The Inheritance:
How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond
By Samuel G. Freedman
Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, $27.50
To every election season its catch-phrase, by means of which journalists program their computers to compress a hunch into a sound bite about “the bottom line,” the “story” of “what it’s all about.” Angry whites, especially males, were the bite of 1994. Observant citizens might have remembered that they had earlier made a decisive appearance as “Reagan Democrats” in 1980. In the historically Democratic Northern cities, white men who had worked with their hands, or whose fathers had, were deserting the party of those fathers. Firemen and construction workers, men of parishes and saloons had fought their way into a modest though insecure comfort. Now they were mad as hell that somebody else–elitists, blacks, government bureaucrats–seemed to be making off with this country they now considered theirs.
All this is cliche, which does not mean that it is inaccurate. It is the merit of Samuel G. Freedman’s “The Inheritance” that it makes the cliches sing. Freedman, a former New York Times reporter who has also written books about a black church and a high school, notes that in the 1994 congressional elections, Catholics, less than one-quarter of the population, made up nearly one-third the vote. Not only that: For the first time in more than 60 years, a majority voted Republican in the congressional races, as had a majority for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Early in 1992, Freedman set about to understand this “Catholic exodus from the New Deal coalition.” He has written a forceful, frequently gripping book that tells the stories of three generations from three families and makes them stand for the Republicans’ hope and the Democrats’ (or at least the liberals’) nightmare.
In this drama, the grandparents were working-class immigrants who became regular Democrats, crucial vertebrae in the backbone of the New Deal: an ltalian plumber from New Rochelle, N.Y., an Irish domestic from New York City, and a Polish numbers runner turned ward heeler in Baltimore. Three of their grandchildren are today Republican operatives in Republican-ruled New York state. How this happened took, in fact, three generations, and what Freedman shows by amassing a goodly amount of detail is not only change but continuity. Like some recessive genes that take a generation or more to express themselves, and then only when the environment has changed, the conservative tendencies of the grandchildren were prefigured. Some of the current Republican spirit was founded in a deferred revolt against Democratic machines like those of Albany and Baltimore. Reagan Democrats weren’t born in 1980.
Lizzie Sanford, a domestic like her widowed mother, married Edward Garrett, a gravedigger who was out of work during long stretches in the Depression, listened to Father Coughlin on the radio, and moved the family upriver to a town with dirt streets and a one-room schoolhouse. Lizzie became a Democratic committeewoman. Their son, Richie, grew up to be a Kennedy liberal. Loving to fish the Hudson, he was mobilized by environmentalists into fights for clean water against the likes of Con Edison, organizing networks of blue-collar folks to report on toxic spills. His great day came when he spoke in 1970 to tens of thousands on the first Earth Day in New York’s Union Square, sharing a platform with Pete Seeger and Leonard Bernstein. This was no radical chic for Richie Garrett. He wanted, Freedman writes, “to raise the issues polarizing America, to offer environmentalism as a unifying cause.” No believer that state governments are more responsive than the feds, Richie proclaimed to the crowd: “You can whip Albany and shove the decisions right down their bumbling bureaucratic throats.” Yet the other folks on the platform weren’t Richie’s sort. He passed up a reception at the mayor’s house and said no to a free night in a Manhattan hotel, found a saloon, had a few beers, and drove home listening to the Mets game on the radio. Politics offered little to draw him.
His nephew, Tim Carey, was drafted, and on Oct. 21, 1967, found himself on the front line–not in Vietnam, but at the Pentagon, where the antiwar legions laid siege. In Freedman’s account, it wasn’t so much the onward march of the demonstrators that made the difference for Tim, not even when they hurled cans, bottles and rocks, charged his line, and he started swinging his club. What made the difference in Tim Carey’s life were Dick Gregory’s words as the comedian told a rally that the Army was made up of “poor blacks and dumb whites.” Tim Carey had been a good student, but he came from the wrong side of town, which meant that in high school he was tracked into shop courses, never studied algebra and couldn’t qualify for the sort of diploma that would get him into college. When he finally did get himself into a university, he gravitated to peers who were dislocated and upwardly mobile at the same time, an inflammable combination. He learned to campaign for Republicans. By 1994, he was a skilled political pro running phone banks targeting neighborhoods like his own for George Pataki’s successful gubernatorial race against Mario Cuomo. Although Freedman doesn’t make this point in so many words, the thrills of political campaigning proved more alluring for Tim than leftish movement politics for his uncle.
Freedman is adept at conveying scenes in which values collide and ordinary people coalesce into historical currents. He reminds readers whose eyes may mist over at the memory of urban machines that they were corrupt and self-serving, securing loyalty by buying favors and not by converting the beneficiaries to liberal ideals. He does not take anti-government rhetoric at face value, pointing out that it was the federal success in creating suburbs after World War II that made it easy for the beneficiaries to disdain the folks left behind in the cities.
He is an observant reporter–observant, at times, to a fault. (Does the reader really need to know that 17 granite steps lead to the bronze door at the U.S. Courthouse in lower Manhattan, or that the lobby floor is marble, or that the courtroom carpet is orange–and so on for eight lines?) His empathy is considerable. Although himself of liberal sympathies, or so he reveals in his acknowledgments, he never lets disagreement demonize his characters. Yet if empathy is the beginning of understanding and judgment, it is not the end. Freedman is sometimes limited by his method of reconstruction, which takes him so far and no further. There are times when the reader would be better served if the author could dig down beneath the elements of experience, beneath the surface of what the characters saw and said for themselves, and sort through their claims more rigorously.
In the story of plumber Silvio Burigo, for example, the “defining moment” was an occasion in 1967 when civil rights advocates demonstrated at his suburban New York construction site, demanding that more blacks be admitted to the apprenticeship program. The state Human Rights Commission investigated, and although Burigo’s local was exculpated, the long shadow of the accusation was not easily dispelled. The apprenticeship program under scrutiny was Silvio Burigo’s baby. He remained a Democrat, but “this product of the New Deal was bequeathing to his descendants a disgust with what Democratic liberalism had become–the force that treated him as a virtual criminal.” Freedman does show that the investigation was less than perfect, and also relays evidence that there was overt discrimination. But he is too retiring. Burigo’s defensiveness remains mysterious. What did he think of the fact that his local was lily-white? Burigo didn’t like sloppy work; was that a reason or a rationalization for exclusion? Freedman doesn’t get close enough to Burigo to make sense of what is going on in his mind. He does better with the ordeals and practical reasoning of the living generation.
In publishing hype that he would surely flag if he heard it from somebody else’s mouth, Freedman calls his triptych “the essence of a century.” Well, there’s room for more than one essence in the American saga. But leave this momentary overkill aside. In a time when piety toward a rosy, fantastical past substitutes for a full measure of respect for the troubles we’ve seen, Freedman succeeds memorably in telling important stories of real ordeals that have, over time, undermined the Democratic faith.
