In August 2025, the town of Philadelphia agreed to go back a statue of Frank Rizzo to the supporters that commissioned the memorial in 1992.
The two,000-pound bronze tribute to the previous police commissioner-turned-mayor had stood in entrance of the town’s Municipal Products and services Development from 1998 till 2020, when then-mayor Jim Kenney ordered it got rid of days after protesters tried to topple it all the way through the protests that adopted the homicide of George Floyd.
Whilst the settlement states that the statue can’t be positioned in public view, conservatives have nonetheless hailed its go back as a triumph for Rizzo’s legacy. Within the ongoing tradition wars over ancient reminiscence and memorialization, Rizzo’s supporters have declared their repossession of the statue a victory over the “woke mayor” who unlawfully got rid of it.
As a historian and local Philadelphian, I’ve written widely in regards to the metropolis. My first guide, which can be rereleased with a brand new preface in February 2026, strains the upward thrust of Rizzo’s political enchantment and contextualizes his supporters’ politics within the broader historical past of the upward thrust of the fitting.
My paintings acknowledges Rizzo no longer most effective because the quintessential backlash flesh presser of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, but additionally as a harbinger of nowadays’s identity-based populism that favors social and cultural victories over financial redistribution.
As police commissioner from 1967 to 1971 and mayor from 1972 to 1979, Rizzo become a hero to the white, blue-collar Philadelphians who clamored for “law and order” and railed in opposition to liberal policymaking. Till he died in 1991, whilst working a 3rd marketing campaign to retake the mayor’s administrative center, Rizzo was once an avatar of what I name “blue-collar conservatism.”
Figuring out Rizzo’s profession and political reputation can assist give an explanation for the continual enchantment of this identity-based populism within the twenty first century.
Cops guard the Frank Rizzo statue as protesters conflict with police close to Town Corridor in Might 2020 after the homicide of George Floyd.
Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto by the use of Getty Pictures
Rizzo, from cop to mayor
Francis Lazzaro Rizzo was once born in South Philadelphia, within the most commonly Italian-American community his folks settled in after immigrating from Calabria, Italy.
In a metropolis the place police paintings was once incessantly a circle of relatives affair, Rizzo adopted his father’s footsteps into the Philadelphia Police Division a couple of years after throwing in the towel of highschool.
Early on, he drew reward from superiors for his clean-cut symbol and competitive policing. Within the Nineteen Fifties, Rizzo fortified that recognition whilst patrolling predominantly Black neighborhoods in West Philadelphia and main raids on homosexual assembly puts in Heart Town.
As deputy commissioner within the Nineteen Sixties, Rizzo at once faced the town’s civil rights motion. Amongst different exploits, he commanded the reaction to the Columbia Road Rebellion in 1964, when North Philadelphia citizens spoke back to an all-too-common act of police brutality with 3 days of city dysfunction.
He additionally confronted down protesters searching for to combine Girard Faculty, an all-white city-operated boarding college for orphaned boys within the center of predominantly Black North Philadelphia.
Whilst serving as appearing commissioner in 1967, Rizzo led a throng of baton-wielding police right into a crowd of top schoolers tough training reform. The scene ended with police chasing down and beating most commonly Black children in entrance of the Board of Schooling headquarters.
Rizzo was once promoted to commissioner later that 12 months.
Whilst African American citizens and white liberals decried his “Gestapo tactics,” Rizzo grew an increasing number of standard some of the metropolis’s white, blue-collar citizens.
Contributors of the Philadelphia Black Panther Birthday celebration are handcuffed and stripped by means of Philadelphia police after Frank Rizzo ordered an early morning raid in their Columbia Road headquarters on Aug. 31, 1970.
Courtesy of the Particular Collections Analysis Heart, Temple College Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.
He capitalized on their enthusiasm in 1971, when he campaigned and gained his first election for mayor as each a Democrat and the self-proclaimed “toughest cop in America.”
For 2 phrases he rewarded his supporters by means of opposing and proscribing liberal methods they’d fought, like public housing, college desegregation and affirmative motion. When disillusioned Democrats challenged his reelection in 1975, Rizzo vowed revenge by means of pronouncing he would “make Atilla the Hun look like a fa—t.”
After all, whilst campaigning for an modification to Philadelphia’s House Rule Constitution to permit him to run for a 3rd consecutive mayoral time period, Rizzo advised an all-white target audience of public housing warring parties to “vote white” for constitution alternate.
Populism then and now
Rizzo’s report makes transparent why protesters centered his statue in 2020. When Mayor Kenney ordered it got rid of, he known as it “a deplorable monument to racism, bigotry and police brutality for members of the Black community, the LGBTQ community and many others.”
Whilst Rizzo and his supporters had been undoubtedly a part of the past due Nineteen Sixties backlash in opposition to civil rights and liberalism typically, his populism was once extra advanced and sturdy than that narrative suggests.
He additionally presented confirmation to a beleaguered white, blue-collar identification. His supporters raved about his forceful policing and cheered his anti-liberalism as a final defensive line in opposition to insurance policies they regarded as threats to their livelihoods. Simply as vital, they noticed themselves mirrored within the rough-talking highschool dropout who labored his method as much as essentially the most tough place in Philadelphia.
When Rizzo first ran for mayor, one in all his supporters advised a reporter that “He’ll win because he isn’t a Ph.D. He’s one of us. Rizzo came up the hard way.”
That roughly identity-based populism presented social and cultural victories even if it did little to handle the declining economic system that struck city The us within the Seventies. So whilst Rizzo’s populism had few solutions for deindustrialization, in 1972 he was once ready to quickly halt building on a public housing challenge in an all-white segment of his local South Philadelphia.
Mayoral candidate Frank Rizzo campaigns in a Philadelphia manufacturing unit.
Dick Swanson/The Chronicle Assortment by the use of Getty Pictures
Trump’s an identical enchantment
Donald Trump provides a an identical populist enchantment within the twenty first century. If truth be told, he has drawn comparisons to Rizzo since his first presidential marketing campaign.
Like Rizzo, Trump’s enchantment is extra social and cultural than financial. Critics have argued that Trump’s promotion of conventional Republican financial insurance policies belie the perception that he’s a populist. Trump’s populism, on the other hand, lies no longer in his talent to ship working-class prosperity, however conservative victories within the country’s long-standing tradition wars.
Trump’s insurance policies won’t satisfy his promise to decrease the price of groceries or well being care, however mass deportations praise those that worry a converting American identification.
Sending troops into towns won’t deal with the cost-of-living disaster, but it surely delights those that see dysfunction in city society.
Trump’s try to recast nationwide historical past museums in a patriotic mould won’t bring in a brand new “Golden Age of America,” but it surely guarantees a victory to warring parties of “woke” historical past.
A big mural in South Philadelphia that paid tribute to Frank Rizzo was once painted over in June 2020.
AP Photograph/Matt Rourke
Redistributive vs. identification populism
Regardless of the lopsided consideration Trump’s social and cultural populism receives, one of those modern, redistributive populism persists in lots of American towns. This populism guarantees a redirection of assets from elites and towards operating other folks.
In Philadelphia in 2023, the multicultural, left-populist Running Households Birthday celebration gained the 2 at-large seats reserved for minority-party illustration within the metropolis’s legislature. These days, Zohran Mamdani’s upstart marketing campaign for mayor of New York appears to be reviving a protracted custom of modern city populism.
Redistributive populism, on the other hand, stays at odds with the identification populism as soon as championed by means of Rizzo and now by means of Trump. Whilst the Trump management’s insurance policies would possibly promise social and cultural victories, they have got finished little to impact the industrial possibilities of working-class American citizens.
