Introduction Blue-Collar Conservatism and Frank Rizzo''s Philadelphia Frank Rizzo strode into South Philadelphia''s crowded Columbus Square Playground with little fanfare. He had arrived to hear members of Philadelphia''s American Federation of Musicians Local 77 give a free concert of Italian arias in honor of Columbus Day. Although he hoped to keep a low profile and said he was only there to celebrate his Italian heritage, the six-foot-two-inch-tall former police commissioner easily stood out in a crowd. Rizzo was also in the final month of his first campaign to become mayor of Philadelphia. The event quickly turned into a pro-Rizzo rally. Chants of "We want Frank!" drowned out the music as concertgoers clamored around the candidate. Longtime political reporter Sandy Grady said men cheered and women swooned at the sight of him. "These things just happen whenever Rizzo goes into an Italian American neighborhood," another reporter commented.

Uncharacteristically humbled, Rizzo took the stage to insist the concert continue. When the show ended, Rizzo made a final stop at a nearby tavern. Surrounded by patrons sipping cold pints of Piels draft beer, he raised a toast to the hardworking men and women of South Philadelphia before heading out into the night. When Rizzo was gone, Sandy Grady took an informal poll of the bar''s patrons, asking how he would fare in the election. Reflecting on the problems facing the city and the nation, one replied that Philadelphia needed "an 11th grade dropout" to straighten things out. "He''ll win because he isn''t a Ph.D.," barfly John Marzano continued.

"He''s one of us. Rizzo came up the hard way." Despite his warm welcome in South Philadelphia, Francis Lazaro Rizzo was one of the most controversial figures in the city''s history. As a young man, long before his entrance into politics, the son of Italian immigrants dropped out of high school and followed his father''s footsteps into the Philadelphia Police Department. He quickly earned a reputation as one of the toughest cops on the force. Rising through the ranks in rapid succession, he earned the department''s highest post in 1967. As the city''s top cop, Rizzo was fond of saying that the way to treat criminals was "scappo il capo," an Italian phrase he translated to "crack their heads." He earned a national reputation for his tough stance on crime, the heavy-handed tactics of his police force, and his openly hostile treatment of civil rights activists.

Yet Rizzo claimed those methods were the reason that Philadelphia avoided the urban rioting that struck cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, or nearby Newark, New Jersey, in the late 1960s. While that won him little favor in African American communities or among liberals that decried his "Gestapo tactics," he became a hero to the white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphians that demanded "law and order." Capitalizing on their enthusiasm, Rizzo used his police experience as a springboard for his first campaign for public office in 1971. Rizzo had been a longtime Republican until he switched parties to accept the job as police commissioner from Democratic mayor James H. J. Tate. Running his own mayoral campaign as a Democrat and the self-proclaimed "toughest cop in America," Rizzo scored an impressive victory when he became the first former police commissioner elected mayor of a major American city. He then polarized Philadelphia during his two terms in office.

Rizzo split Democratic voters when he broke with his party to campaign for Richard Nixon in 1972. He maintained his base of support by opposing public housing, school desegregation, affirmative action, and other liberal programs that he and his supporters deemed unearned advantages for nonwhites. Although he alienated many Philadelphians with a series of scandals and controversial statements--most famously that he would "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot" when dealing with his political opponents--Rizzo remained incredibly popular among white ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphians. Their support helped him survive a strong challenge in the Democratic primary of 1975 and a recall drive in 1976, and almost succeeded in changing the city charter so that he could run for a third mayoral term in 1979. That effort only fell apart when an anti-Rizzo coalition mobilized after he told an all-white audience to "Vote White" for charter change. Still, Rizzo remained a hero to the blue-collar white ethnics that viewed him as "one of us" because they saw a bit of themselves in the immigrants'' son who dropped out of high school and worked his way up to the highest position in Philadelphia. Frank Rizzo was perhaps the archetypal example of late twentieth-century urban, white ethnic, populist conservatism and the quintessential "backlash" politician of the 1960s and 1970s. To his critics, Rizzo was little more than a villain.

They saw him as an enemy to civil rights, a bully, a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, and a mean-spirited patriarchal figurehead of a regressive political order. He was all those things. But Frank Rizzo''s politics and legacy were far more complicated than the caricature that emerges from his long record of outlandish behavior and offensive statements. More importantly, Rizzo''s supporters never saw him as a villain. While Rizzo''s critics have largely succeeded in writing his legacy, their grave depictions do not allow for a thorough understanding of the people who called him "one of us" or the politics they created and championed. Frank Rizzo was loved as much as he was hated. The admiration he inspired among blue-collar white ethnics cannot be reduced to a simplistic backlash narrative. This is not a biography of Frank Rizzo.

Although his rise and fall is central to the story this book tells, other writers have more clearly detailed Rizzo''s life and career. Instead, this book uses Rizzo, his allies, and his city to examine broader changes in modern America. In addition to Rizzo, it is a book about the evolving politics of his blue-collar white ethnic supporters. Their abandonment of urban and New Deal liberalism is at the core of this book, but it is also about the long-standing blue-collar populism and political sensibilities that they created, developed, and maintained in the long postwar era. It argues that the resultant "blue-collar conservatism" arose from their mutually reinforcing promotion of law-and-order conservatism and selective rejection of welfare liberalism. While the racial upheavals of midcentury urban America were central to the rise of blue-collar conservatism, this book also shows how working- and middle-class white ethnics in Frank Rizzo''s Philadelphia imbued their politics with blue-collar class discourses and identities. The stories recounted herein are part of a larger whole that explain the United States'' turn to the right in the late twentieth century. Yet the subtleties of the specific blue-collar politics presented call into question the traditional bifurcations of political history and political identity.

Real people rarely fall into neat categories established by scholars and critics. The white, blue-collar supporters of Frank Rizzo steadily moved to the right over the course of the postwar decades. While they surely would have rejected the label "liberal" at the end of their political transformation, not all of them would have readily accepted the label "conservative." With few exceptions, the subjects of this book did not become conservative activists. Many blue-collar Philadelphians who began the postwar era in the Democratic Party shifted to the Republican Party by the 1980s, but not all of them. Shifting political affiliation is a part of this story, but many blue-collar whites remained in the Democratic Party and contributed to its subtle move to the right between the late 1960s and 1990s. This book''s use of the term "blue-collar conservatism," therefore, is not meant to indicate a hard-set political ideology. Instead, the development of a specifically urban, blue-collar political sensibility examined in this book demands a reconsideration of the dichotomy between the right and left.

Its ambiguities require a more nuanced conception of political categorization. They also demand the acknowledgement of categories that belie the strict polarization of traditionally understood liberal and conservative political identity. The story of Frank Rizzo and his blue-collar supporters'' shifting politics offers a window into these ambiguities and complexities in modern American working- and middle-class politics. While some of that story is tied to specific urban spaces, it is not a history limited to Philadelphia. It is true that some of the things Rizzo said and did would only make sense in his city. But he also shares an affinity with other big-city mayors like Sam Yorty and Richard Daley, as well as national figures like George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. It is equally true that some of the events that led to Rizzo''s rise and fall were indebted to the specificity of Philadelphia''s structural, institutional, and political environment. Yet Philadelphia still offers an opportunity to draw broader conclusions about postwar urban America.

It was the fourth-largest city in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Philadelphia''s size linked it to major metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Yet, due to its decentralized neighborhoods, its economic dependence on light industry and small-scale manufacturing, and, in many ways, its parochialism, Philadelphia also shared meaningful commonalities with smaller and midsized cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Its size may have made Philadelphia one of the nation''s biggest cities, but its culture was often more analogous to cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Perhaps more than many other cities, Philadelphia was representative of a large swat.