May 29, 2000 The Protests in Washington: What's Next? BY JASON VEST The Insider BY DAVID MOBERG Joseph Stiglitz challenges the Washington consensus. Breaking Law to Keep Order BY TERRY J. ALLEN Free speech can be hazardous to your health. The Riot That Wasn't BY DAVID GRAEBER The Protest Next Time BY LAURA FLANDERS Christian Right Update: Bench Press BY HANS JOHNSON Bush promises to stack the courts for the far right. Does God Hate Unions? BY HANS JOHNSON All the Right Moves BY BILL BERKOWITZ Bush is still beholden to religious conservatives. News & Views Editorial BY SALIM MUWAKKIL A common enemy. Appall-O-Meter BY DAVID FUTRELLE A Terry Laban Cartoon Seeking Justice BY DAVE LINDORFF The Supreme Court narrowly defends habeas corpus Atomic Reacton BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Officials use global warming to save nuclear power Mad Grads BY KARI LYDERSEN Graduate student unions are gaining ground nationwide Profile BY TERRY J. ALLEN Dyke to watch out for. Culture Red Gotham BY KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN BOOKS: Working-Class New York Dinner and a Show BY JASON SHOLL BOOKS: The Invention of the Restaurant Secrets and Lives BY SCOTT McLEMEE FILM: Joe Gould's Secret Moms Rule BY BETH SCHULMAN Ariel Gore, one hip mama.

Red Gotham By Kim Phillips-Fein Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II By Joshua B. Freeman The New Press 409 pages, $35 For a few short years between the two world wars, the capital of Austria was known as "Red Vienna." Governed by Austria's (non-Bolshevik) Socialist Party, the city built tens of thousands of units of public housing, providing homes for 200,000 Viennese. It expanded public health services and working-class education, built libraries and subsidized magazines. But the rest of Austria was intensely hostile to the socialist city, and the government fell when the repressive, quasi-fascist Christian Socials came to power in 1934. Joshua B. Freeman's excellent new book, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II, brings to mind the sad fate of Red Vienna. After the Second World War, Freeman argues, New York City was "a social democratic polity unique in the country in its ambition and achievements ... a model as close to European social democracy as the country had seen." New York's unions and city government constructed housing, raised wages, expanded the city's free public university system, provided health care and even built a partially public municipal arts center. But in the '70s, New York's elite took advantage of a recession to strike back against the city's labor movement and destroy the municipal government's social programs. The result was deepening inequality, impoverishment of the city's public resources and the erosion of New York's working-class culture. The canonical tale of the decline of New York (and, by extension, urban America) focuses on the '60s: the breakdown of social mores, the spread of drugs, riots and the rise of black radicalism. Some urban historians - like Thomas Sugrue writing about Detroit - have argued that the exodus of whites from the city after the chaos of the late '60s had its roots in the political economy of the Golden Age, when deindustrialization began and whites rioted against blacks moving into their neighborhoods. Unlike Sugrue, Freeman accepts that the '50s and '60s were glory days for New York, the high point of the city's unparalleled experiment in "socialism in one city." But in telling a story which emphasizes that poverty and its attendant social ills resulted from the calculated destruction of the social state by a powerful and anxious business class, he also challenges the neocon narrative.   TOP HOME SUBSCRIBE MAIL   In These Times © 2000 Vol. 24, No. 13