314
PARTISAN REVIEW
Chicagoans, as steel workers and residents, restructure old institutions to
overcome the allegiances which traditionally divided them. Kornblum's
analysis of the role of ethnicity is particularly imponant, for he shows that
the South Chicagoans are far more sensible than the ethnic intellectuals
who have recently been agitating for a revival of ethnicity as a primordial,
somewhat mystical, force to counteract both secular rationalism and left–
liberal and radical appeals for political change. There was no ethnic ·revival
in South Chicago, for the steel workers have a flexible attitude toward their
ethnicity which has changed little in recent years; they use it to protect their
families and homes from outside influences they consider undesirable, and
as a mechanism for political organization around essentially working-class
issues, in which they cooperate both with ethnics from other national back–
grounds and blacks. What the larger society calls working-class racism is
not absent from South Chicago, but Kornblum points out that while white
steel workers
try
to keep blacks out of their residential neighborhoods main–
ly to protect their own status, they regularly suppon black candidates for
leadership in their unions and
th~ir
ward political organizations.
Although sociological texts have sometimes promulgated the same
stereotypes about the working class against which Levison's book argues,
Kornblum's study represents a long-standing sociological tradition, the use
of empirical research to defend the working class against its critics.
Kornblum eschews explicit advocacy, but in the end, he comes to much
the same conclusion as Levison. By implication, he too pleads for the in–
clusion of working-class interests in the politics of the larger community,
although he is more aware than Levison that the workers must struggle for
that inclusion themselves and cannot wait for the development of greater
tolerance among upper-middle-class liberals. In fact,
Blue Collar Com–
munity
ends with the struggle of a progressive young steel union leader,
Edward Sadlowski, to defeat the old Germano machine-the equivalent
in Chicago area union politics of the Daley machine . Sadlowski won his
election, with the help of the courts, after Kornblum's book was completed,
and is likely
to
support the kind ofworking-class-liberal coalition that both
authors stand for.
HERBERT
J.
GANS
