Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works by Rick Santorum
Authors: Rick Santorum
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CHAPTER ONE
BLUE COLLAR CONSERVATIVES REALLY DID BUILD IT
T here was a time not long ago when Americans without college degrees could expect to earn a decent and steady income in exchange for hard work. This income and job stability provided a foundation for families and communities that, with their churches, Little Leagues, Boy Scout troops, and a hundred other civic organizations, fostered the strong values and the work ethic that underpinned American life. Millions of Americans came of age in these communities and took those values with them as they started their own families and thanked God for his blessings.With good incomes, Americans could afford new cars, kitchen appliances, and trips to Disneyland. Demand for such new goods kept others working and employment strong. With stable marriages, children enjoyed the gift of security and neighborhoods where values were taught at home and in church and enforced by parents.
This is how I grew up. My grandparents came here from Italy in 1930, fleeing fascism and settling in a coal town in the hills outside of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That’s where they found freedom and the opportunity to earn decent pay for hard work in the mines. They found a gritty but overall wholesome place to raise their kids and taught them that in America there was no limit to what they could become. I know the American Dream was real because my grandparents lived it.
Their son Aldo, my father, was seven when his family left Italy for America. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the South Pacific in World War II, and when he came home from the war, he earned advanced degrees in clinical psychology. He worked for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) counseling World War II, Korea, and Vietnam vets for almost forty years. At his first post, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, he met and married my mother, Catherine, an administrative nurse. I was born in 1958, the second of three children. Unlike most mothers at that time, my mother continued to work as a nurse. It was a great setup because the hospital where she worked was a stone’s throw from our house. My siblings and I spent our childhoods livingin various rented World War II–era buildings, including the post jail that had been converted into apartments. When I was seven, we returned to western Pennsylvania and settled in Butler, among the mines and steel furnaces that were the economic bedrock of that part of the country.
I went to Butler Catholic Grade School and then Butler High School. Like other kids, I played (but not well) both baseball and basketball, and I saw my first major league game, between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds, at Forbes Field. As in most small towns in America back then, families kept their doors unlocked. Kids roamed neighborhoods freely, but there was always a parent nearby, and they didn’t hesitate to enforce the values of the community. And though I wasn’t aware of this at the time, this world was possible in part because Butler made stuff. While my dad didn’t work in the mill, almost all of my friends’ dads did. That and numerous school field trips to local plants drove home the importance of manufacturing to our community. We had thriving manufacturers like the Pullman-Standard Company, which made railroad cars (it was shuttered in the 1980s and demolished in 2005), and an Armco steel plant, which is now AK Steel. There was a job for virtually anyone out of high school who was willing to work an honest day. And those jobs carried benefits and security that formed the core of the community. Looking back, it’s not a very complicated equation.
Those field trips and conversations with my friends’ dads were extra motivation for me, and many others, to hit thebooks in school. It was clear then that change was afoot with automation and global competition, so I headed off to Penn State University, where I fell in love with Penn State Nittany Lions football,
BLUE COLLAR CONSERVATIVES REALLY DID BUILD IT
T here was a time not long ago when Americans without college degrees could expect to earn a decent and steady income in exchange for hard work. This income and job stability provided a foundation for families and communities that, with their churches, Little Leagues, Boy Scout troops, and a hundred other civic organizations, fostered the strong values and the work ethic that underpinned American life. Millions of Americans came of age in these communities and took those values with them as they started their own families and thanked God for his blessings.With good incomes, Americans could afford new cars, kitchen appliances, and trips to Disneyland. Demand for such new goods kept others working and employment strong. With stable marriages, children enjoyed the gift of security and neighborhoods where values were taught at home and in church and enforced by parents.
This is how I grew up. My grandparents came here from Italy in 1930, fleeing fascism and settling in a coal town in the hills outside of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That’s where they found freedom and the opportunity to earn decent pay for hard work in the mines. They found a gritty but overall wholesome place to raise their kids and taught them that in America there was no limit to what they could become. I know the American Dream was real because my grandparents lived it.
Their son Aldo, my father, was seven when his family left Italy for America. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the South Pacific in World War II, and when he came home from the war, he earned advanced degrees in clinical psychology. He worked for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) counseling World War II, Korea, and Vietnam vets for almost forty years. At his first post, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, he met and married my mother, Catherine, an administrative nurse. I was born in 1958, the second of three children. Unlike most mothers at that time, my mother continued to work as a nurse. It was a great setup because the hospital where she worked was a stone’s throw from our house. My siblings and I spent our childhoods livingin various rented World War II–era buildings, including the post jail that had been converted into apartments. When I was seven, we returned to western Pennsylvania and settled in Butler, among the mines and steel furnaces that were the economic bedrock of that part of the country.
I went to Butler Catholic Grade School and then Butler High School. Like other kids, I played (but not well) both baseball and basketball, and I saw my first major league game, between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds, at Forbes Field. As in most small towns in America back then, families kept their doors unlocked. Kids roamed neighborhoods freely, but there was always a parent nearby, and they didn’t hesitate to enforce the values of the community. And though I wasn’t aware of this at the time, this world was possible in part because Butler made stuff. While my dad didn’t work in the mill, almost all of my friends’ dads did. That and numerous school field trips to local plants drove home the importance of manufacturing to our community. We had thriving manufacturers like the Pullman-Standard Company, which made railroad cars (it was shuttered in the 1980s and demolished in 2005), and an Armco steel plant, which is now AK Steel. There was a job for virtually anyone out of high school who was willing to work an honest day. And those jobs carried benefits and security that formed the core of the community. Looking back, it’s not a very complicated equation.
Those field trips and conversations with my friends’ dads were extra motivation for me, and many others, to hit thebooks in school. It was clear then that change was afoot with automation and global competition, so I headed off to Penn State University, where I fell in love with Penn State Nittany Lions football,
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