Urban Populist

I was hardly alone in feeling that way, as Timothy J. Lombardo makes abundantly clear in his new book about Rizzo and his times. Francis Lazarro Rizzo (1920-1991) was the prototypical Philadelphia Italian-American, except with 100 times the ambition. He was a high school dropout who worked briefly in a steel mill before joining the Philadelphia police department, where he made a meteoric rise to commissioner. For complex reasons, the teasing apart of which is central to Lombardo’s book, Rizzo became the focus of the admiration of not only Italian-Americans but of every other ethnic group in Philadelphia. The only exception was the African-American community. At the heart of Philadelphia’s political culture, Lombardo argues, was the racial antagonism of white, blue-collar ethnics toward the city’s growing African-American population.

Lombardo is far from the first to identify incorrigible racism as the basis of the anger and fear of blue-collar whites in urban America during the 1950s and ’60s, and this is perhaps the least interesting part of his book. What makes it worth reading is that his argument is more nuanced than most, in part because he is studying the complicated vagaries of perhaps the strangest big city in the country. In 1960, Philadelphia was the fourth-largest American city, and it was divided into a patchwork of hundreds of neighborhoods. These were fiercely patriotic, or, depending on one’s perspective, maniacally localist. Their inhabitants were employed mainly in light manufacturing. As blue-collar Philadelphians saw it, they enjoyed comfortable lives and were deeply suspicious of anything that might change them or any outsiders who might enter into their communities. African-Americans arriving during the ’50s—the Great Migration came late to Philly—were regarded both as competitors for jobs and interlopers into the clannish neighborhoods. “Defense of neighborhood,” Lombardo writes, “was at the root of nearly every conflict that contributed to the transformation in white working- and middle-class politics in the 1960s and 1970s.”

The New Deal, too, arrived late in Philadelphia, as the city was long controlled by a Republican machine. The new progressive order of the 1950s destroyed the machine by weakening the city council and strengthening the power of the mayor. The executive was now supported by an array of boards and agencies whose directors believed they could manage the lives of Philadelphians with technocratic precision. Blue-collar whites, in Lombardo’s account, regarded this at first with suspicion, but ultimately with pleasure when they benefited from the multiplicity of assistance provided via federal funding. They held themselves to be worthy recipients. African-Americans, on the other hand, were not: Blue-collar whites regarded the arriving blacks as unwelcome competitors for slices of the welfare-state pie.

Bettmann / Getty

The concentrated fears of blue-collar whites were focused on the Philly PD, partly out of a fear of rising crime and a fear that the growing African-American population would bring crime and disorder with it. Also, the police represented the best means by which a lower-class, uneducated white male could get a steady job and become a member of the middle class, just as Frank Rizzo had done. So white, blue-collar Philadelphians were suspicious of any interlopers—blacks, women, or college-educated whites—in the police department ranks.

Moreover, police officers began to be the object of admiration just short of idolatry. Traditionally, cops had been regarded as idlers in uniform, shiftless or even on the take. Now they were the thin blue line separating the people of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods from urban anarchy.

Frank Rizzo became the focus of this adulation—and ultimately the vehicle by which his fellow blue-collar whites could revenge themselves against both black Philadelphians and despised white-collar elites. When as deputy police commissioner he battled black activists and a college-educated commissioner whom Rizzo said was insufficiently careful of policemen’s lives, the blue-collar whites were on his side. They were pleased when Mayor James Tate, a blue-collar Irishman, made Rizzo the commissioner. And they exulted when Rizzo ran for mayor himself in 1971. He was their guy, a defender of their neighborhoods, a union supporter, an advocate of social assistance for them (including state assistance for Roman Catholic schools), and the enemy of black-power activists and the elite that had ruled Philadelphia since William Penn stepped onto the banks of the Delaware.

There is much more to Lombardo’s account: The growth in importance of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nature of union politics, the rise and fall of Catholic schools in Philadelphia, the neighborhood riot in Fishtown when a black family moved into that blue-collar enclave, the attempts to integrate Girard College, and Rizzo’s war against the Black Panthers are just a few strands in the rich fabric Lombardo weaves. It is impossible to capture the intricacies and events of Philadelphia’s political culture of this period in a shorter book.

Perhaps most interesting to today’s non-Philadelphian readers will be Rizzo’s reputation among his people, both during and after his term. For he was, by just about any way of judging political achievement, a failure. Indicators of the quality of urban life declined during his two terms in office, from 1972 to 1980. (His later mayoral campaigns in 1983 and 1987 did not succeed, and he died while trying for the job yet again in 1991.) Many of the reasons for Philadelphia’s decline were beyond Rizzo’s control, such as the disappearance of the urban manufacturing base that had employed Philadelphians and the broader troubles of the national economy during that period. Yet some were not. Incredibly, considering Rizzo’s law-and-order platform, crime increased during his mayoralty. Yet this never diminished the regard his supporters had for him; they looked back on his time as one in which “there were no gang wars, no organized mob killings, no racial violence, no brutal rapes, and no murders of senior citizens,” as Lombardo quotes one Philadelphian. They attributed to Rizzo success he did not have and gave him praise he did not deserve. It was more important to Rizzo’s supporters that he made the right enemies—that he was one of them. That, not policy or good governance or economic results, was the basis of their political loyalty.