to say, but I’m quiet.  Why must death always be at the center of our lives?  Last week didn’t I go to three funerals?  Wasn’t one of them a good friend to my daughter?  A good-hearted man with a terrible disease, only forty-five years old and gone

forever.  She leaves the line to speak with the man in charge.

“Let’s go Mom; I’m taking you home for a scarf and gloves.  You can get your car.  He said it’s okay for you to get the food.”  I nod and move out of line.  In silence we walk to her car.

She tells me, “I’m leaving the apartment unlocked.  These are the only keys we have.  Here’s a paper you will need to get the food.  I love you Mom, and thank you, thanks for doing this.”  A sound comes into her voice I have not heard forever, she leans over, and gives me a kiss.  “I love you,” she whispers.  “Live well,” I answer.

Now, I must remember the way back to the food pantry.  I forget one turn and wind up near the railroad tracks.  I turn around.  When I see the chicken house sign, I know I’m on the right path. But I have lost my place in line.  This is the story that keeps   happening to all of us, but didn’t I read somewhere the last shall be first?  And that white-haired man in his warm green coat, didn’t I hear him tell a tall boy wearing an orange knit hat, “Yes, yes you can stand for your grandma and your mother.”  And didn’t that boy grin at me saying, “They had to go to the car.  My grandma is old and my Mom has a neurology disease. She has MS.  She can’t stand too long.”  I saw his grandmother’s pale face under her stocking cap, watched her wobbly gait steadied on the arm of her daughter who is younger than me.

In our long line there’s not one person of color because this is the north end of our county, but I know ten miles down the road people are waiting/wanting/hoping the wind may die down and quit blowing them like leaves.  Odd sizes of baby diapers sit under a sign that says, “Please do not take for relatives or friends.” You must think only of yourself.  These are the rules for survival.  Everyone in line knows the rules, but one package of diapers doesn’t have a size marked.  Like a crystal ball, mothers lift it up and try to guess its mystery.

Against the gravel, I stomp and stomp my feet. Without thinking, I am learning this new dance.  About twenty people have arrived since I went to get my own car.  I check to be sure the paper my daughter gave me is in my pocket.  For her scarf and gloves, I am grateful.  The newcomers are mostly women.  Elderly. White hair, walkers, and canes.  Oh Lord, I think, who will carry their food inside when they get home?  I step out of line, go to the place where first we started.  “Do you remember me?  I was just here with my daughter.  She had to go to work.”

“Yes, I remember you.  You were with the woman in a black coat.”  And the tall boy in his orange knit cap nods and smiles.

“Well, would you mind if I step back into line here?  I have to get my mother-in-law to physical therapy by noon.”

“Sure.  Jump right back in here,” the woman replies.

A first-grade boy swings the bag of broken donuts.  He stops in front of us.  “Want a donut for a penny?” he asks.  His mop of brown hair and grin are contagious.  We start laughing. All of us.  It ripples up and down our line.  “An entrepreneur,” I comment.  The woman behind me says, “Yes.”  Our laughter and this cold, hurting air starts an old man’s chronic cough.  We watch him struggle.  We hear his phlegm rattle and somehow it chokes us all.

We are about twelve feet from the white door.  A lady in a mauve coat opens it every so often and says, “Three of you may come inside now.  Bring your numbers.”  I think of heaven. I think of all the people who must wait their turn.  People here are not grumpy.  Lord, they are pleasant.  All these volunteers who have been here for several hours setting this up and the woman with black-rimmed glasses who checks me in with her big ledger, the woman who saw my I don’t know what to do next look and leaned closer to ask me, “Is this your first time?”

“Yes, yes.  It’s my first time.  I’m here for my daughter.  She had to go to work.”

“Tell me her name.”

“Julie.  Julie Brown.”

There’s a box with note cards she thumbs.  It looks like my recipe box.  “Here she is.  Now, just find her name in the book.  Sign her name with your initials after it.  Give me your number.”  She sounds like my second grade teacher, and I do just as I’m told.

My number is four.  There are four people in my daughter’s family.  Two of them are children.  “We have another four,” a man yells to his co-workers in the back of this huge unheated garage.  And bags of food are placed into a deep plastic wheelbarrow.  My number four lies in there too.  It feels like I’ve hit the jackpot at a quarter casino machine.  A man pushes my wheelbarrow toward the produce.  Cabbage, green peppers, onions, acorn squash, apples and ten pounds of potatoes get carefully loaded.  Someone hands over a big frozen turkey, a small roast, juice drinks.  Another voice tells me to take a jug of laundry detergent.  Every voice is cheerful.  The wheelbarrow aches under its weight.  “Lead the way,” the man smiles at me.

“The tan Chevy, over there,” I say, choking on something I can not name.

His cheeks flush from the cold, and both our bifocals help us to see everything more clearly.  Together, we lift and load what has been given into my car.  “Have a happy Thanksgiving,” he says.  “God bless you, all of you,” I tell him.  Our words stir the air like church bells calling us back to something we once knew and must never forget.

Jeanne Bryner

Jeanne Bryner is a poet, a former emergency room nurse, and a community affiliate of the Center for Working-Class Studies

The resistance began quickly over Ohio Governor John Kasich’s 302-page bill – Senate Bill 5 — that eviscerated public sector bargaining.  The extreme bill went even further than other states had dared to go: it would abolish binding arbitration, outlaw fair share provisions, declare strikes unlawful, and completely eliminate many key issues from collective bargaining, including health care plan design, privatization, and staffing levels. Thousands of public and private sector union members and their allies showed up for rallies and hearings at the statehouse.

After the Governor padlocked the doors of the People’s House and pushed the bill through, over 10,000 volunteers collected signatures on petitions to bring the issue to the ballot.  Those petitions filled a semi-truck that was the focus of a terrific parade, delivering the boxes representing Ohio voters’ commitment to worker justice to the Secretary of State’s office.  The mood was festive, proud, and industrial.  My wife (an AFSCME member), two of my daughters, and I marched behind the lawmakers who had voted against SB5.  The Ohio Secretary of State’s office had to stop the petitions from coming into their office until a structural engineer assured us that the office building floor could withstand the weight of the boxes of justice.

Community support grew throughout the campaign with the help of our Outreach Director Karen Gasper.  Much of that support came from churches across the state.  African-American churches brought their members to the polls for early voting.  A Youngstown Catholic Church sponsored a “Blue Mass” for the police, but the special service soon expanded to include other public servants all dressed in blue.  Many faith-based groups, including Lift Dayton and St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Cleveland, held educational forums that brought out scores of members and supporters.  Toledo worshipers held a large event to bring those of faith together in their efforts to defeat Issue 2.  The United Church of Christ spoke out forcefully in opposition to SB 5.  The Catholic Bishops posted social teaching on their website to educate Catholics about the issue.

The effort pushed forward to include student organizers on Ohio college campuses.  The bill would have gutted all collective bargaining rights for a large percentage of faculty, even as a potential strike at Youngstown State University and an organizing campaign at University of Akron during the campaign demonstrated the power of collective bargaining in higher education.

Safety forces pulled together to host anti-SB5 events throughout the state.  Rallies were held with incredible turnout rates in rural areas of Ohio.  Harley riders circled the Statehouse on their hogs.  Workers spoke out and wrote letters to the editors.  Elected officials who voted against Senate Bill 5 were especially helpful in many areas of the state, including some Republicans.  It was truly an 88-county campaign of working people and their allies pulling together in unity.

We did face some challenges to that unity. When Governor Kasich and his friends went after voters’ rights, many African-American leaders called upon labor to lead a citizen’s veto against what is being called the “Voter Suppression Act.” While still fighting SB5, a new coalition was built linking organized labor with African-American organizations in ways that I have never seen in Ohio.  SB5 volunteers circulated petitions fighting the voter suppression bill, and what had started as an obstacle to unity became the glue. By Election Day, 93% of African Americans voted to overturn SB5, according to a poll conducted by the AFL-CIO.

Throughout the petition drive and the campaign on Issue 2 (as SB5 was identified on the November ballot), the Ohio Democratic Party stood firmly on the side of workers.  The Party worked hard to collect signatures, recruit volunteers, and get out no votes on Issue 2.  The ODP brought out nearly 5,000 volunteers to add to the ranks recruited by labor and community organizations. It was an impressive effort that demonstrates the values of the Party, even in a nonpartisan election.

Of course, on the ground organizing is only one part of politics today.  The media campaign over SB5 was also worker-centered. Action-packed ads, produced by The New Media Firm, featured Ohio workers, citizens who explained why they valued those workers, and an ad featuring Ohio hero John Glenn urging Ohio voters to stand up for our “everyday heroes” by voting no.

One of those ads featured 78-year-old Marlene Quinn, who told the story of how her great-granddaughter was saved by Cincinnati firefighters.  The other side recognized the power of that story, so they sliced her words and added material to create an ad in which Quinn seemed to support Issue 2.  Thirty television stations pulled the offensive ad with the stolen, remixed story. .  Yet, even as the political firestorm coined “Grannygate” was burning, Governor Kasich expressed his support for the tactic.

The ads and mailers supporting SB5 were, to a large extent, made possible by outside money, though we will never know exactly how much or where it came from. Most groups supporting the bill will not disclose their funders. Undisclosed amounts of out-of-state cash poured in through groups such as Citizens United (the Citizens United) and the Alliance for American Future. The Alliance flooded the state with mail marked with a Virginia return address that was linked back to former Vice President Chaney’s daughter. The Ohio Liberty Council (a Tea Party group), the Republican Governor’s Association, and the Ohio Republican Party also jumped into the fray.

New media also demonstrated the intensity on our side.  The pro-Issue 2 “Building a Better Ohio’s” Facebook page had 4,368 likes and comments from 1,488 people.  Those numbers were dwarfed by the more than 100,000 likes and 10,847 comments on We Are Ohio’s page opposing SB5.  Our new media program yielded incredible support, including over 11,000 contributors.

In the end, more Ohioans cast votes against Governor Kasich’s top initiative than they did for Governor Kasich a year earlier.  It was a blow away election, with workers winning 61.3% of the vote, including the majority of the vote in 82 out of 88 counties. Participation was higher in this off-year general election than in any other in the history of Ohio.

While union members were incredibly supportive, with an overwhelming 86% showing their solidarity against SB5, 57% of independent voters stood with them.  An even stronger message to the Governor is that 30% of Republicans voted against Issue 2.  Indeed, 26% of those who voted for Kasich just a year ago voted no on Issue 2.

Ohio history suggests that the vote on Issue 2 might predict a larger change in the state’s political climate. In 1958 working people were also campaigning for voters to reject Issue 2.  That year, Issue 2 was a Right-to-Work law.  Two thirds of all Ohioans voted against that issue. Voters also tossed out all the elected officials who had supported the anti-union initiative. It was a clean sweep that tamed anti-worker Ohio politicians for years.  But one need not look back 50 years to know how these out of touch politicians might be punished now. Polls show that the majority of voters will punish legislators who continue to press issues that were in SB5, even the more “popular” parts of it.  Just look to this year’s council elections in Cincinnati.  All four council members who had supported Issue 2 lost their reelection bids.  Perhaps Governor Kasich is lucky that he doesn’t come up for reelection until 2014.

It does seem as if he may have heard the voters’ message. The week after Election Day, the Governor might have shown he is changing his approach; he reached an agreement with the largest state union after just a couple of sessions. The agreement freezes wages for three years but restores step increases and furlough days. He also started to talk more seriously about one of his key campaign issues – jobs.

John W. Ryan

John W. Ryan was first elected president of Cleveland area’s CWA Local 4309 in 1981 at age 21 and was later the principal officer of the Cleveland AFL-CIO Federation of Labor; he served as senior consultant to We Are Ohio and is State Director for U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.

At virtually the same moment Time magazine mounted a slide show on its website of the five most “colorful” celebrity critics of Occupy Wall Street. At the top of the list was Frank Miller, author/illustrator of 300, Sin City and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns who called the protestors “a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.” Also in the top five were Ben Stein, long time Republican-identified star of the game show Win Ben Stein’s Money and All Clear eye solution commercials, The View talk show host Elizabeth Hasselbeck, hyperbolic pundit Glenn Beck, and Frasier star Kelsey Grammer.

Though this recent news coverage of celebrity involvement in politics is almost parodically superficial, political celebrity is hardly the latest fad. Activism by actors is as old as Hollywood itself . As Steven J. Ross argues in his new book, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (2011), the power of Hollywood celebrities to effect real political change dates back to the first red scare in US history, when J. Edgar Hoover ordered FBI agents in to investigate left-leaning stars. In 1922 FBI agents reported back to Hoover that “numerous movie stars” were taking “an active part in the Red movement in this country.” These actors, the agents reported, were “hatching a plan to circulate ‘Communist propaganda…via the movies.’”

If The New York Times is right (and I hope it is) and Occupy Wall Street represents the legitimate beginnings of the third progressive movement in modern American politics, then Ross’s book is a timely reminder that we should treat celebrities’ involvement in politics seriously. With Hollywood Left and Right, Ross has produced a thoroughly researched, extremely readable, and fascinating account of Hollywood stars, on the left as well as the right, who have used their money, influence, and star power, as well as their considerable organizing and leadership talents to create, sustain, and shape American political movements.

Ross has spent much of his career finding the connections between popular films, film stars, and working class and left politics. His seminal Working Class Hollywood offered the counter-intuitive thesis that working class politics could be found in early silent films, and in this book Ross argued that unions were among the most enthusiastic early adopters of film technology for their cause.

With Hollywood Left and Right, Ross gives us ten engaging biographies of some of the most prominent and political Hollywood stars and moguls, from studio head Louis B. Mayer to Charlie Chaplin, Edward G. Robinson, Harry Belafonte, George Murphy, Warren Beatty, Charlton Heston, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For readers like myself who did not grow up in the 1950s and 1960s, the biographies of Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda are especially surprising. In the Jane Fonda chapter Ross explains how Fonda’s momentary lapse in judgment during a trip to Vietnam labeled her forever as Hanoi Jane, but Ross also shows why her long, committed political career should be seen in greater detail and complexity. Fonda was an important foot soldier as well as a leader and strategist for the New Left—an activist more committed to stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors than to becoming a high profile emblem of the cause. Likewise the stereotype of Reagan as an “actor turned politician” does little justice to Reagan’s long, sometimes contradictory, but surprisingly intellectual and well-thought-out transition from the silver screen to the presidency.

But what about Hollwood and the working class? What can Ross’s history of political celebrities tell us about this fragile and fascinating relationship? Ross shows at least three ways that political celebrities have connected to the working class over the last century:1) many political celebrities came from working-class backgrounds and/or had working class sympathies from a young age; 2) many political celebrities have played working-class characters; 3) many political celebrities, both left and right, have understood that their audiences were mostly working-class and have used the populist rhetoric of “ordinary Americans” to explain their political actions.

Of the Hollywood luminaries that Ross profiles, Louis B. Mayer, Charlie Chaplin, and Edward G. Robinson had the most hard-scrabble childhoods. Mayer, born Lazar Meir in the Ukraine, migrated to Canada in the early 1900s,where his father became a junk dealer. For London-born Chaplin, after his parents divorced he was “plunged into the harsh underbelly of Victorian London.” It was there, according to Ross, that the humiliation Chaplin suffered at the hands of condescending reformers and do-gooders was even worse than being cold and hungry. Edward G. Robinson was a Romanian immigrant whose parents sent their sons to America one by one, as they could afford to, after Robinson’s brother Jack was killed in Romania by an anti-Semitic mob. Robinson later attended PS 20 in New York City, living with his family in a “cramped Broome Street tenement flat.” And even stars like Reagan and Warren Beatty, who grew up in relatively middle-class homes, both suffered from having alcoholic fathers. Low down suffering, it seems, lurks in the biography of many a political Hollywood star.

Ross also writes about the way these political stars played working-class characters on the big screen. Ross explains how Chaplin created working-class characters, like The Tramp, who was not content with his station in life, and who even engaged in political struggle, however hilariously. Robinson played lowbrow gangsters throughout the 1930s, and he knew that the gangster motif appealed to working-class viewers who envied the gangster’s material success but who also judged the route the gangster used to achieve it. Belafonte, who also had a difficult immigrant childhood, played a labor leader in the film Island in the Sun (1957). Warren Beatty, who resisted many calls to enter politics as a candidate in his own right, played the radical John Reed, in the epic film Reds. Jane Fonda memorably played Gertie Nevels, the luckless working-class Appalachian mother in The Dollmakers (1984).

Finally, Ross writes about the way that Hollywood’s more political stars understood the classed nature of the film industry’s mass audience, and how some used populist rhetoric to describe their own political choices. Mayer, despite his conservative politics, or, perhaps because of them, understood that the movie industry was built on the “nickels of the working class.” Reagan and George Murphy, from the years they spent appealing to viewers at the box office as “B” movie stars, understood how to craft a message that would appeal to working-class Americans, even if the policies they campaigned for ultimately hurt those same people. “Americans really are conservatives,” Reagan argued on the campaign trail in the 1960s. “They pay their bills, they don’t run big debts.” Echoing this populist note, Arnold Schwarzenegger “warned Democratic and Republican politicians tos ‘do your job for the people and do it well, otherwise you’re hasta la vista, baby.’” Likewise Jane Fonda’s China Syndrome is about the way ordinary people rise up against a large corporation, demanding answers as well as change.

The most important lesson of Ross’s book is that when Hollywood stars become political, their rhetoric, and their activism, should be taken seriously. Though Ross certainly leans to the left himself, he admires the sincerity and the skill with which even right-leaning Hollywood politicos have operated. “They worked as hard at their politics as they did at their screen careers,” Ross argues. The “United States would be a far better place,” Ross, concludes, if each of us was willing to work as hard as these emblematic Hollywood luminaries.

But another, more subtle lesson of Hollywood Left and Right is that political movie stars have often understood that the working class—the 60+% of Americans who do most of the difficult and underappreciated work in our country—must be recognized for the productivity and consumer power they possess. From the ranks of the working class, and, especially, from the ranks of working-class immigrants, we have been given some of our biggest entertainers and stars. Their understanding of poverty, suffering, and solidarity can serve as inspiration to the rest of us, whatever our backgrounds.

Kathy M. Newman

The decisive referendum vote to repeal the bill that would limit collective bargaining by public sector unions has changed the political landscape in Ohio. Tuesday’s vote on Senate Bill 5 could and should be a harbinger for the 2012 presidential election. By mounting a direct assault on public sector workers and the unions who represent them, Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio may have done more to help Barack Obama win re-election than anything Obama’s political team is likely to do over the next 12 months.

With Ohio’s continuing high unemployment rate (9.1%!, just like the rest of the U.S), it had seemed unlikely that President Obama could win Ohio, and without Ohio, he’d have difficulty getting re-elected. The same factors make re-election a challenge for Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democratic and one of the most pro-labor members of the Senate. But Kasich, the Republicans in the Ohio legislature and outside conservative financers and think tanks like the Buckeye Institute, may have done Obama and Brown a big favor.

Karl Rove described Senate Bill 5 as a much “more extensive reform” to public sector unions than was enacted in Wisconsin, in part because the Ohio version included firefighters and police officers. While the protests in Columbus were smaller and received less national attention than those in Madison, unions and community groups in Ohio organized a ballot initiative with 10,000 volunteers circulating petitions in all 88 counties. Over 1.3 million Ohioans — more than five times the number required to put the initiative on the ballot — signed the petitions.

Despite a large influx of money from conservative organizations like Citizens United, Freedom Works, and Restoring America, Ohio voters repealed Senate Bill 5 by an overwhelming 22 point margin — 39% yes, 61% no (a no vote was pro-union). Democrats and independents voted overwhelmingly against the measure, and, if pre-election polls are correct, 30% of Ohio Republicans also voted to reject Senate Bill 5.

This should be good news for Obama. While Ohio is notorious for swinging back and forth between supporting Republicans and Democrats, its 18 electoral votes are especially important for Republican candidates. It’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the presidential election without Ohio, and that means winning significant support among union household voters.

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).

If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich’s actions, together with the national Republicans’ just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.

It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans – a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio’s union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent – that is, if they match the national average for union household voters – they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio’s electoral votes.

But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

This gives Obama the opportunity to score a big victory in Ohio, but that won’t happen solely on the basis of Senate Bill 5. The president must offer a positive economic vision and a program for economic change. The American Jobs Act – even if it must be pushed through piecemeal — is a good start, as are the president’s recent actions on mortgages and student loans.

Such positions will also help Senator Brown’s chances of re-election, but in 2012, in Ohio at least, the usual pattern of members of Congress benefiting from presidential coattails could be reversed. Brown’s solid support for organized labor, community groups and those who have been most hurt by the continuing economic crisis — positions that resonate with the millions of Ohio voters who overturned Senate Bill 5 — may help Obama more than anything Obama has done will help Brown.

None of this is guaranteed, of course. In order for the battle over Senate Bill 5 to influence the 2012 election, those who have organized so effectively to defend unions must continue to work together. Unions will have to keep educating members and reach out to those outside of the labor movement. They will also have to work closely with community and neighborhood groups like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which played a pivotal role in community organizing around Senate Bill 5.

None of that will be easy. Competing interests within and between organized labor and community organizations make the coalition very fragile. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is relatively weak in Ohio, and some tensions exist between public and private sector unions. Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to put parts of Senate Bill 5 through in a series of smaller bills next year. Without solidarity across labor organizations, the coalition that fought so well against one big bill could fracture. It may be that other issues won’t have the unifying effect of Senate Bill 5. After all, the same voters who overturned that bill approved a constitutional amendment barring the implementation of the individual insurance mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act.

But if the organizers of the campaign against Senate Bill 5 can hold together and if the Obama campaign can tap into the anger and solidarity of that fight, Tuesday’s vote could turn out to be the turning point in the 2012 election.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies