The Washington Times
published my review of Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and
Populist Politics.
In 2017, while there was a national campaign
to tear down the statutes of Confederate soldiers and historical figures deemed
racists by the left, some Philadelphia
politicians and left-wing activists demanded that the City of Philadelphia
remove the 10-foot-tall statute of former Police Commissioner and Mayor Frank Rizzo
from in front of the city’s Municipal Services Building.
Frank Rizzo’s
supporters rallied to keep the statue in place, and the current mayor, Jim
Kenney, stated that he was looking into moving the statue to another location,
possibly to South Philadelphia,
where Frank Rizzo
was born and raised, and where many of his supporters live, work and vote.
Today the statute remains in front of the Municipal Services Building.
Frank Rizzo,
who rose from beat cop to mayor, was a controversial figure with fervent
supporters and detractors, and he remains so years after his death. The
larger-than-life Frank Rizzo
was a big man physically, at 6‘2 and 250 pounds, and he loomed large as a personality
as a tough and aggressive cop in the 1950s and early 1960s, known then as the
“Cisco Kid,” and as the police commissioner in the late 1960s. A famous 1969
photo of Frank Rizzo
shows the commissioner, who left a formal event to respond to a violent
incident, in a tuxedo with a nightstick jammed into his cummerbund.
Timothy J. Lombardo, who
teaches history at the University of South Alabama, offers a look back at Frank Rizzo’s
life and times in “Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s
Philadelphia
and Populist Politics.” Mr. Lombardo opens the book with a passage about the
time Frank Rizzo
visited South Philadelphia
during his first campaign to become mayor. The South Philly native attended a
Columbus Day free concert that became a spontaneous pro-Rizzo
rally.
“Despite his warm welcome in
South Philadelphia,
Francis Lazaro Rizzo was one of the most controversial figures in the city’s
history,” Mr. Lombardo writes in his introduction to the book. “As a young man,
long before his entrance into politics, the son of Italian immigrants dropped
out of high school and followed his father’s footsteps into the Philadelphia
Police Department. He quickly earned a reputation as one of the toughest cops
on the force. Rising through the ranks in rapid succession, he earned the department’s
highest post in 1967.
As the city’s top cop, Rizzo
was fond of saying that the way to treat criminals was “scappo il capo,” an
Italian phrase he translated to “crack their heads.” He earned a national
reputation for his tough stance on crime, the heavy-handed tactics of his
police force and his openly hostile treatment of civil rights activists. Yet Rizzo
claimed those methods were the reason that Philadelphia
avoided the urban rioting that struck cities like Los Angeles, Detroit or
nearby Newark, New Jersey, in the late 1960s. While that won little favor in
African-American communities or among liberals that decried his “Gestapo
tactics,” he became a hero to the white-ethnic, blue-collar Philadelphians who
demanded “law and order.” Capitalizing on this, he used his police experience
as a springboard for his first campaign for public office in 1971.”
You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
