Toledo’s public campaign for labor peace inspired others across the country to push for the same goal. The failure of this idea and the simultaneous failure of Toledo’s reform class to create substantive change left the city in a perilous position, struggling to find itself. Identity is tied to image and image is a commodity. Like any commodity, image can be bought and sold on the market and was highly mercurial. In the 1970s, Toledo was both buyer and seller, still making goods for the upwardly mobile middle-class family but also desperately looking for something new to hang its hat on. Years of decline within the city’s union leadership and the increasingly anti-worker policies of major employers left the decades-long façade of labor peace shattered. The means by which this was achieved fostered an animosity which ran both cold and hot, representing one of the critical themes of Toledo’s twentieth-century story: in whose image would the city be (re)made?
Toledo was never an anti-racist utopia, no land of hope. Neither was it a national hotbed for racial tensions. Like much of the industrial Midwest, Toledo’s race relations simmered in a constant state of uneasiness. Redlines were more common than fistfights. However, when a city is experiencing social and economic insecurity, it often reveals its underlying racists structures. Reactionary forces looking for someone to blame began to thrust themselves into the public conversation. Many of these forces looked to blame those actually responsible. Others, though, used it as a moment to mask pre-existing animosity with concern over the future. Toledoans were left to support themselves in their communities, where they watched and waited.
No group exemplifies this more than the American White Nationalist Party and its brief but notable entry into Toledo’s politics. Founded by Toledoan Russel R. Veh in 1970, originally as the Ohio White National Party but renamed shortly thereafter, AWNP was headquartered in Toledo.[4] With a slogan of “Free Men Are Not Equal, Equal Men Are Not Free,” the party’s ideology was an amalgam of Klanism, Lost Cause rhetoric, Neo Nazism, and militant authoritarianism.[5] Spearheaded by Veh—who ran a write-in campaign in the 1971 city council elections—AWNP ran a ticket of open anti-Semitism, lower taxes, “more and better trained police,” asking whether Toledoans had “had enough” of “integration, cop killers, underworld paid politicians, special rights to ‘minority’ groups, and Negro crime.”[6]