| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kenneth D. Durr. Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. x, 284. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
Reviewing Kenneth D. Durr's book proved more difficult than expected and, after much frustration, I figured out why. It is really two books: one comprising the introduction and conclusion, and the other almost everything in between. The first is balanced and reasoned, with a debatable, but credible thesis. The second is racially distorted, thinly supported, and contradictory, wanting more to justify than to explain backlash against the social and political reforms of forty tumultuous years.	1
The book investigates how social and economic changes after World War II influenced the political behavior of Baltimore's white working class, tracing the breakup of the New Deal coalition and suggesting why workers joined a conservative alliance that elected Ronald Reagan. Although much of his story is familiar—workers in a postindustrial city saw institutions threatened by outside influences and fought to protect them—Durr challenges a literature that presents workers as parochial and reactionary, hoping instead to show them as complex and adaptable. His argument seems plausible: working-class whites held the neighborhood as the key institution; neighborhood stability was threatened by civil rights activists; neighborhood cohesiveness was threatened by busing; the neighborhood itself was threatened by freeway and bridge construction; and the workers used whatever means available to protect the neighborhood. At first, they used "the familiar language of segregation," not because they were racist but "because it was the nearest tool at hand." But since it "could not encapsulate what lay at the heart of [their] protest," Durr insists, racist rhetoric later "gave way to a newer one that championed the rights of working people" (pp. 2, 3).	. . .

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