1046 ★ CHAPTER 26 The Triumph of Conservatismlow- wage areas of the United States
and overseas. The effects on older
industrial cities were devastating. By
1980, Detroit and Chicago had lost
more than half the manufacturing
jobs that had existed three decades
earlier.
Smaller industrial cities suffered
even sharper declines. As their tax bases
shriveled, many found themselves
unable to maintain public services. In
Paterson, New Jersey, where great silk
factories had arisen in the early twen-
tieth century, deindustrialization left
a landscape of abandoned manufac-
turing plants. The poverty rate reached
20 percent, the city sold off public
library buildings to raise cash, and the
schools became so run down and over-
crowded that the state government
took control. The accelerating flow of
jobs, investment, and population to the
nonunion, low- wage states of the Sun-
belt increased the political influence
of this conservative region. Of popula-
tion growth in metropolitan areas, during the 1970s, 96 percent occurred in the
South and West. San Jose and Phoenix, with populations around 100,000 in 1950,
neared 1 million by 1990.
In some manufacturing centers, political and economic leaders welcomed
the opportunity to remake their cities as finance, information, and enter-
tainment hubs. In New York, the construction of the World Trade Center,
completed in 1977, symbolized this shift in the economy. Until destroyed by
terrorists twenty- four years later, the 110-story “twin towers” stood as a symbol
of New York’s grandeur. But to make way for the World Trade Center, the city
displaced hundreds of small electronics, printing, and other firms, causing the
loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs.Labor on the Defensive
Always a junior partner in the Democratic coalition, the labor movement found
itself forced onto the defensive. It has remained there ever since. One example
of the weakening of unions’ power came in 1975 with the New York City fiscalBecause of economic dislocations and dein-
dustrialization, Americans’ real wages (wages
adjusted to take account of inflation) peaked in
the early 1970s and then began a sharp, pro-
longed decline.
FIGURE 26.1 REAL AVERAGE
WEEKLY WAGES, 1955–1990Year1947195119571961196719711977198124.023.523.022.522.021.521.020.520.0AgeMaleFemale