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momentum, and soon
Time
magazine warned that “if Sadlowski does become the Steelworkers’ chief, both the economy and the climate of the nation’s labor–management relations could be significantly affected.” One company executive told a reporter that if Sadlowski was elected “it would be a whole new ballgame.” (The executive also tipped his hat to Sadlowski, saying “He was far and away the ablest union guy who has come down this pike—dedicated, tireless, and honest.” ) Profiles of Sadlowski appeared in
Rolling Stone
and
The New York Times Magazine
. He gave an interview to
Penthouse
and appeared on
Meet the Press.
He became the darling of the left; Richard Goodwin and the television producer Norman Lear held fund-raisers for him. Geoghegan, in his marvelous book
Which Side Are You On?,
wrote
,
“It’s hard to believe now, but in 1976 this was a big story.” Bigger for some, Geoghegan recounts, than the presidential election that year, between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Sadlowski became a modern-day paradox, a working-class hero in a country that doesn’t think it has classes.
    When the old guard accused Sadlowski of being a communist dupe, he told a
New York Times
writer: “You can make it sound like any kind of revolutionary rhetoric you want but the fact is it’s the working class versus the coupon clipper. The boss is there for one damn purpose alone, and that is to make money, not to make steel, and it’s going to come out of the worker’s back. . . . I guess maybe I’m a romantic, but I look on the American labor movement as a holy crusade, which should be the dominant force in this country to fight for the workingman and the underdog and make this a more just society.”
    Sadlowski tapped a deep vein of worker discontent, and so faced deep hostility from the opposition. One Sadlowski supporter at a steelworkers’ convention was beaten up by three old-line unionists. Another, while pamphleteering outside a Houston factory, was shot in the neck. (Marlene says the supporter resembled her husband from behind, and she believes that that’s who they thought they were shooting.) In the end, Sadlowski lost the election, garnering forty-four percent of the vote. In hindsight, some say he should have waited—until he was older, until his politics had mellowed, until the world caught up with him. But Sadlowski was impatient, and not without reason, since he saw what was coming in America’s heartland, a dismantling of people’s livelihoods.
    It wasn’t easy for Sadlowski after the loss. He spent the next fifteen years working in various union staff jobs, and for some of that time drinking too much. (“I drank everything,” he says.) “In the end,” a friend observed, “he had to answer to guys who in every way were his inferiors, ham-and-egg guys, guys who should’ve been glad to hold his overcoat. They couldn’t get rid of him, but they reduced him.” He retired from the union in 1992, the same year that U. S. Steel shuttered South Works, where he had begun. But Sadlowski has brushed himself off and started again. He has stopped drinking and is now involved with labor and with his community in a new capacity, as a guardian of their histories.
    Â 
    A couple of years ago, our mutual friend Tony Judge suggested that I spend a day with Sadlowski. Tony, a kind of intellectual entrepreneur, is connected to just about everyone in the city, and once a year, the two men drive around Chicago and visit sites that mean something to Sadlowski, like the gravesite of Allan Pinkerton, whose Pinkerton guards were frequently used to break strikes. Sadlowski, Tony told me, likes to urinate on Pinkerton’s grave. “He sees the lineage stuff,” Tony says. “The old grudges are his grudges.” So, with Tony’s introduction, I called Sadlowski, who growled and grumbled, and grudgingly