Teamster Sal
| 🚛 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 35-50 |
| Home | Newark, NJ |
| Demographic | urban, white, Italian-American |
| Lean | cold_war_hawk |
| Race | white |
Sal is an Italian-American truck driver and Teamsters member in Newark. He is Catholic, anti-communist, a Democrat on economic issues and a hawk on nearly everything else, and he is the first of his class of voters to drift toward the Republican Party.
Who they stand for
Sal stands for the white ethnic working class of the industrial Northeast. Italian, Polish and Irish voters form the urban base of the Democratic Party, and this group is the part of that base most exposed to the changes of the decade. Newark's North Ward is an Italian stronghold. The riot there in July 1967 kills twenty-six people a few blocks from Sal's neighbourhood, and within months it produces Anthony Imperiale's armed citizens' committee. The Teamsters union has been outside the AFL-CIO since 1957. Robert Kennedy's Justice Department convicts the union's leader, Jimmy Hoffa, twice in 1964 and sends him to prison in 1967, and the union's members take the prosecution personally.
Italian Catholics voted for Kennedy in 1960 because they saw him as one of their own. By 1968, a large share of Northern union members tell pollsters they plan to vote for George Wallace. The AFL-CIO's autumn campaign that year pulls most of them back to Humphrey. Union Hall Frank remains loyal to the party through these same years without much persuading. Sal represents the members the party has to work hard to keep.
Playing to them
Sal responds to a hard line in Vietnam and in Berlin, to a president who backs the police after a riot, to wage gains, to respect shown to the parish and the neighbourhood, and to a Justice Department that leaves the union's leadership alone. Sal's support can be kept by a Democrat who takes a hawkish stance on foreign policy. It is lost by a Democrat who does not. He does not forgive a prosecution of Hoffa, a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, a president who meets with peace marchers, or an open-housing order that reaches the North Ward. He also hears any attack on the Mafia as an attack on Italians in general.
Winning Sal's support costs the support of Campus David and Faculty Eleanor, and, on questions of policing and housing, the support of Harlem James. Catholic Mary shares his religious faith but not his view of the Kennedys, so attacking Robert Kennedy to please Sal loses her support. Union Hall Frank remains supportive as long as wage gains continue. Pentagon George and GI Bill Bobby share Sal's views and stay with him.
Where they live
The five states where Teamster Sal makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- West Virginia
- Michigan
- Wisconsin
- Pennsylvania
- Ohio