How Bruce Springsteen Helped Make Being a Working Class Rebel Cool Again

Editor's Note: An epic account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the ’70s, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class presents the decade in a new light. Part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and TV lore, Cowie's book makes new sense of the ’70s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present. From the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford and Carter, Cowie connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the ’60s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan.

The following is excerpted from Jefferson Cowie's Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010).

In the summer of 1984, Ronald Reagan campaigned toward his landslide victory over liberal Democratic challenger Walter Mondale. That same summer, America's foremost working-class hero appeared on stages across the nation, dwarfed, Patton-like, by an enormous American flag, pounding his fist in the air like it mattered. Tens of thousands of voices united to chant the most popular song of the summer, the year, and the decade:"Born in the U.S.A."

This audience sometimes drowned out the marshal tones of the E Street Band itself, heightening the pitch of an event that was already equal parts rock concert, spiritual revival, and nationalist rally. Replacing the skinny greaser poet of his earlier tours, Bruce Springsteen had become a superhero version of himself, his new pumped-up body accentuated by exaggerated layers of denim and leather, his swollen biceps working his guitar like a jackhammer. Fists and flags surged into the air at the first hint of the singsong melody, as thousands of bodies shadowboxed the empty space above the crowd to the rhythm of the song, the deafening refrain filling stadiums around the world. Whether one chose to compare the spectacle to the horror of a Nuremburg Rally or the ecstasy of an Elvis Presley show, rock 'n' roll felt almost powerful again -- more like a cause than an escape.

On the surface, the performance seemed obvious evidence that working-class identity had been swept out into the seas of Reaganite nationalism. The toughness, the whiteness, the chant, the fists, the flags, the costume, all pointed to the degree to which this figure, once hailed as "the new Dylan," had, like so much else in the 1980s, been stripped of even the pretense of authenticity. Instead, Springsteen, dubbed "rock and roll's future" only a decade earlier, had been painted red, white, and blue, and packaged as an affirmation of American power and innocence to an eagerly waiting marketplace.

"Like Reagan and Rambo," writes Bryan Garman, "the apparently working-class Springsteen was for many Americans a white hardbody hero whose masculinity confirmed the values of patriarchy and patriotism, the work ethic and rugged individualism, and who clearly demarcated the boundaries between men and women, black and white, heterosexual and homosexual." The many and complex labor questions of the 1970s seemed to have found easy answers in the 1980s with the narrowing and hardening of white working-class identity into a blind national pride that sounded like belligerence.

Yet these surface elements of "Born in the U.S.A." and its performance belie a profound complexity -- much like political discourse and popular culture in the 1980s masked the intricacies of post-New Deal working-class identity more generally. The song's story line, buried beneath the pounding music and the patriotic hollers of the chorus, explores the muffled tale of a socially isolated working-class man, burning within the despair of de-industrialized, post-Vietnam America: a social history of white working-class identity unmoored from the elements that once defined it. Though Springsteen projects the chorus with all his might, the tale told by the verses barely manages to peek over the wall of sound, like a man caught in a musical cage, overpowered by the anthem of his own country. Like the neo-patriotism of the Reagan era itself, the power of the national chorus, "I was Born in the U.S.A.," dwarfs the pain of the "dead man's town" below it. "You end up like a dog that's been beat too much / Til you spend half your life just coverin' it up."