A PARALLEL ACCOUNT
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
A parallel account Who are the people behind the political statis-tics? Samuel G Freedman's The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (Simon &...
...Freedman traces the political choices of the Burgios and Trottas, the Garretts and Careys, the Obryckis and Maebys-Italian, Irish, Polish families-from the immigrant generation to the third generation He masterfully sots forth how they chose their parties, how they cast their votes, how social and economic forces directed those choices and most movingly how personal experience and feelings, from gratitude to resentment, shaped these political responses...
...provides a parallel account to David Leege's demographics on ditholic voters-the stories of three Catholic families who over three gem-rations shifted from Roosevelt to Reagan...
...When he heard Dick Gregory tell the crowd that only "poor blacks" and "dumb whites" tilled the army ranks, his political inclinations were set in a new direction, not just contrary to the demonstrators but to his whole family...
...But grandson Frank Trotta, Jr., from his high-school days an active Republican, works tor Richard Nixon, Lew Lehrman, and New York State Assembly representative, Joseph Pisani...
...Tim Carey is the grandson of Lizzie Sanford Garrett, Irish mother, neighborhood refuge, and political or-ganizer...
...Finally as much disheartened by Republican machine politics as he ever was by the Democratic machine, Trotta steps back from partisan politics, only to find himself on Lincoln's birthday 1990 lecturing his fellow lawyers at the American Bar Association on the similarities between Roe v. Wade and the Dred Scott decision...
...and a New Deal Democrat...
...The Inheritance is a brilliant, sobering, and deeply moving book...
...Samuel G Freedman's The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (Simon & Schuster, $27.45,464 pp...
...Comes the sixties and the civil rights movement and his union, all white, all talian, becomes the object of demonstrations, state hearings, .ind ti-d-eral .suits...
...Where others decry voter cynicism, Freedman sees astute political actors ready to vote what they see as their own and the country's best interests...
...Silvio Burgio, an orphan and slum dweller, becomes a master plumber of tenaciously high standards, a union man of exemplary lovalty...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELSEINFELS...
...He stood with the 503rd military police battalion protecting the Pentagon against a mammoth an-tiwar demonstration It never occurred to him that his army set vice was anything but the ordinary duty of a good American...
...The class and race resentments that Mow do not si-em to touch Burgio, or oven his son-in-law Frank Trotta, Sr., who steadily tries to keep a New Rochelle...
...His efforts are built on his down-to-earth knowledge of ordinary people, mostly Catholic like himself...
...Tim ends up a Republican who campaigns for Ronald Reagan and most recently New York Governor George Pataki...
...During the Depression, lizzie and her bus-kind Edward were so broke they had to leave one of Manhattan's worst slums for a shanty town up the Hudson-a place so miserable that no town services or Republican town supervisor over visited, not until Lizzie began organizing her neighbors and found same Democrats willing to treat them as equals...
...October 21,1967, was a political turning point in his life...
...New York, housing project warm, clean, and in good repair for the sake of the older tenants and in the face of graffiti-writing, drug-dealing, disorderly younger tenants...
Vol. 123 • September 1996 • No. 16
