Class Matters

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 Class Matters
The Strange Career of an American Delusion

STEVE FRASER

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.

Copyright © 2018 by Steve Fraser.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Richard—Long may he ride through his heart’s pastureland
For Sabina, someday
In memory of Vev
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 Contents

Acknowledgments i x

i n t ro d u c t i o n . The Enigma of Class in America 1

one. East of Eden 26
t wo . We the People in the City of Brotherly Love 60
three. Wretched Refuse 84
four. There Was a Young Cowboy: Homeless on the
Range 117
five . John Smith Visits Suburbia 156
six . Free at Last? “I Have a Dream” and Involuntary
Servitude 194
conclusion. The Homeland 248

Notes 257
Index 269
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 Acknowledgments

In one way or another much of what I’ve written about over

the years has involved the role of class in American history. I
might have come up with the idea of writing about why class
matters on my own. But I didn’t. Steve Wasserman, then an
editor at Yale University Press, suggested I tackle this subject. I
had known Steve through his various incarnations as a discern-
ing editor and literary agent. When he broached this, I knew I
wanted to give it a try. But I wasn’t sure how to approach the
project. I threw out a slew of ideas about how I might go about
it and Steve was my first sounding board. So I am grateful to
him both for the genesis of this book and for helping me
through this period of what I hope turned out be productive
confusion.
Others were equally helpful in listening, criticizing, and
offering their own ideas about how to grapple with a topic that
offered up almost too many tempting ways in. My long-time
friends Josh Freeman and Paul Milkman were among those
early listeners and commentators. I have relied on their judg-
ment for every book I’ve written. That is true as well of my wife
Jill. I also called on the three of them again to read and criticize
initial fragments and whole drafts of some of the first chapters
x Acknowledgments

as well as for other advice and help once the book was complete.
My good friend Rochelle Gurstein also read some early mate-
rial and as always provided sharp, sympathetic criticism. When
I had about half the book drafted I grew nervous about the
approach I had adopted. I asked another friend Marshall Rafal,
and two superb historians, Elaine May and Nelson Lichtenstein,
to react to what I had done. They did so with alacrity, and
combined critical commentary with encouragement that the
approach I had chosen seemed to be working.
When I had a complete draft in hand, Yale University Press
asked the distinguished historian Gary Gerstle to provide the
Press with a critical reading. He produced a wonderfully incite-
ful and sympathetic critique and then subsequently shared with
me the knowledge that he was its author. Gary is not only a
talented writer and historian, but an editor as well; indeed, he
and I have edited two books of essays together. Class Matters
benefited immensely from all these readings, but especially from
Gary’s.
Many people I don’t know or barely know–scholars and
laymen alike—made indispensable contributions to this book.
Class Matters covers six subjects about none of which can I
pretend to have expert knowledge. Without the work of histo-
rians, social scientists, and journalists whose work is cited in
the endnotes there is no way I could have written this book.
Other good friends helped along the way in discussing
possible titles, jacket designs, and other matters dear to an
author who is also a once, and now and then still an editor.
Thanks to Robert Boyers, Tom Engelhardt, Corey Robin, and
Geoff Shandler as well as a good number of the people I’ve
already thanked above.
I am in debt of course to several people at Yale University
Press. When Steve Wasserman left Yale for another publishing
Acknowledgments xi

position, Yale’s Editorial Director Seth Ditchik graciously took

over the project. I have valued his advice and warm support for
my orphaned book. His assistant Michael Deneen has been
unfailingly responsive to every noodling question and anxiety
that impatient and anxious authors often are apt to express.
Robin DuBlanc is a superb copyeditor and also knows how to
hold the hand of a self-doubting writer. Margaret Otzel epito-
mized professionalism in her work as the book’s production
editor and, like Robin, made that production process seem less
impersonal than it sometimes can. I want to thank as well my
publicist Brenda King. And finally at Yale I want to thank Mary
Valencia for her perceptive visualization of the book’s mood
and purpose in her design of the book’s dust jacket.
As always, my family has been my most precious asset.
They helped in specific ways, but most of all by being there for
me. Without Jill there would be no books nor much of what I
value. My son Max and his wife Elena are dear to me, not least
for bringing into the world my brand-new granddaughter
Sabina who is hilarious and a thrill. I can’t imagine my life
without my daughter Emma. My brother Jon and his husband
Marco have enriched my life and the family’s in so many ways.
And to that group I must add my last remaining uncle, Arthur
Oluwek who shared with me information and memories of his
father, my grandfather, that find their way into Chapter 3. To
all of them thanks is scarcely enough.
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 Introduction
The Enigma of Class in America

I
am sitting down to write this two days prior to the inau-
guration of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president
of the United States. So I am tempted to compose the
shortest book on record: The answer to Why Class Matters
is “Duh.” And thank you for your time and you can thank me
for mine.1
Debates over how the inconceivable happened will stay
hot for years to come. But the triumph of “the Donald,” every-
one seems to agree, had something vital to do with the surfac-
ing of a rebellious working class, in particular a “white working
class.” Suddenly class seemed to matter a great deal in a country
long grown accustomed to relegating matters of class to some
musty attic of national memory.
Trump doesn’t deserve all the credit, however. In the run-
up to his stupendously unanticipated victory, the notion of class
had been worming its way to the surface of public life. Across
the Western world, from London to Athens, the norms of pub-
lic life were being shattered by right- and left-wing populisms
fired by class animosities. Here at home, people had become
acutely sensitive to the specter of the class divisions in our midst,
faintly reminiscent of that specter Karl Marx invoked when he
2 Introduction

penned The Communist Manifesto. Worries about runaway

inequality have commanded headlines, generated reams of
government reports, and turned scholarly tomes into best sell-
ers over the past decade. Some people occupied Wall Street.
Cities and states rushed to pass minimum wage and living wage
ordinances. The economy nearly fell apart at the seams, and all
of a sudden capitalism itself stood before the bar of public
judgment. Our vocabulary filled up with references to “the 1
percent and the 99 percent,” and “financial vampires.” We chris-
tened our era a second “Gilded Age,” pockmarked by poverty
and extravagant displays of wealth. Polls regularly recorded that
a large majority of Americans believe government services the
rich with little left over for working people. Everybody la-
mented the vanishing of the middle class, that special class that
is no class, the victim of bipartisan abandonment.2
Everyday life in every way bears the stigmata of class. Who
lives longest and who dies soonest, who goes to jail and who is
free, who is healthy and who sickly, who learns and who lives
in ignorance, who gets bailed out and who goes under, who
pursues happiness and who goes off to fight and die, who lives
with rooms to spare and who six to a room, who breathes clean
air and drinks clean water and who is poisoned, whose children
thrive and whose barely survive, who looks to the future and
who lives moment to moment, who is secure and who in peril,
who rules and who obeys? Answers to these and other life-and-
death questions depend to a very considerable degree on just
which niche in the class hierarchy you inhabit. Reports and
research studies periodically remind us of these stark realities.3
Even without the help of investigative journalists and
social scientists, however, we know. How could we not? Social
life is mapped with this knowledge. A restaurant—fast food or
gourmet—is wallpapered with the compulsory deference and
Introduction 3

suppressed resentment of its wait staff. Emblems on our cars

tell us where we stand on the highway to preferment. Driving
may entail passing through or avoiding the wrong neighbor-
hoods. Logos on pants and T-shirts, handbags and footwear,
are brands that brand us as belonging to some distinct inner
or outer sphere of the social cosmos. Skin color darkens the
closer we venture down to the bottom of the economic pecking
order. Disembodied voices from the telecom recite sales mes-
sages to dial tones while in drear warehouses the messengers
are surveilled, disciplined, and live in fear. Lush landscapes are
tended by intimidated migrants who daily line up at Home
Depot, eyes averted. Window shopping, on- and off-line, in
magazines and TV dramas excites our admiration and secret
envy of those who have reached the summit of wealth and
power. The housoleums and helipads and private islands of the
1 percent are the insignia of both their superordination and our
frustrated desires. Others get by in trailer parks, row houses, or
in the back seat. Children “race to the top” or fall by the wayside.
Passengers fly with ample leg room or are vacuum sealed. We
live reminded over and over again at the sports arena or theater,
in the “’hood,” at the mall, on the links, or on the pockmarked
asphalt of inner city parks that we are traveling through life
either in business class or coach. Blue-collar workers fend off
contempt. We genuflect before “winners” and show the back of
our hand or a piteous sneer to these “losers.” Workers don’t
produce, they serve. We are a servant society that demands. The
demand is that we respond to every nuanced prompt that tells
us America is after all intensely rooted in the deference, jealou-
sies, resentments, and aspirations given life by the combustible
energies of social class.
So of course class matters, at the very least in the public
arena and, one suspects, at the subatomic level of private life as
4 Introduction

well. America, after all, began on the premise that social class
counted a great deal. About this its earliest settlers, people like
John Smith in colonial Virginia, had no doubt. The captain
explored the Atlantic coast of the New World searching for an
escape from the Old World’s fixed hierarchies, a place where
“every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and
land.” That dream would abide for generations, even though
from the days of the earliest settlements class insinuated itself
into the tissues of settler America.4
Still, even a decade or so ago, in the years before the
global financial meltdown and “Great Recession,” many would
have denied those cleavages existed or were important or would
last. We had lived for decades during a conservative ascen-
dancy that treated even the traces of class animosity as a sacri-
lege. Metaphors of class did not compose the lingua franca of
everyday life. Class differences were less abrasive, if they regis-
tered at all. As a category of social life class seemed a leftover
from some bygone age—if people even remembered that far
back. And this too is hardly surprising. America has spent most
of its short life denying it was a society in which class mattered,
or if it did that it was a strictly temporary condition. Living in
denial has ever since required great political, intellectual, and
imaginative resources to keep the lid on that incendiary paradox.
Class is the secret of the American experience, its past,
present, and likely future. It is a secret known to all, but a source
of public embarrassment to acknowledge. It lives on all the
surfaces of daily life, yet is driven underground every time its
naked self offends cherished illusions about how we deal with
each other.
Our economy is and always has been a set of architec-
tural variations on the hierarchy of class. But at the same time
its avowed purpose has always been to abolish class. As a material
Introduction 5

matter that is what the American Dream promised, a country

so richly endowed that no matter how low down you began the
resources to rise and rise again were there in abundance. Here
too, however, the paradox lived on underground. The hawking
of goods and services, from the days of patent medicine ads in
daily tabloids to today’s agora in virtual reality, has mined the
subtlest distinctions of social status. Yet this invidious pursuit
of inequality happens under the smiley face of equality for all.
Officially we all subscribe to the American Dream. But as we
also all know, as George Carlin once bluntly put it, “They call
it that because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
More than in any other realm, in the United States the
political system has worked overtime to expunge class from our
public vocabulary, to keep it from shaping legislative proposals,
to prevent its organization into independent parties, and to
stigmatize any open ideological articulation of class interests.
Largely successful in that effort, the two-party system, so cel-
ebrated for that accomplishment, has nonetheless been chron-
ically troubled, sometimes nearly overwhelmed, by questions
of class it veers away from answering.
Thinkers of every species and subspecies—historians,
political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers,
scholars of the law, social critics, and theologians—have filled
whole libraries with proofs that class in America doesn’t exist,
or is going out of existence, or is an intellectual dead-end. Still,
that those libraries even exist, that over time they expand rather
than shrink, confounds their premise that class is ephemeral, a
hallucination, a categorical mistake, a profound misunderstand-
ing. One might say they do protest too much.
From Bartleby to Gatsby to Willy Loman our literary
imagination has been populated by characters caught up in the
compulsive flight from the antinomies of class. The typical
6 Introduction

American hero—in popular and “serious” fiction, in a thousand

westerns and post-westerns, in the romances that pass for jour-
nalism, inlaid in the tissues of every organ of popular culture
from sports to music—is a solitary, steely, emotionally trun-
cated male at odds with the social order. Both his sense of
freedom and his estrangement are rooted in an antipathy to the
constraints, protocols, dependencies, and emasculations felt to
be the psychic ransom of social stratification and the submis-
sions it commands.
“Lighting out for the territories” has always been more
than an economic escape mechanism, more than a second
chance at democracy, more even than a cutting away of the
spider webs of social entanglement that suffocate the free
spirit. Out there is the ever-renewable promise of an Edenic
rebirth, a paradise as classless as anything ever dreamed of by
Marx. Here metaphysics meets sociology. Here utopian desires,
which after all are always about transcending the social an-
tagonisms forever plaguing humankind, can themselves live
forever. Before Marx thought of it the New World had already
set sail for a future without classes.
Some say Joseph Stalin invented the notion of American
exceptionalism in one of those unkind moments of intellec-
tual dictation he was so well known for. He was actually repri-
manding an American Communist whom he accused of falling
prey to that native delusion that the New World was exempt
from the universal laws of class conflict. (If Stalin was indeed
the godfather of “American exceptionalism,” one can’t help but
relish the irony that it is nowadays the favorite catchphrase of
conservative ideologues.)5
Others maintain the notion goes way back generations
before the general secretary stalked the earth. Whether or not
the phrase itself came over on the Mayflower or the Arbella,
Introduction 7

clearly the New World offered itself to its first European settlers
as a way out. It was a passway with multiple exit ramps, some
leading its voyagers closer to the divine, some to a virgin land
immune to the social and moral pathologies afflicting the
steeply hierarchical Old World. For some heaven and earth met
here, heaven on earth would happen here. American exception-
alism is the nation’s sanctification. It confronts the specter of
class by stopping it at the water’s edge. It is our native form of
class consciousness, a consciousness that the curse of class may
be exorcized but only at the price of eternal vigilance.6
American exceptionalism has also functioned as a kind
of promissory note to the rest of the world. Our plenipoten-
tiaries carry it in their diplomatic pouches. Its reach is global
and meant to be exemplary. We can tutor the rest of the world
on how to avoid the pain and suffering, the civil wars and
international Armageddons that have bedeviled all ancient
civilizations—from Europe to the Levant and on to the Far
East—because we have discovered the secret of democracy and
equality and abundance. Social jealousies, class resentments, all
those cravings for pelf and power that make up the warp and
woof of life outside our borders can be domesticated, even
eradicated, if only nations would imitate what we are and do.
But this is strikingly odd, of course, because the United States
also stands before the world today and long before today as the
globe’s principal imperial power. Such a position presumes
overlordship and subordination. Yet American imperialism,
like our peekaboo relationship to class here at home, is a real-
ity that dare not speak its name.
There was a time when this shyness was not so pro-
nounced. During the first Gilded Age our nouveau riche were
so exquisitely class conscious (precisely because they were so
nouveau) that they concocted preposterous fantasy lineages
8 Introduction

and masqueraded as aristocrats to prove and justify their

superordination. Across the great class divide where the “other
half ” struggled to survive, where the “dangerous classes”
assembled as a reasonable facsimile of Marx’s specter, where
the nation seemed poised on the precipice of a second civil war,
class consciousness was a familiar idiom within the American
lexicon. Yet even then and there the “dream” lived on. The
stigmata of class, however anxious they made people, could be
treated not as indigenous to the New World but as viruses
imported from the Old, temporarily toxic but soon enough
rendered harmless by America the Abundant.
Nowadays, our nouveau don’t act out a charade of class
superiority. They do the opposite—dress in bib overalls, ride
the range in Range Rovers, and suck on bacon rinds in order
to efface from public view their power and privilege. Both
getups—the costumed and bejeweled pretenders of the Gilded
Age and the good ol’ cowboy-hatted billionaires of today—are
ways of being that express a chronic fixation on class. Indeed,
class consciousness, either as an affirmation or as a strategic
repudiation, has been a more conspicuous and continuous
feature of daily life for our country’s elites than has been the
case for those further removed from the centers of wealth, social
preferment, and political power. That’s as it should be. Under
normal circumstances, those empowered to deploy a society’s
resources, to steer its political institutions, to shape and guard
its means of cultural reproduction also create, as a matter of
course, justifications for their right to be doing these things,
their right to rule, and do so with confidence. If they lose that
confidence, if the justifications begin to ring hollow, the cir-
cumstance are no longer normal.
Are we edging closer to such an abnormality? Inequality
is once again a political incendiary. Under more settled
Introduction 9

conditions, the chosen way to expunge class from our public

life has been to invoke America as the land of the middle class.
Now such references are at best aspirational. Instead most la-
ment the vanishing of that class and the looming up of a social
vacuum. A creeping premonition grows that a world of the
downwardly mobile and dispossessed is gathering on one side
of that vacuum, the overly propertied on the other. Is America
headed back to the future, to a time long ago when social
classes squared off against each other with such venom that,
American exceptionalism notwithstanding, consciousness of
class mattered so much it could not be anesthetized?

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World

Class matters in America precisely because the country has
labored so hard to pretend it doesn’t. Has that imparted a dis-
tinctive dialectic to American society and if so, what have been
the consequences? Living in denial is generally considered a
danger to mental well-being. Psychoanalyzing an individual is
a problematic enough undertaking. Trying to do that for a whole
society would be a fool’s errand. However, without supposing
the existence of some collective mind, it may still be possible
to take the measure of class and the erasure of class in American
life, to sketch its social pathologies.
Hamlet-like, the upper classes can’t decide whether to be
or not to be. At one moment they parade their prerogatives like
the feudal stanchions of some yesteryear. Wealthy and wise,
they assert their fitness to rule. Then again, susceptible like
everyone to the egalitarian mythos of the land of the free and
worried they might be dangerously offending their less blessed
compatriots, they flee grandiose pretension. Better to remem-
ber their parents and grandparents coming over in steerage,
10 Introduction

sweating in steel mills, cleaning up after the careless and idle

rich. To and fro they go, trailing behind a perverse form of faux
democracy, moneyed but anti-statist, populist yet engineered,
credulous but cynical.
Those of wealth and power always have it and always will
feel skittish about exercising their outsized wherewithal inside a
democracy. Electoral and parliamentary protocols can’t be
ignored, and managing them is not simple. But matters must have
moved to an advanced stage of deterioration and psychic disori-
entation when elites feel it necessary to stir up incendiary passions
directed at themselves. Say what you will about ruling classes,
they hold things together. When they are psychologically as well
as politically unable to, the abyss looms. That might be welcome
news or not. Trump’s victory suggests a gloomy prospect.
Sisyphus would have sympathized with the infinite frus-
tration of the American middling classes: always climbing,
chronically afraid of falling, sentenced never to attain the sum-
mit. Such are the wages of a peculiarly American sin: the yearn-
ing to be not only equal but first among equals. If the Sisyphus
complex doesn’t show up in the DSM, it is nonetheless a social
malady that’s been a plague practically from the beginning. The
race after invidious distinctions observed trenchantly by Toc-
queville in the early nineteenth century has delineated the
middle ranks of American life ever since. It is the dark matter
lurking beneath the civic commitment to a classless equality—
namely, the equal right to become unequal.
What might be called the Sisyphus complex, the peculiar
pathology of this heterogeneous milieu, has left the middle class
politically malleable and at a cultural in-between: a politics
oscillating between spread the wealth and keep what’s mine, a
cultural persuasion part bourgeois self-advance, part bohe-
mian off-road. “Personality disorders” lend piquancy to TV
Introduction 11

sitcoms and melodramas, to novels of familial dysfunction, to

the ceaseless back-and-forth on Facebook and like social media,
and to the self-regard and self-surveillance that suffuse the
middle-class psyche. By definition, this preoccupation seems
to originate and reside somewhere far away from the outside
world. What’s it got to do with that other realm of big bureau-
cracies, professional associations, corporatized universities,
faceless insurance companies and banks, white-collar sweat-
shops, ateliers of digital innovation, a brazen plutocracy, or the
invisibles of über-America who serve them? Where and when
do these private and public spaces have intercourse? What
offspring emerge?
Maladies of the interior life may be routinely diagnosed
as arising from within the suffering individual and conse-
quently are ministered to at that site. However, this is tenable
only so long as the “individual” is accepted as the elementary
particle of the social cosmos. What if instead the “individual”
is a social fiction assembled out of an assortment of building
blocks of which class is a cornerstone? Still, everything about
middle-class life conspires to uphold the fiction of the autono-
mous individual; it’s a primal unreality and a faith.
Bossed yet self-invented, children of choice but shaped
from birth into bureaucratic and professional functionaries,
meritocrats who network just in case, captains of consciousness
in thrall to experts, creatives under surveillance, free agents yet
under duress from an armada of institutions in which they are
embedded; this is a class whose constitutive illusions leave it
unmoored, at sea. Such is the psychic dispensation for those
who work so hard to put in the shade all that might encumber
their fragile selfhood.
A society riddled with social fissures but one that seeks to
hide them from view makes casualties, economic but also
12 Introduction

psychological, of its subalterns. They in turn may act out or

internalize the wounds. A blue collar has long been a stigma.
Faux Bubbas from among the upper crust may sport one to
effect a kinship with those down-home. But it’s the quaintness
of food, drink, and dress, the frozen-in-time picturesqueness,
the masculine caricature of the backwoodsman that is being
offered up as a spectacle and masquerade. The celebration is
an insult.
The insulted may internalize the contempt. So “the hidden
injuries of class” can fester into malignancies of shame. They
are crippling, disempowering, ending in quiescence. Un-
schooled, living in dreary, passed-over districts, eating wrong,
playing the numbers rather than the stock exchange, conde-
scended to, superannuated, out of fashion in every way, the
socially invisible tunnel down into zones of self-reproach.
Or they may not. Instead those wounds may flare up as
an infectious resentment. The political psychology of resent-
ment, anger aimed at circles of privilege and power, will often
couple, as it does today and has at times in the past, with a fury
deflected downward at the mudsills of American society. No-
body plays by the rules, neither the snobs nor the incorrigibles.
Latte sippers and welfare queens, pinstriped bankers and the
zebra-striped incarcerated defile the homeland, mock what is
sacred, diss those who do still fuck, marry, reproduce, and work
the way you’re supposed to. This is a form of class conscious-
ness, to be sure. And it has its points. But it is one terminally
tainted with jealousy and envy, fear and loathing. It is an escape
route that dead-ends, a movement that remains fixed in place.
What was once identified as “the blue-collar blues” may,
however, assume yet another psychological profile. Rarer, it
subsumes and can eventually extinguish resentment by a yearn-
ing for emancipation. The social psychology of emancipation—
Introduction 13

something our ancestors of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries were familiar with, something many of us
today can still remember from the era of black liberation—is a
generous emotion. It embraces the whole social order. It is also
a class consciousness but one trying to escape the pathology of
class.
Nothing much like this exists today. Still, its embryonic
presence may be observed. Invariably it surfaces where the
politics of resentment also show up. Occupy Wall Street was
ecumenical in its indictment of capitalism and the system’s
multiple indignities and servitudes. But it was also caught up
in its own anarchical individualism and identity group resent-
ments. Schoolteachers, relentlessly and maliciously made the
scapegoats for the squalor and poverty of deindustrialized fi-
nance capitalism, find common cause with students and parents.
This is social outreach into the unknown but also a tactical
maneuver for securing a square deal in the here and now. The
Sanders campaign elicited the once unspeakable—there may
be life after capitalism in which the needs and desires of the
commonwealth take precedence—yet its more quotidian pro-
grams and platform rhetoric enunciated a vision just left of the
New Deal and its ex-communication of “economic royalists.”
Inside trade unions empathy and solidarity cohabit with I’m
alright, Jack. Environmentalists may find capitalism and the
health of the earth incompatible, or on the contrary lobby for
a “green capitalism” as the best medicine.
Class consciousness is everywhere and at all times a form
of social pathology trailing a variety of psychic ailments in its
wake. This is true even when it inspires the sentiment of eman-
cipation. Class has always mattered in America. That our soci-
ety so often compulsively denies that is not only politically and
economically problematical but also leaves it damaged in the
14 Introduction

heart, afflicted in the brain. Only in the case of class conscious-

ness as liberation might it function as the healing agent for the
wound it created.

Into the Heart of Darkness

There’s an adage in Great Britain advising that if you’re ponder-
ing a social dilemma, the first place to look for answers is that
country’s exquisitely intricate class structure. In America that
would be the last place to look. One sociologist has called this
aversion “America’s forbidden thought.” Committed to the no-
tion that class in America is everywhere and nowhere, I de-
cided to take the measure of class where it is least likely to show
up, where the heart and soul of Americanism is thought to
reside, free of any tincture of class.7
Iconic events and documents and images in our national
history comprise the raw material of my version of why class
matters. I’ve selected six: the settlements at Plymouth and
Jamestown; the U.S. Constitution; the Statue of Liberty; the
cowboy; the “Kitchen Debate” between Richard Nixon and
Nikita Khrushchev; and the March on Washington and Martin
Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Each in its own way
enjoys an exalted status. All are emblematic of the American
credo and deeply lodged in the national imagination. They
capture something essential about what many would agree is
at the heart of the national experience, summarizing its best
intentions or most fervent yearnings.
None of them appear to have anything much or essential
to do with class; class does not seem to matter. Scholars might
see them differently, aware that their histories are entangled
with the social division of labor or the unequal distribution of
power and wealth or the rise of capitalism. For most people,
Introduction 15

however, they stand as monuments to individual freedom, self-

reliance, tolerance, democracy, racial justice, and equality. And
in some sense they do. By looking for telltale signs of class, I do
not mean to argue that these are really camouflaged landmarks
of the class struggle. What I do believe is that class mattered in
their origins and evolution and the space they came to occupy
in our national life. And if that is the case for what many con-
sider instances of immaculate conception in our national nar-
rative—defining moments when class didn’t matter—then it
might be that class runs in the American grain. However much
the country has dedicated itself to effacing that blemish and
however deeply embedded and hard to discern that grain might
be, it’s there like Henry James’s “figure in the carpet.”
My six semaphores are not the only ones signaling the
country’s exceptional immunity from the contagion of class
conflict. I might have chosen “the New World” or manifest
destiny or Horatio Alger or family values or the Declaration of
Independence or the Empire State Building or “the Free World”
to serve the same purpose. All are equally well known. What-
ever else they might conjure up, they evoke a universe that
operates free of the constraints and abrasions of class.
What I deliberately avoided selecting were memorable
moments that recall times when the lineaments of class were
clear for all to see: the Haymarket Massacre, or William Jennings
Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech or the Flint sit-down strike, or
Shays’ Rebellion, or the châteaux imported from their Euro-
pean homesites by Gilded Age “robber barons” to line Fifth
Avenue and the seashore at Newport, Rhode Island, or the
Bradley-Martin Ball where “the 400” masqueraded as Euro-
pean nobility while outside the barricaded Waldorf Hotel
“huddled masses” floored by the depression of the 1890s scav-
enged to stay alive, or the uproarious denunciations of
16 Introduction

“economic royalists” during the New Deal, or Teddy Roosevelt’s

scorn for “malefactors of great wealth,” or Jacob Riis’s photo-
graphs of the urban misery in which “the other half ” lived, or
utopian and dystopian best sellers like Looking Backward or
Caesar’s Column, about a country ravaged by class antagonisms,
or The Grapes of Wrath, or of course the battlefields where the
fate of slave labor was decided, or the Emancipation Proclama-
tion that made abolition official. However imperishable at least
some of this inventory from the past might be, none of it reg-
isters as an all-American theme, if only implicitly, in the creation
of an exceptional nation. On the contrary, they live on as aber-
rations, departures or interruptions that were gotten past, their
lessons learned, the ruptures they caused in our public life
transcended.
I picked my six icons in part because they first appeared
during distinctive periods in the country’s life. Those eras
roughly coincide with phases in the economic evolution of the
New World. Plymouth and Jamestown as well the Constitution
are products of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when
the future of the country as a capitalist society was not yet
settled. Alternatives coexisted alongside the emergence of
market-centered arrangements. The earliest colonial settlements
as well as the document that definitively put an end to that era
were marked by this pre-capitalist condition, which profound-
ly influenced just how class mattered and just what class signi-
fied.
The Statue of Liberty and the cowboy are figures of the
nineteenth century. Then a way of life that might be character-
ized as family capitalism flourished. It nurtured romantic no-
tions of unfettered individualism and sometimes Napoleonic
delusions of grandeur. In this “new world” the hierarchies once
assumed to organize social life before capitalism were now
Introduction 17

expected to get erased. Yet family capitalism brought with it the

specter of proletarianization and unanticipated modes of sub-
ordination. Both the myth of the cowboy and the statue were
initially molded by that encounter.
What some have called corporate capitalism or the cor-
porate welfare state overshadowed (although without extin-
guishing) family capitalism in the twentieth century. Relations
between classes were engineered out of existence, their incendi-
ary potential defused, their boundaries crossed and eroded away
by the flood tides of the “affluent society.” Triumphant postwar
America accomplished all this so effectively that the nation’s
founding utopia as a “city on a hill” seemed to have taken on
the flesh-and-blood secular reality of a country without class-
es. Vice President Richard Nixon boasted as much in his cele-
brated encounter with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in a
model kitchen at a commercial exhibition in Moscow. Not long
after that hundreds of thousands assembled in Washington to
march for “Jobs and Freedom” and listened to the most honored
speech of the twentieth century. Martin Luther King’s “I Have
a Dream” and the movement it spoke for seemed then and even
more emphatically since then to mark a further historic step
forward on the road to realizing the promissory note of equal
rights for all originally issued with the Declaration of Indepen-
dence. That road might run straight through the barriers of
racial exclusion, but it bypassed the hidden fault lines of class.
The political economy of midcentury America had less and less
use for the stigmata of race so long as they might be erased
without igniting the fires of class conflict.
Pre-capitalism, family capitalism, and corporate capital-
ism are rough categories I am imposing to counteract the tidal
momentum of the more conventional staging of our national
history. This nation—any nation, for that matter—inherently
18 Introduction

understands itself as rising above whatever internal fissures may

lie beneath the surface of national unity. The tensile strength
of that conceit is especially strong here in the New World; that’s
part of what made it new. But it is my claim that distinct po-
litical economies, full of flesh-and-blood social divisions,
shaped the way the nation originated and evolved. Having said
that, I do not pretend here to describe or analyze those political
economies, but merely to use them as demarcation points.
Finally, my purpose is not to write histories of these six
cardinal pieces of Americana, an absurdly ambitious undertak-
ing even to contemplate in these short essays. Rather, they are
focused strictly on how class mattered in their makeup and
nothing more.

The Personal Is Political

Class has mattered to me as it has to all of us. When Yale Uni-
versity Press first asked me to undertake this book, it made what
I considered an odd suggestion. Why not, the editors proposed,
include or even organize the book around the experiences of
your own life? The fame and commercial success accompanying
Ta Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son (which became a best-selling
book under the title Between the World and Me) no doubt en-
couraged this thought. I rejected the idea out of hand and the
press accepted my decision.
Then, as I began work, I rethought the proposal. My own
life span, it occurred to me, might be conceived as running from
one postwar moment, when class still occupied a prominent
place on the surface of public life after World War II, to a second
postwar moment after Vietnam, when class was already rapidly
receding into the background, becoming a kind of dark matter.
Perhaps introducing this vantage point into the treatments of
Introduction 19

my six iconic moments might enrich the larger story. It could

offer a personal way of embodying Faulkner’s much-quoted
adage that the past is not only not dead, it’s not even past.
Moreover, I’ve spent a good portion of my life engaged in
political affairs. That naturally influences the way I look at
events like the Kitchen Debate or the March on Washington, at
which I was present. Unlike Zelig, I can’t say the same about
the foundation of the Jamestown colony or the arrival of Lady
Liberty. Yet it would be naïve to think the opposite, that because
I didn’t come over on the Mayflower or ride the range with
Buffalo Bill, my views of those times are unmarked by my own
political and even personal experiences.
When I was first asked to tackle this project, I thought
immediately of all the reams and reams of paper devoted to
more analytical and theoretical as well as empirical accounts of
class. Many are of immense value. I didn’t want to replicate that
approach, however. Going personal was therefore also a kind
of end run.
Consequently, each chapter contains material from my
own life. This shows up in no special sequence, sometimes at
the opening, sometimes at the closing, sometimes here and
there throughout any particular chapter. If a thread runs
through it all, it might be called one man’s encounter with the
proletarian metaphysic.

The Elephant in the Room

I was born into a world where the notion of class enjoyed a
relatively distinct meaning. To the degree it was an opera-
tional part of everyday language, it pinpointed where a social
group stood in the system of production. There was a class of
owners, a class of wage earners, and in between floated a broad
20 Introduction

middle strata of professionals, administrators, self-employed

businesspeople, and farmers. The terrain was always more
complicated than that, of course. Middle managers, clerical
workers, the marginally employed, the idle rich, and the idle
poor fitted into their own special places, situated in a hierarchy
grounded in the way American society organized its capitalist
economy. Even in America, especially in the one just emerging
out of the Great Depression, it was common enough to con-
template the country’s future by anticipating how the tension
between workers and bosses would be resolved.
However, as even this simple schema suggests, there were
then and before then and since then alternative ways of defin-
ing class. Already in the post–World War II world in which I
came of age, class was being refigured in terms of income dis-
tribution, varying standards of living, and competing styles of
consumption. Social scientists referred to social strata rather
than classes. They noted the impermanence of what were once
thought of as firmly rooted class divisions. These status distinc-
tions were often seen as invidious ones, even if highly liquid.
They might give rise to resentment, jealousy, imitation, snob-
bery, fawning, envy, emulation, or even renunciation. What they
did not take into account openly (but nonetheless embedded)
were relations of power and subordination.
Power and subordination are at the forefront of the way
class is deployed in these six essays. Before it was reduced to an
abstract economic category, capital first of all existed and con-
tinues to exist as a vessel of power, a political relationship be-
tween those who have it and those who, because they don’t,
must submit. In that sense, I remain a child of the proletarian
metaphysic. That outlook for a long century, beginning with
the advent of the industrial revolution, imagined the new class
of propertyless wage workers brought into being by that
Introduction 21

revolution to comprise the generative social division of modern

life. Moreover, that working class was perceived as the principal
agent of historical transformation, the class that was nothing
destined to become everything, to paraphrase a famous anthem.
Recent times belie that anticipation. The political align-
ments that were supposed likely to emerge from that class
configuration have not formed, or where and when they did
they soon dissolved. Other developments similarly undermined
older expectations or forebodings. In an idea stretching as far
back as midcentury and resurfacing today, social observers have
spied in automation or cybernetics a logic that will do away
with classes by making most human work superfluous. One
theorist, André Gorz, put it so: “Work—the defining activity of
capitalism—is losing its centrality both to exploitation and to
resistance.” Even stopping short of Tomorrowland, work (and
its relationship to class in contemporary life) suffers an am-
biguous status; glorified yet steeply stratified, inviting a badge
of honor yet disguised so as not to appear like common labor,
which is perceived as dependent, dumb, undignified.8
Classes conceived instead as congeries of consumer be-
haviors and aspirations is perhaps the most frequently used
map of our social geography. This is true even in this new age
of Trump, when most of the superheated populist rhetoric
zeroes in on the cultural pretensions of elites. The “relations of
production,” to use the Marxist term of trade, have largely
subsided beneath the surface of public life, no longer quite as
visible to the naked eye. I am preoccupied with refocusing at-
tention on power and subordination in these six explorations
into why class matters. In that sense, the essays are about both
the past and a return to the past. However, interrogating who
runs things and who doesn’t necessarily expands the boundar-
ies of class well beyond the economic sphere. Dependency may
22 Introduction

originate or be nurtured there, but it naturally and inevitably

spills into political and cultural life. That is where social class-
es make their presences known—and, more profoundly, is
where they actually take shape. The chapters that follow thus
pursue the hunt for class into these realms.
We live in an ostensibly democratic society whose politi-
cal protocols, institutional mechanisms, and creedal beliefs
reflect those democratic commitments, however often they are
breached. But the forms of democratic life may work to obscure
class boundaries. Is capitalism compatible with democracy
always, at times, never? Are “the people” a class; are they the 99
percent? These are the formulations of a populism that may or
may not converge on class divisions as they are molded through
the “relations of production.” The American political genius
has at times overmastered those underlying “relations” and
at other times laid them bare, as these six explorations may
show.
Those “relations of production” may seem bloodless, aris-
ing out of the mathematics of the otherwise antiseptic inter-
course of labor with capital. It has become a commonplace,
however, to note that race and gender muddy those waters. That
they do is self- evident. The subaltern status of African
Americans, women, and others of the wrong color or nativity
decidedly inflect the nature of class in America (and of course
elsewhere as well) at work and away from work. This interlarding
of racial and class subordination has never been clearer than it
is now with the metastasis of the carceral state. As the economy
has deindustrialized, it has produced a swelling surplus popu-
lation largely, if not entirely, made up of people of color. Millions
have ended up jailed. One social observer has noted, “From the
point of view of Capital ‘race’ is renewed not only through
persistent racialized wage differentials or . . . occupational
Introduction 23

segregation . . . but through the racialization of the unwaged

surplus or superfluous populations.”9
Less frequently noted, however, is that class itself tends to
biological interpretation on the part of ruling classes. One of
the great achievements of the American Revolution was to strike
a blow at the stigma born by the mass of laboring humanity
since Adam’s fall. Yet Thomas Jefferson, that paladin of democ-
racy, voiced a hoary commonplace when he wrote to his friend
John Adams noting the existence of a “natural aristocracy
among men” marked by “virtue and talents” who should run
society. A subordinate status within the “relations of produc-
tion” has again and again been associated with a basal inferior-
ity, apart from any tie to a specific “race” or other organic
identity. Such was the case within the fractious Jamestown
community, among those hoping to save “Lady Liberty” from
the “huddled masses,” and with the upstanding farmers and
ranchers who warned off proletarian cowboys, even those of
pure Confederate stock, brash enough to want to marry their
daughters. “White trash” then and “white trash” now has marked
those down at the bottom of the class pyramid with a primal
stain their “racial” makeup can’t remove.10
Whatever rigor may attach to a definition of class rooted
in “the relations of production” tends to become more elastic in
the mercurial realms occupied by my chosen six. Cowboys were
working stiffs and heroes of lone rebellion at one and the same
time. Makers of the Statue of Liberty were champions of bour-
geois liberal democracy, in flight from working-class insurgencies,
and phobic about immigrants. Vice President Richard Nixon was
a veteran anticommunist yet a herald of the classless society.
Martin Luther King’s speech rejected skin color as an arbiter of
one’s fate, but over the years that followed licensed a national
amnesia about how social class continued to play that tragic role.
24 Introduction

And when we talk about the first colonial settlements and

the Constitution that turned a loose confederation of ex-
dependencies into united states, the relations between the
powerful and the subordinate seem categorically different than
in later centuries. Within settler communities in Massachusetts
and Virginia, traditional hierarchies from the Old World pre-
vailed alongside the first intimations of modern classes. Mean-
while, outside the stockade these colonial outposts dominated
aboriginal communities, an overlordship that ended in the
extinction of the indigenous settlements as viable societies. Here
class took on the character of imperial predation, including the
racial coloration that so often rationalizes colonialism. At the
same time, these settlements themselves were subjected and
subordinated to the powerful institutions of global trade and
finance. And as for the nation’s founding document, the
struggle to formulate and adopt it set off an encounter between
a frontier agrarian society against the commercial momentum
of a seaside one that would decide the country’s future.
Class in America has always mattered, then, but not always
in the same way. Lineaments of the country’s classes have been
reconfigured again and again. The middling classes of
nineteenth-century family capitalism have only a resemblance
to the suburban world of the 1950s when I was a kid. The rob-
ber barons, who by and large refused to donate money to build
the Statue of Liberty, were differently motivated than the cor-
porate CEOs who applauded Dr. King’s speech on the Mall.
Moreover, the way classes have dealt with each other, the
way their presence has been reflected in our imaginative as well
as our political and moral life, has mutated again and again,
expressing the fluidity characteristic of any capitalist society
and emphatically true of the United States. Consignment to
one class has always, for many, seemed temporary even if it
Introduction 25

wasn’t. Immigrants reduced to Stücke in Carnegie’s steel mills

could nonetheless harbor the dream that they could flee their
proletarian exile for an American paradise. Footloose cowhands
were one or two lucky breaks away from a herd of their own.
What persists, as shown in these essays, is the way class has
figured in the disposition of power in a society that has strug-
gled mightily to fend off the recognition that class matters.
 1
East of Eden

I
live in rural Manhattan. That oxymoron refers to the up-
permost point of the island. There a climax forest rises
above the banks of the Hudson River. A scattering of
private homes still stands nearby. Apartment buildings
top off at six stories, which by Manhattan reckoning may as
well be the Great Plains.
As recently as the beginning of the twentieth century
there were still working farms in the neighborhood where
residents could get freshly laid eggs and milk. The IRT subway
line didn’t get to Dyckman Street, the southern border, until
1906. In the decades that followed Inwood became a haven
for working-class Jewish immigrants on their way up and out
of the teeming precincts of the Lower East Side and Brownsville
in Brooklyn. Already living there were working-class Irish, some
with lace-curtain aspirations. If they managed to get the
curtains, they left. By the time I arrived in the 1970s, Inwood
was overwhelmingly blue-collar Irish, plus a remnant of old
Jews, some wiling away the day reading the Jewish Daily Forward
or its Yiddish edition, the Forverts, on sidewalk benches,
and an outpost on the east of working-class African Americans
East of Eden 27

living in a housing project where Kareem Abdul- Jabbar

grew up.
Studs Lonigan might have grown up there as well. It was
clannish and class conscious. More people read the Irish Times
than the New York Times and probably as many as read the
Daily News. Rumor had it that guns were run out of the neigh-
borhood to the IRA. Money certainly was. Every Irish bar and
restaurant and boutique (selling plastic shamrocks, Irish flags,
soda bread, Claddagh rings and mugs, Waterford crystal, green
ice cream cones, and Irish Republican paraphernalia) hung
signs urging support for the hunger strikers in Ulster prisons.
During “the Troubles” the Irish population of the neighborhood
was refreshed with young refugee/recruits from the Republic.
Although New Yorkers, they rarely left the neighborhood
except to work: construction jobs, on the subways, as domestics,
as cops, as firefighters. Picture an Irish and Manhattan version
of Saturday Night Fever. Young people like Studs graduated high
school or dropped out and then matriculated into a lifetime of
manual labor; a smaller fragment made it into low-level white-
collar jobs on Wall Street or in Midtown. While still young
and fit they played ball, but drugs and drinking soon benched
them. Wary of beat cops who were always hassling them about
petty vandalism or booze, they deferred to the local parish priest,
before whom they knew to genuflect and sanitize their language.
Except at home and at church, authority was unwelcome. By
their midtwenties, for most “Gotham” might as well be in a
galaxy far, far away—not their hometown but an exotic amuse-
ment park for the rich and sophisticated. Unless a job took them
there, only an occasional (and too often financially unapproach-
able) Knick or Ranger game found them mixing with a world
they sensed as alien. When they voted, if they voted, that semi-
underground feeling of being a class apart surfaced in loyal
28 East of Eden

support for their local congressional representative, a populist-

minded Democrat who still aroused the class-inflected passions
of the New Deal years.
Outliers, they treated me like an outlier among outliers.
Middle class and of the wrong ethnicity, I was tolerated at
pickup basketball games but otherwise ignored; although they
nicknamed me Woody after Woody Allen, whom they thought
I looked like (short, glasses, Jewish—or short, glasses, and
therefore Jewish), and/or because Woody stood as a not-hostile
but not-friendly moniker for a social boundary not to be crossed.
Whatever they may have felt, I winced at the estrangement for
two reasons. I didn’t like being stereotyped. But I fit the stereo-
type and lamented my own inability to cross that class divide,
in part because as a young political activist I wanted to make
contact with just this sort of passed-over working-class world.
Then again, being a bit of a loner myself, this treatment
did not bother me all that much. And I was in graduate school
becoming a historian of American labor, so I had a certain
sympathy for and interest in worlds inhabited by Studs Lonigan
and those like him. If my neighbors distrusted middle-class
outsiders, I thought I had an inkling as to why.
Nowadays, Gotham is rapidly absorbing Inwood. Once it
was the last Irish neighborhood left in Manhattan, but the Irish
are greatly reduced in number. Gentrification is spreading.
Many of the bars are gone. Bodegas have replaced them, along
with a smattering of hookah bars, tapas cafés aimed at the
newly arriving white upwardly mobile, and even a waterside
nightclub for the glitterati. Class and ethnic borders are etched
more visibly into the neighborhood’s geography than they used
to be: east of Broadway is Hispanic, black, and working class;
west is white, including some Irish hangers-on as well as the
city’s youthful cultural precariat of film and music makers,
East of Eden 29

graphic artists, theater people, and magazine writers. Residents

of the paleface precincts may also struggle to get by, enjoy as
little or less security than their colored neighbors, but are more
subject to illusions about their class identities, thanks in part
to their skin color. All in all, though, it’s still down-market (by
Manhattan standards), and the neighborhood remains largely
working class, now Latino, mainly Dominican. I wonder how
long it will retain this class character. Not long, probably, not
in Manhattan. But then again, Inwood has always been a prov-
ince of outsiders.
Frequently I walk through the magnificent woods separat-
ing my apartment building from the Hudson. A boulder guards
the entrance to the forest. It is a memorial rock. An inscription
reads: “Sharakkopoch: According to legend on this site of the
principal Manhattan Indian village, Peter Minuit in 1626 pur-
chased Manhattan Island for trinkets and beads worth 60 guil-
ders.” Nearby are the remains of a midden, the shell depository
where the Lenape coined their own wampum currency.
True or not in its particulars, the story on the boulder
resonates. We all know it (although the usual version prices the
island at $24). It carries with it several understories. One
faintly echoes a tale of lordship and submission that began back
then and with many a twist and turn resurfaced in Irish Inwood
and its Dominican successor. If Peter Minuit had possessed
Donald Trump’s flair for self-promotion, he might have called
the transaction “the art of the deal.” That is to say, we recognize
this as a tale of commercial shrewdness. Less “out there,” con-
veyed more by a wink and nod, the story implies how naïve
those natives were, how easily conned. Even more sotto voce
than that is a dimmer awareness that something more than a
piece of geography was on the block. Ways of life thousands of
years old would soon cease to exist. That the rock also
30 East of Eden

memorializes the emergence of American capitalism out of its

relationship with noncapitalist societies is not legible at all but
hidden beneath the boulder, in the earth. Down there class
matters. Up here as well.

A Wilderness Story
The purchase of Manhattan, although part of the lore of early
America, is not a national foundational myth the way the settle-
ments at Plymouth and Jamestown are. It is rather a quintes-
sential New York story, and therefore familiar yet somehow alien.
After all, Minuit was Dutch, not British, and it was the Dutch
who first set up shop on the Hudson (although that’s where the
Pilgrims were headed until a storm and navigational mistakes
landed them on Cape Cod). Men from the Netherlands were
the merchant kings of the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the Dutch East India Company four or five times the
size of its English equivalent. The Dutch built the wall where
Wall Street runs.
There can be no question that Dutch explorers like
Henry Hudson and the adventurers who followed him, financed
by the great banking firms of Amsterdam and Antwerp, were
after the New World’s “natural” resources (timber, fur, fish, and
so on) to trade around the globe. This was the age of mercantile
capitalism. It was dominated by vast trading monopolies that
were licensed by and collaborated with their governments; the
companies and their investors represented, let us say, the em-
bryonic Wall Streets of the world. The Dutch were first among
equals back then, just as New York occupies that position today.
No doubt exists about their motivations.
According to the country’s origin story, our true ancestral
heroes occupied a more empyrean realm. Pioneering settlers at
East of Eden 31

Plymouth and Jamestown and slightly later in mainland Mas-

sachusetts were political refugees, religious dissenters, instinc-
tive democrats, egalitarian individualists, idealists, inventors of
a “new man” in a “New World.” There is considerable truth in
this depiction. However, it effaces other realities, kin to the
earthier aspirations of the New York Dutch. Historians have
written about these, but the founding tale remains essentially
intact, for the average citizen a past perfect.
Plymouth and the much larger “plantation” of Massachu-
setts Bay established ten years later are particularly enlightening.
The original settlers were in the main (although not entirely)
Puritans of one sort or another. Some were what were called
“Separatists” who had been living as expatriates in Holland (or
more covertly in England). Their Protestant antipathies toward
the Anglican Church of England and to the Crown, which they
suspected was in league with the Church’s heavy tincture of Ca-
tholicism, were severe enough to countenance separation: reli-
gious, territorial, even political. They were outsiders by choice
and by virtue of official intimidation. Other Puritans shared their
basic beliefs but were insiders. Often enough these were men of
considerable wealth, usually accumulated in trade but also in
land. They might even occupy positions of political influence.
They weren’t separatists, but they were both dissenters and people
attuned to the commercial prospects of the mercantile world.1
When the seventeenth century began, both those eco-
nomic prospects and political pressures were becoming more
and more worrisome. The monarchy was asserting prerogatives
offensive to parliamentary tradition and threatening to those
not disposed to conform. At the same time, the economy fell
into a steep decline. The collapse that began in 1620 was the
steepest in six decades. Businesses of all kinds went under.
Artisans lost their workshops. Tradesmen fell into insupportable
32 East of Eden

debt. Larger merchants watched world markets shrink or

get annexed by the Dutch. Something similar happened on the
land. Tenants couldn’t make the rent as bad harvests and
the enclosure of common land by manorial lords aggravated
the crisis. Even larger landlords felt the pinch. “Masterless
men”—people whose traditional and deferential ties to land-
lords or master craftsmen or ship captains or ship builders or
merchant princes or political patrons had been severed by
the fluctuating fortunes associated with the labile rhythms
of the market—roamed country roads and urban back alleys
in growing numbers. This vagrant underclass, although regu-
lated and punished by the Elizabethan codes of the previous
century, remained a cause for alarm. It also had potential.2
Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay especially, as well as
Jamestown, were born out of this miscible brew of religious
and political high-mindedness, customary deferential social
relationships, and the economic ambitions and class tensions
characteristic of the world the settlers were leaving behind.
Many migrants came from the Midlands, a region suffering
acute distress, thanks both to the enclosure movement and to
a growth in population. Pilgrims on the Mayflower were joined
by forty-eight “strangers” (meaning non-Separatists) from
London and elsewhere. Of those, eighteen were indentured for
a year. There were twelve sailors, a cooper, a carpenter, a master
gunner, and a professional soldier, Myles Standish. So too the
Jamestown voyagers were a mixed lot of the high and low born.
Virginia in particular soaked up some of the surplus population
of the depressed motherland, its emigrants often recruited from
that roving population of day laborers, agricultural workers,
domestics, textile operatives, and displaced tenants.3
On board the Mayflower social ranks were clearly ob-
served, deference shown, for example, to the Carver family (its
East of Eden 33

patriarch would become the colony’s first governor, although

he soon died), which brought along its five servants. The major-
ity of those who made the earliest voyage to the New World
were middling sorts, not the most deprived. Still, the part of
England they left behind had long been organized into well-
defined hierarchies and dependencies resting on property, age,
and patriarchy. Even modestly equipped households maintained
servants, although in the ruder circumstances that awaited them
abroad only the wealthiest—families like the Appeltons and
Bradburys—were able to reestablish servants in husbandry
when they disembarked. Initially, everyone worked, including
John Winthrop and others in his patrician milieu, people who
would have considered labor beneath them back home.4
Soon after the “plantation” of Massachusetts Bay was
settled, subsequent ships from England carried a growing pro-
portion of bonded servants, some captured as prisoners of war
by Cromwell’s New Model Army in Scotland and Ireland, then
sold and indentured. Soon enough a small population of day
laborers emerged, supplemented by farmers who moonlighted
for wages to survive. So a social hierarchy not unlike the one
back home sprouted early on, although it was a shorter one that
didn’t extend so far down or up.5
But even if its social order was less steeply terraced than
the one it left behind, settler society remained subject to the
cultural assumptions and expectations of the old order: that
society rested on different “condicions of mankinde,” and that
the wealthiest among them would by the nature of things rule.
With the exception of Captain John Smith, the leaders of James-
town were credentialed members of the upper class. Edward
Morris Wingfield, the colony’s first president, said of Smith, “If
he were in England, I would thinck scorne this man should be
my companyon.”
34 East of Eden

Similarly, Massachusetts Bay was the home not only of

John Winthrop but of the future nabobs of Brahmin New En-
gland, including the Saltonstalls, the Endicotts, and the Hig-
ginsons. Some of these aristocrats brought their feudal retinue
with them, including stewards, their own clergy, like John Cot-
ton, and other retainers. The Arbella itself was named after a
Puritan nobleman’s sister imprisoned by the king for two years.
The Earl of Lincoln, Theophilus Clinton, had also backed the
earlier undertaking at Plymouth. Yet under the changed cir-
cumstances of the New World, new forms of wealth accumula-
tion through global trade and investment would work to undo
the old order. That rankings were fewer and shorter made it
easier to view the top from the bottom and left the whole system
more porous. Nonetheless, as those ancient orderings weakened,
new stratifications arising out of the commercial flux of the
New World would take their place.6
All of these colonial outposts were exercises, after all, in a
mercantile form of venture capitalism, whether or not they were
also vessels of religious or political liberty. The Mayflower, the
Arbella, and the three ships sailing to Virginia had on board a
heterodox group of passengers, some true believers, some not,
some of middling ranks, some rather wealthier, and some
“masterless.” They sailed under the flags of privately owned,
although publicly sanctioned, joint-stock trading companies,
some of whose investors and creditors were aboard ship, some
waiting for their returns on investment back in London. (The
Virginia Company conducted a public offering of its stock two
years after it was created.) We call them “colonies,” which pre-
sumes their character as public projects, but in fact all of their
assets—land, tools, houses, and, of course, profits—belonged
to the joint-stock company and its shareholders. Passengers
might be shareholders or not, or some might hold a greater
East of Eden 35

share than others. Each settler traveling to Plymouth had at

least one share worth £10, and a second share if he or she brought
£10 worth of supplies. Women and children over the age of
sixteen were also granted a share (a half share was given to those
between ten and sixteen). During the seven-year term of the
company’s initial existence, food, clothing, shelter, and drink
were to be paid out of the common stock.7
Shareholders aboard the Arbella were granted land,
often in groups acting as proto-towns. Founding proprietors
of each “town” were given collectively six square miles, which
they then could dispose of as they saw fit. The grants were usu-
ally based on the extent of each person or family’s existing
resources to ensure that the land would be most fruitfully
developed. That in turn meant people with servants and some-
times cattle.
Right away, then, a truncated but not unfamiliar pecking
order emerged. Individual landholders were free to do what
they wanted with their property, subject only to certain com-
munal constraints on how the land was used, some obligation
to show real improvement in three years, and other customary
restrictions. A similar evolution in the direction of private
ownership of land occurred in Virginia just before the Pilgrims
arrived. There, property ownership was established as a require-
ment for voting. According to one historian, “More than
anything else, it was the treatment of land and property as
commodities traded at market that distinguished English
conceptions of ownership from Indian ones.” Putting aside for
the moment how that would open up an existential and class-
inflected chasm between pre-Columbian civilizations and
European ones, the pursuit of accumulation through the
mechanisms of the market would also cleave the world that had
been transplanted across the Atlantic.8
36 East of Eden

Whatever their religious or political purposes, these settle-

ments or “plantations” were intended to be not merely
self-sufficient but profit making. Their promoters were hardly
shy about drawing airy pictures of untold wealth there for the
taking. An early dispatch from Cape Cod called it “a goodly
land” and went on to describe a commercial Eden. In New
England that meant the ordinary—fish, fur, timber. In James-
town it signaled the extraordinary, the hard-to-shake conviction
that gold was there somewhere, a belief that fueled a quest
that nearly destroyed the outpost, as no one wanted to work.
After all, half of the 105 voyagers could be classed as “gentlemen”
who looked down on labor of all kinds. Captain John Smith,
who is rightly credited with imposing a harsh, if life-saving,
discipline on the would-be prospectors, remarked after return-
ing to England, “Gold promises made all men their slaves in
hopes of recompenses.” There was, he remembered, “no talke,
no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade
gold, such a bruit of gold, that one mad fellow desired to be
buried in sands [in order that the sands] would make gold
of his bones.”
Smith had little regard for “gentlemen.” He thought of
them as people who “never did anything but devour the fruits
of other men’s labor” and mocked their behavior on the
Virginia frontier. where they whined about the lack of “any of
their accustomed dainties, with feather beds and down pillows,
taverns and alehouses, in every breathing place, neither plenty
of gold and silver and dissolute liberty as they expected.” In his
view, “A plaine souldier that can use a pick-axe and spade is
better than five Knights, although they were Knights that could
break a Lance; for men of great place, not inurred to those
incounters; where they finde things not suitable, grow many
times so discontented, they forget themselves and oft become
East of Eden 37

so careless that a discontented melancholy brings them to much

sorrow, and to others much miserie.”9
Famously, Captain Smith proclaimed that “he that will
not worke shall not eate . . . for the labours of thirtie or fortie
honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine
an hundred and fiftie idle layteres.” His envisioned a land where
“every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and
land; or the greatest part in a small time. . . . If hee have nothing
but his hands, he may set up this [his?] trade; and by industrie
quickly grow rich; spending but halfe that time wel, which in
England we abuse in idleness, worse or as ill.” Others of higher
social station saw things differently. Even after the gold craze
subsided, a Virginia Company pamphlet of 1620 advertised “the
rich Furres, Caviary, and Cordage which we draw from Russia
with so great difficulty, are to be had in Virginia, and the ports
adjoining with ease and plenty.”10
Part of our folklore is how this too sunny view of what
awaited them, their lack of preparation, meant disaster for the
colonists. Only 38 of the original 108 who landed in Jamestown
made it through their first winter alive. What became known
as “the Starving Time” came a few years later. Staying alive meant
eating rats, cats, mice, dogs, shoe leather, and finally human
flesh. On Cape Cod colonists waited for a resupply ship from
England and meanwhile begged from the Indians (Virginia
colonists did the same in the early years, or if they felt strong
enough plundered the neighboring Powhattans). And in that
connection, incidentally, it is very unlikely any turkey was served
at that fabled first thanksgiving dinner hosted by the Wampa-
noog tribe. The bird, originally imported from Turkey to North
America by the Spanish, had been hunted to near extinction by
both natives and Europeans by the seventeenth century. In any
event, things couldn’t continue down this road.11
38 East of Eden

If this undertaking was to serve as a “city on hill,” a “light

unto the nations,” it would also need to function like any more
earthbound city. That meant it would have to satisfy the more
secular desires of its financial facilitators. Investors and creditors
were known as “adventurers,” a nomenclature that had more
to do with risking money than life. A generation before the
Pilgrims set sail, the soldier-poet and Calvinist Philip Sidney
summed up the vision of a “hazardous enterprise of planting
upon the main of America, an Emporium for the confluence
of all nations that love or profess any kind of virtue or com-
merce.” “Adventurers” were customarily seeking a 30 percent
return on their investment. Whether these expectations were
rational or not, they put enormous pressure on these enter-
prises. Articles of incorporation were time bound, seven years
usually, at the end of which they might be dissolved and the
spoils divided up. All investors had incurred debts to finance
these expeditions before they hauled up anchor and would ac-
cumulate more to survive once they landed. Plymouth “planta-
tion” had about seventy investors, some of landed wealth,
others merchants or master artisans, all in it for the good works
and good returns.12
Deference and debt, along with visions of religious and
commercial liberation, comprised the baggage carried abroad
and unloaded on the shores of the New World. These were rude
encampments at first. Nothing quite like the steep hierarchies
of power, wealth, and preferment could be reproduced on the
coastlines of an unknown continent. Planted there were the
seeds of a middling social order but also one whose formative
years were molded by a world accustomed to acknowledging
rank, the incentives and perils of the market, and the specter
of “masterless men.” Barely taken into account were the people
who already lived there.13
East of Eden 39

Solvency and Salvation

Even before disembarking, the Plymouth expeditioners nearly
came to blows. We think of the Mayflower Compact as a kind
of democratic and constitutional premonition, a prophylactic
against tyranny or milder forms of elitism. Insofar as it is thought
to prefigure the Constitution, it has been considered providen-
tial. There is some truth to this, although the Constitution it is
supposed to foreshadow was itself the outcome of intense social
conflict, some of which got inscribed in its articles.14
The language of the compact is suggestive. The signers
assented “to such governance and government as we should
agree to make and choose.” The document clarified that they
were embarked on “a voyage to plant the first colony in the
northern part of Virginia” (note that they sailed at first under
a license accorded by the Crown to the Virginia Company) and
that they had combined “into a civil body politic” that would
“enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordi-
nances, acts, constitutions, offices from time to time, as shall
be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of
the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and
obedience.” It is tempting, for the sake of our national origin
story, to interpret the compact anachronistically.
It is easy to forget that the document signed on board the
Mayflower was a corporate, not a communal agreement. Nor
was it a state document, nor did it envision anything remotely
like a new nation; indeed, it paid explicit obeisance to the king.
Nor was it a secular or democratic understanding in the first
instance but a religious one—as it ought to have been, given who
was aboard. The Pilgrims were not against monarchy as a form
of government even if they had severe differences with their
present monarch. They were as well colonialists who believed in
40 East of Eden

their nation’s suzerainty over others as much as James I did, and

thought of his foreign foes, especially the Spanish, as their own
enemies as well, on both religious and political grounds.15
What drove the voyagers to sign a compact before disem-
barking were the tensions that had already surfaced between
the adventurers and their fellow passengers, especially the
“strangers,” over the division of the profits both groups were
looking forward to. The adventurers were suspected of cheating,
of trying to squeeze out something extra to compensate for the
risk involved in supplying the wherewithal of the venture, in-
cluding the ship. This is the context in which they submitted
“to such governance and government as we should agree to
make and choose.”
Moreover, when contemplating more precisely what ide-
als motivated these undertakings, it is worth remembering
perhaps the most famous pronouncement of their exceptional
nature. John Winthrop delivered his sermon, “A Model of
Christian Charitie,” while still on board the Arbella: “Men shall
say of succeeding plantacions: ‘the Lord made it like those of
New England’: for . . . we shall be a City upon a Hill, the eyes
of all people are uppon us.” The sermon makes no mention of
democracy or liberty, but rather fixes its attention on the new
settlement’s practice of its version of the Protestant faith and
how well its congregants might execute its vision of charity.16
Christian charity no doubt moved the consciences of
many a settler. Cotton Mather referred to William Bradford,
the Plymouth Bay colony’s governor, as the “Moses of the Pu-
ritan migration.” But the settlers were also preoccupied with
surviving, thriving, and doing business. Winthrop argued on
behalf of colonization not only for religious purposes but be-
cause there was a good chance it would realize high returns for
the labor expended. Business, however, was not good at first.
East of Eden 41

These colonies functioned within a global web of financial and

trading relationships. Their life expectancy depended not only
on ensuring their material subsistence but on their capacity to
produce commodities for the worldwide market that could be
monetized and satisfy the adventurers’ thirst for profits—and,
even more urgent, pay off their swelling debts to their London
bankers. That wasn’t happening in Plymouth in these formative
years because there was precious little in the immediate vicin-
ity that might be shipped back to England and turned into cash.
At Jamestown the situation was at first even worse. Gold fever
sickened efforts at any real economy.
Much of the Pilgrims’ labor in those early days was done
to repay debts to their financial backers. They needed to produce
vendible commodities: so that, for example, the first ship sent
back to England in 1621 contained two barrels of fur and a
cargo of lumber for use in the homeland shipbuilding industry.
That wasn’t much, however. A few years later the colony was
self-sufficient in food, but its debts grew relentlessly. It owed
the enormous sum of £1,300 to its creditors and still relied on
being resupplied from England. The situation in Virginia was
more dire. By 1612 no more stock offerings were possible to
refinance the settlement. A version of martial law imposed by
Smith included forced labor, no right to return home, and
draconian punishment for the pettiest infractions, including
death by starvation for stealing from the company stores. What
was to be done?17

The Mad Hatter

Alice of Alice in Wonderland attends a “Mad Tea Party” hosted
by a “Mad Hatter.” Actually, Lewis Carroll named him simply
the Hatter, but he quickly became known far and wide as the
42 East of Eden

Mad Hatter because he was clearly crazy. When Carroll was

writing, in the mid-nineteenth century, the phrase “mad as a
hatter” had been in circulation for at least two hundred years,
a common idiom Carroll no doubt knew and may well have
had in mind. “Mad as a hatter” has a sad backstory that speaks
to class and pathology.
Fur hats had been the preferred headgear for the aristoc-
racies of Europe, Russia, and China for centuries. This was a
luxury trade of mass proportions. Making a fur hat, in par-
ticular the popular beaver hat, was a complex undertaking,
labor intensive and dirty. The hat passed through several
stages of production, often requiring considerable skill and
some chemistry. At one point the hatter had to make use of
liquid mercury, which was released as fumes as the artisan
steamed the hat in order to shape it. Workers in the trade soon
enough began showing various physical and neurological dis-
orders: their teeth fell out, their kidneys and endocrine systems
malfunctioned. They slurred their speech, suffered hallucina-
tions, showed signs of memory loss as well as paranoia and
depression, and often were subject to uncontrollable tremors,
or “hatters’ shakes”: “mad as a hatter” indeed.18
Fur workers might be driven mad from their work, but
the trade was making what we might today call mad profits. It
is hard to exaggerate how precious furs had become by the time
the Pilgrims set off. From raw pelt to finished hat the markup
was eightfold. The great state-sanctioned trading companies
monopolized the business. Their markets spanned the globe.
Beaver hats in particular were coveted items in wider circuits
of high-end consumption by landed elites, wealthy merchants,
lawyers, state bureaucrats (including the boyars who ran the
czar’s autocracy and China’s Confucian state functionaries). In
London the upper class could shop at the New Exchange, a kind
East of Eden 43

of shopping mall for the elite that included haberdashers, mil-

liners, and the like. Quality varied depending on the nature of
the pelt and the complexity of the production process. The
finest were sleek, silky, sometimes lined with velvet or taffeta,
finished to a glossy sheen. Beaver hats were markings of social
prestige, worn within prescribed social rituals that determined
when exactly they were suitable, when they were to be doffed,
and so on. They made their debut in Paris in the late sixteenth
century. Some remarked on their extravagance. One writer
noted “fashions . . . rare and straunge, so are the things where-
of their Hattes be made.” Soon enough they had become what
one historian has called a “golden fetish.” They were also quite
warming during Europe’s Little Ice Age and, thanks to the bea-
ver’s way of life, relatively waterproof.
In otherwise depressed times, this luxury trade kept the
economy moving. And for that reason, among others, it at-
tracted the support of the Crown. (Prince Charles indulged his
appetite for high living in every conceivable way, including a
spectacular collection of beaver hats and clothing.) State poli-
cy pursued colonization in order to augment the circulation of
goods (both luxury items like fur and silk, and homely essentials
like lumber) and taxable revenue from their sale. Conflict with
other nations pursuing the same goal was inevitable and worked
to raise even further the price of beaver.19
North America became an increasingly desirable source
of supply. Western Europe had hunted out its beaver population
by this time (in medieval days local beaver had been ample and
so too, therefore, hats). The beaver stock east of the Urals was
likewise heavily tapped out, and in any case dealing with Russia
was politically difficult and entailed hazardous transit through
Archangel. Another factor, however, made North America ex-
traordinarily appealing. Native hunters could furnish the furs
44 East of Eden

and they didn’t have to be paid in bullion; indeed, these men

and women of the forest would have had no use for it. In a
mercantilist age that placed a premium on hoarding stashes of
gold and silver, this was an “offer” impossible to refuse.20
Beaver were not plentiful where the Pilgrims landed. But
they were elsewhere, especially further north along the forested
coast of Maine. Before the English arrived, other Europeans
had traded there for furs. It was the discovery of this “golden
fetish” in its raw form that rescued Plymouth. It became as well
an important support for Massachusetts Bay.
Tribes living in the vicinity of Plymouth were mobile so-
cieties whose material well-being depended on cyclical rounds
of hunting, fishing, gathering fruits and herbs, and agriculture,
in particular the growing of corn. They had customarily traded
some of that maize with tribes living further north for furs for
their own use as clothing. The colonists caught on quickly, know-
ing that fur was a valuable cash commodity back where they had
come from. So they traded with the locals for corn, grew some
themselves, and sailed to Maine. The eastern Abenaki living along
the Kennebec River were already accustomed to trading with
Europeans for metal tools, cooking implements, and other items.
They were also highly proficient at trapping beaver, using birch
bark dugout canoes as long as eighteen feet, manned by two men
and capable of carrying a cargo of a thousand pounds yet able
to traverse streams with depths of only five inches. In Plymouth’s
first venture to the Kennebec region, settlers swapped surplus
corn for furs weighing seven hundred pounds. In 1630 the Pil-
grims shipped two thousand beaver pelts to England, worth
about £5,000, a far cry from that original shipment of two bar-
rels of fur. Fur trading was the colony’s financial salvation.21
Like liquid mercury, however, the fur trade, together with
the implanting of distinctively European practices of private
East of Eden 45

property, would have a pathological impact. This time the

victims were the trade’s producers of raw material, the native
sons and daughters of the New World. Social antagonism
erupted both within the European settler communities and
between them and the indigenous worlds they settled among.
Class relations were already part of the cargo en route to
America and infected the atmosphere even before landfall. They
were at work insidiously undermining the harmony of the city
on a hill, and imperiling the survival and civil peace of James-
town. Once the colonies took root, newer kinds of class tensions
began to mutate. Those internal social hemorrhages would
sicken but not kill the body politic.
Something more deadly, however, accompanied the ex-
ternal transactions between mercantile and Indian societies.
They would eventually poison the latter, incubating behavior
and motivations as well as social and political distempers that
would prove fatal. Moreover, that lethal relationship would
produce a different kind of racial pathogen in the collective
psyche of settler society. The primitive accumulation of liquid
capital in the mercantile world accomplished by absorbing the
labor and resources of noncommercial societies was a kind of
supra-class form of exploitation that left indelible imprints on
both parties to that relationship.
Wampum lubricated the circuits of trade between natives
and colonists. It was as much a European as an Indian medium.
Tribes made use of the shells (whelks and quahogs) for various
ceremonial and practical purposes, including as gifts to neighbor-
ing groups and to the sachems who led them, as compensation
for powwow medical treatment, and so on. Western drilling
instruments made it possible to mass-produce wampum, and
that made it a currency of the fur trade in Maine. However, as
wampum became widely available, its very prevalence overturned
46 East of Eden

customary intra- and intertribal relations, upsetting traditional

systems of social status by diffusing the political power that had
once attached to established leaders of the tribes. The new system
promoted both competition among Indians and dependence on
the English.
Commerce, not technology, revolutionized the ecology
and economy of Indian life. Axes and iron pots simply made it
easier to reproduce life as it had always been without uprooting
those ways of surviving. Frequently such items not only proved
useful but were incorporated into preexisting social rituals,
functioning, thanks to their exoticism or rarity, as insignia of
social status. Guns made intertribal conflict more deadly, of
course, but there had always been intertribal confrontations.
Relying on European guns, however, meant that the im-
memorial skills of making traditional weaponry were lost, in-
tensifying indigenous dependency on the Old World. The
market as a social system increasingly reconfigured who mat-
tered and who didn’t. Traditional kinship and political hierar-
chies were transgressed or abandoned. The market inculcated
a competitive instinct that eroded communal norms. Tribes
could and did become shrewd traders (the British tried to
control the trade for wampum shells with the Indians of Long
Island, but the tribes were too crafty to be dominated). But
whether or not they could function well or poorly in this re-
gional and ultimately global network of trade, Indian social
esteem came to rest on “killing animals and exchanging their
skins for wampum or high-status European goods.”22
Societies that had rested on production for use, with trade
an occasional activity tied to reciprocal obligations and tributes,
became inveigled in economies given over entirely to trade and
private accumulation. And because the terms of trade so disfa-
vored these indigenous communities, they were compelled to
East of Eden 47

produce for the market at a rate and in quantities that eventu-

ally came at the expense of traditional forms of labor. Ironically,
the shift to fur trapping for international markets diminished
the time the natives had once devoted to making their own cloth-
ing and blankets, so that they came to rely more and more on
European textiles and European goods more generally. By the
latter part of the century, one observer noted, local tribes had
“abandoned all their own utensils.”
So too, in order to meet the demand of the global mar-
ketplace, formerly mobile communities had to become more
sedentary, both because the game they once tracked was vanish-
ing and so as to be near the source of wampum shells or beaver.
Permanent settlements became denser, which made them
readier carriers of disease (not to mention the near-complete
eradication of Indian populations by European-born microbes
against which they had no immunities). Population growth
intensified pressure on the land both for hunting and agri-
cultural purposes, and tribal diets became less varied and
nutritious.23
It wasn’t long before the only asset left to these communi-
ties was the land, but by the latter part of the seventeenth
century they had lost most of it either through war, by working
fields to exhaustion (something unheard of under the old re-
gime of a mobile, cyclical economy), through sale to provision
themselves with the basics, or through subterfuge and seizure
by the continent’s “new man.” Moreover, this relentless pressure
to produce a surplus for trade put enormous pressure on the
animal population they had long relied on (especially given the
low reproductive rate of the beaver) and on the whole eco-
logical system of which the Indians had been a part for millen-
nia. Bear, lynx, and elk, once staples of tribal diets, also became
scarce, in part because the colonists allowed their hogs and cows
48 East of Eden

to roam through the woods at will, consuming much of the

vegetable matter those wild animals lived on. Cows foraged the
unfenced fields of tribal communities, devouring the corn,
squash, and beans planted there. As beaver were hunted out,
the dams and ponds they had created, which helped make the
land arable, went with them. Those same aquatic structures had
encouraged fish and waterfowl by slowing water flow and rais-
ing the temperature, which nurtured plankton and insect life
for the fish and birds to feed on. Everything of customary tan-
gible value was going under.24
Intangibles were being lost as well, a situation just as life
threatening. Along with material dependency came a cultural
conversion—sometimes coerced, sometimes the outcome of
the silent persuasion exercised by the new character a structured
market society encouraged—that insidiously eroded the tissues
of communal and familial life. These were by and large societ-
ies long accustomed to elastic notions of tribal territory and
personal property that treated these not as exclusive, heritable,
or alienable but rather to be held for the common use and
distributed to individuals as custom and need prescribed. There
was no need for property accumulation in these mobile social
economies. Tools and other items were used by many people.
Land was farmed and then left for brush as the settlements
moved on, only to be cleared again in the future. Property was
often embedded in political and cultural institutions of gift
exchanges rather than sold, and such transactions were en-
acted in order to confirm or reaffirm social position. Fisheries
and hunting grounds, berry- and nut-picking areas were
treated as a tribal commonweal, a notion the British either could
not understand or simply ignored. Tribe members accepted as
a matter of course that they all were entitled to hunt, gather
wild plants, or cut birch bark for canoes. The same sense of
East of Eden 49

common usufruct applied to the rivers and coasts. Villages

owned not the land but what was on the land.
Now these communities were confronted by a very dif-
ferent conception of property, buttressed by British law, which
took for granted that property of all sorts inhered in the indi-
vidual, who could do with it what he wanted: pass it on to heirs,
sell it, borrow against it, and so on. So, for example, settlers
adopted tribal practices of clearing land through periodic burn-
ings, but these burnings occurred within strict property bound-
aries that were meaningless to their neighbors. Moreover,
because colonists were free to do what they wanted with their
property, their burnings were much more extensive, intended
not merely to clear away the undergrowth but to eliminate the
forest itself—and the forest was an ecological lifeline for the
tribes. Conversely, Indians conducting their cyclical, communal
burnings were held liable for damages to British property.
A fur trader named William Pynchon struck a deal with
an Agawan village in 1636. The Agawans assumed they were
retaining their conventional rights of usufruct—to hunt, fish,
and gather on the land—and granting Pynchon and his partners
permission to share in doing that, in return for which they
would receive various tools. The villagers considered this an act
of their sovereign tribe, not as an act that transferred ownership,
and as a usufruct right that applied only to specific uses of the
land. Pynchon and the English law courts thought otherwise.
They treated the exchange as a private transaction that granted
the Indians limited rights but vested ownership in Pynchon,
the “buyer.” John Winthrop confected a similar arrangement
with the Indian sachem Maskonomen in 1637 in which all In-
dian rights were cancelled and the land comprising what became
Ipswich was parceled out to private owners. Native Americans
were selling one thing and the British were buying something
50 East of Eden

else. All of this amounted to a kind of cultural aphasia. Non-

commercial societies were afflicted, sometimes mortally.25
And how rapidly the affliction spread. Miantonomo, sa-
chem of the Narragansett Indians, summed up in 1642 what
had already happened: “You know our father had plenty of deer
and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and
of turkies, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English
having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass
and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass,
and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”
Later he was assassinated by the English. A noted historian of
this profound imbalance has remarked, “By integrating New
England ecosystems into an ultimately global capitalist econo-
my, colonists and Indians together began a dynamic and un-
stable process of ecological change which had in no way ended
by 1800.”26

A Chosen People
Settler society from the outset erected an ideological fortress
of justification for what soon had become a relationship of
overlord to subordinate, a set of rationales that traversed the
borders of two very different worlds. In this instance, the social
illness unto death that gripped the native Americans also seeped
into the cultural bloodstream of their conquerors, leaving them
and their heirs carriers of a warped class and race consciousness.
Despite the colonials’ early dependence on Indian food-
stuffs, agricultural know-how, and woodland knowledge, the
New Englanders adopted the view that tribal life was largely
given over to idleness, wiling away time hunting and fishing.
The very mobility that characterized Indian economies as tribes
moved from place to place in accord with the seasons (and
East of Eden 51

consequently with little vested interest in property accumula-

tion) offended the conventional wisdom of the Puritans. Fran-
ces Higginson concluded, “The Indians are not able to make
use of one fourth part of the land, neither have they any settled
places as Townes to dwell in, nor any ground as they challenge
for their owne possession, but change their habitation from
place to place.”
Indian laziness forfeited any legitimate claim to the land,
so the English felt entirely within their rights to take it. Because
the natives underused the land, failed to “improve” it, they didn’t
deserve to possess it. Indians would “rather starve than work”
(although under normal circumstances proportionately far
fewer Indians starved than settlers). Males were especially lazy
and lived for pleasure. Captain Smith observed, “The men
bestow their times in fishing, hunting, warres, and such manlike
exercises, scorning to be seen in any woman-like exercise, which
is the cause that women be very painfull, and the men often
idle.” He was describing Indian life as he saw it in Virginia, where
“women and children doe the reste of the worke. They make
mats, baskets, pots, morters, pound their corne, make their
bread, prepare their victuals, plant their corne, gather their
corne, bear all kinds of burdens and such like.”
New England settlers agreed. One Puritan noted that the
tribes were not “industrious,” “neither have art, science, skill,
or facility to use either the land or the commodities of it, but
all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gardening,
etc.” Their land, “spacious and voide,” was there for the taking.
John Winthrop proclaimed that except for the fields planted by
Indian women, which he considered theirs, “the rest of the
country lay open to any that could and would improve it.” And
when in fact the land was “all voide” because a severe epidem-
ic had emptied it soon before the Pilgrims landed, Winthrop
52 East of Eden

considered it providential: “God hath hereby cleared our title

to this place.” The city on a hill would be built where “God hath
consumed the natives with a miraculous plague, where by a
great parte of the Country is left voyde of Inhabitants.” John
Cotton would offer ministerial reinforcement of that view,
explaining, “In a vacant soyle hee that taketh possession of it
and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.”27
God had help in sanctioning these behaviors and attitudes.
A racially inflected view of native peoples as inferior was com-
monplace. In the beginning that was not entirely the case.
Colonists could recognize their neighbors as human, equipped
with language, large-scale social organization, government,
agriculture, and so on; they could even appreciate the aes-
thetic appeal of body decoration common among the tribes.
Soon enough, however, the acquisitive disposition of these
shareholders, together with imperial instincts implanted in the
homeland, fostered a dimmer view. Roger Williams pronounced
native people “barbarous scum and the offscourings of man-
kind.” Puritans were prepared to do missionary work among
these benighted people but called them “savages”; in the words
of Plymouth’s second and long-serving governor William
Bradford, the settlers had found a land “devoid of all civil in-
habitants, where there are only savage and brutal men which
range up and down, little otherwise than the wild beasts.”28
Hostile encounters were inevitable under these circum-
stances and occurred almost immediately upon settlement (the
first at a beach now known as Wellfleet). Myles Standish, who
had been hired by the Pilgrims as their military leader, was a
courageous man with an inflammatory temper. He had no use
for Indians and would decapitate one if he thought it called for.
Even before the Mayflower arrived, local Indians had experi-
enced the dark side of European commerce. Captain John Smith
East of Eden 53

(who sailed and mapped much of the Atlantic coast) reported

on how a sea captain named Thomas Hunt had tricked a group
of thirty natives to come on board, made them captives, and
sold “these silly Salvages for Rials of Eight” in Malaga. Serial
conflicts with native peoples (sometimes complicated by shift-
ing alliances between colonists and some tribes who had become
the strategic enemies of other tribes) culminated in the vicious
Pequot War and massacre; four hundred to seven hundred
Pequots were slain by a combined force of settlers and native
people in 1636. Praising God for the victory, the colonists held
a thanksgiving to celebrate.29
Relations further south in Virginia were similarly exploit-
ative, marked by racial stigmata and blood on the ground.
Thanks to the legendary friendship between Captain Smith and
Pocahontas, a royal and favored daughter of the region’s prin-
cipal sovereign Chief Powhatan, the Jamestown fable of bitter
hardship is overlaid with an aura of romantic good feelings.
And indeed, Smith and Powhatan did oversee a period of rela-
tive stability between the colonials and the federation of Algon-
quian tribes Powhatan presided over. The captain recognized
the value of the Powhatans’ rich, corn-based agriculture and
their deep knowledge of the environment. That hardly called
into question his firm belief in English dominance, however.
After all, Smith believed in the Christianizing and civilizing
mission that British colonialism purported to be about. Nor
did he have any objections to indentured servitude, nor doubt
the essential savagery of the native population. The tribes re-
quired, in his view, a substantial dose of discipline and a con-
spicuous show of force.30
Discipline was not the strong suit of the idling gentry who
comprised such a large portion of the early settlers. They pre-
ferred not to work. Instead they took to trading with—and if
54 East of Eden

they ran out of tradeables, raiding—Indian villages. This be-

came commonplace during and after “the Starving Time.” Once
Smith returned to England, they kidnapped Pocahontas and
ransomed her back to her father. These conflicts remained
sporadic until the colonists found their own way to meet the
financial demands of the Virginia Company’s investors and
creditors.
Tobacco became Virginia’s version of the fur trade. John
Rolfe, the man who married Pocahontas and brought her back
to England, where she died not long after, developed a strain
of tobacco based on a West Indian variety. It would soon make
the Virginia Company financially viable. By 1618 the colony was
shipping nearly fifty thousand pounds of tobacco annually to
England, and by 1628 that had grown to half a million. The rise
of tobacco agriculture in turn produced an enormous demand
for labor and land. Cultivating the plant was labor intensive
and exhausting, especially the weeding and planting. This would
lead to a substantial flow of indentured labor from England,
people tempted by a promise of land of their own once their
indentures expired.
Very soon tobacco production would lead to the use of
slave labor, including Indians but especially Africans (although
initially that enslavement did not call upon racial stereotypes
for its justification). So a steeper hierarchy of social power and
powerlessness than that maturing in New England was evolving
quickly to the south. Moreover, a hunger for fresh land on which
to grow tobacco led to seizures of tribal plots and violent con-
frontations culminating in the massacre of 350 colonists in 1622
followed by a decade of warfare. Back in England, Smith advo-
cated an official policy that in effect would provide a writ to
seize Indian land, impose a military occupation, and reduce
native dwellers to the status of laborers, coerced or otherwise.
East of Eden 55

At the end, no Englishman doubted that the Indian was indeed

a “brute savage.”31

Paradise Lost?
Neither English settlers nor their Indian neighbors inhabited
some earthly utopia, free of social and political conflict. Clear-
ly, the relationship established between the new occupiers and
the original occupants eventually rested on exploitation of the
latter that verged on extinction. Tribal life before that, however,
was marked by its own social stratifications and violent conflict.
A priestly class, albeit a polytheistic one, ruled, lived, and died
in ways not available to ordinary tribespeople, made decisions
about how the collective wealth of the community was to be
used, raided rival tribes and took their women and children as
captives, and so on. They hardly matched those savage carica-
tures deployed by the colonists from the Old World to malign
those they were plundering. But they grew up in complex so-
cieties thousands of years old that had constructed their own
political and social hierarchies characteristically patriarchal
and, in Smith’s not entirely inapt word, “monarchical.”
So too, when the passengers disembarked at Plymouth or
at Jamestown, they brought with them their own distinct social
and political pecking orders. These were long-established def-
erential relationships that dictated economic and political be-
havior, who ruled and who didn’t, who worked and who didn’t,
who owned and who didn’t, how you dressed, where and how
you lived, whom you genuflected to, whether you had a good
or less good chance of surviving.
Therefore, it is hardly surprising, mythic origin tales not-
withstanding, that the New World was neither a classless para-
dise nor a paradise lost. Instead, what was truly new emerged
56 East of Eden

out of that intercourse between mercantile and non-market-

based political economies and strikingly different ways of life.
The integrity of tribal societies dissolved, their material where-
withal transplanted and transformed into liquid capital, their
human resources into “human capital,” their land and animals
into marketable commodities, their cultural cohesiveness and
independence corroded and debased.
By virtue of this same commercially driven interaction,
the traditional hierarchies of Old World Europe gave way to
new ones, powered by the drive to accumulate capital through
global trade. In general, the trend was to abandon traditional
forms of land tenure in favor of more strictly defined indi-
vidual ownership that ensured exclusivity of use and strict laws
against trespassing. An “Essay on the Ordering of Townes”
advised that “he that knoweth the benefit of inclosing will omit
noe diligence to bringe his selfe into an inclusive condicion,
well understanding that one acre inclosed, is much more
beneficall than five falling to his share in Common.” This sup-
ported the emergence of a middling farming class but also one
oriented more to the market. In turn, that meant an intensifica-
tion of work, work discipline, and the duration of work. In
Virginia the emergence of a commercially minded rural world
of family farmers as well as a more self-sufficient yeomanry was
retarded. That was thanks to the parallel development of slave-
plantation agriculture dominated by large landholders. Vir-
ginia’s colonial brethren to the north, however, were hard at
work birthing a class structure that would soon characterize
the New World.32
With gathering speed in colonial New England, bigger
landholders like the Bradburys, Appeltons, and Gardeners hired
laborers in their quest to furnish the markets in seaport towns
that were themselves tied to transatlantic trade. Acute labor
East of Eden 57

shortages encouraged day labor and good wages. As landed

elites grew accustomed to the new commercial practices, their
relationship with their tenants was modernized, made for fixed
terms (usually lasting ten years) and for fixed sums, payable in
currency as well as in labor or in kind. Wealth was a prerequisite
to high office as it had always been; magistrates, community
offices, militia captains, and other positions of authority fell to
the wealthiest, but the sources of that wealth shifted in the di-
rection of trade.
Class mattered from the beginning. Class may seem an
anachronism. Neither the hierarchies of old nor the ones emerg-
ing in the New World conformed to modern conceptions of
class. Those rest on the division between labor and capital that
define the production process and/or on levels of income and
styles of consumption. The former was incipient at most. As
for status distinctions, while apt enough, they nonetheless
embedded income and consumption in a web of heritable,
religiously sanctioned, and customary arrangements that our
world of invidious, consumer-based distinction would scarce-
ly recognize or credit.
However, if we seek to appraise the validity of a story that
tends to erase matters of deep social cleavage from the map of
our beginnings, then “class” must be counted back in, albeit in
some more capacious definition. This is true and necessary to
get at a richer story. It is true because the peculiar and in the
end parasitic relationship established between the colonists,
native populations, and the world economy would be repeated
again and again, in different contexts, for the next two centuries,
both at home and abroad. This process of primitive capital ac-
cumulation at the expense of noncapitalist economies and ways
of life would help define not only the economic dynamics but
also the political upheavals and the ideological predispositions
58 East of Eden

and prejudices of life in the New World. Likewise, those new

tensions arising within settler society between middling sorts
and rising mercantile elites would continue to inflame colonial
and postcolonial society for a long time and find articulation
in the battle over the Constitution.
Some people were disturbed by these trends, especially
those fissures surfacing internally, which could seem at odds
with visions of a godly commonwealth and a spiritual “errand
into the wilderness.” Robert Cushman, a wealthy deacon in the
Separatist church in Leiden that helped organize the expedition,
warned, “Let no man seek his owne; But every man another’s
wealth.” He denounced greed, or what he termed the “belly god”
worshiped by those who sought to become country gentlemen:
“Men that have taken in hand hither to come out of discontent-
ment in regard to their estates in England; and aiming at great
matters here, affecting to be Gentlemen, Landed men, or hop-
ing for Office, Place, Dignity, or fleshy Liberty, let the show be
what it will, the substance is naught and that bird of self-love
. . . if it not be looked to will eat out the life of all grace and
goodness.” The powers that be, however, welcomed the “new
man.” Governor Bradford recognized that the settlers “began
to think how they might raise as much corn as they could not
obtain a better crop than they had done that they might not
still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of
things, the Governor (with the advice of the chieftest among
them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own
particular [household], and in that regard trust to themselves.”33
“Trust to themselves” became the watchword of a whole
civilization, observed as much in colonial Virginia as in colonial
New England, and thereafter by the new nation. It heralded a
hardy individualism of the sort Captain Smith envisioned en
route to North America. Treated in the right way, the virgin
East of Eden 59

continent would become a paradise of middling sorts, hard-

working men and women of independent means. No fixed ranks
and orders—except those ordained by nature, whether by vir-
tue of sex or race—would undercut that prospect. Yet everything
that made these colonial undertakings feasible—their corporate
origins, their relationship to the global marketplace, their
transactions with vulnerable and incommensurate societies
and, ironically, that urge to “trust to themselves”—set in motion
a logic that generated new hierarchies, new forms of inclusion
and exclusion, new modes of political preferment, new relation-
ships to the natural world, new modes of work and exploitation,
and finally a propulsive individualism that would inexorably
undermine the chances of its own survival.
Fleeing to the New World was imagined as a way of start-
ing over, a flight from history. But history abides. Smith’s vision,
the view of America the exceptional, would turn out to be a
grand ambition—and a grand illusion.
 2
We the People in the City of
Brotherly Love

E
arly one weekday evening the police came knocking
at my door. I was living in West Philadelphia with two
friends. It was 1969 and I was twenty-three. There were
a couple of uniformed officers and another three or
four men in plainclothes. They belonged to a special unit of the
Philadelphia police called the Civil Disobedience Squad, more
colloquially known by political activists like me as the Red
Squad.
They came hunting for bombs or the makings of bombs.
Minutes after the Red Squad arrived, so did a television crew
from the local NBC affiliate, which had obviously been notified
in advance of the raid. A search of my apartment uncovered
just what they were looking for: pipes, gunpowder, wires, fuses,
and the powerful military plastic explosive C-4 (recently re-
ported stolen from a local military base). All of these materials
were hidden in and around and underneath the refrigerator.
That’s where the police, in collaboration with the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, had planted them earlier that day.
We the People 61

Four of us were arrested and charged with conspiracy to

blow up national monuments. Our arrests as suspected terror-
ists were part of a larger national FBI operation later identified
as COINTELPRO, designed to discredit antiwar, civil rights,
and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activists. Raiding
and arresting members of activist groups was already a well-
established law enforcement tradition in Philadelphia. There
the police were commanded by Frank Rizzo, who had built a
career by terrifying the citizenry with fabrications of alleged
plots to burn down the city or (in a particularly outlandish
invention) schemes by Black Power advocates to poison the
police with cyanide-laced sandwiches. A beefy six foot plus
tough guy rarely seen without his billy club, Rizzo promised to
show no mercy, to clear the streets, to lock up all those who
disrespected the flag, moral and sexual conventions, the racial
status quo, and campus decorum. (Later he would leverage this
reputation into two terms as the city’s mayor.)
Just a month before the raid on our apartment, we were
in the midst of a mass strike centered at the University of Penn-
sylvania that also included students from many of the area
colleges. The strike was in response to the plans of a consortium
of schools that had joined together to build something called
the University City Science Center, which was forecasted to
invite government-sponsored war-related research. Moreover,
the center was to be built on land in the West Philadelphia
ghetto that abutted the Penn campus, land that would have to
be cleared of its low-income, largely African American tenants.
It was discovered that leading real estate and financial interests
had been speculating in these properties for some time, using
a legal technique called the “sheriff ’s sale,” which permitted
evictions for overdue consumer debts—a car, say, or a refrig-
erator. Vacated homes were then auctioned off.
62 We the People

So if ever a strike cum occupation was overdetermined,

this one based at Penn was: war, racism, and class exploitation
were in the dock together. Although those occupying the Penn
administration building were largely students, members of the
surrounding community were present as well. The strike lasted
nearly a week and ended with some largely symbolic concessions
from the university. (The science center itself went up as
planned.) In its aftermath, however, a movement for jobs, hous-
ing, and education that included high school students and
members of the local Black Panther Party emerged in other
parts of the city. One area of activism was North Philadelphia’s
black ghetto, the city’s largest. Nearby was Temple University.
There students who had participated in the Penn strike were
sniffing out sheriff ’s sales, evictions, auctions, and land deals
tied to Temple’s own expansion plans.
Rizzo sprang into action. Stories appeared in local papers
and were broadcast on radio that the police had come across a
pamphlet on how to make bombs and Molotov cocktails that
was being distributed in the ghetto by left-wing student agita-
tors. The stage was set. Days later I was arrested along with my
friends.
Getting arrested for political crimes in 1969, while not
exactly commonplace, was a frequent enough occurrence in
those tumultuous times. I had been arrested before. So out-
wardly I was, if not calm, then not entirely shocked, even in the
heat of the moment and in the heat of the TV camera klieg
lights. As if already rehearsed for their appearance, I launched
into a running commentary on the objectives of the Alliance
for Jobs, Housing, and Education as I trailed them trailing the
police in their circumnavigation of our apartment.
Underneath that surface cool, however, I was unnerved.
How eerie and surreal it seemed. When the police opened the
We the People 63

refrigerator and “discovered” a sour ball candy can full of ex-

plosive, I suddenly remembered seeing the candy can, but when
and where I could not for the life of me figure out. How in the
world had the agents of the law managed to squirrel away this
rude arsenal without any of us being aware of it? And then came
one of those eureka moments, as in: “Oh, now I realize what
that large tractor trailer had been doing parked outside our
house for more than a week,” during which not one us grew
suspicious—talk about naïve. That the whole event was so
deliberately staged and coordinated with the local media made
it feel less like a political happening than a grotesque form of
vaudevillian comedy in which I was playing a prescribed role,
including my yapping at the TV cameras.
Perhaps one reason I was less scared than I might have
been was this air of unreality. Theatrics notwithstanding, could
it actually be the case that the guardians of law, order, and lib-
erty could stoop to such preposterous antics and expect anyone
to fall for it? No matter how politically knowledgeable I fancied
myself to be, no matter what I knew to have been the case again
and again over the course of the country’s history, in the mo-
ment I still retained a subsurface belief that ruling institutions
had to play within their own rules. One might credit that as a
form of middle-class malignant indifference to the unruly real-
ity that so often envelopes the lives of less favored classes and
races.
And then again, could it be that these praetorians were so
socially ignorant that they actually thought our movement was
well rooted enough to represent an imminent threat to the
prevailing distribution of wealth and power? On the one hand,
that was flattering. But it was also untrue. Much as we liked to
believe we were in touch with the grassroots, that was only
partially the case on campus, faintly so with regard to the
64 We the People

ghetto, and no more than a pious wish when it came to the rest
of working-class Philadelphia. We knew that. Didn’t they?
According to the police and prosecutor who filed charges
of conspiracy, our real object was not to incinerate or inspire
others to incinerate North Philadelphia. Nor did jobs, housing,
and education enter into it at all. Instead we were after the
Liberty Bell. Why? Was it because liberty and social justice were
at odds? Blow up one, you get the other? But that would be a
disquieting equation for the official defenders of democracy
and equality to work with.
Housed nearby in Independence Hall, the bell is a sacred
object. It rang out freedom and the birth of a nation. It had
been used to call out Philadelphia residents to the first reading
of the Declaration of Independence. To blow it up would be a
sacrilege and a mad act. Those purportedly conspiring to do so
might thereby be stigmatized as political fiends. No need to pay
attention to their ostensible concerns about economic and
racial injustice and inequality, or their worries about the infes-
tation of the campus by the military-industrial complex or their
outrage over the mechanized slaughter in Southeast Asia. Lib-
erty and its bell could thus function as a political prophylactic.
Liberty in 1969, like liberty in 1776, was a universal bene-
diction. It didn’t matter where you happened to be located along
the spectrum of wealth and income; its blessings were a birth-
right. And if back in 1776 it did matter what “race” you belonged
to, by 1969 that ostensibly had been taken care of by an enlight-
ened Establishment. If matters of class and race nonetheless
intruded into a world committed to ignoring them, then the
guardians of liberty might feel driven to commit a mad act of
their own, violating liberty on behalf of liberty: a micro-version
of destroying the village to save it. So off we went, handcuffed,
into a paddy wagon, which my grandmother watched drive
We the People 65

away on TV before making a hysterical phone call to my

mother, her daughter, to tell her the news.
Class mattered in the “City of Brotherly Love.” It always
had. Devotion to the classless ideal of liberty concealed that. It
always had. When the bell tolled long ago, a nation emerged,
one consecrated to liberty and justice for all. That pledge was
later reaffirmed in a document that opens “We the People.” Our
national credo reveres the Constitution the way it does the
Liberty Bell. Where they reign, class privilege and exploitation
go to die. But that was no more the case in Philadelphia in 1787
than it was in 1969.

Brotherly Love and Fratricide

Conceived in secrecy, the Constitution was a near-miss propo-
sition. Both the secrecy and its perilously close ratification (only
thirty-nine of the fifty-five delegates actually signed the docu-
ment) had everything to do with the intensity of social antago-
nisms that led up to the gathering in Philadelphia. Liberty was
indeed at stake. For some the document that emerged would
protect their liberty; for many others it would be a story of
liberty lost.
Historians have argued for well over a century about
whether the Constitution was the outcome of class conflict, and
if so whose interests did it articulate, whose did it squelch.
Among scholars that remains an unsettled question, even if the
terms of that debate have been reframed more than once. For
most people the matter is simpler, not really a question at all.
Those fifty-five men who assembled in the sweltering July heat
(and kept the windows and doors closed and locked in the East
Room of the Pennsylvania State House to ensure they wouldn’t
be eavesdropped on) were, after all, our “founding fathers.”
66 We the People

There is something ageless and sacerdotal about that hono-

rarium. It cries out virtue, guardianship, and a kind of supra-
wisdom ordinary people simply don’t possess. They were there
to save an infant nation verging on dissolution. And more than
that, to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity.” Missioned in that way, they put the commonweal
first, submerging any instinct to line their own pockets or come
to the aid of any subdivision of the body politic.1
To be sure, there were balances to be struck. States were
jealous of their independence, wary of ceding too much author-
ity to the newly fashioned federal government. Regional inter-
ests could clash, especially those separating the North and South.
Here slavery itself wasn’t at stake, however. All the states were
slave states, and no one was proposing a general emancipation
(in fact, hopes for emancipation born during the Revolution
were buried in Philadelphia). Rather, what was bargained over
was how that slave population was to be counted in the distribu-
tion of congressional representation. Perhaps the most famous
bone of contention we are all familiar with was how individual
rights might be jeopardized by the newly empowered national
authority. The Bill of Rights, later attached to the Constitution
as a set of ten amendments without which passage would have
been impossible, nonetheless had virtually nothing to do with
any latent or explicit forms of social or class grievance.
Yet precisely such complaints and forebodings had every-
thing to do with why the “founding fathers” gathered together
at Independence Hall and why the document they cobbled
together there had such trouble winning favor enough to pass.
Class mattered a great deal, even if that’s not the way we re-
member what transpired in Philadelphia in 1787.
America was overwhelmingly rural then. Ninety percent of
the population lived in villages or in the countryside. So the
We the People 67

abrasions of class showed up in different places and in different

ways than people living later on in urban, industrial, and postin-
dustrial societies might imagine or expect. The great divide in
the late eighteenth century New World had already been fore-
shadowed at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown.
Would American society face east or west; that is, would it become
increasingly imbricated into the circuits of global trade and
finance, or would it become a freeholder settler society whose
ties to the marketplace would remain supplemental to a life of
agrarian self-sufficiency on the frontiers of the new nation?2
The outcome of a fateful standoff of that magnitude
naturally depended on who had the most artillery. During the
brief years that followed the victory at Yorktown, advantage
seemed to be leaning strongly in favor of the settler state. The
Articles of Confederation, that loosely articulated and decen-
tralized governing mechanism put together by the ex-colonies,
afforded a great deal of leeway for local and state initiatives
covering the most vital elements of public life: taxes, currency,
debts, interstate trade, the judiciary, militias, property rights,
law and order, and more. Over and over again, those initiatives
were exercised by town councils, unicameral state legislatures,
local judges, and on occasion by extralegal insurgent move-
ments. These movements and the largely rural peoples they
represented were trying to extricate themselves from the webs
of taxes, credit, debt, and foreclosure, all inherent elements of
the rising mercantile economy that were placing in peril their
existence as independent farmers.
Friction points cropped up everywhere. All the states were
burdened with debts from the Revolutionary War, as was the
Confederation government. During the war (and after it), a
great deal of that Continental Congress’s debt had been deeply
discounted, as had the “Continental” currency, given the un-
68 We the People

certain prospects of the Revolution and what might follow it.

Often ordinary farmers, artisans, village tradespeople, and
soldiers had been the original holders of this paper (and the
equally valueless currencies issued by the separate states’ gov-
ernments), notoriously “not worth a Continental.” Eventually
much of that debt was bought up by more well-to-do specula-
tors and others who could afford to hold onto it in its depreci-
ated, nearly worthless state, hoping postwar authority would
redeem this debt at its original and now grossly inflated face
value. “Sunshine patriots” roamed the countryside buying up
paper money at a penny on the dollar. But if they were to cash
out, states would have to levy taxes to generate the revenue to
pay them off. Some governments tried doing that and it ig-
nited a firestorm of protest. Here and there laws were passed to
declare debt moratoria, or plans were made to pay them off in
installments or to inflate the currency so that debts might be
discharged more easily: good news for the debtor, not good at
all for the creditor. Or state legislators simply refused to raise
taxes and left the debt to fester.
Nor was official state debt the only kind that abraded, far
from it. Farmers and tradespeople from the interior had inter-
course with the markets nearer the coast. This could work well.
But then, as they grew more reliant on urban merchants and
banks to sell their goods and finance their growing and harvest-
ing, and became more oriented to producing those crops most
readily converted to cash, it worked less well or not at all. Now
their self-sufficiency was jeopardized. Mortgage and other debts
accumulated accordingly. Dependency, sometimes insupportable
forms of dependency, haunted broad patches of rural America.
One exit ramp out of that cul-de-sac also seemed threat-
ened. “Go west, young man” was folk wisdom long before
Horace Greeley suggested it to eastern workingmen looking for
We the People 69

a new start in life. Settlement even at the time of the Revolution

was still largely confined to a narrow territorial strip running
not too far back from the Atlantic. Victory, however, meant that
the trans-Appalachian West was now open to all comers, thanks
to the peace treaty signed with the British. True enough, but
some of those “all comers” included the biggest landholders
and land speculators (people like Washington, for example) in
the country. They had the wherewithal to aggrandize the best
acreage available, to cultivate it or hold it until prices soared.
In General Washington’s case, after the war he had visited the
Ohio Valley, where he discovered squatters who refused to ac-
knowledge his title to the land. This was not an uncommon
predicament. Incipient social conflict was a fact of life even out
on the frontier (and this does not take into account the popu-
lations living there for the previous ten thousand years).3
No wonder the countryside was at a boil. People worried
about foreclosure for debts or taxes or both. Some judges en-
forced the law. Others refused to. Sheriffs and militiamen might
obey a command to restore law and order—or they might not.
Out on the frontier chaos reigned. To call the regions lawless is
not much of an exaggeration as the Confederation government’s
writ was too weak to mean much even back east. Land was
seized, squatted on, abandoned at a show of force, then retaken.
Plus, the British, the treaty notwithstanding, were still occlud-
ing settler occupation, entrenched in the fur trade, and conspir-
ing with Indian allies.

America’s First Civil War

Rebellion was in the air. Farmers in western Massachusetts, in-
debted to Boston bankers and merchants and in danger of losing
their ancestral homes in the economic hard times of the 1780s,
70 We the People

rose in arms. In those years the number of lawsuits for unpaid

debt doubled and tripled, farms were seized, and their owners
were sent off to debtors’ prisons. Incensed farmers led by former
revolutionary soldier Daniel Shays closed local courts by force
and liberated debtors from jail. One historian has estimated that
one-quarter of all adult men in Massachusetts enlisted in the
rebellion. The state couldn’t afford to pay the militia to quash
the rising, so a volunteer army was assembled, funded by wealthy
people in Boston. Once the revolt was put down, many of the
rebels fled to the frontier, where there was little in the way of
authority and they could start over. Similar but smaller uprisings
erupted in Maine, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania,
while in New Hampshire and Vermont irate farmers surround-
ed government offices. Ethan Allen’s “Green Mountain Boys”
and the “Regulators” of North Carolina faced off against “gran-
dees and speculators” in defense of republicanism.4
Alarm spread among the country’s elites. They depicted
the unruly yeoman as “brutes” and their houses as “sties.” An
observer of the Shays transgressions worried that “if the rebels
succeed,” the situation “must end in an abolition of all public
and private debts and an equal distribution of Property may
be demanded. The Countrie is not democratic in the Opinions
of these Geniuses.” In New York these class animosities and fears
were out in the open. A writer with the New York Daily Adver-
tiser noted: “Of all the evils which attend the republican form
of government, there are none that seem to have more perni-
cious effects than the insolence which liberty implants into the
lower orders of society.” Mercantile elites were frightened as
well by state governments like Rhode Island’s that were more
open to popular influence, declared debt moratoria, and issued
paper currencies to help farmers and others pay off their debts.
As the date for the Philadelphia convention neared, legislators
We the People 71

in Connecticut voiced reservations that the state “will send

men that had been delicately bred and who were in affluent
circumstances, that could not feel for the people in their day of
distress.”5
General unrest created the atmosphere in which the del-
egates deliberated. There is no question that those assembled
in Philadelphia were, at least in part, determined to confect a
prophylactic against this type of democratic excess. Liberty and
democracy might or might not comport well with property and
commerce. As many scholars have noted, republicanism was a
persuasion whose meaning remained fluid. To those social
circles oriented to a marketplace-centered society, it meant a
level playing field on which all could pursue their self-interest.
In the outback among folk breaking land in territories of for-
ested and mountain wilderness without roads and houses,
where a rough equality prevailed, proponents of a republican-
ism that rested on self-sufficiency and village-level collaboration
suspected the motives of their commercial-minded cousins
closer to the sea. The standoff was a version of class conflict
insofar as the coexistence of these two ways of life became in-
creasingly problematical.6
Those who envisioned a promising future for the new
nation as a participant in a flourishing transatlantic trading
economy needed to be sure that the basic institutional and legal
frameworks were in place to protect and foster that commercial
future. That meant, on the one hand, guarding the sanctity of
private contracts, whether mortgages or other forms of private
credit, and protecting public debts and the power of government
to honor those debts. On the other hand, to do that might mean
constraining the liberty of the populace to modify or repudiate
those transactions even if attempts to do so were carried out
through impeccably democratic channels.
72 We the People

By and large, the men who met together in Philadelphia

were well to do (who else would have the time to sit around
talking politics for two or three months?). However, some of
the delegates were not well-off (although virtually none were
small farmers). Moreover, the Constitution promulgated in
Philadelphia was far more than a form of self-enrichment for
the already rich. A world in which trade and commerce could
flourish, one that would expand the reach of the marketplace
into the outback, one that would encourage the growth of towns
and cities and all the trades and handicrafts likely to find cus-
tomers there, one that would invite investment in new enter-
prises by merchant bankers at home and from abroad was
broadly appealing. Sailors; slave owners engaged in the world
market for cotton; artisans in Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
and Baltimore; Back Bay and Hudson River merchants holding
mortgages and shipping cargoes to Europe—all were enticed.
So were farmers drawn by the growing domestic and foreign
demand for their food and raw materials. Canal builders and
ship builders owning the means of transport, town shopkeep-
ers and great land speculators betting on the commercial con-
version of the interior, small-scale manufacturers of modest
means together with “moneycrats” costumed like native nabobs
could all get excited envisioning a new world in which the
pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of property were con-
joined.7
Was such a grand prospect credible? Market society is
always a confidence game: that is, it rests on confidence that
people can be counted on to honor otherwise impersonal con-
tractual relations, or at least that if they fail to do so, they can
be coerced into doing so. Without that confidence, who will put
at risk their land or liquid capital, venturing it into an unknown
future? Washington’s wartime comrade Lighthorse Harry Lee
We the People 73

wrote to his ex-commander to make precisely this point about

the fatal effects on prospective foreign investment if the Con-
gress defaulted. Worried about “violent enemys to the impost”
because “part of the principal of our foreign loans is due next
year,” Lee knew Congress lacked even the interest due on the
loan.8
On the eve of the Constitutional Convention that confi-
dence was at a low ebb. The economy was faltering and had
been since the Revolution, although probably less than its
Philadelphia critics decried. Trade between the states was again
and again interrupted by rivalries the Confederation govern-
ment was powerless to subdue or override. Britain could flout
peace treaty provisions on the high seas and out west without
fear of reprisal because the Confederation couldn’t afford to
field a real army or navy. Most of all, law and order, meaning
the kind of law and order that ensured the sanctity of private
property, was everywhere under siege by democracy. Unless
that changed, unless what many in Independence Hall and
elsewhere thought of not as democracy but as “mobocracy” was
put to rest, there would be a real crisis of confidence. A world
organized around the market would be in peril if that happened.
Liberty was born amid class conflict. Many of the debates
during the convention and especially during the long months
and in the angry diatribes over ratification that followed were
simultaneously about liberty and democracy and about wealth
and property, about what kind of political mechanisms might
allow for popular government yet insulate it from an excess of
popular willfulness. Who owned what and how that should
influence who should rule were entangled questions, even if
in retrospect our national mythos tells a story about the salva-
tion of liberty and democracy. As Adam Smith had already
commented in The Wealth of Nations, “Authority, so far as it is
74 We the People

instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for

the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have
some property against those who have none at all.”9
Had the stakes been not so fraught, we might not have
gotten the Constitution at all. The delegates came to Philadel-
phia charged with the task of amending the Articles of Confed-
eration. That is what nearly everyone, including many of the
delegates, believed to be their mission. But from the outset, it
became clear that the articles were going to be scrapped for a
whole new plan of government. Not only did amending the
articles demand unanimity on the part of the states, the docu-
ment’s most basic institutions and rules of procedure seemed
to the framers hopelessly inadequate to rein in the “mob,”
separating off its pressures from legislative, executive, and ju-
dicial deliberations. Indeed, it wasn’t so much the articles that
were felt to be faulty as, in Madison’s view, “the evils . . . which
prevail in the states individually as well as those which affect
them collectively.” What he pointed to was state “interferences”
with “the security of private right, the steady dispensation of
Justice,” especially when it came to how these legislators had
bailed out debtors and taxpayers by printing paper currencies
or allowing debts to be discharged without cash but rather
through “old Horses” or trading with pine barrens instead of
hard money; or by closing courts to stop proceedings by
creditors; or by refusing to burden their citizens with taxes to
help discharge the Revolutionary War debt.
Delegates feared the “corruption and mutability of the
Legislative Councils of the States.” William Plummer, a delegate
from New Hampshire, noted that “our rights and property are
now the sport of ignorant, unprincipled state legislators.” People
were tired, as Alexander Hamilton was, “of an excess of democ-
racy,” or what some likeminded thinkers called “a republican
We the People 75

frenzy.” With emotions that high, no wonder this was part of

the reason the delegates’ meetings were held in secret.
Neither Hamilton nor Madison held government securi-
ties. But both feared for the future well-being of the country if
it lost its credibility in the eyes of potential creditors and inves-
tors. Without robust enough assurances for the safety of capi-
tal, the post-Revolution recession would drag on indefinitely,
trailing in its wake a debilitating weakness. But that selfless view
was mixed in with a willful blindness on the part of bondhold-
ers like the Adams family. They complained bitterly about the
Massachusetts Assembly passing debtor relief legislation, con-
veniently forgetting that they had purchased their bonds at
rock-bottom prices but were expecting to get paid interest on
their face value.10
What began circulating around the country as a draft
Constitution in September 1787 was in many respects an eco-
nomic document and one whose political inventions carried
substantial economic and social implications. At the time, if
not since then, this was widely taken for granted; for example,
it was believed that there were two great classes: “all the holders
of Public Securities” and the “substantial yeomanry” who don’t
own them and “whose interest it is to have the public debt
discharged in the easiest manner.” Guy Carelton, Lord Dorches-
ter, a Canadian observer, noted, “Many wealthy individuals have
taken a decided part in favor of the new plan from the hope
that the domestic debt of the Union may be funded and that
the various paper securities of which they are holders to a great
amount purchased for a trifle may rise to their value.”11
Key articles endowed the new federal government with
the power to levy taxes, and prohibited states from printing
paper money to bail out debtors or from in any way “impairing
the obligations of contracts.” This section 10 of Article 1 was
76 We the People

praised by people like Benjamin Franklin and Virginia governor

Edmund Randolph as the “soul of the Constitution.” So too,
the new government was granted the power to regulate interstate
and foreign commerce, to issue a national currency, to uphold
the sanctity of contracts, to quash domestic disorder (“to sup-
press insurrections”), to issue and guarantee payment of
a national debt, to acquire and distribute land, to establish
uniform standards and measures, and to foster internal
improvements. The new nation that followed these guidelines
might be virtuous or it might not be, but it was definitely open
for business.12
Moreover, the structure of government sketched by the
draft Constitution was meant to reinforce protections against
the excesses Hamilton and others were scared of. We are ac-
customed to praising the document’s shrewd system of checks
and balances, but it is also a system that afforded checks by the
powerful against the powerless. This was part of the explicit
rationale for a lifetime federal judiciary, a six-year Senate term
of office, proposals like those of Hamilton for a lifetime execu-
tive, and for sizeable enough congressional districts to insulate
legislators to some degree from their constituents. In a private
note regarding his famous Federalist No. 10, in which Madison
talks about the virtue of diverse interests functioning to coun-
terbalance each other’s ambitions, he confided, “Divide et
imperia, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain
qualifications, the only policy by which a republic can be ad-
ministered on just principles.”13
Madison’s pragmatic pact with the devil notwithstanding,
others at the time and since recognized that the Constitution
would supplant one kind of republic with another. Historians
sometimes distinguish them as liberal and Spartan, the former
prioritizing the liberty and self-interest of the private individual,
We the People 77

the latter the self-sacrificing communal republicanism loosely

modeled on the ancient Greek city-state. These are only heu-
ristic devices, not to be found in their pure state on this earth:
plenty of raw self-interest could be found in the ranks of those
defending their local communities from mercantile predators,
and much genuine patriotism among those eager to join the
ranks of great trading nations. Still, the debate over ratification
reached such a high temperature because whole ways of life
seemed to hang in the balance.

The People versus We the People

Even before the convention disbanded to go to the country for
approval of its work, a tax rebellion erupted in Virginia. It was
led by a tavern keeper, Adonijah Matthews. He and his follow-
ers burned the county jail in Greenbrier, vowing not to pay the
tax. Soon enough the uprising spread to other counties. The
rebels were also hostile to land speculators, who in turn want-
ed the state government to repress the rebellion. Instead the tax
was repealed.14
Ratification, which the framers once thought would hap-
pen speedily, instead was bitterly contested and protracted.
Hamilton thought the odds for a yes vote were good because
that position had the backing of powerful commercial circles,
creditors, men of property who wanted a stronger government
as protection against “the depredations which the democratic
spirit is apt to make on property.” John Quincy Adams, then
still at Harvard, wrote to his mother Abigail describing the lay
of the land as he saw it: “While the idle, and extravagant, and
consequently the poor, complain of being oppressed, the men
of property, and consideration, think the Constitution gives too
much liberty to the unprincipled citizens, to the prejudices of
78 We the People

the honest and industrious.” In his diary, however, Adams as-

sessed the Constitution as “calculated to increase the influence,
power, and wealth of those who have any already,” resigned to
the fact that “a free government is inconsistent with human
nature.”15
A Massachusetts representative to the Articles of Confed-
eration Congress saw what Adams saw, but from the other shore.
He worried about the dangers of counterrevolution, writing
home to warn of plots to restore “baleful Aristocracies.” For
people like this, soon to be known as anti-Federalists, the plan
drawn up in Philadelphia was “identical with the attempt to
solidify upper class rule.” When the ratifying convention as-
sembled in Massachusetts, one delegate, Amos Singletary, ar-
gued that “lawyers and men of learning and Moneyed men”
expected to run the new government; once having grasped
power, they would “swallow up all of us little folks.” Another
partisan, Timothy Bloodworth, foresaw that under the new
dispensation “the great will struggle for power, honor, and
wealth, the poor become a prey to avarice, insolence, and op-
pression.” Spying the same trend, a South Carolina opponent
of the Constitution sought to unearth his aristocratic family
heritage back in the British isles because, “for as our steps toward
monarchy are very obvious, I would wish my Children to have
all the Rights to rank and distinction, which is to be claimed
from Ancestry. . . . We are getting back to the system we de-
stroyed some years ago.”
For a scheme that was supposed to forge unity where there
had been none, the Philadelphia plan ignited the rawest forms
of class antagonism. A Virginia anti-Federalist warned, “They
will order you, as yet smarting under the effects of bondage, to
pay immediately all the debts due to the British enmities, yea,
even the interest during the war; and they will order you to
We the People 79

make good the plunder of the usurers and the speculators, the
abomination of the land; and all those will rejoice exceedingly.”
Patrick Henry sympathized: “It sounds mighty prettily to
gentlemen to curse paper money and honestly pay debts. But
apply to the situation of America, and you will find there are
thousands and thousands of contracts where equity forbids an
exact literal performance.” Even after Pennsylvania ratified and
assured the Constitution’s passage, a fervent anti-Federalist
newspaper predicted a Congress that would consist of “lordly
and high-minded men” with “a perfect indifference for and
contempt of ” the people, “harpies of power” who would “riot
on the miseries of the community” and use standing armies to
enforce their will.16
However, if our devotion to what was wrought in the city
of brotherly love makes the anxieties and forebodings of its
opponents seem hysterical, is that not a verdict equally appli-
cable to the framers like Hamilton who prophesized anarchy
or monarchy as the only options left if the Constitution failed
to pass? The mad passions aroused by profound discord over
how the new nation should evolve were not confined to one
side of the class divide. The struggle to decide if the Constitu-
tion should pass or not amounted to America’s first civil war.
Pass it did. Voting patterns varied and certainly do not
display some simple split between the rich and the poor; oth-
erwise, how could it have passed? Smallholders tended to be
against, larger property holders (including such property as
slaves, securities, capital on loan, goods for sale) for the new
government. But that was hardly an invariant outcome. What
came closer to displaying the rival social orders at stake was the
tendency of all towns, not just the few larger seaport cities, to
vote for the Constitution. Here was the new world in embryo:
merchants especially, no matter what region they hailed from,
80 We the People

and then the more general “mercantile interest” which, accord-

ing to John Adams, included “Merchants, Mechaniks, Labour-
ers.” Here too were the ship owners, seamen, dockworkers,
artisans and their apprentices, all wired into the networks of
domestic and international trade. So too, the Federalists drew
on the support of rural areas that were enmeshed in supplying
the towns and producing for the export trade.
Farther removed from that commerce, the world seemed
different. A town meeting to discuss the draft in Spencer, Mas-
sachusetts, depicted itself as one of those places “distant in
Situation from the metropolis . . . Renders the profits, of farm-
ers, Very Inconsiderable, to Those of an equal Bigness, and
Quality, near the Maritime and Market Towns.” A similar village
get-together in New York talked about the difference between
“navigating and non-navigating individuals.” Navigating and
non-navigating indeed! The world envisioned by the framers
was a mobile one, full of promise and risk, ready to put its
confidence in the free market and the free individual so long as
property and its privileges were closely guarded. If that meant
displacing forms of local democracy and the constraints that
democracy now and then placed in the way of capital’s liberty
to do as it desired and the law licensed, well, that was the price
of progress.17
Ratification soon enough paid that price. A stronger cen-
tral government fully capable of suppressing future debtor
insurgencies exercised its power right away. Shays’ Rebellion
was part of a trilogy of uprisings that continued into the 1790s.
The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was the most serious. An excise
tax (“whiskey tax”) meant to generate revenue to back up the
national debt threatened the livelihoods of farmers in western
Pennsylvania who used whiskey as a currency in a part-barter
economy. President Washington sent troops, many of them
We the People 81

Revolutionary War veterans, with Hamilton at their head to put

down the rebels. The U.S. Constitution, at the moment of its
birth, and for that matter ever after, has simultaneously func-
tioned as a blueprint for a nation and as a chastity belt for class
conflict.

Liberty and Terrorism in the City of Brotherly Love

Had I been convicted of conspiring to blow up the Liberty Bell
(and of a heap of associated charges), I would be getting out of
jail just about now, in time to write this book (well, actually
sooner than that as the charges carried a sentence of twenty-five
years in prison, still a long time). Loosely speaking, it is thanks
to the Constitution that that didn’t happen. When eventually
the FBI refused, although under court order, to turn over its
surveillance records and wiretaps of our apartment and phone
to the defense, the local Philadelphia judge dismissed the
charges. During the two years it took for the case to be resolved,
I had dark forebodings about whether I could take being locked
up. I contemplated fleeing the country. Instead, I actually ran
for city council, only to discover I was too young to serve if
elected, and that “the mad bomber,” as one paper christened
me in an article about my candidacy, stood zero chance of get-
ting elected anyway. In the end, the rule of law prevailed.
Capitalist society depends for its stability on a uniform
set of laws and rights, without which the Darwinian law of the
jungle would prevail with a vengeance. Even the empowered
are compelled to recognize limits, most of the time.
However, if that law-bound infrastructure set me free, it
is also the case that those who created and administered it
prevailed. My friends and I were free. A salute is due the anti-
Federalists who, although they lost the larger battle to defeat
82 We the People

the Constitution, mustered enough fight-back to ensure there

would be a Bill of Rights appended to the document that would
protect dissenters like me. But the Alliance for Jobs, Housing,
and Education was dead. Accusations of terrorism tend to have
a chilling effect. One might say the alliance was at liberty to
continue its struggle. But under the circumstances that would
be jejune. The rulers of law had used their lawful authority to
undermine that liberty. Local and national police, the district
attorney and the U.S. attorney general, and Rizzo and Hoover
had conspired to thwart liberty in the name of liberty. Terror-
ism was the pretext. The hidden text, however, was the danger
to the liberty of established elites—real estate developers,
speculators, slumlords, banks, university mandarins, military-
industrial contractors—to pursue their own interests free of
democratic constraint.
Irony, in small bits and in large, encircles liberty. Trying
to prove the police planted the evidence of my terrorist con-
spiracy was a quixotic crusade. On the contrary, to this day the
Philadelphia Police Department makes an annual award to one
of its members in memory of Lieutenant George Fencl, the
leader of the Civil Disobedience Squad, who led the raid on my
apartment.
At its formation, the Constitution, revered today as the
guardian of a free society, was a promissory note already in
default. It guaranteed liberty at the expense of liberty because
the country’s understructure was already riven with social
tensions that could not be resolved without someone losing
out. When I came along in the 1960s, the promise of the Con-
stitution (and its subsequent amendments, especially those
following the Civil War) was once again failing. It had failed to
deliver on equality at home. The brutal imperial war waged
abroad proceeded under a paper-thin patina of congressional
We the People 83

and popular consent, itself a result of cynical manipulation by

the nation’s elite.
Liberty is supposed to be the realm where class becomes
irrelevant. But in 1787, again in 1969, and at many other times,
class surfaces, and although it is denied, it matters and drives
some to mad acts. Terrorism is a ghastly form of political bank-
ruptcy. There is the official kind: Hoover’s and McNamara’s.
There is the pathetic, if fatal, kind, practiced by crazed sectar-
ians unable to establish a real foothold among the oppressed
and exploited. Me and the millions like me were neither. And
as our weak joke at the time reminded people, the bell was
already cracked.
 3
Wretched Refuse

W
hether seen sinking beneath the waves of a
postapocalyptic planet Earth in Planet of the
Apes or erected and then leveled in Tiananmen
Square, the Statue of Liberty is the world’s most
universally recognized symbol. Her meaning is taken as axiom-
atic. She is the mother-protector of freedom, tolerance, and
democracy. She has achieved a kind of secular sainthood in the
eyes of the oppressed, the impoverished, and the voiceless.
Above all, Lady Liberty is thought of as the patron saint of
hard-pressed immigrants. So it is particularly poignant to be
writing about the monument at a time when the world is over-
run with millions of desperate refugees who couldn’t be more
wretched but are welcomed nowhere, threatened everywhere.
Every schoolchild is familiar with Emma Lazarus’s poem
“The New Colossus” and its stirring welcome to the “huddled
masses yearning to breathe free,”“the wretched refuse” of Europe’s
teeming shores. For them the Lady lifts her “lamp beside the
golden door.” Lazarus imagined the statue as the “mother of exiles.”
Exiles come in various shapes. Lazarus, a well-off and
long-settled Sephardic Jew (her father was a prominent sugar
Wretched Refuse 85

manufacturer), was thinking mostly about her fellow Jews flee-

ing the violent pogroms of czarist Russia. Who would save them?
“The New Colossus” was not a sectarian offering, however. The
lamp was lit, according to the poet, for all those driven from
their homelands by economic calamity or political tyranny or
cultural stigma: a world of exiles. In time, this polyglot bouil-
labaisse of the despised and miserable, revived by the oxygen-
ated air of a free land, would amalgamate to form the common
citizenry of a nation without crippling social hierarchies.
However, Lazarus might not have included exiles like
Emma Goldman, the anarchist charismatic. Goldman was also
a migrant Jew from Russia (modern-day Lithuania). She had
arrived in 1885, a year before the statue’s unveiling, but from
considerably more comfortable circumstances than most of her
Litvak coreligionists from eastern Europe. Passionate in her
anti-capitalism, a fearless feminist and foe of imperialism, she
was jailed at the outbreak of war in 1917 for urging men to resist
the draft. Two years later Goldman was swept up in the Palmer
raids that followed World War I and was among the hundreds
of aliens whom the attorney general deported. When she sailed
out of New York on the USAT Buford—dubbed by the press the
“Soviet Ark”—with 250 fellow deportees, she gazed shoreward
and noted in melancholic irony: “It was my beloved city, the
metropolis of the New World. It was America indeed, indeed
America repeating the terrible scenes of Czarist Russia! I glanced
up—the Statue of Liberty!” An exile, to be sure, but headed in
the wrong direction.
Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary, first a
member of the Menshevik Party, later a Bolshevik and Soviet
government minister, one of the first women in the world to
hold the post of ambassador. During the tumultuous years
leading up to the 1917 revolution she made a whirlwind tour of
86 Wretched Refuse

the United States. As the Norwegian steamship Bergensfjord

entered the harbor, the statue was “hidden by a thick autumn
fog which shrouded from our naively searching eyes that sym-
bol which once caused the hearts of our European fathers and
grandfathers to beat with triumphant happiness and exultation.”
Four and half months later, when her tour drew to a close, Kol-
lontai had been disabused. As the Bergensfjord sailed back east,
the statue was no longer hidden: “The sun illuminated every
line of this bronze image. And I still refused to believe my eyes.
Is that the Statue of Liberty? So tiny, lost in the noise of the
harbor and framed against the soaring skyscrapers of the Wall
Street banks. Was this powerless, tiny figure shrinking before
the all-powerful gigantic skyscrapers, those guardians of finan-
cial deals, the Statue of Liberty we had pictured to ourselves?
. . . It was then that I realized that the New World, the Statue of
Liberty, is simply an old and forgotten legend, a fairy tale of
pre-capitalist times which can only be recounted from the
reminiscences of our grandfathers.”
Grandfathers and fathers, grandmothers and mothers
from the shtetls and steppes of Russia, from the desiccated fields
of southern Italy, from the warred-over provinces of the Austro-
Hungarian and Ottoman empires, all these “huddled masses”
yearning for something as tangible as enough food and as in-
tangible as a second chance, made up a Noah’s flood of exiles
for whom the Statue of Liberty was an uplifting promissory
note. For people like Kollontai and Goldman, exiles of a differ-
ent sort, it was a note in default.
For the Cleveland Gazette, an African American newspaper,
Lady Liberty’s debut was the unveiling of an illusion: “Shove the
Bartholdi [the statue’s sculptor] statue, torch and all, into the
ocean, until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it
possible for an industrious and inoffensive colored man in the
Wretched Refuse 87

South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, with-

out being kukluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife
outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’
of this country ‘enlightening the world’ or even Patagonia, is
ridiculous in the extreme.” This same voice of internal exile
echoed a century later in Lou Reed’s “Dirty Boulevard,” an anti-
song of acidic irreverence. Reed mocks Lazarus’s famous poem,
noting that what he calls the “Statue of Bigotry” could care less
about the “huddled masses” of mid-twentieth century America.1

Lady Liberty and the Class Struggles in France

Naturally enough, we take for granted that the Statue of Lib-
erty was always adored as the “mother of exiles.” Less known
are those instances when her reputation was called into ques-
tion. But whether honored or, more rarely, criticized as the
guardian of the world’s “wretched refuse,” the monument car-
ried no such meaning when it was first conceived in the 1870s
and then finally unveiled in 1886. Lazarus wrote her poem in
1883, but it was not inscribed on the Statue of Liberty until 1903
(and was pretty much out of sight until the 1940s). For years
before that, in fact, many thought the statue was imperiled by
precisely those “exiles” Lazarus invoked.
Lady Liberty had two birth mothers: one French, one
American. Neither had huddled masses, immigrants, or refugees
of any kind in mind when they began their collaboration. On
the contrary, this was an undertaking of elites who, if anything,
harbored a gnawing anxiety about the bacillus of disorder or
even insurrection that might fester inside any critical mass of
“wretched refuse.”
Originally, of course, the idea for the monument was a
French one. The notion was to present the American people
88 Wretched Refuse

with a gift to commemorate the Franco-American alliance that

had been so instrumental in winning American independence
in the Revolutionary War a century earlier. (Indeed, the plan
was to have the statue ready for the 1876 centennial.) However,
this was not to be an official offering from the French govern-
ment, although numerous notables from France’s political class
and cultural elite were deeply involved in the project.
Although Napoleon III’s empire had collapsed during the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Americans had fresh memories
of how the emperor had tried to intrude into the recently con-
cluded Civil War by sponsoring a Mexican adventure of territo-
rial aggrandizement under the feckless reign of his puppet
emperor Ferdinand Maximilian. When the Prussians laid siege
to Paris, trying and nearly succeeding in starving it to death,
aid packages arrived from the United States. But during the war
itself the U.S. government was more favorably disposed to the
Germans. So Franco-American relations, if certainly not un-
friendly, were by no means fraternal, made edgy by political
suspicions and trade disputes.
Moreover, after the fall of Napoleon, France was a frac-
tured nation. The Paris Commune faced off against a reconsti-
tuted bourgeois government of military, business, clerical, and
political elites that had declared itself the Third French Repub-
lic under Adolphe Thiers. The commune, a revolutionary instal-
lation of workers, artisans, and small shopkeepers—a world of
les peus and les pauvres—had committed trespasses against
private property, moral and sexual conventions, and religious
orthodoxy—intolerable to the haute bourgeoisie of the Thiers
government. The newborn Third Republic eventually crushed
the commune in a spasm of unforgiving violence.
Those who concocted the idea of Lady Liberty were men
of irreproachable middle- and upper-class respectability. They
Wretched Refuse 89

loathed the aristocrats, clerics, social climbers, and men on the

make who had gathered in the court of Napoleon during the
Second Empire. They were liberal democrats who chafed under
the repressive state apparatus the emperor depended on. Believ-
ers in constitutional democracy, they admired what they imagined
to be the world’s best exemplar of that system of government, the
United States. They were as well staunch abolitionists gratified
at the outcome of the American Civil War. They sought to du-
plicate in France a political persuasion and constituency that
would respect individual rights, private property, law and order,
and a parliamentary democracy.2
However, these same circles supported the Thiers govern-
ment and the annihilation of the commune. If the American
Constitution inspired them, the commune’s communalism
terrified them. Nor was this a newly born fear. Ever since the
French Revolution, a bourgeois class had struggled against a
still-vibrant reactionary element left over from the ancient
regime—monarchists, church patriarchs, the remnants of the
nobility, corrupt state bureaucrats—to its right, and an insur-
rectionary current of working and lower middle classes to its
left. Indeed, the Second Empire had been born out of this
chronically unsettled state. Fearing the worst from the working-
class rebels who audaciously established “national workshops”
and sent the revolution of 1848 careening to the left, the French
liberal bourgeoisie lost courage, depending on the new Napo-
leon to restore order, not quite anticipating how their savior
would bury all hopes for a constitutional republic.3
Lady Liberty was dreamed up in this context. With Na-
poleon gone and the commune destroyed, how better to inspire
and memorialize their dedication to a stable, liberal, middle-
class society than by fashioning a monument to the nation that
had pioneered in inventing it? Lady Liberty’s godfather was
90 Wretched Refuse

Édouard de Laboulaye. He was a renowned scholar whose

specialty was American history. He came from an upstanding
middle-class family. During the empire he had resented the
restrictions on public speech and writing but kept a low profile.
It was during that period that he formed the notion of creating
a memorial to American liberty. Under the guise of celebrating
a long-ago military/political alliance, this would also be a covert
operation, an end run around the Napoleonic prohibitions
against voicing democratic sentiments. Laboulaye convened a
gathering of like-thinking intellectuals, politicians, and public-
spirited businessmen to promote the project. That became
much easier once Napoleon exited the scene.
Soon this group included Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a
young but already established sculptor with orthodox aes-
thetic views and upper-middle-class credentials. His father was
a civil servant and substantial landowner. The family origi-
nally hailed from the German Rhineland but had moved to
Alsace, where they served as elders of a Lutheran church. Not
a great artist, Bartholdi nonetheless had fared well under the
empire as a designer of public monuments. He had even been
involved in planning, along with Ferdinand de Lesseps, the
engineering genius responsible for the Suez Canal, a stupendous
lighthouse at the entrance to the canal, meant to rival the one
built by Alexander, one of the wonders of the ancient world.
The project was aborted but remained lodged in Bartholdi’s
aesthetic memory bank.4
Statues of women as heroines of the homeland, as guard-
ians of domestic tranquility, had been commonplace for as long
as anyone could remember, all the way back to antiquity. And
Bartholdi, as an artist schooled in the neoclassicism of the
French artistic establishment, was utterly at home in conceiving
a statue of liberty along those lines. There was a problem,
Wretched Refuse 91

however. Another view of “lady liberty” depicted her as more

sanguinary, as a militant, sword-wielding mother of revolution.
She too had deep roots in the past, and had become especially
prominent since the revolution of 1789, surfacing again and
again in the serial revolutions that followed decade by decade,
a stirring image that reached a kind of apotheosis in the cele-
brated painting by Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading the People.
Created to celebrate the 1830 revolution that finally put an end
to the Bourbon monarchy, Delacroix’s “lady” storms the bar-
ricades, leading an army of determined revolutionaries against
their bloodied reactionary tormentors, her classical tunic,
ripped in the fray, exposing her breasts, a visual emblem of the
poetry of the revolution: “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” This was
definitely not what Laboulaye, Bartholdi, and their colleagues
had in mind. Or rather, it was precisely what they had in mind
and were determined to avoid. Because of their own political
and social proclivities and with the commune still fresh in
memory, they wanted instead a stately, decorously robed lady
whose classical demeanor would impart a kind of maternal
calmness. Speaking at a fund-raising gathering in Paris, Labou-
laye assured his affluent listeners, “This liberty will not be the
one wearing a red bonnet on her head, a pike in her hand, who
walks on corpses. It will be the American Liberty, who does not
hold an incendiary torch but a beacon which enlightens.” He
assured those business circles enamored with the achievements
and promise of science and commerce, “Progress is nothing but
Liberty in action.”5
The symbolic narrative evolved so that the monument
increasingly veered away from any double entendre that might
attach liberty to social upheaval. The sword was replaced by a
tablet of laws commemorating the Constitution. The torch was
not an incendiary but a light. Together with the seven rays
92 Wretched Refuse

radiating from the Lady’s tiara, the statue conveyed enlighten-

ment, not discord (the seven rays bathing the seven continents
in sunlight were a Masonic code for enlightenment). Indeed,
originally the gift bore the name “Liberty Enlightening the
World.” The crown itself was conceived in place of the original
Phrygian cap, another borrowing from Roman days meant to
signal the liberation of the enslaved and oppressed. The Lady
herself was unsexed, made virtually motionless, becalmed. Since
its inventors were antislavery men, they had at first imagined a
prominent display of broken shackles at the statue’s base. The
shackles remained but are scarcely visible for fear they might
set off sympathetic shock waves in America, where disgruntled
talk of “wage slavery” was commonplace. Much wiser to keep
the message focused on enlightenment, away from liberation,
except insofar as one could conflate the one with the other: the
truth shall make you free.6
How this whole undertaking might be received in Amer-
ica was a serious worry. That might seem implausible since
after all this was intended as a gift, an honorarium that France’s
onetime ally would surely welcome with open arms. The French
needed that response in part because they couldn’t foot the
entire cost of creating, transporting, and erecting the monument
themselves. So too, they needed the Americans to provide a
place to put it. More than that, however, the whole political
premise of the operation was that there was a basic simpatico
between the liberal elites of the two countries. Both cherished
learning, enterprise, peaceable commerce, and republican liber-
ties in a unified nation-state over which they presided. This
conceit presumed these two classes, although an ocean apart,
were in essential respects identical, when in fact their historical
experiences and motivations diverged in ways that made an
altar to “Lady Liberty” more problematic.
Wretched Refuse 93

Lady Liberty and the Class Struggles in America

Strangely, their American counterparts turned out to be less
than enthusiastic. The statue’s French promoters did initially
succeed in assembling an American equivalent to their own
grouping. It was composed of eminences from worlds of poli-
tics and business and high culture, including Peter Cooper, the
manufacturer and philanthropist, Horace Greeley, Longfellow,
an aged Senator Charles Sumner, and President Grant. Money
was raised. But not enough. Congress seemed ready to appro-
priate funds and deed Bedloe’s Island in New York harbor as a
site, but then delayed. France and America were at odds over
trade and other mundane matters. New York City appeared
enthusiastic, but its ardor cooled enough to encourage other
cities, Philadelphia especially, to woo the statue’s French
sponsors.7
Hesitation became chronic, one reason it took about fif-
teen years from conception to unveiling (the other reason being
the technical complexities associated with the design, construc-
tion, assembling and disassembling, transportation, and reas-
sembling of this gargantuan memorial). Practical considerations
slowed matters. It soon became clear that there was no way the
statue would be ready for the nation’s centennial as originally
hoped; that was disappointing. More disabling, not long after
the idea took root in the United States, the country plunged
into the worst economic depression of its brief history. Every-
body was on short rations, first of all the mass of unemployed
but also the U.S. Treasury and the private treasuries of the
nouveau riche, whom the statue’s advocates hoped to touch for
contributions.
Depression invited insurrection. Practical matters of
dollars and cents morphed into a quicksand of political and
94 Wretched Refuse

ideological second thoughts. The embryonic life span of the

Statue of Liberty extended through a decade and a half of the
bitterest class warfare. There were hunger riots, most notably
at Tompkins Square in New York in 1874. Even before the Tomp-
kins Square calamity, the nation’s “better sort” were hysterical
about the prospect of the Paris Commune being imported to
America. Specters of Amazonian pétroleuses (raving, long-haired
women flinging incendiary glass bombs into the streets of
Paris) haunted the middle classes of metropolitan America.
Congressman James A. Garfield, a few years from his brief
presidency, warned, “The real fool-fury of the Seine” had been
“transplanted here, taking root in our disasters and drawing its
life only from our misfortunes.”
A nationwide railroad strike in 1877, to be remembered
as the Great Insurrection, involved thousands of railroad work-
ers, hundreds of thousands of their supporters in cities, towns,
and in rural America, armed confrontations between federal
and state militias on one side and strikers on the other, millions
of dollars in incinerated locomotives, tracks, roundhouses, and
other equipment, general strikes, and scores of dead and
wounded in cities from coast to coast. Fever rose again in the
mid-1880s. In the Midwest the country’s most despised “robber
baron” Jay Gould (known far and wide as the Mephistopheles
of Wall Street) faced off in a violent battle with his own railroad
workers and their legions of irate farmer allies. By 1886 what
had become a popular resistance to free-market, Darwinian
capitalism culminated in a series of rolling strikes, the Haymar-
ket bombing in Chicago, and a nationwide movement for the
eight-hour workday. On the eve of the statue’s unveiling, New
York City was in the throes of a mayoral election campaign.
Henry George, whose best-selling book Progress and Poverty
was a scathing indictment of economic injustice and political
Wretched Refuse 95

plutocracy, was the candidate of the United Labor Party. In a

shocking display of how deeply divided American society really
was, George finished second, well ahead of his Republican rival
Theodore Roosevelt.8
Naturally enough, therefore, the country’s business and
political classes were preoccupied with the class struggle in
America. Unlike their French counterparts, they weren’t con-
cerned with defeating the aristocratic, clerical, and monarchist
remnants of some ancient regime. There was no such regime.
This was no doubt comforting. But it was also bad preparation
for the kind of political craft and self-consciousness necessary
for running a society, a privilege but also an obligation ex-
pected of any nation’s elect.
Democracy, when coupled with capitalism, can’t run
itself—laissez-faire fantasies notwithstanding—as it gives rise
to too many abrasive encounters. But the upstart industrial
tycoons of Gilded Age America were too self-absorbed in build-
ing their patrimonies to think consistently in a more disinter-
ested way. Doctor Elihu Hubbard Smith observed of New York’s
nouveau riche that they thought of nothing but “Commerce,
News, and Pleasure. . . . The history of the city of New York is
the history of the eager cultivation and rapid increase in the
arts of gain.” When they weren’t indulging their appetites in the
most extravagant forms of high living for which the Gilded Age
became infamous, they were erecting monuments of a different
sort than the one conceived in France.
A spasm of armory building followed the Great Insurrec-
tion. These were urban fortresses financed by the wealthy,
constructed in the centers of big cities, armed with Gatling guns
and rifle apertures commanding all the sight lines running
down the cities’ major arteries. The male offspring of the haute
bourgeoisie trained there, readying themselves to meet the
96 Wretched Refuse

enemy, a “rabble” of the lower orders, “offal” (or, if you will,

“wretched refuse”) from alien shores. These were expensive
undertakings but in the eyes of many a titan of industry and
finance money better spent than on a statue that might even
vaguely hint at social emancipation. In the two years following
the Great Insurrection of 1877, the Astors, Stewarts, Vanderbilts,
Morgans, and a galaxy of big businesses, like Equitable Life,
Singer Sewing Machine, and Harper Brothers, among others,
raised more than $500,000 to build the Seventh Regiment
Armory on Park Avenue.9
Rule by blunt instrument and bribery was the instinctive
reaction of newly risen upper classes otherwise fixated on
money making and with acquiring for cold cash the social
pedigrees, genealogies, equipage, manorial homes, and savoir
faire they otherwise lacked. A statue honoring liberty might
elicit polite applause, but there was greater enthusiasm for plans
afoot to restrict suffrage, especially among the troublesome
working classes, immigrants particularly. J. P. Morgan and the
editor of the Nation E. L. Godkin, among others, did what they
could to make voting a privilege rather than a right. Whitlaw
Reid, the publisher of the New York Tribune, editorialized that
“ignorant voters” were “as dangerous to the interests of Society
as the communists of France.” Pinkerton detectives, private
militias, court injunctions, and the brute force of police, state,
and federal troopers made quick work of the discontented. It
was less complicated and required no compromise, as compared
to devising mechanisms of social peace that might impinge on
elite prerogatives.10
Political affairs were time consuming and required getting
down and dirty with the “wrong sorts,” machine politicians and
their unsavory clientele, precisely those unseemly urban
masses who in an ideal world would be extruded from the body
Wretched Refuse 97

politic entirely. Better to enter into a system of mutual ransom.

Party hierarchs would tithe the “upper tendom” for licenses to
loot the public domain (utilities, streetcar franchises, zoning
and building regulations, railroad rights of way, land grants,
and so on). In return, machine bosses would make sure the
lower orders didn’t intrude on the prerogatives of property. No
ongoing involvement in public life was necessary so long as
dynastic interests were looked after. If government apparatchiks
presumed too much, a Napoleon of business could always call
on an armada of family lawyers and a kept congressman or
senator to set things right again.
Cultivating responsible ruling-class social consciousness
was not likely in such unnourishing soil. Private concerns came
first. Fashioning a sense of national solidarity and tradition was
a lower priority. When Bartholdi first ventured to America to
raise money, he found his potential benefactors obsessively
focused on “the God Dollar.” A decade later, former president
Grant was blunt in blaming the paltry donations of the wealth-
iest on precisely their money-mad self-regard, taking note of
“the marked indifference of the citizens of New York to the
munificent gift of the French People to the People of the
United States.” Far too few among the country’s upper classes
recognized how a cultural investment in glorifying the nation-
state could work as a prophylactic against the divisiveness of
class animosities, something the French had learned the hard
way.11
To be sure, there were some among the country’s elect
who had been enlightened in this regard by the Civil War.
Monuments were being lofted left and right in the after-war
years to commemorate the war dead. The Union League, a club
of the most prestigious bankers and businessmen in New York
and elsewhere created to support Lincoln, formed the core of
98 Wretched Refuse

early financial and public support for the statue. Its members,
including J. P. Morgan and even that inveterate sea dog capital-
ist Cornelius Vanderbilt ponied up initially. But as the years
went by the cupboard remained half bare. These were the de-
cades when even philanthropy, which often emerges among the
super-rich as a pre-political form of social engagement, was
still gestating. Jay Gould wasn’t giving any money away; that
would happen in the next generation. Commodore Vanderbilt
donated one of his steamships to the Union navy but kept most
of his wealth for his offspring. Russell Sage was a miserable
miser; only after his death would his wife reverse course. Andrew
Carnegie wasn’t yet seeding towns and cities with libraries, too
preoccupied with his castle in Scotland and driving his steel-
workers into open rebellion. Only after many years of ruthless
acquisitiveness would the pious Baptist John D. Rockefeller shift
his attention to the ameliorative measures in public health and
social welfare designed to redeem his black reputation as the
monopolist ne plus ultra.
Even among the most enlightened a sense of public com-
mitment remained underdeveloped. Morgan thought of him-
self as the country’s unofficial central banker but insisted
nonetheless, “I owe the public nothing.” Mark Hanna, a Cleve-
land industrialist and kingmaker within the Republican Party,
simplified what he understood to be the essential mechanism
of democratic politics in this witty aperçu: “There are only two
things that are important in politics. The first is money and I
can’t remember what the second one is.” A larger number of
the nouveau riche, industrialists, financiers, a rentier class of
landlords and coupon clippers were more gun-shy about em-
broiling themselves. Instead, they confected a hermetically
sealed-off Potemkin village in which they pretended they were
aristocrats, with all the entitlements and deference and
Wretched Refuse 99

legitimacy that came with that station. This was both a way of
displaying power for all to see and presumably defer to, and a
form of self-delusion. All the feudal paraphernalia on display
at their masquerade balls, on parade in Central Park, holed up
in the reconstructed gothic monoliths looming over the coast-
line of Newport, constituted the infrastructure of a utopian
fantasy created by a newly risen class so raw and unsure of its
place and mission in the world it needed all the borrowed cre-
dentials as protective coloring.
After all, many of these first- and second-generation
bourgeois potentates had just sprung from social obscurity and
the homeliest economic pursuits. Their native crudity was in
plain sight, mocked by many. Herman Melville remarked: “The
class of wealthy people are, in aggregate, such a mob of gilded
dunces, that not to be wealthy carries with it a certain distinc-
tion and nobility.” Mrs. Astor, the doyenne of this world whose
grandfather-in-law started out a butcher and itinerant peddler
of flutes, was accused of being an admirer not of the Thiers
Third Republic, but of the French royalist cause. She was de-
scribed as a “walking chandelier” because so many diamonds
and pearls were pinned to every available space on her body.
She deployed her drawing room’s huge red damask divan on a
raised platform like a throne. Her relative John Jacob Astor IV,
a notorious playboy, was chastised by an Episcopal minister:
“Mr. Astor and his crowd of New York and Newport associates
have for years not paid the slightest attention to the laws of the
church and state which have seemed to contravene their per-
sonal pleasures or sensual delights. But you can’t defy God all
the time. The day of reckoning comes and comes in its own
way.” (Years later Astor went down with the Titanic.)
Many of the great dynastic families disported themselves
in the same way. It was all, as one historian noted, a “pageant
100 Wretched Refuse

and fairy tale,” an homage to the “beau ideal” by a newly hatched

social universe trying but failing to “live down its mercantile
origins.” But this dream life was ill suited to the arts and crafts
of ruling over a society that was, at best, apt to find this charade
amusing, at worst an insult. Wall Street Brahmin Henry Lee
Higginson, fearing the “Awful Democracy”—that whole me-
nagerie of radicalism inflaming both urban barrios and the Great
Plains—urgently appealed to his fellows to take up the task of
mastery “more wisely and humanely than the kings and nobles
have done. Our chance is now—before the country is full and
the struggle for bread becomes intense I would have the gentle-
men of the country lead the new men who are trying to become
gentlemen.” This appeal, like the more modest one to fund a
monument to the nation’s revolutionary heritage, fell mainly
on deaf ears. One pair among them, however, was listening.12

Joseph Pulitzer’s First Prize

Joseph Pulitzer was an immigrant. He came from Hungary and
he came poor. What made him rich was his talent for publish-
ing a certain kind of sensationalist journalism. He wasn’t the
first to do this, but he was certainly among its grandest practi-
tioners, first in St. Louis and then, seemingly, everywhere, in-
cluding New York. Sometimes overlooked about what was
derided as “yellow journalism” was its populist inclinations.
Such papers were full of titillating gossip, scandal mongering,
conspiratorial intrigue, purple prose, and cultivated exaggera-
tion. The stories were undersourced and often bordered on
fiction. But precisely because they were aimed at a working-class
readership, these tabloids catered to that audience’s suspicions
and resentments regarding the country’s pretentious plutocracy.
This had been true earlier in the century when James Gordon
Wretched Refuse 101

Bennett made fun of the “chip-chop aristocracy” in the pages

of the New York Herald. And it became truer still during the
Gilded Age when Pulitzer, along with his chief rival William
Randolph Hearst, assaulted Wall Street financiers, tycoons like
Carnegie and Rockefeller (Hearst was an adamant anti-
monopolist), and their political enablers.
As the Statue of Liberty lay in limbo in a Paris storage
shed, its promoters were still begging for the money to construct
the pedestal and undercarriage that would support the gigantic
memorial. The Astors, Vanderbilts, and Samuel Tilden, asked
for $10,000 each, said no. The American committee created to
get the job done continued to plead, managing to squeeze out
some money from the ranks of the privileged. But not enough.
They hired the country’s architect de jour for the “upper ten-
dom,” Richard Morris Hunt, to design the pedestal (it was put
together by Italian workers living in barracks on Bedloe’s Island,
sleeping on bare wooden bunks).
Bedloe’s Island, a three-acre sandbank of mud and clay,
had been designated as the statue’s resting place. Congress had
so decreed in 1877, but appropriated no money to pay for the
pedestal to be erected there. Still, the island seemed a good
enough spot, its sorry history having left it not fit for much else.
Since around the year 1000 it had served as a hunting ground
for an Algonquin tribe that spoke the Munsee dialect. The In-
dians lived off the island’s rich oyster beds and hunted native
animals. They were long gone, as were the oysters, killed off by
dredging, landfill, pollution, and overfishing as first the Dutch
and then the British moved in. A Dutch patroon named Isaac
Bedloo swapped “certain cargoes or parcels of goods” with the
island’s native fish farmers in return for the oyster fishery. In
the eighteenth century the island was used as a pesthouse for
carriers of contagious diseases, smallpox especially. During the
102 Wretched Refuse

Revolution it became an asylum and way station for Tories

fleeing the country. Then a merchant-farmer named Samuel
Ellis acquired it (along with another island that bore his name
and would become the most famous immigrant processing
center in the world at the end of the nineteenth century). Ellis
sold Bedloo’s to the federal government, which built a modest
fort there. Finally, it was ready for something far more auspi-
cious. But only if someone would pay the bill. The Social Reg-
ister, however, remained gun-shy. Its ardor for republicanism
was on a very low flame.13
Pulitzer sensed an opportunity. He launched a campaign
to raise pennies, nickels, and dimes from ordinary people, even
little kids, to accomplish what the high and mighty had failed
to do. And mocking the niggardliness of those upper-crust
misers became a piquant point of this newspaper barrage, which
went on for months. “We have more than a hundred millionaires
in this city any one of whom might have drawn a cheque for
the whole sum without feeling they had given away a dollar. . . .
Any one of them would have willingly spent the amount in
flunkeyism or ostentation [or on] a foreign ballet dancer or
opera singer. . . . But do they care for a Statue of Liberty which
only reminds them of the equality of all citizens of the Repub-
lic.” Pulitzer singled out people like Jay Gould and William
Vanderbilt, characters known to be nativist in their inclinations,
accusing them of buying up Confederate bonds (Pulitzer had
fought in the war). A reader responded: “A few poor fellows
whose pockets are not as deep as a well but whose love for
Liberty is wider than a church door . . . it seems that New York
rich men do not.” (Along with his letter came a donation of
$7.25.) A ten-year-old boy sent 10¢ with a note saying, “Please
take this from a little boy who wants to set Jay Gould a good
example.” He signed himself “A Young Patriot.”
Wretched Refuse 103

In an age when money ruled, but only alongside the most

vigorous resistance, other publications joined Pulitzer’s on-
slaught. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated ran a picture captioned “The
Statue of Liberty One Thousand Years Later”—still waiting for
her pedestal. Lady Liberty was woeful, drooping, aged, ex-
hausted. Life magazine ran an image of a scrawny lady and told
its readers, “Jay Gould thinks we have too much Liberty here
now.”
As a publisher and man of affairs, Pulitzer was no radical.
He was loyal to the Democratic Party, although not to its east-
ern wing, dominated by August Belmont and the mercantile-
financial circles centered in New York. On the contrary, because
his journalistic practices made him acutely sensitive to the
populist, even anti-capitalist currents coursing through the
national bloodstream, he knew that upper-crust world was
vulnerable, its formidable wealth and connections notwith-
standing. And he was an immigrant who’d come up the hard
way. Whether that made a difference and prompted him to act
is not clear. But the fact of the matter is that thousands and
thousands of those his multicity campaign reached were im-
migrants; for example, by the 1870s the majority of Chicago’s
population was foreign born. Waged by Pulitzer papers all over
the country, the campaign was a triumph. It was incentivized
by the chance to see your name in the paper alongside note of
your contribution, sentimentalized by publication of the
scribbled letters of small children sending in their pennies,
orchestrated with rallies and parades sponsored by the pub-
lisher, and tracked daily as the collections neared and then
reached their goal: well over $100,000, an enormous amount
to be collected in this way from people of the most limited
means. So it was thanks to Pulitzer and the People that on
October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty, then the tallest structure
104 Wretched Refuse

in New York at 305 feet, was unveiled before a throng of digni-

taries on Bedloe’s Island and a million watching from the
shorelines of Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Predictably, the mood was upbeat. President Cleveland
delivered the anointment, noting that “a stream of light shall
pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until
Liberty enlightens the world.” He assured his audience, “Instead
of grasping in her hand the thunderbolt of terror and death,
she holds aloft the light that illuminates the way to man’s en-
franchisement.” Chauncey Depew, lawyer to the wealthy, a
Republican wire-puller, and president of the Union League Club
and of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, in-
terpreted the statue to signal that “the problems of Labor and
Capital, of prosperity and poverty, will work themselves out
under the benign influence of enlightened law-making and
law-abiding liberty, without the aid of kings and armies, or of
anarchists and bombs.” French attendees painted a glutinous
picture of the statue as “some fantastic apparition of a queen
of the seas, emerging all aglow from her liquid domains and
advancing, mysterious and veiled to greet her visitors.” Mark
Twain offered a lonely dissent. He didn’t much care for the
statue. It seemed to him smug, “too hearty and well-fed.” He
would have preferred a lady “old, bent, clothed in rags, downcast,
shame-faced” so as to better depict the “insults and humilia-
tions” liberty had always been subject to. Instead it seemed a
monument to the “insolence of prosperity.” But the statue’s
“artistic banality” and the president’s equally banal speechifying
prevailed.14
In the shadow of Haymarket, the Great Uprising of the
eight-hour day movement, and the Henry George electoral
insurgency, no mention was made of any connection between
Lady Liberty and emancipation, democracy, the brotherhood
Wretched Refuse 105

of man or, for that matter, of “huddled masses yearning to

breathe free,” of “wretched refuse” from foreign shores. This is
noteworthy, of course, because we are so accustomed to associ-
ating the statue with all or at least some of those invocations.
What is even more remarkable, however, is that quite to the
contrary of what we have grown up believing, very soon after
its unveiling Lady Liberty was again and again depicted as be-
sieged by “mongrel hordes” who constituted a fearsome threat
to the liberty the statue was erected to celebrate. Astonishing as
that seems, more extraordinary still is that the elites who had
once demurred fell in love with the statue, and some of the
working people who had pinched pennies to see her be erected
now turned their backs, alarmed at the growing flood of “hud-
dled masses” sailing into New York Harbor beneath her torch.

Lady Liberty and the Enigma of Class

One perennial boast made by the stewards of our country’s
heritage is that we are a nation of immigrants. True. By this is
meant not only that we welcome newcomers from abroad flee-
ing this or that kind of dilemma, but that when they get here
soon enough they melt, under the heat of a vigorously growing
economy, into a commons of individuals all in hot pursuit of
happiness. What beckons is the liberty to chase that dream free
of any entangling ties to old homelands, deferments to tradi-
tional overlords, and obeisance to ancient beliefs. To those who
originate as “huddled masses,” poor and subordinate, the
“golden door” is a passway out of that fate. A nation of immi-
grants is not a nation of hierarchy, of social inferiority, of class
against class. As Lincoln once envisioned, even if you began life
as a wage laborer, America’s boundless opportunity promised
that would last only temporarily.
106 Wretched Refuse

Yet we know this is not so. Freshets of immigrants have

often set off a counter flood tide of anti-alien sentiments of
great force. Immigrants may arrive dreaming, but they wake up
soon enough to their lot as proletarians, a condition lasting
much longer (generations even) than Lincoln believed. Staying
true to old religious faiths, ancient homelands and languages,
kinship networks and ethnic associations, festivals, mores, eat-
ing habits, dress and deportment, child-rearing and endoga-
mous marriage practices was more common than not. Melting
was slow and sometimes coerced.
Never had the United States experienced such a tidal wave
of immigration as it did during the time the statue was being
conceived and built and during the immediate decades that
followed. Nearly 7 million migrated to America from Europe
between 1881 and 1894. Already by 1870 the foreign born ac-
counted for one-third of the industrial workforce. Well over a
million Jewish refugees arrived in little more than a decade
between 1904 and 1917. Even more Italians disembarked: 2 mil-
lion in a single decade from 1900 to 1909. During the 1880s the
average annual inflow of immigrants was half a million; by 1907
it was 1.3 million. And the source of this mighty human river
had shifted: in 1882 three-quarters came from northern and
western Europe, by 1896 half set sail from southern and eastern
Europe, and by 1906 70 percent did. Today nearly 40 percent of
American citizens have at least one ancestor who disembarked
at Ellis Island (although this number includes those who arrived
after this period until the center closed in 1954).15
For the business classes that initially had been so reticent
about Lady Liberty’s welcoming torch, this was manna from
heaven. After all, this was cheap labor, malleable labor, easily
cowed labor that American industry—heavy industry like steel
as well as light industry like garment manufacturing—relied
Wretched Refuse 107

on to move the country with lightning speed into the front

ranks of the world’s economic powerhouses. Trade associations
and more ecumenical business federations lobbied for unre-
stricted immigration, sent labor agents to the far corners of the
earth to recruit, entered into relations with foreign-based labor
contractors, and came out against those lobbying to restrict the
flow of the foreign born, to dim the light.
Hostility to immigrants has been a subtheme of American
history virtually since the beginning, even as the country more
and more assumed the profile of a nation of immigrants. Some
of that earlier hostility was fueled by religious (Protestant
versus Catholic) differences, some by ethnic suspicions (the
potato eaters from Ireland were among the country’s earliest
white trash), and some by racial phobias (swarthy Italians and
southeastern Europeans were akin to lowlife “niggers”). Anti-
Semitism wounded all Jews, but the strangely costumed
Hebrews from the Pale of Settlement suffered the brunt, includ-
ing hostile barbs from their uptown Ashkenazi brethren from
Germany who got here before them. All of these stigmata, no
matter their racial, religious, and cultural colorations, carried
with them the anathema of class inferiority. And with the
volcanic eruption of open class warfare during the Gilded Age,
low class signified as well a political category: the dangerous
classes.
Animosity toward immigrants became especially heated
during the Gilded Age, the formative years of the statue’s pres-
ence in American public life. Old prejudices continued to in-
flame. But almost as soon as the statue was unveiled, class and
political fears and fixations surfaced that until then had been
largely camouflaged. Some of that irrational fearmongering
originated in the most urbane and sophisticated sectors of
American life, as, for example, among the Boston Brahmin and
108 Wretched Refuse

New York Knickerbocker elites—men like Henry Cabot Lodge

and Henry Adams. They worried about the mongrelization of
the Anglo-Saxon “race” and about their own displacement as
the country’s bespoken stewards. Very little of that bigotry
infected the business classes, which had too much to gain via
the “golden door,” even though they continued to brood
darkly about the “dangerous classes.”
But in a tragic irony, similar cultural poisons incubated
within the precincts of the native working classes. Fearing for
their jobs, worried about the downward pressure on wages
exerted by those “huddled masses,” prey to propaganda about
the alien ways of these “strangers in their midst,” they mobilized
to shut the door. So the Chinese were excluded by an act of
Congress in 1882. While the Knights of Labor had audaciously
opened its ranks to all comers, the newly hatched American
Federation of Labor confined itself to the skilled and native
born, and agitated to shutter the sluice gates; soon the Holy
Order of the Knights of Labor also succumbed. A distinction
was drawn between those fit to live in “A Nation of Free Men”
and the “slavish, ignorant, and unassimilable foreigners.” Even
leaders of the Socialist Party, founded near the end of the cen-
tury, would now and then inveigh against the human flood from
abroad.
Sentiments like these echoed widely. Newspapers filled up
with editorials denouncing foreign “rabble, dangerous classes,
ruffians, incendiaries, malcontents, rapscallions, and brigands.”
Cartoons depicted the statue beleaguered by such people, claw-
ing at her robes. One magazine, reacting to the proposal to
construct an immigration processing center on Ellis Island,
called the project “The Proposed Emigrant Dumping Site” and
accompanied its opinion with a nasty picture of European
“garbage ships” unloading their human refuse at the statue’s
Wretched Refuse 109

base. A cartoon in Puck imagined the ruination of the statue;

it was infested with immigrants. A figure representing Big Busi-
ness sat in front of a Doric-columned bank. Tammany leader
Boss Platt was shown running the whole show to suggest an
unholy alliance of money and politics colluding to provide
cheap labor and cheap voters. Lady Liberty was quickly becom-
ing an emblem of exclusion rather than a “mother of exiles.”
Moreover, the great preponderance of white workers, even those
subjected to the most noxious forms of discrimination and
bigotry, helped man the walls against any intrusion by those
internal exiles from Afro-America.16
If it was in the enlightened self-interest of industrialists
to welcome this “wretched refuse,” was it not in the enlightened
self-interest of the working classes to bar the door? Do the two
enlightenments cancel each other out? Was there a madness to
the logic? Does enlightenment, which after all was the settled-
on mission of the Statue of Liberty, have anything to do with
the matter? What is at stake here rather is the parochialisms
that a class-divided society is subject to, boilerplate cant about
American exceptionalism notwithstanding.
Emma Lazarus’s poem wasn’t chiseled into the statue
until 1903. Even then it got little notice, no ceremony, and virtu-
ally no press coverage. It wasn’t until the Great Depression and
the advent of the New Deal that the memorial’s connection to
the immigrant experience was firmly fixed in the public mind.
Earlier it had been enlisted for patriotic purposes: during World
War I people were urged to buy Liberty Bonds and the money
helped finance Liberty ships. Yet the 1920s witnessed the most
sweeping immigration restriction legislation ever to become
law. The precipitous decline in global migration during the
Depression cooled political tempers. And the folk culture de-
liberately nurtured by the New Deal sketched out an honored
110 Wretched Refuse

place for working people and their homeland customs and

habits, once so despised. In that atmosphere, the Statue of
Liberty became the symbol we have assumed it always was.
Nowadays, of course, it is debatable whether that is still the
case.17

On the Road
What did those “huddled masses” make of the statue’s strange
symbolic transformations? Many, no doubt, were more than
ready to view Lady Liberty as the deliverer Lazarus elegized.
True or not in reality, this perspective became more entrenched
in the second generation as a part of the cultural arsenal avail-
able to break down barriers to their own mobility. Others of
the first generation—half of all Italian migrants, for example—
went back home anyway, so the statue, if they thought of it at
all, faded from memory. Millions of others came and remained
too wretched to notice. Substantial numbers rose from wretch-
edness to a modicum of civilized decency, self-respect, and
dignity. For them the statue might signify in retrospect a chance
at self-emancipation, if not the social emancipation carefully
censored out by its original conceivers. Whether faring well or
less well, immigrants certainly had to wince at the way metro-
politan newspapers and public speakers went on and on about
how the Lady was being despoiled by people just like them.
Then again, there was a good chance they couldn’t read those
papers or hear those orators as they didn’t read or speak English.
My maternal grandfather couldn’t. He was fluent in Yid-
dish, German, and Polish, but when he first arrived in America
he knew little if any English. He hailed from Warsaw, where at
an early age he learned how to do skilled work with sheet
metal. That was not what his father wanted for his eldest son.
Wretched Refuse 111

Instead, he had in mind a loftier position as a Jewish cleric. But

the czar intervened. My grandfather had been drafted into the
Russian Army (there was no state of Poland at the turn of the
twentieth century). When he was released after two years or so,
rumors began circulating that the czar was not quite done with
him. But my grandfather Max was done with the czar. He told
his father he was hitting the road. But for where?
Not long after the savage slaughter of Jews in the infamous
pogrom at Kishinev in 1903, torrents of panicked Jews headed
west, mainly to the United States, Max among them. Their
German-Jewish cousins already ensconced in New York and
elsewhere were less than happy about this prospect and had
been for some time. They looked down on these Litvaks as
uneducated village provincials, slavish believers in obscurantist
doctrine. They were indeed “huddled masses” habituated to
lives of demeaning poverty, living in squalor, babbling a bastard
dialect. Especially as they massed together in great cities, New
York above all, they could only heighten the anti-Semitism
already implanted in the Western psyche and from which Ger-
man Jews, wealthy or not, also suffered. Stopping the onrush,
the original desire of those already settled here, proved impos-
sible. Instead, uptown set out to civilize downtown (the Jewish
Messenger hoped the “immigrants might be Americanized in
spite of themselves”) and to disperse it when possible so it would
become a less conspicuous mass. Ghettos were unseemly and
attracted the wrong kind of attention.18
Max had a skill. And he was a young (about nineteen)
single male. That profile was just what the various German-
Jewish-sponsored aid societies were looking for. Either through
word of mouth or by direct recruitment, Max made his way,
stealthily keeping out of sight of Russian police and troops,
across Poland to Bremen in Germany, where a ship awaited that
112 Wretched Refuse

was scheduled to take men like him to, of all places, Galveston,
Texas. His German-Jewish benefactors, seeking to spread out
their Litvak charges, had identified Galveston as a port city
where ships were built and metal workers were in demand,
aware that Texas had been for a long time a place where Jewish
refugees from the German revolution of 1848 had established
communities—thus they matched Warsaw Max with the Lone
Star State. Indeed, Galveston was known as “the Ellis Island of
the West”; more than two hundred thousand immigrants from
Germany, Greece, Italy, and eastern Europe disembarked there
between 1864 and 1924.
But Galveston had been ravaged by a great hurricane in
1900, not long before Max got there, and was still recovering (it
never really did, never managing to become the “Wall Street of
the Southwest,” as its boosters had imagined in its salad days).
So my grandfather sailed to the other side of the Gulf Coast
and debarked in New Orleans, a far more thriving entrepôt.
Employed, but not comfortable in the Deep South, even in a
cosmopolitan city like New Orleans, Max yearned to get to New
York, but he lacked money and the right papers. Then he met
a guy who knew another guy who was connected to the right
guy and managed to stow away on a ship to Gotham.
Now what? Lost in the city, the ghetto beckoned. The great
metropolis was a vast zone of intimidating anonymity for way-
farers from the American outback. Its teeming ghettos might
be shunned by the uptown Ashkenazi, but it was different for
immigrants, who could, like homing pigeons, hone in on
densely settled neighborhood reproductions of their native
villages and shtetls from the Old World. In these confraternities
squirreled away amid the towering monoliths of New York’s
movers and shakers, the chances were strikingly good that you
would find not only food and drink, languages, clothing,
Wretched Refuse 113

houses of worship, newspapers, and pastimes you were familiar

with but, more remarkably, someone you knew. That’s what
happened to Max. He ran into a landsman on the Lower East
Side. That man sent him to a factory in the Bronx that was
looking for skilled sheet metal workers. Max showed up and
was asked for his references. He had no idea what “references”
were, and anyway he had none. When after a while he managed
to piece together what his interviewer meant by “references,”
Max held up his two rather large hands, already weathered by
a young life working metal. He made his point.
Max spent many years at this work. Early on he became
involved with a group of fellow workers trying to form a union.
They would meet secretly at a cheap Manhattan cafeteria (prob-
ably a Horn and Hardart) before dawn on their way to work in
the Bronx, afraid to meet nearer the factory; no one even
dreamed they could meet on the premises. One day they won;
a union local was born; how sweet.
I never heard my grandfather (or for that matter any of
my grandparents, three of whom were immigrants like Max),
mention the Statue of Liberty. Whether Max thought of it at
all, I don’t know.
What I do know is that all through his life my grandfather
was loyal to three faiths: the union, Jewish socialism as it was
expressed every day in the Jewish Daily Forward (or in its Yid-
dish edition, the Forverts), which he continued to read until he
died, and his trade. Whenever I, as a child, would visit him and
my grandmother, Max, who was otherwise a rather quiet, even
taciturn person, would advise me that the best life, the most
secure life was to be gained by mastering a trade, the way to
navigate the shoals of misfortune and economic unpredict-
ability. He referred to a skill, something so embedded in the
body it was hard to replace or do without. Moreover, that skill
114 Wretched Refuse

of the sort he meant when he displayed his knowing hands gave

forth a spiritual sustenance as well, an inward confidence, mas-
tery, and a rock-bottom sense of self-worth grounded in the
tangible.
Growing up, I had no time for the Statue of Liberty and
I ignored Max’s advice. The statue was an obligatory site visit
in elementary school that, for a suburban kid in midcentury
America, was a hollowed-out symbol lacking any connection
to life as I knew it. Measured against other icons of Americana—
Davy Crockett, say—it didn’t come close. My grandfather’s
wisdom seemed to me archaic (or whatever a kid who hadn’t
learned that word yet might have called it—“old-fashioned,”
maybe). His words seemed to emerge out of some other galaxy,
from a past so murky and strange it could no longer be quite
understood—like Harold Pinter’s cribbed lines: “The past is a
foreign country. They do things differently there.” And yet . . .19

Napoleon, Max, and Me

Without Napoleon III, there might never have been a Statue of
Liberty. True, such endless regressions might be posed about
any historical event. Nonetheless, Bonaparte’s coup provided
the context in which the will and the imagination of the French
liberal elite took shape, finally to be embodied in Lady Liberty.
Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is
widely considered one of the mountain peaks of historical and
political journalism in the way it captured the triangulation of
class conflicts in France. Napoleon emerged from that storm
of contending social protagonists—ancient elites, rising com-
mercial classes, middle-class champions of constitutional lib-
erty and good order, fresh-born proletarians and the still-lively
currents of artisanal rebellion, not to mention the mass of the
Wretched Refuse 115

peasantry Marx considered so shapeless and so easily manipu-

lated. The nephew of the original emperor surfaced at the dead
center of this revolutionary impasse. He leveraged its yearning
for resolution into his own ascension and dictatorship. Napo-
leon became the default position. For liberal France, the Statue
of Liberty would become one exit ramp away from that dead
end.
On the American side, the history of the Statue of Lib-
erty might be thought of as the eighteenth Brumaire of Joseph
Pulitzer or as a turning point in the coming-of-age of the
American bourgeoisie. Neither welcomed nor rejected, the
statue turned out to be more plastic than its colossal presence
suggested. Pulitzer, one of the New World’s Great Men of Busi-
ness and the Vox Populi, had to embarrass his compeers into
taking possession of a monument to their own achievement as
a class. This is comical in a way that calls to mind perhaps the
most famous line from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire that every-
one loves to quote: his notion that history repeats, the first time
as tragedy, the second as farce.
A moment came in my own life in which the austere
legacy of my grandfather and so many immigrants like him
returned to laugh at me. When I was still in college, during the
summer I applied for a job in a garment factory, hoping to
thereby get close enough to my fellow workers—most of whom
turned out to be internal exiles from Afro-America and colonials
from Puerto Rico—to instill in them the same opposition to
the U.S. imperial intervention in Vietnam that I and my fellow
students felt so deeply. Unwittingly, I applied for a job as a cut-
ter, not knowing that that was the most skilled occupation in
the “rag trade.” The company was a fly-by-night firm in the
bowels of Queens, so when a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old
showed up claiming he had such skills and was willing to work
116 Wretched Refuse

for the going sweatshop wage, no questions were asked. None,

that is, until I was given a trial run on what in the business is
known as a “lay” of fabrics, in this case about a dozen layers
thick. On top of the lay was placed a pattern that functioned as
the template for cutting the textiles. The foreman handed me
a machine (I had imagined a scissors) and gave me the green
light. Away I went. Or rather, away went the cutting machine,
with me hanging on for dear life as the blades slashed through
the fabrics at warp speed in a pattern that had no resemblance
to the template; really, there was no pattern at all, not one even
as coherent as those wonderful colored photos used to illustrate
chaos theory. Left behind instead was a pile of shredded, now
useless material that looked exactly what we all know chaos
looked like before the physicists got ahold of the term.
All this took only seconds. The foreman’s reaction was in
its own way extraordinary. He might have come at me with the
cutting machine—after all, destroying layers of fabric at one
fell swoop is not happy hour in any factory, much less in a
penny- pinching sweatshop. Instead, slack- jawed, open-
mouthed, eyeballs rolling, nonplussed, befuddled beyond be-
fuddlement, he paused to collect himself. And then, after he
carefully removed the cutter from my fiendish Scissorhands, he
took me down to the warehouse and put me to work as an
order picker, a task a lot more suited to my skill grade.
If only I had listened to Max.
 4
There Was a Young Cowboy
Homeless on the Range

A
t night, when my son and daughter were toddlers, I
would sing them to sleep with a melancholy lullaby
they never tired of hearing; nor, for that matter, did
I ever grow weary of singing it. “There was a Young
Cowboy” was its title and opening line. Most of the lyrics that
followed I made up. And they changed every night as I in-
vented the young cowboy’s adventures, trials, and tribulations.
But the tune and the mood and the imaginative terrain were
inherited. My father had sung me to sleep to the same music.
He, a second-generation immigrant Jew from New York, knew
the real lyrics by heart. He was not alone. Millions, just as alien
as my father from the song’s heartland, had inherited as part of
their cultural genotype the classic ballad known either as “The
Streets of Laredo” or “The Cowboy’s Lament.”
Apparently, the folksong originated in an Irish ballad of
the eighteenth century called “The Unfortunate Rake.” Later an
old-time cowboy named Frank H. Maynard turned it into a song
of the Texas plains. That sounds plausible. The “poor cowboy”
118 There Was a Young Cowboy

in Laredo lamenting his fate is indeed “unfortunate” as he tells

his “sad story” while dying in the street “wrapped in white linen.”
And he’s dying because, young and “dashing” as he was, he was
a “rake” who knew he’d “done wrong,” shot in the chest while
gambling and brawling in a barroom. Rakish he may have been,
but we mourn him nonetheless. We hear his lament through the
voice of a fellow cowboy who mourns his comrade, “gone to the
last round-up.” He leaves us in a state of emotional ambiguity:

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly

And bitterly wept as we bore him along
For we loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome
We all loved our comrade, although he’d done wrong.1

When I sang this song to my children, I had long since

forgotten the lyrics my father once sang to me. He, however,
knew them so well because “The Streets of Laredo” had bur-
rowed deeply into the interior pathways of the national psyche.
Over the decades, renditions have been performed by numerous
artists—Burl Ives, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Roy Rogers, Willie
Nelson, the Kingston Trio, and Pete Seeger—and featured in
movies like Bang the Drum Slowly and Brokeback Mountain and
TV shows from Maverick to Deadwood.
Vital elements of the original were missing from my rendi-
tion. The young cowboy, perhaps needless to say, never died. And
he never “done wrong.” Other touchstones of mythic memory
remained, however. He was brave. He was alone. He was on a
quest, but one always just out of his reach. He was virtuous, not
a rake, but capable of killing evil ones when they crossed his path,
which they inevitably did. His horse—in my version “a young
pony”—was as faithful as the most loyal comrade. Our hero was
made an orphan by violent circumstance but lived in perennial
There Was a Young Cowboy 119

hope of recovering his loved ones. He survived in a vastness full

of dangerous varmints, human and animal, as well as treacher-
ous terrain and weather. But there was nothing he couldn’t
handle, relying only on himself and of course his young pony.
My young cowboy, my kids’ young cowboy, was a hero, a savior,
an adventurer, a wanderer, a protector—free, honorable, fierce
when he needed to be, very male, and very lonesome.
If I couldn’t rely on my own memory, I could completely
count on popular collective memory to lullaby my kids to sleep.
After all, growing up in a ranch house America, I was awash in
images of cowboys riding the range and holing up in ranch
houses (which, by the way, only faintly resembled any of the
house-raisings taking place on the great plains of suburbia). It
is virtually impossible to overestimate the inundation. Ho-
palong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the Cisco Kid, and the
Lone Ranger were only among the best known of an armada
of singular heroes roaming the Great Plains, chasing bad guys,
singing around campfires, facing off against Indians, rounding
up stampeding cattle, going mano a mano with gunslingers,
lighting out for the territories once they’d saved the town, trick-
riding their horses, bedding down on moonlit mountains,
protecting the womenfolk. They were fearless, chivalrous, mod-
est, rough-hewn yet soft-spoken; sometimes gathered together
in fraternal revelry, but they were often alone. Whether gallop-
ing furiously across the Plains to the strains of a Brahms sym-
phony or the William Tell Overture or meandering down the
Chisholm Trail to the plaintive strumming of a solo guitar, they
were America’s knights of the realm. While the cowboy romance
long predated my childhood, its efflorescence in the two decades
following World War II was extraordinary.
Hopalong rode the range on sixty-three TV stations, fifty-
two radio stations, and appeared in 155 newspaper comic pages
120 There Was a Young Cowboy

in 1952. So many kids wanted clothes modeled on his all-black

outfit that the United States ran short of black dye. The Lone
Ranger did even better and could be heard or seen on 250 radio
and TV outlets; Roy Rogers showed up on 175, and his celeb-
rity was such that his name appeared on more stuff than anyone
else’s except Walt Disney’s. Gene Autry presided over an empire
worth somewhere between $4 million and $7 million in 1948.
It included his own movie company, two music publishing
houses, four movie theaters in Dallas, two Phoenix newspapers,
three radio stations, a flying school in California, and four size-
able ranches in Texas, California, and Arizona. There were Gene
Autry comic books and royalties on hair oil, jeans, hats, and cap
pistols amounting to about $100,000 a year. Autry and William
Boyd (Hopalong) thought of their characters as “role models
for many American boys and girls.”
America was awash in cowboy culture. For example, of
the 2,400 movies released in 1951, 480 were westerns. Bantam
Books issued 25 million western stories between 1947 and 1951.
Zane Grey novels were read by 54 million people. By 1958 11
percent of all works of fiction published in the United States
were westerns. Hollywood released a cowboy movie every week.
In 1959 eight of the sixteen most watched TV shows were west-
erns. (Bob Zimmerman, a fan of Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke, first
came up with the pseudonym Bob Dillon; only later did it
become Dylan in honor of the Welsh poet.) The lingo of the
mythic Wild West permeated the national vocabulary with talk
of showdowns, last stands, hired guns, and roundups. And this
was true for decades, going all the way back to Owen Wister’s
Virginian, which went through fifteen reprints in its first year
(1902). Westerns comprised an outsized share of silent films by
1910. Newsstands in the 1920s were already dominated by cow-
boy magazines selling well over a million copies a year.2
There Was a Young Cowboy 121

To paraphrase a line from William Butler Yeats, mid-

twentieth-century America was fed on cowboy fantasies and
grew sententious from the fare. A compacted metaphor, the
cowboy became the carrier of every self-congratulatory maxim
of the American credo: self-sufficiency, freedom, individualism,
moral sure-footedness, manly fortitude, frontier vigor, and
Anglo-Saxon destiny. No other image was as quintessentially
American; hence the Marlboro Man and Ronald Reagan’s cow-
boy hat and string tie. Perhaps only GI Joe rivaled the cowboy
as an emblem of what one writer has called the triumphalism
of “victory culture.” One thing was clear: class did not matter.
The “ranch house” housed a society given over to that delusion.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, that picture of
the West would darken in movie houses and on TV in dramas
like Deadwood or in mordant novels like Lonesome Dove. Virtu-
ous violence descended into mere violence. Axiomatic racism
got deconstructed and condemned. Even at the height of the
love affair with all things West, novels and movies like The Ox
Bow Incident or Oakley Hall’s Warlock would peer beneath the
sunnier surface of the cowboy idyll. But the young cowboy of
my childhood and the young cowboy of my kids’ bedtime were
washed-out characters compared to “the poor cowboy” who
told his “sad story” on the streets of Laredo.
That story and song were closer to the physical and social
reality in which the fantasy was nurtured and then subjected
to the recombinant mechanisms of popular culture. Echoes of
the cowboy’s marginality, his poverty, his restless mobility, his
rootlessness, his falls from virtue, his inwardness, his malignant
innocence, his social invisibility except to his compeers, and his
wayward violence are still audible in “The Cowboy’s Lament.”
But they grew more and more faint. The thousand- or two- or
even three-thousand-mile trail drives, the arduous monotony
122 There Was a Young Cowboy

of day-after-day, dawn-to-dusk cattle tending, the manipulation

and plundering of youthful naïfs in the cattle towns of Texas,
Kansas, and the northern Plains, the vicious range wars between
cattlemen, sheepherders, and “nesters” (farm folk) receded into
a sentimentalized, sepia-hued yesteryear. Telling too was that
hiding in plain sight was the poignant fact of the matter that
the man being eulogized was thought of as a “boy,” a locution
so naturalized that its affectionate condescension didn’t make
it to the surface of public consciousness.
A near-magical transubstantiation happened. A “boy” was
metamorphosed into the all-American hero. All that was dis-
tilled from his real life to form that image suggested that he was
the perfect embodiment of the country’s historic rejection of
the Old World’s cramped and suffocating social hierarchies and
dependencies. Yet this man-boy was, on the contrary, a version
of the perfect proletarian, set adrift from any social anchorage,
from any familial safe harbor, afloat and at the mercy of the
currents of global trade. At the hidden heart of the nation’s
primal mythos of self-sufficient manly individualism was an
invisible, proletarian “poor boy”—a wayfarer who left little
trace, yet an icon exalted, redeemed, and imperishable. And
because that boy was an American boy, he nourished his own
indigenous hopes of escaping that fate.

Human Tumbleweeds
Andy Adams made his first trail drive—well over a two-
thousand-mile trek from San Antonio in Texas to the Blackfoot
Indian Agency in Montana—when he was in his early twenties.
It was 1882. Andy kept a log he published years later. It begins
with a word about where, socially speaking, he hailed from.
“Just why my father moved, at the close of the Civil War, from
There Was a Young Cowboy 123

Georgia to Texas, is to this good hour a mystery to me. While

we did not exactly belong to the poor whites, we classed with
them in poverty, being renters; but I am inclined to think my
parents were intellectually superior to that common type of the
South.” Andy remembered his early days in a one-room log
cabin as Sherman marched to the sea. Once in West Texas, “the
vagabond temperament of the range I easily assimilated.” Tales
told by his older brother and his friends who were cowboying
on the northern Plains “set my blood on fire.” Until then, this
young cowboy-to-be thought, “I had had adventures, but mine
paled into insignificance beside theirs.” So off he set on a six-
month journey full of hazard and tedium.3
Cowboys were a heterogeneous lot. Some were ex-
Confederates or at least hailed from the old Confederacy, like
Andy and his brother. In fact, one reason cowboys were called
“boys” had to do with the way the Civil War disrupted life in
the South. With grown men away, disabled, or dead, young boys
still at home took on the tasks of herding domestic cattle and
horses, work that would have been done in normal times by
their father or older brothers. The nomenclature actually went
all the way back to the Revolution, to Westchester County in
particular, where Loyalist “cowboys” and patriot “skinners”
plundered each other’s cattle. (It was a small band of skinners
that captured British intelligence chief John André, thus foiling
Benedict Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point to the redcoats.)
Confederates joined ex-Union men, northerners, Indians,
itinerant peddlers, and ex-slaves fleeing the terror and vassalage
of the post-Reconstruction South. Charles Siringo, whose A
Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Span-
ish Pony was probably the best-known memoir of this life, was
a nomad practically from birth; he became a cowboy at eigh-
teen, working for the Texas cattle king Shanghai Pierce, and
124 There Was a Young Cowboy

later on became a range detective in pursuit of Billy the Kid. All

these men were migrating to Texas from lives disrupted by war
and economic depression. Or they might be homegrown one-
time Texas or Great Plains farmers. What they shared was a
footloose existence and the “vagabond temperament” Andy
assimilated.
If not actually boys, they were disproportionately young.
They were overwhelmingly single males. They were literate, but
most were without more than a short grade school education
(Adams was exceptional in this regard). Family life for many had
grown tenuous as they hit the road in search of work. Even before
they rode the range, they were already a mobile, migratory
population, in some cases dispossessed from family homesteads,
in others lured west by news of gold strikes or fur trapping or
by wanderlust. When together on the trail, they coalesced as
all-male families, bands of brothers of unshakeable solidarity
when confronted by enemy outsiders or just plain outsiders.
Once the drive was over, however, they tended to go their sepa-
rate ways.
During the heyday of trail driving—from the mid-1870s
through the next decade and dwindling after that—there were
probably no more than forty thousand working cowboys; a
small grouplet that left a large footprint. They filled a particu-
lar niche in the political economy of the extractive capitalism
characteristic of the western half of the country. This included
ranching, mining, fur trading, hunting, agriculture, timber and,
as time went by, drilling for oil and other natural resources.
Like every other form of newborn capitalism, these enterprises
intruded onto a landscape where other economies had already
rooted.4
There Was a Young Cowboy 125

The Political Economy of Extractive Capitalism

Homesteaders, prospectors, family ranchers, and native Amer-
ican communal hunters and village cultivators coexisted, at times
uneasily, before the great trail drives and railhead destination
towns reconfigured the terrain. Squatters in Texas and elsewhere
early on filled these empty spaces by right of first occupation,
and treated grazing land and water and bands of wild cattle and
horses as resources available to everyone. “The Great American
Desert” was great beyond imagining. It comprised 44 percent
of the land mass of the United States, an area as big as France,
Germany, Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Austria,
Italy, Spain, and Portugal combined: roomy enough to accom-
modate a broad spectrum of settlers not yet acclimated to the
ways of life and livelihood blowing in from the East.
Ranchers raised cattle not for the world market but as part
of self-sufficient family farms. In the antebellum years, no large-
scale market existed for meat, but rather local ones for hides
(leather), horns (fancy “Spanish combs”), hoofs (glue), and
tallow. These earlier and concurrent ways of life and livelihood
were often themselves inveigled in the marketplace; in the case
of fur trading and grain production, dense commercial circuits
wired them into a global agora. But closer to the ground they
remained outside the orbit of capitalist relations; personal and
family labor predominated, and wage labor was, if not unheard
of, infrequently used. Slaves and ex-slaves, Indians, and peons
filled the occasional need for casual labor. Before Abilene was
converted into a depot for cattle trains by Joseph McCoy, an
enterprising middleman from Missouri, it was “a small dead
place . . . of about one dozen log huts” and one saloon, whose
owner moonlighted selling prairie dogs at $5 a head to tourists
passing through on the train.5
126 There Was a Young Cowboy

Establishing the preeminence of extractive industry and

mass-market-oriented agriculture on the Great American Des-
ert meant first of all absorbing and supplanting those preexist-
ing modes of life prevailing in the American outback. This was
accomplished by the impersonal dynamics of the market, by
guile, by force, and always with an assist from the government,
no matter how much the legend insists that this was a world
that had little use or patience for official state functionaries, not
to mention simple law and order.
Multiple roads all led to extinction during the decades
between early white settler incursion and the great cattle drives
of the 1870s and 1880s. An increasing share of Indian labor was
devoted to meeting global demand for fur, so older forms of
mobile agriculture and tool and clothing crafts diminished,
then fell by the wayside. Indians, long involved in the fur trade
of the mountains and forests of the North and Southwest,
eventually became dependent on it, no longer able to maintain
their immemorial self-sufficient communities. Being tethered
to the world market led tribal people inexorably into debt and
default. With remarkable speed the animals upon which this
new commerce depended grew scarce as the kill rate far ex-
ceeded the pace of reproduction.
Alien life-forms came to the Plains in waves: not just
mountain men and trading posts, but then “nesters” traveling
the Oregon Trail, miners, buffalo hunters, railroad crews, and
last of all cattlemen. Even powerful warrior nations like the
Comanche succumbed as buffalo disappeared, transformed
into winter clothing and conveyor belts for factory machinery
back east. Capturing horses or humans from wartime rival
Indians to use or trade as slaves became harder to carry on as
Anglo settlers intruded. Far to the north, the cattle business of
Wyoming, where Indians occupied two-thirds of the territory,
There Was a Young Cowboy 127

was made feasible by the erection of federal forts in places like

Laramie, eventually overwhelming the resistance of the Sioux
and the Cheyenne tribes of the north.6
So too, as the railroads and the army spread west, both
developments making mass cattle herding and distribution
possible, their workers and soldiers ate buffalo meat in vast
quantities. A mainstay of the Plains Indians diet was killed off
rapidly. In two years alone on the southern Plains, nearly 1.5
million buffalo hides were shipped to market. The army cleared
the land of human competitors, herding them onto reservations.
(That’s why Andy Adams was headed for the Blackfoot Agency;
his “outfit” was subcontracted by the army to feed now impov-
erished and superannuated native tribes.) And this in turn
opened up the prairies for more efficient grazing by livestock
as their animal competitors for grass vanished.
Government too facilitated the building of transconti-
nental rail lines with enormous grants of public lands and
other financial favors. Once those lines reached places like
Abilene or Dodge City in Kansas or Cheyenne or Laramie in
Wyoming, it became feasible, although still daunting, to con-
ceive transporting cattle from West Texas to these railheads a
thousand or more miles to the east. Building vital if less impos-
ing infrastructure (wagon roads, for example) also depended
on the federal government; agencies likes the Geological Survey,
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Interior Department, and the
U.S. Land Office created a new West into which the cowboy as
hired hand fitted. One historian of the American West has
concluded, “In some basic ways the federal government created
itself in the West.”7
What had once been common grazing land supporting
wild longhorn cattle that anyone might use, sell, or kill became
enveloped in a network of legal claims to private property in
128 There Was a Young Cowboy

land, water, steers, and horses. Barbed wire fences sprang up in

a flash, sometimes covering hundreds of miles of now private
rangeland. At first the fences were resented, causing range wars,
fence cutting, and killings. Eventually, however, the wire proved
quite useful as it made selective breeding easier. Mavericks—
both longhorn cattle and wild horses there for the taking that
had made possible small-time operations—grew rarer on the
Plains; hence the big business in rustling as the market value of
these animals appreciated.
But the armature of private property had unwelcome
consequences for ranching as well. Sheepherders and farmers
moved onto the Plains; the sheep were voracious as they ate
what cows ate and what they wouldn’t; and the nesters up-
rooted the grass to plant other vegetables and fenced in what
land wasn’t already enclosed. On the arid Plains a quarter sec-
tion was simply too little to produce enough of a crop to make
farm life viable, so “grangers” pushed for more, which further
crowded ranchers, some of whom, from the old days, depend-
ed on the “free range,” while the biggest among them fenced off
what was once a commons.
Mini civil wars broke out between competing forms of
agro-economies; the cowboy was caught in the middle and the
life expectancy of his “career” placed in jeopardy. Surplus labor
from defunct homesteads, family ranches, and exhausted fur-
trading posts made his position that much more precarious.
And the mining camps that sprang up in the mountainous
neighborhoods surrounding the Great Plains to the north and
southwest were themselves subject to periodic collapse, either
actual cave-ins and explosions or because the veins of gold,
silver, copper, and coal played out; consequently, ex-miners
resorted as well to riding the range.8
There Was a Young Cowboy 129

Meat to Market
Long-haul cattle drives originating first in Texas began more
or less coincident with the completion of the transcontinental
railroads. This made vast potential markets at home and abroad
accessible. Ranchers seized the moment, and by the early 1870s
the Chisholm and Santa Fe trails and other less legendary routes
were nearly gridlocked with longhorns and other meatier and
more docile varieties of cattle. There were enough of them
consisting of two or three thousand steers or more that they
ran into each other regularly; indeed, sometimes days were lost
separating members of one herd from another. The business
was both fiercely competitive and very lucrative, especially as,
at first, there was so much common land to take advantage of.
On average, expeditions made a 40 percent return. Although
always a hazardous undertaking for both cowboy and animal,
as the routes became better known the trade grew less risky and
so more tempting to join.9
Quickly the logic of the market attracted the attention of
larger-scale enterprises. The appetites of investors back east and
in Europe were stimulated. Many in that circle were already
major players in western land speculations, so ambitious and
aggrandizing that they tended to make a mockery of the Home-
stead Act, which presumably was designed to encourage land
distribution to actual cultivators. The meat business became
an attractive outlet for idle pools of liquid capital. English,
Scottish, German, and Yankee bankers and merchants purchased
huge spreads consisting of thousands of heads of cattle and
employing sizeable cowboy outfits to manage and transport
them. The cattle business attracted a higher percentage of Eu-
ropean investors than any other western enterprise. The British
alone poured in $45 million to set up immense spreads like the
130 There Was a Young Cowboy

Prairie Cattle Company, which was actually a Scottish firm and

embraced eight thousand square miles. One venture capital
firm from Edinburgh offered property in Wyoming consisting
of four hundred square miles, nineteen thousand head of cattle,
and 150 saddle or work horses. Predictably, some of these more
extravagant promotions turned out to consist of phantom
livestock and land. Absentee owners might occasionally visit,
not to ride the range but to hunt big game or play polo. In the
Northwest, much of the pressure to push tribes out of their
ancestral lands came from outside eastern and European inves-
tors. An Alien Land Law passed in 1887 in Minnesota and
mimicked by other states was designed by domestic competitors
to banish foreign ownership in the territories but proved tooth-
less.
Boston and New York moneymen established 91 cattle
companies in Wyoming capitalized at $51 million; Colorado
exceeded that with 176 companies worth $74 million. The
Sparkes-Harrell spread in Nevada and Idaho grazed 150,000
head of cattle over 3 million acres. Some ranches in the South-
west were so big they were known as “cattle empires,” the most
famous of which in the 1870s was the King Ranch in Texas
consisting of half a million acres.
When the Union Pacific reached the borders of Wyoming
in 1867, similar cattle kingdoms soon emerged in the vicinity
of Cheyenne. Federal law in these territories was quite elastic,
allowing for gargantuan claims to land and water. What began
as rude sites consisting of a dugout on the side of a riverbank
with a log roof overlaid with prairie sod or adobe, or a house
made of cottonwood timber chinked with mud or moss, a dirt
roof, a door of dried beef hide, and a bed of wolf skins, turned
into baronies. Some claimed five hundred or even as much as
thirty-two hundred square miles.
There Was a Young Cowboy 131

Feudal domains ruled over by these freshly minted “cattle

barons” behaved like mini autocracies that recognized no law
they hadn’t promulgated themselves. In loosely governed ter-
ritories like Montana and Wyoming this was especially the case.
In Wyoming, the association of the biggest livestock operations
dictated the time and place for roundups, assumed the power
to impose fines or penalties, and essentially made territorial
law. The Cheyenne Club, a clubby combine of big cattlemen,
bankers, railroad operators, investors, and commission agents,
ran Wyoming while wining, dining, socializing, and enjoying
the best food, whiskey, wines, gambling tables, tennis courts,
and race tracks.10
Perhaps the best known of these corporate undertakings
was the XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. It was created by
investors from Chicago. Its “Cattle Reservation” was over two
hundred miles in length, a vast, unbroken turf of various graz-
ing grasses, once the feeding grounds of antelope, buffalo,
mustangs, and wild Texas longhorns. It employed 150 cowboys
and its remuda consisted of a thousand horses riding herd on
150,000 head of cattle. Fencing in this country-sized territory
required 781 miles of barbed wire, which cost about $181,000.
By 1890 the amount of fencing had doubled. On the more arid
stretches, artificial reservoirs were built along with storage tanks
and windmills. The rather odd brand—XIT—was alleged to
signal that the ranch spread over ten counties; true or not, it
was a difficult brand for rustlers to counterfeit.
Texas lawmakers patented the ranch to its Chicago real
estate developers (originally two farm boy immigrant brothers
from England and two other partners) in return for building
the State House in Austin in 1879. An undertaking of this scope
required large infusions of capital, which the partners found
available from British aristocrats who then sat on the board of
132 There Was a Young Cowboy

directors of the newly formed Capital Freehold Land and In-

vestment Company. As that unwestern-sounding corporate
name might suggest, the XIT worked a transformation in
the human ecology of West Texas. One observer reflected: “The
practice of eating a neighbor’s beef was once general upon the
ranges of Texas. Hungry men killed a fat beef when they found
one, regardless of owner, and in those days of lax business
methods and open-handed hospitality, such actions seemed
beyond reproach. But foreign capital came, the barbed wire
fence confined each brand to its own range, the happy-go-lucky
pastoral ways of the [18]70s became a business of exacting
methods, and killing strays came to be regarded as theft.”11
Imposing as it was, the XIT model of modern ranching
was not the inexorable wave of the future. On the northern
Plains, if not in Texas, that way of organizing the business died
out. It was a case of back to the future. In territories like Wyo-
ming and Montana these mega-businesses and their “outside”
backers generated great resentment and resistance from family
ranchers. The class hostility directed against these financial
outsiders was intense enough that even rustlers could masquer-
ade as Robin Hoods, social bandits challenging eastern interlop-
ers from Wall Street. If the “Wild West” was indeed wild, a big
part of the reason is that it became a terrain of violence-ridden
social animosities: mine workers against owners, cattlemen
versus sheepherders, white men facing off against Indians,
Mexicans, and Chinese, cowmen of the open range against
nesters, farmers at odds with local bankers, and big ranchers
threatening littler ones.
Cattlemen in particular were prone to violence, thanks in
part to the hazy notion of claims to land and the sketchy pres-
ence of legitimate authority; driving off rivals rather than suing
them was the preferred and readier remedy. So “big thieves”
There Was a Young Cowboy 133

faced off against “small thieves,” according to one Wyoming

newspaper. Most of the small-timers were ex-cowboys who
charged their overbearing competitors with being illegal mo-
nopolists. Johnson City, Wyoming, was briefly controlled by
the little fry until a lynching in 1889 and imported hired guns
from Texas put an end to that in the Johnson County War of
1892. As far as the ranch hand was concerned, he might at
various times work for either corporate or family enterprises.12

On the Line
However instinctive it might be to think of the cowboy as a
throwback, he was in some respects exactly the opposite. The
emergence of the transient cowboy of the Wild West was a straw
in the wind, a sign that the West was “wild,” perhaps, but be-
coming less so, even as the atmospherics of the gunslinging
cowboy desperado suggested the contrary.13
Cowboys manned the supply chain turning out mass-
produced meat for the urban markets of the East and abroad.
Imagining these “hands” starring in a rural version of Charlie
Chaplin’s Modern Times is both apt and absurd. Apt because
they too, like the Chaplin character whose robotic movements
on the assembly line erased the distinction between human and
machine, were largely interchangeable parts in a highly reticu-
lated mechanism they neither understood nor controlled; absurd
because they romanticized themselves and were romanticized
while going extinct, a fate no one contemplated for the human
automaton of the assembly line. To think of the Wild West’s
picaresque, decked out in boots, chaps, and spurs, a colorful
bandanna around his neck, lariat and six-shooter at his hip,
serenading the heavens as longhorns bed down for the night
under a star-studded sky, is to conjure up a world about as far
134 There Was a Young Cowboy

away as it’s possible to get from the clanging cold geometry and
dolorous, suffocating regimentation of the factory production
line. Nonetheless, an understructure of capital accumulation
lends these two alien life-forms an essential affinity.
Whether employed by a giant corporate ranch covering
millions of acres or a more modestly sized one, the cowhand
could reckon on a work life whose rigors were both nicely cap-
tured and grossly demeaned by his metaphorical reduction to
a “hand.” Wages were low, around $1 per day plus food and a
bunk bed when not on the trail. He wasn’t paid until the drive
was over. Then he got gold because many of those ex-
Confederate cowboys had been burned by worthless paper
they’d received as soldiers. A cowhand was on call and on
horseback most of the hours of every day, and he regularly
worked for twelve hours. It was a life of work, eat, sleep. On the
Chisholm Trail, it took two months to travel a thousand miles
and many drives were far longer than that. Whatever the natu-
ral charms of the wide-open spaces, unexplored rivers, and
breathtaking mountain ranges, as a daily experience trail herd-
ing could also entail a deadening monotony.
Andy Adams remembered spending sixteen to eighteen
hours in the saddle. “We frequently saw mirages, though we
were never led astray by shady groves of timber or tempting
lakes of water.” Those endless, parched days and nights made
towns like Dodge “points of such interest to us that they were
like oases in desert lands to devotees on a pilgrimage to some
consecrated shrine.” The dust created by the herd as it traveled
was often so thick it saturated right through clothes and into
the skin. On the largest ranches, cowboys often lived off by
themselves in sod-covered lean-tos, doing their cooking over
outdoor fires. Employment was precarious. Winter often meant
layoffs, and survival depended on scaring up a job as a bartender
There Was a Young Cowboy 135

or cook. Establishing a family under these circumstances was

rare. Once the drive concluded, there was no assurance the
cowhand would be hired on for the next one.
Danger lurked everywhere. Cowboy “outfits” were always
at risk of life and limb from stampedes, floods, and windstorms,
from fording raging rivers, dealing with unfriendly Indians,
enduring blizzards and scorching heat in an arid land, evading
panicked cattle wielding horns that could cut deeply. Longhorns
were not overly friendly and were nervous beasts, easily stirred
up by anything from thunder and lightning to a passing animal,
but cowboys had to chance that because a stampeding herd
might run off a cliff, a thousand at a time. Breaking a bronco
was rough work and risky, requiring special skills. The cowhand
was even expected to face off against rustlers. He didn’t own
the livestock, but it was understood that the cowboy was bound
to safeguard it even if that meant gunplay. Life on the trail was
a young cowboy’s way of life because older ones had mainly
been all used up, suffering everything from broken bones
to rheumatism. There were not many, if any, occupations as
dangerous.14
Although the cowboy often worked on his own or with a
comrade, there was an implicit work discipline. It was first of
all imposed by the natural rhythms of this exercise in long-
distance animal husbandry: when cattle and horses needed to
rest, when they needed water or grass, preventing them from
wandering too far afield, bedding them down in time, keeping
up a pace that assured timely arrival at this river or that trail
before it closed off or got flooded, relieving each other at regu-
lar intervals to ward off exhaustion, siphoning off the sick and
lame, and so on.
Hierarchies of skill and authority configured the cowboy’s
workplace, even if that site extended over enormous distances
136 There Was a Young Cowboy

and he worked alone or with a single comrade much of the

time. The trail boss, or drover, acted like a foreman, allotting
tasks that formed a rough occupational division of labor. The
drover could handle business matters as well when the outfit
reached the market. On the larger ranches, the owner often
settled in town, leaving day-to-day operations to the foreman.
For all that he was well paid. So was the cook, who not only
prepared the outfit’s meals but functioned as a kind of quar-
termaster, managing supplies of blankets, saddles, and so on.
The wrangler took care of the horses, grouped together as a
remuda of fifty to a hundred ponies; he was usually a teenager.
The cowboys who led the herd were also among the most
highly skilled and were called pointers. They were charged with
preventing the mixing together of cattle from nearby herds and
with stopping stampedes. Swing riders, flank riders, and then
drag riders at the rear had their own distinct tasks; although
among the less skilled, they had to watch out for straying calves
and sore-footed and tired adults.
“Cutting out” mature cows, ready for slaughter, from their
calves was a tough and demanding job, requiring considerable
talent with a rope. Branding was less skilled but rough. A line
rider patrolled to make sure no predators—animal or human
or bacterial—were making off with members of the herd. Once
barbed wire arrived, the line rider became a fence rider. The
semiannual roundup entailed a complex choreography of men
and beasts that involved branding, culling diseased cattle from
the herd, and a dozen other tasks performed over ranges the
size of Connecticut. A cowboy of average competence had to
be able to track both cattle and horses.
Each position not only carried with it a set of skills and
obligations but also established an order of command. These
were more or less informal arrangements sanctioned by
There Was a Young Cowboy 137

tradition and the more natural hierarchies of age and experi-

ence. But in the most modern enterprises work rules were
explicit. The XIT Ranch issued “Rules of the XIT Ranch” to each
hired hand. The rules made clear no guns were allowed, no
gambling, no mingling of mustangs with XIT horses, no liquor
on the premises, that work was expected seven days a week for
seven to eight months, and that all employees were prohibited
from maintaining their own livestock or horses on the ranch;
the employee was a “hand” indeed.
Yet putting yourself at risk chasing rustlers or fighting
Indians or embracing the social norms of collective work or
respecting the wide spectrum of skills and experience and
earned authority knitting the outfit together or participating
in the comradery of nighttime campfire singing and storytell-
ing suggest that the “hand” was also a brother. As much as his
experience might be compared to a life of proletarian estrange-
ment, debased and unskilled, this was a world, on the contrary,
of hard-earned knowledge learned on the fly, of multifaceted
crafts and the social esteem that went with them. The trials and
demands of cowboy existence nurtured both a toughened sense
of self-reliance and mastery and of a kind of work group soli-
darity. Living a spare social life and by and large not religious,
cowboys, for just those reasons, highly valued the brotherhood.15
Fraternal relations were particularly prevalent on the
northern Plains, where these men lived a less nomadic existence
gathered together on fenced-off family ranches that functioned
as “home for all.” Competing outfits would, under trying emer-
gencies or even in more ordinary times, collaborate to get the
work done; that was the unarticulated protocol. However, this
was a distinct kind of solidarity. It spilled over that class bound-
ary dividing ranch boss and owner from the cowhand so as to
become a peculiar, if temporary, enterprise loyalty. Here workers
138 There Was a Young Cowboy

might at one and the same time function as the cattle baron’s
hands while paying a voluntary fealty to the land he ran. The
outfit was simultaneously a fraternity and a patriarchy.
Had the Industrial Workers of the World formed twenty
years earlier than when it did in 1905, that anarcho-syndicalist
revolutionary-minded group of roving, rebel proletarians man-
ning the docks, harvesting the wheat, digging the coal and silver
of the far West might have included the footloose “range bum.”
Yet many of those same cowhands nurtured a more tradi-
tional aspiration, not one set on revolution. Able on occasion
when times were good to mix in a small number of their own
steers with the ranch owner’s herd, they hoped one day to run
their own spread, regain the independence they had lost, to rise
the way Lincoln had imagined from wage labor to self-
sufficiency. They hoped to graduate, so to speak, into man-
hood.16

Recombinant Hero
In real life that was a rare occurrence. There was no more social
mobility or equality out west than back east. But the alchemical
transformation of the cowboy in our popular culture made for
a different story. Although there too no property got redistrib-
uted in favor of the cowboy, he was endowed nonetheless with
all the attributes—and then some—that were supposed to ac-
company that station in life: independence, self-reliance, cour-
age, ingenuity, an appetite for risk and adventure, a readiness
to draw a line in the sand, the habit of command, and a steely
will to go it alone.
Marvelous about this figurative redesign was the way it
took elements from the cowboy’s more proletarian way of life
and transmuted them into the features of its antithesis. The
There Was a Young Cowboy 139

fantasy cowboy hero who rode the TV range of my boyhood

had shed the monotony but kept the tribulations. Drama
stripped away the poverty but stylized the homespun costume,
redressing the cowboy cum cavalier in fancy high-heeled riding
boots, his horse with a fine saddle and silver bridle, his gun
handle studded with pearls, silver-buckled cartridge belt at the
ready, silver too his spurs, his chaps made of leather, hatband
dressed with rattlesnake skin.
Dime novels unholstered the six-shooter the real cowboy
rarely fired. Dodge, Abilene, and Laramie were turned into war
zones, while back in the day very few died and most guns had
to be surrendered on entering town. Once viewed as “white
trash,” not a suitable mate for a respectable young woman, the
cowhand got a makeover to become not only dashing but so-
cially acceptable, even desirable. “Rough men with shaggy hair
and wild staring eyes in butternut trousers stuffed into great
rough boots,” fated for failure, morphed into heroes. The cow-
boy might be coarse, but he was strong, inventive, and a man
among men—unlettered, perhaps, but his virtue and intelli-
gence came naturally. Long gone were the days when President
Chester Arthur sent a message to Congress in 1881 asking for
the military to put down bands of “armed desperados known
as ‘cowboys’ ” who were terrorizing the good citizens of Ari-
zona. Myth retained the cowboy’s juvenile delinquency, yet
erased the more prosaic danger of his workaday life.17
The cowboy was invariably a white man; his storied legend
edited out not only the substantial presence of African Ameri-
can cowpokes but also our hero’s own axiomatic prejudices.
Indians, everybody agreed, were savages, so in popular mediums
like movies and comics no censorship was required, even while
veteran trail hands marveled at native American horsemanship
and deep knowledge of the outdoors. Hispanic vaqueros (who
140 There Was a Young Cowboy

had pioneered the cowboy craft in the New World and from
whom much of cowboy dress and lingo was borrowed, includ-
ing rancho, corral, lasso, and bronco, Spanish for wild horse)
were looked down on by their Americano counterparts out on
the Plains. One cowhand noted to his buddies, “Speaking of
Mexicans and Indians I’ve got more use for a good horse than
I have for either of these grades of humanity.” But these aliens
fared far better on the silver screen, where the Cisco Kid talked
a little funny but was a straight arrow and Tonto was a loyal if
subordinate comrade. Where African Americans were con-
cerned, the case was different. They were as invisible in popular
culture fantasies as if they’d never ventured across the Missis-
sippi. Andy Adams knew better. He named his favorite horse—
a jet-black animal he relied on for the most trying of tasks,
including night riding and stampede control—Nigger Boy.18
Many a movie depicted the cowboy as an existentialist,
crooning to the stars and moon in a mood of contemplative
melancholy and brooding, rather than engaged in the more
prosaic business of lulling the cows to settle down at night,
which was the practical object of his vocalizing. Stories de-
picted him as a solitary man but omitted the insecurity. Cine-
matic cowboys could still be found gathered at the campfire
telling tall tales, but stretches of suffering hunger and thirst got
largely erased. Our hero wasn’t a wage-earning functionary or
a sometime bindle stiff; rather, he lived in an empyrean realm
where plainsmen became Übermensch.
Most of what connected the cowboy to the commercial
mechanisms of the global marketplace receded into the back-
ground; after all, as an action figure he was a living critique of
modernity. Foregrounded instead was the violence-prone
loner, the self-reliant frontiersman, the manly man, a natural-
born survivor, nature’s husband and master. Cherished was the
There Was a Young Cowboy 141

solitary, not the comrade, the mountain man and pathfinder,

not the cowpoke who actually poked cows with a rod designed
to get them moving along, either to their soon- to- be-
mechanized feeding stalls as the business got more organized
for mass production, or to their slaughter. If the real West was
about business and real estate, the confected West was inspired
by depictions of white knights and black knights dueling at high
noon as in the movie of that name or in the climactic shoot-out
at sundown between Owen Wister’s Virginian and a horse thief.19
Cowboys were refashioned as voluntary exiles from an
industrial-urban civilization grown culturally obese and un-
natural. Life on the range was an antidote to that enervating
eastern-bred routine, its effeminate lusting after creature com-
forts, its social affectations and nose-in-the air snobbery, its
stultifying uniformity, its urban density, its alienation from the
natural world. That’s why once and again cowboy Theodore
Roosevelt idealized that rough-riding life, rode the range, went
back and forth to his ranches in North Dakota (on the Big Horn,
where Custer met his fate) and Montana, hoping to export back
east some of its native resilience and bravery before it was too
late. The original “Rough Rider,” an offspring of cosmopolitan
elitism if ever there was one, affected to despise its overcivilized
softness, its cold rationality, and the promiscuous undermining
of those unique and uniquely male, Anglo-Saxon racial virtues.
Indeed, if much of what made up the reality of cowboy life
got diluted or washed out entirely when laundered by myth, one
element instead was hugely magnified. Violence! Incipient vio-
lence, acted-out violence, an inward reservoir of violent emotion
supplied the atmospherics of the cowboy legend. Moreover, it was
cleansed of moral reproach; on the contrary, violence practiced
by the cowboy hero was reconstituted as a virtue—however much
it might be regretted, it was also righteous. And glamorous.
142 There Was a Young Cowboy

Yet the actual incidence of violence among cowboys,

however rough and tumble their lives were, however thin on
the ground the basics of law and order were, was miniscule in
comparison. On the Chisholm Trail encounters with Indians
were common, but very few ended in combat, most that did
involving the toll cattle herders had to pay to pass through what
after all was Indian country. As long-haul trail herding climaxed
in the 1880s, there was a simultaneous drop in violence. Partly
that was due to the presence in cow towns of outside lawmen
like Bear River Tom Smith in Abilene (Smith was originally
from New York, where he broke up street gangs during the
Civil War). The only marshal to be killed in all of the Kansas
cattle towns was killed by a farmer. Dodge was the deadliest, at
least by reputation, but neither Bat Masterson nor Wyatt Earp
killed anyone (or Earp may have got one—nobody seems to
know for sure). Sheriffs in these towns used gun-control ordi-
nances, as in Wichita, to keep order. Town elders, including
clerics, merchants, and other middle-class businessmen, ex-
erted their own pressures as they sought to make these places
fit habitats for families, schools, and churches. Lynch law and
violence generally were directed far more against social crimes,
especially “crimes” against property—horse theft, most fatally,
but also against encroaching sheepherders or between mine
owners and their workers or loggers and timber companies—
than against individuals.20
Moreover, the metaphoric arsenal of the Wild West could
be imported back east to fire at working-class insurgents and
radicals. Strikers were pinioned as “savages” who needed to be
dealt with the way the western hero treated Indians and ban-
dits—that is, with no mercy, unsanctioned by law, with direct
and violent action. James Gordon Bennett, a sensationalist
newspaper publisher, reversed the equation and labeled the
There Was a Young Cowboy 143

Sioux as “communistic” and tramps as “savages.” Frederic Rem-

ington, whose sketches of life on the range memorialized that
infatuation for everybody (he was the illustrator for Roosevelt’s
series of articles in Century magazine on the West) said he
“hated” the immigrant aliens, “the rubbish of the Earth,” pol-
luting the cultural atmosphere east of the Mississippi. His
drawings were meant to depict a world with backbone enough
to stand up to this spiritual mongrelization. Perhaps this alter-
nate universe of nature’s aristocrats might reinvigorate and
morally rehabilitate the Republic, saving it from the “scourings
of the Devil’s leavings.” Compared to that decadence, one
story writer at the beginning of the twentieth century offered
this elegy of the primitive refugee from effete civilization: “Here
was a riot of animal intensity of life, of mutiny of physical man,
the last outbreak of innate savagery. The men of that rude day
lived vehemently. They died, they escaped.” Or, as Mark Twain
memorably observed, the cowboy was one who “lights out for
the Territory to escape the constraints of Civilization.”21
Mockery of Wall Street ranchers, absentee owners from
New York or Chicago or London, was commonplace on the
Plains. And the hostility was more than a purely economic com-
plaint about the way these investors crowded out smaller, home-
grown operations. The indictment covered as well the offense
that a preoccupation with finance presented to a way of life and
a region where nonmaterial values—a rough equality, honor,
and fraternity—mattered more. Latent in this fable was a social
flight from the onrush of mass society, from its spirit-diminishing
entanglements, its worship of Mammon, and its crushing ano-
nymity. The cowboy romance provided therapeutic relief, if not
from capitalism per se, then from the type of civilization corpo-
rate industry and finance was incubating and which threatened
to ensnare everyone, whether they liked it or not.
144 There Was a Young Cowboy

Inheriting a genotype that went way back long before the

wild longhorn spread to Texas, the cowboy became a kind of
cultural bandit admired by those who hadn’t his courage. His
was an amalgamated image. It condensed the knight errant, the
pirate, the mountain man, the buffalo hunter, the pathfinder,
the Indian fighter, the desperado, the Robin Hood of the Plains,
the gunman, and the no-questions-asked, quick-on-the-draw
lawman. At times he lost most or any connection with cow
tending and became instead Billy the Kid (a pathological teen-
ager from the Bowery in New York who was very briefly a
cowboy) or Kit Carson (a bona fide fur-trapping mountain
man but not a cowboy) or Wyatt Earp (who hailed from Illinois
and was at one time or another a bouncer, a gambler, a teamster,
a buffalo hunter, a brothel keeper, a miner, a boxing referee, and
a lawman—but never a cowboy, although he ran them out of
Dodge City and Tombstone, Arizona) or Doc Holliday (an al-
coholic dentist from back east) or even John Fremont (the first
Republican candidate for president in 1856, a military man who
grew up in Georgia and became known as the Pathfinder for
his daring explorations of the West before, in a fit of reckless
impetuosity, he anointed himself governor of California in the
wake of the Mexican-American War and was court-martialed
for his trouble). Buffalo Bill, hero of dime novels and Wild West
theatricals, was perhaps the greatest fabricator of all, who in his
later years had so fallen in love with his own press notices that
he crafted his own epitaph: “I stood between savagery and
civilization most of my early days,” when in fact he had been a
hunter, freight hauler, army scout, and a guide of average
competence and courage. All of these figures, each in his own
way, encapsulated the romance extracted from a political
economy of extractive capitalism. The abiding allure of these
recombinant heroes was their implicit repudiation of the
There Was a Young Cowboy 145

pedestrian, soul-crushing wave of the future rolling in from the

industrial, urbanizing East.
Moreover, this seduction appealed not only to urban
cowboys but to the real McCoy. In the actual, not the fanciful,
life of the range bum, hard as it was, there was embedded a kind
of masculine reverie. Veteran cowboy Jim McCauley recalled
the pain and exaltation: “I wish I had never saw a cow ranch.
. . . While Ide rather be on a cow ranch and work just wages . . .
than anything you could name . . . the wild free life where you
have to feel if your closest friend is still on your hip . . . and if
your old horse will make it in, and to make the Mexico line and
get back without any holes in your hide—that is real living, that
is sport but ’tis the violent kind and lots of people love it beyond
doubt.”22
Our fantasy cowhand avoided the fate faced by most. He
had managed to stay clear of the demoralizing and enervating
way of life urban-industrial America was embracing. He escaped
or fought against its demeaning structures of authority at work,
its supercilious social distinctions based on wealth and lineage,
its conformity to the rhythms of the machine, the way it emas-
culated free men.
Moreover, the homoeroticism that went along with the
adulation of the cowboy is hard to miss as, for example, in the
opening pages of Owen Wister’s classic The Virginian. On
the very first page we meet the hero as he climbs down from a
corral gate “with the undulations of a tiger, smooth and easy,
as if his muscles flowed beneath the skin.” He is “a slim young
giant, more beautiful than pictures. . . . The weather-beaten
bloom of his face shone through duskily, as the ripe peaches
look upon their trees in a dry season. But no dinginess of
travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that
radiated from his youth and strength.” The countless sketches
146 There Was a Young Cowboy

of cowboy life by Wister’s contemporary Frederic Remington

conveyed a sexual magnetism radiating from the lean and
muscular athleticism of the cowboy in action. Eventually he
would reappear riding through the Rockies selling cigarettes
for Marlboro. However, this studied machismo was at odds with
the actual social and sexual awkwardness of the cowhand. He
was a social naïf who lived almost exclusively among other
males. He might blow off sexual steam during his brief sojourns
into cow towns, but he was far more a creature of Victorian
inhibitions than he was a Don Juan.23
Part of the proletariat of the American West, along with
loggers, miners, migratory farm laborers, fur trappers, and
railroad gangs, the cowboy, uniquely, escaped the proletarian
condition—yet only in the nation’s imaginary life. He was
both the perfect proletarian and the perfect free man. He was
the invisible American and the legendary American. His seduc-
tive power as an exemplar of the triumphant outsider, the
naysayer to the dolorous shades of factory and office, was and
has remained a spiritual aphrodisiac. After all, we love our
subterfuges.

“Our Hippie Cowboy”

Jed Briscoe joined the round-up the day following
Fraser’s initiation. He took silent note of the Tex-
an’s popularity, of how the boys all called him
“Steve” because he had become one of them, and
were ready to either lark with him or work with
him. He noticed, too, that the ranger did his share
of work without a whimper, apparently enjoying
the long, hard hours in the saddle. The hill riding
was of the roughest, and the cattle were wild as
There Was a Young Cowboy 147

deers and as agile. But there was no breakneck in-

cline too steep for Steve Fraser to follow.
Once Jed chanced upon Steve stripped for a
bath beside a creek, and he understood the physical
reasons for his perfect poise. The wiry, sinuous
muscles packed compactly without obtrusion
played beneath the skin like those of a panther. He
walked as softly and easily as one, with something
of the rippling, unconscious grace of that jungle
lord. It was this certainty of himself that vivified
the steel-gray eyes which looked forth unafraid,
and yet amiably, upon a world primitive enough to
demand proof of every man who would hold the
respect of his fellows.24

The above is not a subterfuge. Nor is it about me. It is

instead a wondrous coincidence if you happen to be me writing
about the national love affair with the cowboy. Steve Fraser the
ranger appears in a book called A Texas Ranger published in
1911 in a chapter called “The Broncho Busters.” I have never
busted broncos nor been confused with a panther. However, I
came close enough to smell the coffee.
Long ago I attended a wedding in the borderlands between
eastern Colorado and Wyoming. The ceremony was outdoors,
by which I mean it took place in the great outdoors in the steep
rust- and ochre-colored canyons and boulder-laced plains of
that territory. The wedding party was on horseback. It in-
cluded besides the bride and groom a trio of guitar-strumming
cowboys serenading the couple. They rode down a ravine to
where the rest of us were sitting on rocky outcroppings that
formed a naturally terraced arena. A minister in cowboy garb
performed the nuptials. Then we feasted on the better part of
148 There Was a Young Cowboy

a whole steer that had been rotating all day on a spit over an
open fire.
I was there to celebrate the marriage of one of my dearest
friends. Richard had rented an apartment with me years ear-
lier in Philadelphia when we were both in school, both political
activists, and both arrested for a crime we didn’t commit. Rich-
ard went to Swarthmore. It didn’t suit him, nor probably would
any college. He used to walk around campus in a cowboy hat,
chaps, spurs a-jingling. What he really wanted to do is what
millions of American boys grew up wanting to do: to become
a cowboy. Unlike those millions, he actually did it.
Richard remembers: “I grew up in Vermont and just out-
side New York City and I went out West in 1972. I have a draw-
ing (crayon) of the ‘Sunny Hollow,’ my mythical horse farm,
done at age 8. My sister Betsy married a man whose dad had a
ranch in Colorado. I spent two summers . . . working on that
ranch. The foreman . . . was an alcoholic so he taught me to
drive when he was too drunk to drive. Anyhow, I loved riding
horses and moving cattle, putting up the hay.”
Once political turmoil subsided and we were exonerated,
Richard headed where he’d always been destined to go. Out
west he found work on family ranches in the foothills of the
Rockies, in northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming.
“My first job was on a ranch on the Laramie River at about 8000
feet. It was January and it was way cold. I didn’t have cold
weather clothing so I only lasted 3 or 4 days. But during that
time I watched a calf being born and something about that
experience really moved me. I knew then what I wanted to do.
I wanted to do it on my own terms.”
Now and then I would visit, even join Richard on cattle
drives (when the livestock had to be moved to higher elevations
in the early summer). But I was no mere summertime cowpoke.
There Was a Young Cowboy 149

I have photos of me hooded in a sheepskin hat with donkey-size

earlaps and wearing a long sheepskin coat riding through a
snowy mist like a phantom figure from McCabe and Mrs.
Miller. In better weather my family came along, and my young
son was thrilled to sit on the saddle with me as we did our best
to move recalcitrant steers up the foothills. Even a single day’s
work was hard—but thrilling.
For Richard, this hard life was always gratifying and still
is. It somehow embraced the antimonies peculiar to the cowboy
experience: proletarian harshness combined with an antimod-
ernist exaltation that made the cowboy an imperishable element
of the American mythos. Richard slid down the slope of class
preferment until he reached a place well away from that metric:
under that radar, so to speak.
At first, Richard’s life was more than hard, it was an intel-
lectual challenge. He knew precious little about what it took to
be a competent cowboy. “When I moved out West I had almost
no required skills. I grew up in an upper middle class suburb.”
Painstakingly and painfully, he had to master a great range of
skills and knowledge that had always been prerequisite even if
the lingua franca of the West had minimized that repertoire,
diminishing it to something a mere “hand” could do. Roping
cattle and training horses were essential skills. So he went to
the Livermore, Colorado, Roping Club three times a week to
practice. At first he was pretty bad at it; “local kids out-roped
me.” But he persevered and noticed that however poorly he
performed, his western neighbors admired the “try” in him.
One time when Richard was competing in a roping contest a
stranger watching him remarked, “Who the hell is that hippie?”
(he had kept his hair nearly shoulder length, a souvenir from
the 1960s). His neighbors answered: “He’s our hippie.” Richard
had arrived.
150 There Was a Young Cowboy

Eventually Richard became a good “hand” with a horse

and rope. And he learned many other tasks: how to help a cow
calve, repair fences and irrigation equipment, do artificial in-
seminations, doctor sick cattle, break in a horse, grow and bale
hay, build a corral, and a dozen other jobs requiring both
knowledge and experience. Early on he had lived on his own
far from the main ranch house, isolated by the heavy snows,
where he learned to hunt for his own food and deal with the
loneliness. He was truly living “off the grid,” yet because he was
living in the late twentieth, not the nineteenth century, he also
had to master “rudimentary mechanics,” to keep trucks and
tractors operating, haying machines repaired, even “to replace
a U-joint on a pickup truck stuck over a little creek in the snow”
in the midwinter blizzard of 1979. “Most of my learning was
trial and error.” A glamorous life it was not.
Nor had it ever been. One observer of cowboy life in the
1950s, when I was reveling in what I supposed to be its high
drama, painted a more edifying if soberer picture: “He can rope
a cow out of brush patch so thick that a Hollywood cowboy
couldn’t crawl into on his hands and knees. He can break a
horse for riding, doctor a wormy sheep, make a balky gasoline
engine pump water for thirsty cattle, or punch a string of post-
holes across a rocky ridge. He can make out with patched gear,
sorry mounts, and still get the job done. . . . On top of all this,
he’s got a quality common to most cowhands: a way of meeting
life head-on.” As a myth he was saturated in glamour. In real
life he was, going all the way back and in Richard’s day too, “first
of all a worker with cows . . . and not a gun-totin half alligator,
half-man, on a drunken spree in a red-light town.”25
By the end of the 1970s Richard had become a foreman
on the XX Ranch, “my first job running a ranch. It was remote,
high altitude, and big, 25,000 acres. I had never worked as hard
There Was a Young Cowboy 151

as I did at that job. For one it was a Wyoming ranch and if you
are a cowboy nothing is better than a Wyoming one.”
Wyoming was among the last of the cowboy redoubts.
Even before the cowboy arrived it was home to the original
mountain men who braved the forested wilderness of the Rock-
ies. There, in places like Laramie and Cheyenne (quite close to
where Richard lived), the wide-open spaces were late to get
fenced in. Military outposts (particularly Fort Laramie) were
staging grounds instead for hemming in native Americans. The
fort was established originally by John Jacob Astor’s American
Fur Company with fifteen-foot-high walls surmounted by a
palisade. It served as well as a supply center for migrants on the
Oregon Trial. And the trail was a conduit for the mass shipment
of cattle from Oregon back east.
Conflicts between cattle barons and sheep farmers erupt-
ed into open civil war in the Wyoming Territory. Confrontations
were marked by ethnic prejudices; ranchers viewed sheep farm-
ers as lower-order Hispanics, Basques, and Mormons. The
Laramie County Stock Association, which grew into the Wyo-
ming Stock Growers Association, was the most powerful in the
history of the cattle trade, exercising enormous behind-the-
scenes political influence; it essentially compelled the 1876
treaty with Sioux and the northern Cheyenne. Wyoming was a
dangerous, semi-lawless place. The Johnson County War of 1892
between cattlemen (if you’re an owner, you’re a “man”; if a mere
herder, you’re a “boy”) and homesteaders and smaller ranchers
and rustlers posing as “social bandits” featured hangings and
shootings and eventually the intervention of the National
Guard. And the weather in the Wyoming Rockies was unforgiv-
ing. The frozen corpses of cowboys reemerged with each spring’s
thaw. Wyoming supplied the physical and social geography of
enduring legend. This was where the Virginian left his stamp.
152 There Was a Young Cowboy

It was enduring enough that finding yourself working its rocky

surface a century removed from its glory days could still be
relished.26
However, by the time Richard arrived in the storied ter-
ritory, its glory days had faded; his timing was off. In the 1980s
the world market played havoc with the meat industry. True
enough, President Ronald Reagan, code-named Rawhide by the
FBI, might be vacationing on his California ranch, riding a
horse and sporting a cowboy hat. And Ralph Lauren was run-
ning ads in New York Magazine to capture the mystique: “The
West. It’s not just stage-coaches and sagebrush. It’s an image of
men who are real proud. Of the freedom and independence we
all would like to feel. Now Ralph Lauren has expressed all this
in ‘chaps,’ his new men’s cologne. ‘Chaps’ is a cologne a man
can put on as naturally as a warm leather jacket or pair of jeans.
It’s the West. The West you would like to feel inside yourself.”
But Richard was feeling something else. The early years
of the Reagan administration were marked by the Federal Re-
serve’s austere credit policies. The whole agricultural sector was
in crisis. Exports collapsed and the demand for beef fell by 20
percent. Land values in Montana and Wyoming imploded.
Nature collaborated with a prolonged drought and voracious
grasshoppers. The northern Plains were pockmarked with
decay. Even before that, private as opposed to corporate ranch-
ing had become a luxury for rich widows and investment bank-
ers and oil millionaires in the Panhandle. They could afford to
lose money in pursuit of pleasures. Most ranching business was
conducted by even bigger businesses operating in other sectors
of the economy—oil and gas, TV stations, banking, and so on.
Massive mechanized feed yards were wired into global markets.
“It’s like being in a factory, only outdoors,” noted one reporter.
Could the dream abide in such circumstances?27
There Was a Young Cowboy 153

On Ranch XX Richard tried to weather the storm. “The

winter of 1979–80 was an incredibly hard winter—from an
historic Thanksgiving blizzard through early May it stayed
snowed up. . . . There were times that winter when I was by
myself.” Yet trials like that were also redemptive. “Lost in a bliz-
zard trying to feed 400 cows and 300 yearlings just trying to get
equipment through the snow that winter went a long way to
showing me that I could do it. I kept at it.” A cowboy tradition
of enterprise solidarity clicked in. “Neighboring ranches would
help when they could.” When a broken-down truck left Richard
stranded in the drifts, he walked miles through the blizzard
to get help, and between Christmas and the New Year fellow
workers helped him fix the truck. First, though, he had to ride
another nine miles on horseback to Ty Siding, the nearest
Wyoming town, to borrow a car to get him to a Ford dealership
in Laramie, and then finally another neighbor snowmobiled
him back to the XX Ranch.
Being a cowboy had always been a young man’s game.
Notwithstanding modern technologies and conveniences, it
remains so. Richard not only had to weather the elements and
survive the perturbations of the economy, the toll on his body
grew heavier and heavier as he aged. In the course of his work,
he took numerous spills from his horse, hoofs to his midsection
from irascible steers, and less visible wounds to his innards.
Eventually, he had broken most bones from his ankles on up
through his hips. Artificial joints replaced natural ones. Painkill-
ers became a dietary staple. His lungs betrayed him with rheu-
matoid arthritis so he rode with an oxygen pack strapped to his
side. But he rode on, the cowboy ethos he admired so much as
a kid too resilient to die.
So he prevailed, but could not hold out against the head-
winds of the world economy. Richard managed for a time to
154 There Was a Young Cowboy

lease his own ranch, raising cattle and horses. He ran seventy
cows of his own and three hundred more “on shares.” Here was
that old dream of the cowboy proletarian, to be his own man.
But “I went broke” during a severe drought and a downturn in
the meat market (both for cow and horse meat). That was a
hard blow.
Still, for Richard, as for so many others, it had never been
merely a business, about making money. The horses he raised
and trained and sometimes sold for breeding rights were also
his comrades. They meant that much. The cowboy love affair
with his horse has always been part of the mystique and a well-
grounded one. Today Richard rides three horses, in particular,
that he raised from foals. “I have gotten older and more broken
down and these three horses really take care of me. They are
still very athletic and yet they let me slide on and off them, lead
up to the back of a trailer so I can more easily get on them. So
maybe my ‘Sunny Hollow’ dream did come true.”
Yes and no. A cowboy named Henry Blanton lived in the
Texas Panhandle when a reporter for the New Yorker wrote about
him in the late 1970s. He longed for the heroic West but lived
in the new one of agribusinesses featuring huge automated feed
yards, brokers and financiers and college-educated managers—
all of which left him disappointed. As a young man, he was a
drifting cowhand, paid poorly, living in shacks. Blanton had
moved up over time, become a foreman, and owned a prefab-
ricated house with running water and electricity. But he felt the
absentee owner continued to treat him as “an overgrown boy.”
Blanton went so far as to characterize the ranch owner’s attitude
about taking care of the cowboy as “like taking care of a good
slave before the Civil War.” And where he lived, traditional forms
of deprecation—“just a cowboy” or “there’s nothing lower than
a cowboy” or “poor cowboys”—were commonplace. Sometimes
There Was a Young Cowboy 155

the insults took on an ironic form of self-deprecation as “poor

cowboys” vented their hangdog resentment of being taken
advantage of by New York financiers and the whole “economics
deal.”28
Like Richard, however, Blanton, although bitter (which
Richard is not), remained captured by the life, its myth as well
as its reality. My friend put it like this: “When I moved out west
I’m not sure what called me. Probably the myth of the Old West
and the cowboy and his rugged individualism intrigued me. . . .
It also had to do with being so influenced by nature. The rhythm
and flow of the seasons . . . watching young calves and foals that
I helped birth grow to be useful animals either as tools (horses)
or as a product for the general public.” Despite the solitary
nature of cowboy life, he was surrounded and embraced by a
community alien to his upbringing but one that respected and
loved him for the odd hybrid he’d become. “Being part of the
earth and its cycle of being, able to deal with the aloneness of
the life, being able to deal with the extremes of the weather,
these are the things that make me feel good about myself. Now,
I’m old before my time, broke, broke down, and lonely, but I
am proud of what I’ve done.”
A neighbor of Richard’s, a cowboy and songwriter, bor-
rowed a phrase from a Larry McMurtry novel, a phrase that
Richard always favored, as the title and refrain of a ballad called
“My Heart’s Pastureland.” Through the arduousness and hard-
ships, the loneliness and insecurity, the social devaluation and
personal invisibility, a dream abides. Not the sentimental and
brutal and demented dream of a nation in flight from itself, but
an unassuming one in which a footloose range bum, a proletar-
ian of the Plains, finds solace and his heart’s pastureland.29
 5
John Smith Visits Suburbia

P
eople stocked backyard bomb shelters with survival-
ist essentials and their favorite comestibles, planning
on a life underground. The nose cones of newly de-
ployed intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at
great cities all over the Northern Hemisphere. Lethal subma-
rines would soon patrol the depths with enough firepower to
incinerate the planet. Endgame theorists plotted scenarios for
“mutual assured destruction” (MAD). Diplomats walked on
the brink of a global precipice, playing a grotesque game of
chicken.
Amid all this Armageddon-like fist waving, an odd kind
of domestic squabble broke out in a kitchen in, of all places,
Moscow. At the American National Exhibition in that city in
1959, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev faced off in an argument about just who would bury
whom and how. Instead of pointing to their muscle-bound ar-
senals, the two would challenge each other about which society
was likely to produce the best stoves, washing machines, televi-
sions, electrical appliances, and other consumer delights. The
“Kitchen Debate” would become one of the more memorable
John Smith Visits Suburbia 157

chapters in the history of the Cold War. It was also the mise-en-
scène in which America redeemed its IOU to the world as a
paradise without classes.1
At the center of the exhibit the Americans had built an
entire six-room ranch house they claimed everyone in the
United States could afford and filled it with all the latest gad-
getry. The house itself was split in half to make it easier for the
enormous crowds anticipated to pass through. And enormous
crowds there were. William Safire was then a young press agent
working for the American company that built the house. He
later remembered they decided to call it Splitnik because it was
indeed a split-level and split in half, but also to draw the contrast
with the Soviet’s singular recent achievement: the extraordinary
launching of a vehicle into outer space. And, in fact, the Sputnik
satellite had been on display a month earlier at the parallel
Soviet exhibit in New York. While both countries showed off
their varied accomplishments in the arts and sciences, the Rus-
sian exhibit emphasized Soviet strides in production technol-
ogy while the Yankee display was heavy on creature comforts.
Staged today, the debate might have erupted in a fully
loaded rec room illuminated by the lime-green glow of IT
devices. Back then, however, no room better epitomized the
frontier of modern living than the kitchen. It was the site where
technological marvels were revolutionizing space and time.
More than that, this Tomorrowland kitchen promised to level
the playing field between haves and have-nots. Only the well-off
had previously enjoyed a distinctly separate space for cooking
and serving meals. For most people the place where they cooked
at a coal stove and ate at a side table was also where they usu-
ally slept and sometimes worked. The Moscow kitchen was an
angular, self-contained module with squared-off appliances,
unified in design, of standardized measurements, a terrain of
158 John Smith Visits Suburbia

conjoined countertops supporting mass-produced electrical

and mechanical devices. There were toasters and juicers and
sinks and ovens, even a color TV, that in real life were in turn
hooked up to intricate power, water, and gas grids and systems.
Not lime-green, but lemon-yellow, the kitchen beckoned like a
sunrise. Actually, there were several kitchens on display; one
offered by RCA-Whirlpool, dubbed the Miracle Kitchen, was
allegedly run entirely by push buttons. General Mills presented
its own version of a labor-saving wonder. But it was General
Electric’s ranch house model that captured the world’s attention
when East met West to decide who was best. As these Fortune
500 household names suggest, the American exhibit was a col-
laboration between corporate America and the U.S. govern-
ment. The State Department invited and received substantial
financing for staging the show from General Motors, Ford, IBM,
GE, Disney, Westinghouse, Pepsi, and other heavyweights of
America’s mass-consumption economy. Gilbert Robinson, an
organizer of the event for the State Department, put his finger
on the deep, even historic purpose of this public-private enter-
prise. It was to display the stark difference between the lives of
average citizens of the two countries and to draw a conclusion
about which society had in fact come closer to achieving some
egalitarian nirvana.2
Nixon and Khrushchev jousted about exactly that as they
ambled through the kitchen and the rest of the exhibition. The
vice president told the premier that “the United States, the
world’s largest capitalist country, has from the standpoint of
distribution of wealth come closest to the ideal of prosperity
for all in a classless society.” Soon enough, Khrushchev re-
torted, the Soviet Union would catch up and then pass the
United States, “saying Bye, Bye” as it zoomed away into the
future. The dialogue was alternately chiding and angry and
John Smith Visits Suburbia 159

diplomatically polite. Nixon: “See the built-in washing ma-

chine?” Khrushchev: “We have such things.” N: “What we want
is to make more easy the life of our housewives.” K: “We do not
have the capitalist attitude toward women.” When the vice
president boasted that a steelworker making $3 an hour could
afford to buy a $14,000 house, the premier claimed, “We have
peasants who can afford to spend $14,000 for a house.” All was
not a matter of dollars and cents, however. The Soviet leader
pointed out, “Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but
they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They
are merely gadgets.” Nixon had a ready and ideologically pow-
ered response: “We have many different manufacturers and
many different kinds of washing machines so the housewives
have a choice. . . . We hope to show our diversity and right to
choose.”3
Nixon’s defense of “the right to choose” was treated back
home as if he had enunciated a twentieth-century version of
the Emancipation Proclamation. The debate was broadcast by
all three major networks. Time magazine congratulated the vice
president for his championing of the American way of life and
the national character, “confident of its power under threat.”
He and the exhibition had made a potent connection between
the state and its citizenry, proving that science and technology
opened up a universal passway to progress and social concord.
For a man already prepping to become his party’s presidential
nominee, it was a triumphant moment.4
The Kitchen Debate confirmed what had already become
an all-consuming way of life. The Journal of Retailing (a trade
magazine) reached for the injunctive. “Our enormously produc-
tive economy demands that we make consumption our way of
life, that we convert the buying and using of goods into rituals,
that seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfaction in
160 John Smith Visits Suburbia

consumption.” House Beautiful plumbed the social significance

of ranch house architecture: “Our houses are all on one level,
like our class structure.” Life magazine concurred, noting that
“people are getting more and more on a level with each other.”
A Labor Department study, How American Buying Habits
Change, issued the same year as the Moscow encounter, con-
cluded that the automobile was “breaking down barriers of
community and class.” Business Week headlined news of the
future: “Worker Loses His Class Identity.” Like his vice president,
Eisenhower sent a message to the Russians about just who could
legitimately claim the mantle of labor’s emancipator: “They
[the Soviets] fail to realize that he [the American worker] is not
the downtrodden, impoverished vassal of whom Karl Marx
wrote. He is a self-sustaining, thriving individual living in dig-
nity and freedom.”
Before “Make love, not war” became the anthem of op-
position to the bloody debacle in Vietnam, an analogous formula
summed up the midcentury state of the global class struggle:
“Make washing machines, not missiles” was the message con-
veyed by both debaters at their historic kitchen encounter, even
if they didn’t put things in exactly those words. What Nixon
actually suggested, and the Soviet premier concurred, was:
“Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of
washing machines than in the strength of rockets?” Khrushchev,
blustery, witty in the fashion of a folk-wise peasant, supremely
sure of himself, and proud of his nation’s material accomplish-
ments, might have passed for a corpulent American CEO. Lean,
not yet bulldog jowly, quick at repartee, Nixon seemed just as
confident as his Soviet interlocutor about his side’s ultimate
ideological superiority and might have passed for a gray-
flannelled commissar. Two utopians—antagonists yet carriers
of visions that seemed to converge on some class-free elysian
John Smith Visits Suburbia 161

fields of plentitude—certain, or so it seemed, of their eventual

victories. Still, they were haunted by legacies of social discontent
they could not shed.5

Who Will Bury Whom?

The Kitchen Debate is recorded as a landmark moment in a
war that seemed destined either to go on forever or end in an
apocalyptic flash. It might also be thought of, however, as a
cease-fire. After all, both sides agreed on the fundamentals. The
only issue in doubt was which nation would bury the other, as
the Soviet premier would later foretell, under an avalanche of
goods and services that would permanently anesthetize what-
ever social wounds still festered from the past. What the Chinese
Communist rivals of their Russian big brother would character-
ize as “goulash Communism” enjoyed a kinship with the
American boast that the evil days of capitalist scarcity and class
inequality were already in the country’s rearview mirror. Jeremi-
ads from yesteryear about exploitation, alienation, and wage
slavery from the Soviet camp, and about collectivist slavery,
godless Communism, and state tyranny from the American side
still echoed in the background, but more and more faintly. Both
leaders had spied the future in the eyes of the other as if look-
ing in a mirror. And the future worked, like a well-oiled machine.
Such was the shared fantasy of inveterate enemies celebrating
their respective golden ages.6
Sic transit gloria. For the Soviet Union that fate would
come true with a vengeance unto extinction. Done in as much
by its own internal social repressions and economic dysfunction
as by the hostility of the West, goulash Communism provided
neither goulash nor Communism. Yet at the time, it seemed
Khrushchev had the wind at his back. Although the mainstream
162 John Smith Visits Suburbia

media declared the American vice president the winner, at a

deeper level Nixon was playing defense. He was arguing, after
all, that the United States, a capitalist society through and
through, would be—indeed, already was—the first to make
good on the promise long ago articulated in The Communist
Manifesto: America was well on its way to erasing class from its
economic and political vocabulary, leveling its social terrain so
that it began to resemble the harmonious utopias once consid-
ered the wooly-headed notions of feckless radicals. The New
World, just as John Smith had prophesized, was becoming a
land where “every man may be master and owner of his owne
labour and land.” Take that thought and plant it in a suburban
ranch house and you get the equivalent of the immaculate
conception: capitalism without classes.
Geopolitics, thermonuclear terror, subversion and
counter-subversion, all the grotesque paraphernalia of super-
power bullying can’t account for why the vice president of the
“Free World” wanted to upstage Karl Marx, to claim the arch-
enemy’s inspiration as his own, to bury him, so to speak, in a
grave of his own making.
Recent history better explained Nixon’s premature conver-
sion to a class-free America. It was an odd one, to be sure.
Nixon had come of age as a fierce practitioner of anti-
Communism during the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
That’s what got him elected to public office in California and
made him someone to be reckoned with in Republican Party
politics. But the very potency of that politics of fear was also a
measure of how much the politics of class still smoldered be-
neath the surface. The United States had only recently emerged
from the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the social turmoil
that had called into question the viability of capitalism. Nixon
operated in a political culture where memories were still fresh
John Smith Visits Suburbia 163

of mass and general strikes, factory seizures, street demonstra-

tions of the unemployed, farmer rebellions and penny auctions,
violent confrontations between workers and private corporate
armies, farmer-labor party electoral victories—memories of a
time not so long ago when calls to “share the wealth” and ex-
communicate Wall Street were avidly listened to by millions.
Nixon’s political debut coincided with the largest strike wave
in American history immediately following World War II.
By the time the vice president arrived in Moscow in 1959,
much of that upheaval had subsided (although that year also
witnessed the longest strike in American history when the steel
industry shut down for months). Still, the international rivalry
with the Soviet Union pressured the United States to make the
case that its uglier history of class warfare was over with. Instead,
in vying for the allegiance of people at home and abroad, the
nation’s political elite could claim that it had solved the riddle
of history posed by Marx. Ever inventive, the country had dis-
covered that if the history of all previously existing societies had
been one of class struggle, America had figured out a way around
that. Hence the underlying irony of the Kitchen Debate: Nixon’s
victory, if that indeed was what it was, came by way of ceding
the high ground to the Communist ideal. That high ground, a
society without classes, could be found cropping up all over the
American heartland, forming its own New World: suburbia.7

The Class That Is No Class

Ranch houses with kitchens like the model in Moscow recon-
figured landscapes. Where once there had been forests, mead-
ows, hillsides, farmland, ocean fronts, marshes, riverine villages,
and whistle-stop towns, now there were paved roads, central
shopping districts and malls, one-family homes on streets
164 John Smith Visits Suburbia

without sidewalks, commuter lines running to and away from

work—all of it laid out with a kind of geometric symmetry that
resembled the uniform rectangular subdivision of the Great
Plains during the era of the homesteader. Suburban settlements
blanketed the country at an extraordinary rate in the decades
following the end of the Second World War. They were the
universally recognized site, headquarters even, of what the
economist John Kenneth Galbraith called the “affluent society”
in a best-selling book of that title. Galbraith’s term was meant
ironically as he was by no means enamored with this develop-
ment. But for most people there was no ambiguity. Suburbia
was the romance of everyman.
On the grasslands of well-manicured front lawns, Middle
America erected a cordon sanitaire against the past. All the
insignia of proletarian degradation were erased: no more di-
lapidated, ill-ventilated, overpopulated tenements; settlements
of uniform design instead of city chaos; patios in place of back-
alley squalor; refrigerators instead of iceboxes; coal soot ban-
ished by electric stoves; horizons of shrubbery, flower gardens,
and sunlit expanse rather than cracked concrete and fire escapes,
a shadowland of grime and rationed sunshine. Children’s
rooms, master bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, multiple
bathrooms, backyards, fences, and of course the “miracle
kitchen” formed the physical geography and architecture of a
reborn landed yeomanry. Suburbia also constituted a kind of
psychic rezoning that opened up room for private and familial
preoccupations in spaces once reserved for more promiscuous
social intermingling. Here the inner self could be explored,
ministered to, remade, liberated. If the Soviets could boast of
creating a “new man,” so could suburbia.
Thomas Jefferson had once dreamed it possible to im-
munize the New World against the class antagonisms, the
John Smith Visits Suburbia 165

extravagance, poverty, and corruptions of the Old World, by

buying Louisiana. History could be stopped dead in its tracks
west of the Mississippi. That territory would become an “empire
for liberty,” so vast it would afford generations to come the
chance to set themselves up as self-sustaining citizen-farmers,
dependent on no one: neither overlords nor subjects. Suburban
America was reimagined as a mid-twentieth-century facsimile
of that prospect. It had about it a more or less equal quotient
of the real and unreal as had Jefferson’s idyll. The Kansas land
rush and Levittown were self-evidently quite different anticipa-
tions of the future. What they shared was a deep commitment
to protecting free individuals from whatever might jeopardize
their self-reliance. Where they differed fundamentally, how-
ever, was in identifying the enemy and how to fend it off.
For generations of nineteenth-century Americans, the
threat to their independence was wage slavery; land or other
kinds of property ownership (workshops, stores, professional
assets) could function as prophylactics against becoming prole-
tarian. Both the danger and the way to defuse it were to be found
in the realm of production. Cold War–era suburbanites, on the
other hand, had long since become “wage slaves.” True, some still
held out the hope they might one day escape, reinvent themselves
on the frontiers of entrepreneurship; white-collar workers espe-
cially weren’t about to identify as working class. Most blue-collar
people instead took their proletarian status for granted because,
to begin with, that was just the way things were. Virtually no one
any longer thought that condition was subject to overhaul on a
scale that would reconfigure the social landscape. But more than
that, they didn’t think of themselves anymore as “wage slaves,”
even though they did indeed work for wages.
If in some theoretical sense they suffered a subordination
in the realm of production, they found release in the realm of
166 John Smith Visits Suburbia

consumption. They had been granted the inalienable right to

choose, the summa of freedom. Nixon had it right. In a thousand
car dealerships, department stores, home appliance outlets,
furniture emporiums, supermarket bazaars, TV and radio chan-
nels, movie theaters, and exotic locales where you could get
away from it all, the right to choose could be exercised over and
over again. Each time it was an affirmation of a new form of
freedom, self-assertion, and, when it seemed called for, the
power to try on an entirely new self.
Nor should the vice president’s boast be taken lightly. The
embodiment and exfoliation of human creative powers in
kitchenware and jet planes, in life-saving pharmaceuticals and
central heating and air-conditioning, in telecommunications
and food enough to keep billions alive is, whatever else one
might say about it and the way it was accomplished, stunning.
The national output of goods and services doubled between
1946 and 1956 and doubled again by 1970. Between 1949 and
1973 median income and mean family income doubled. One
out of every four homes standing in 1960 was built in the 1950s.
In that year 62 percent of Americans owned homes, compared
to 44 percent in 1940. The statistics measuring the increase in
consumer durables—everything from cars to washing ma-
chines—indexed the same remarkable growth. The suburban
population rose by 43 percent between 1947 and 1953. Newsweek
anointed a new world peopled by “men of property.”8
Still, Nixon had politics first and foremost in mind. If the
material gratifications on sale were made widely accessible and
alluring enough, they would temper the social resentments of
the past and deliver a rough approximation of the country’s
egalitarian credo. And they would cultivate a sense of indi-
vidual autonomy that would neuter quests for freedom aimed
at dismantling the prevailing hierarchies of power and wealth.
John Smith Visits Suburbia 167

Once the workplace had bred class resentments and yearn-

ings for liberation. Now those passions had cooled. Or rather,
the gulf between haves and have-nots had narrowed; suburbia
promised to efface it completely. Desires for social emancipation
were privatized. The New York Herald Tribune put it plainly:
“The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor
man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of
telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio and TV set.” In 1951 Fortune
published a special issue: “USA: The Permanent Revolution,”
in which it made so bold as to allude to Trotsky, the inventor
of that notion of “permanent revolution,” and the classless
society it foretold.9
Conversely, and ironically, none of this would have hap-
pened without the exercise of the collective power of organized
proletarians in the economic and political arenas. The postwar
rise in the standard of living rested on the collective mobiliza-
tion of the industrial working class during the Great Depression
into militant unions and the potent political influence they
exercised inside the Democratic Party and thereby the govern-
ment. Wages rose not only in unionized companies but in many
companies that hoped to avoid unionization by matching those
increases. Vacations, cost-of-living adjustments, productivity
bonuses, pensions, medical care, and a host of other “fringe
benefits,” without which the “affluent society” would have been
less a reality than an aspiration, were the fruits of class con-
sciousness.
So too, the social welfare state, whose foundations were
laid during the New Deal years and got added onto afterward,
would never had advanced as far as it did without the sense of
social solidarity that for a season infused American political
culture. Hard to imagine now, but in the 1950s the top tax
rate on the rich stood at 91 percent. Minimum-wage and
168 John Smith Visits Suburbia

maximum-hour laws, public works and public relief succored

the down-and-out.
But while it has become commonplace to think of that
welfare system as aimed at the poverty-stricken, unwed moth-
ers, and others consigned to the social margins, actually its most
generous allowances (not counting those tax breaks and sub-
sidies incentivizing big business and financial institutions) were
enjoyed by upwardly mobile working-class citizens. This was
true of specific pieces of legislation like the GI Bill, which made
housing and education widely affordable for veterans, housing
finance laws more broadly, Social Security and, later on, Medi-
care for the elderly, publicly supported universities, and other
innovations to eliminate the pervasive insecurities that had
always before characterized life as a proletarian. Underlying
that legislative infrastructure, moreover, was a commitment of
fiscal and monetary policy to buoying up the purchasing
power of consumers when the business cycle threatened to
subvert it; Keynesianism originated as a kind of class conscious-
ness of the political elite seeking to resecure the social founda-
tions of modern capitalism.
As it aged, however, it became less that than a technique.
The triumph—partial, to be sure—of a class-inflected politics
persuaded many that a class-inflected politics had become a
thing of the past, no longer called for in an “affluent society”
that had transcended class. Necessary instead was a well-trained
bureaucracy capable of managing the “new order,” deploying
an arsenal of psycho-social as well as economic therapeutics to
treat whatever malfunctions might arise. Theorists of the post-
war order—variously labeled post- industrial or post-
capitalist—took it as axiomatic that the new liberal dispensation
epitomized the rational, functioning as a finely reticulated
mechanism for resolving social conflict. History, not merely the
John Smith Visits Suburbia 169

economy, seemed to have achieved some permanent plateau of

social harmony and efficiency, at least inside the borders of the
homeland. Class warfare had been exported abroad where it
could be waged, at harrowing risk, to a successful conclusion
in part precisely because it had disappeared at home.
Celebrants and more dispassionate observers noted the sea
change. Onetime left-wing intellectual Daniel Bell announced
the “end of ideology” in a book with that title published in 1960.
While this soon turned out to be a grossly premature prediction,
what Bell put his finger on was the passing away of the “proletar-
ian metaphysic” and all that it had portended about the elimina-
tion of capitalist society. He argued, in fact, that all the grand
humanistic ideologies born out of the Enlightenment were
exhausted. Proletarian revolution was the last such historical
romance. These dreams of transcendence had been replaced
by a narrow-gauged system of technical adjustments to social
dysfunction.
Bell’s pronouncement was not exactly a lament, but it bore
an air of lowered expectations. Similarly, Louis Hartz in The
Liberal Tradition in America explained that precisely because
the country never had to take on a real aristocracy, it had
never developed the kind of class-driven, ideologically informed
politics true of Europe. That America was an exception to that
rule left Hartz mordant about the limits of the nation’s political
imagination, at a disadvantage when it came to dealing with its
subsurface social tensions.
Others were more unequivocal in welcoming the new
order. John Kenneth Galbraith criticized old-fashioned capital-
ism but looked more favorably on what he and others called
post-industrial society. Mainstream social scientists and histo-
rians rediscovered the indigenous American genius for doing
an end run around history. Whether thanks to providence,
170 John Smith Visits Suburbia

nature’s bequest, the application of macroeconomic and social

science, or a composite of all three, America was once again
proving itself the exceptional nation its colonial and revolution-
ary forefathers had foreseen. In 1957 journalist and ex–left
winger Max Lerner published American Civilization, which was
meant as an encomium to the American zeitgeist and as an
apologia for earlier heresies. The historian David Potter in People
of Plenty argued that the abrasions of class conflict had been
regularly submerged, cauterized, and healed in the bathwaters
of material abundance.
Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter pointed to an innate
American inventiveness, ingenuity, and individualism to account
for the nation’s frontier vigor and resourcefulness; the fixities of
social rank could not take root in such hostile soil. Political and
social scientists like Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and
Robert Dahl explained how class alignments dissolved into a
plurality of interest groups and the demographic amorphousness
of the suburban resettlement. Under these circumstances, tran-
sitory coalitions and the mechanics of compromise worked to
disarm more dangerous kinds of class conflicts that could so
easily get out of hand. Politics itself tended to become a branch
of consumer culture, another place where glamour and cha-
risma might work its magic on the “right to choose.” Leonard
Hall, the chairman of the Republican Party in 1952, spoke these
words of wisdom: “You sell your candidate and your program
the way business sells its products.” He went on to hire the lead-
ing advertising agencies to develop messages tailored to each
market segment. Economists and schools of business and in-
dustrial labor relations proved that the once overwrought arena
where boss and hireling went head-to-head had become instead
a meeting ground where labor and management partnered on
behalf of the general corporate community.10
John Smith Visits Suburbia 171

A whole new academic discipline was born to explore the

distinctive national experience. American studies departments
mushroomed in the postwar era. They shared a premise, if only
an implicit one, with John Smith and the Puritan divines and
Jefferson: that what was happening in the New World was indeed
new in some profound sense. Why that was the case and what
kind of society emerged from that experiment in starting over
were just the sorts of questions students and professors of
American studies sought to figure out. Whatever varied answers
might surface, underlying the researches was a Cold War–in-
spired conviction that class no longer mattered in the homeland.
Specialized scholarship, however, was not required to
come to this judgment. It was already in the atmosphere, the
oxygen of everyday belief, the philosophy of everyday life. Pro-
fessional philosophers, to be sure, offered their own elegantly
formulated treatises, but so too did preachers and policy wonks,
journalists and state managers. The modern corporation to-
gether with the welfare state worked to efface class. A loose
consensus of intellectuals and pundits, including people like
Galbraith and Clark Kerr (soon to become infamous as the
target of the Free Speech Movement at the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley where Kerr was president), was confident
that the social order was infinitely malleable, no longer subject
to the rigidities characteristic of capitalism in its formative
phase when great dynastic owners treated their employees like
serfs.
Neither capitalist nor socialist, this new social species fused
free-market liberalism with social democracy; the future beck-
oned. As Marx had once prophesized, capitalism had evolved.
Its modern corporate form “aims at the expropriation of the
means of production from all individuals,” although, he point-
ed out, “the conversion to the form of stock still remains
172 John Smith Visits Suburbia

ensnared in the trammels of capital.” The philosopher George

Lichtheim categorized this world as “post bourgeois,” one where
old class structures had dissolved along with private entrepre-
neurship, where the “idle rich” had become superfluous while
the working class had been leveled up by the welfare state.
Intercourse between mass production and the mass mar-
ket reproduced mass society, a disaggregated but uniform body
of roughly equivalent middle- class individuals, so all-
encompassing that other social classes were simply disappear-
ing over the horizon of American life. Soon enough that would
become true of the whole world (the “free” western half of it,
anyway) as the United States tutored its new dependencies in
Europe and Asia in the rudiments of democracy and econom-
ic growth, exporting its bureaucratic and managerial expertise
along with its largesse, liquid capital, and triumphant armed
forces.11
If there remained problems to be sorted out, they didn’t
involve social struggles for power but rather the power of
positive thinking. Sociologist David Riesman depicted the new
mass man as “other directed,” engaged in a recurrent effort to
reshape himself in the eyes of significant others, especially inside
the anonymous warrens of the corporate bureaucracy, but also
in his social life more generally. Middle-class mass man became
a kind of infinitely fungible commodity, like a human form of
money. This performing self was an ego in a chronic state of
liquefaction, an identity at risk. This too was a form of power-
lessness but one to be addressed in the realm of the psyche. Even
when popular culture showed sympathy for working-class
subjects, it did so insofar as they faced personal dilemmas, not
ones traceable to their class origins. As one historian has
pointed out, one need only contrast movies of the 1930s like
Scarface, Little Caesar, Public Enemy, or Grapes of Wrath to
John Smith Visits Suburbia 173

postwar films like They Live by Night, White Heat, or Death of

a Salesman, which psychologized what had once been treated
as the wounds of social inequities. Alienation was made to fit
inside the confines of family melodrama.12
Norman Vincent Peale spoke to millions about the
power of positive thinking in an idiom nearly as old as the
country itself. He was a Methodist minister raised in a strictly
prohibitionist Ohio family. He was “plain people,” or so he
portrayed himself; “Everyday people of this land are my own
kind.” In 1957 he reached an audience of 30 million each week.
Well over a hundred newspapers carried his column, “Confident
Living.” His radio show, The Art of Living, broadcast into 1 mil-
lion homes. He could be seen on 140 TV stations. He made
records, lectured widely, and The Power of Positive Thinking,
published in 1952, had sold 2 million copies by 1955. Peale
preached that Christianity was a practical guide to successful
living. It offered self-mastery. That appealed to many who might
be sensing a loss of self-control in the modern world, where
anonymity loomed. Peale’s message was a reaffirmation of that
native belief in self-creation, revised to take account of the fact
that the forested wilderness had been paved over, subdivided,
and reassembled in the dolorous glass and steel monoliths of
government and corporate bureaucracies. Yet even here the free
individual could abide—armed with the right attitude and the
right kitchen.13

Life on Lee Avenue

I grew up in a house with that kitchen around the time of the
Moscow debate. Whether it was lemon yellow I can’t recall. But
it was full of those gadgets Khrushchev both admired and
mocked. The kitchen was not in a ranch house, but it had been
174 John Smith Visits Suburbia

remodeled to show off just what Nixon boasted about. The

house itself was actually an old colonial-style one in an affluent
New York City suburb. The area was not exactly typical of the
places to which the postwar exodus headed. It was older and
richer, more akin to the fictional hang-out of James Gatz, oth-
erwise known to us all as the Great Gatsby.
To a young boy this meant very little, if anything. Yet
something about our social circumstances did register. I became
dimly aware that we didn’t quite fit. While it would be years
before I heard of people like David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, or
Max Lerner, their take on class-free suburbia didn’t quite mesh
with my own experience.
We were not rich, not rich enough, anyway, to mimic
everything about the lifestyle of our friends and neighbors. My
father had acquired enough cash to make the move from Brook-
lyn. But that didn’t last long. Nonetheless, his commitment and
my mother’s to hanging on meant that eventually we moved
into more modest housing, much more like what was on display
in Moscow. I was aware, of course, that this was happening. My
friends all went away to summer camp. I stayed home and played
in the Police Boys Athletic League. When I went to play at friends’
houses, it was fairly common that a live-in maid/domestic
worker loosely monitored what we were up to. Their parents
belonged to private swim and tennis clubs. I played at the pub-
lic courts and swam at the public pool. As we grew a bit older
and clothes became important, something that proved if you
were “cool” or not, I was understocked with what was in fashion.
At school I was in nonstop trouble with the authorities, banned
from the cafeteria and forced to eat lunch in the vice principal’s
office along with “the Murphy boys,” working-class toughs,
brothers who scared me to death. (Luckily the vice principal
scared even the Murphy boys, so lunch was nonviolent.)
John Smith Visits Suburbia 175

None of this bothered me (well, maybe my uncouth cloth-

ing rankled). I was, after all, living the childhood version of the
suburban good life. I had a dog, a big backyard, a bedroom of
my own, an attic hideaway on the third floor, a bike on which
I was free to roam the leafy, quiet streets and parklands of our
“Gatsbyville.” I was a Cub Scout and a Little Leaguer. Later I
would join the “Pepsi generation.” My father commuted into
the city to work on Madison Avenue, and I was there to meet
him at the end of each day at the station as he returned home
on the 5:58. My mother was a pianist; she gave private lessons
at home and later, when our finances declined, taught music in
the public schools. She was a wage earner, to be sure, but also
a homemaker in all the ways that conformed to the profile of
suburban middle-class domesticity.
Yet my parents were different (and I later learned so were
some of the parents of my friends) in a way that hinted both at
the unreality of the suburban myth and why it was so alluring.
And I don’t mean just that they were less well-off than their
neighbors, although they were. The realization of their differ-
ence first came to me as if from another world. Directly across
the street from my spacious backyard—hardly the right word
for an area spacious enough for a rock garden, flower gardens,
a vegetable patch, a mulch pit, a grape arbor, peach and pear
trees, and various oak, chestnut, and maple trees—was a road
called Lee Avenue. Never was a street more improbably named.
Lee Avenue was not an avenue or even a plain road; it was a dirt
lane that turned to dust or mud depending on the weather. It
wasn’t even flat, but rutted and rock-strewn, dotted with hardy
weeds that eked out a life from sandy soil.
On the corner lived Billy O’Brien. A bit older than I, he
took me on scarifying adventures to the “clay mines” (a wood-
ed area fetchingly dark and dense, watered by a stream that
176 John Smith Visits Suburbia

turned the ground into a moist clay we “mined” for treasures

while fearing it might suck us in and under). Billy’s house was
half the size of mine, old and ramshackle, needed painting and
a new roof. It didn’t belong in Gatsbyville. Nor did Billy. He
didn’t go to my school, but instead attended a Catholic paro-
chial school in another town. There he went in terror of the
nuns, with their inflexible discipline enforced by knuckle-
bruising rulers. To this day, I still shudder when I remember
Billy’s tales of spectral, black-hooded “sisters” who seemed not
only ominous but decidedly unsisterly.
Stranger people even than Billy lived down the road from
him on Lee Avenue. They were black. The structures they lived
in made Billy’s house seem palatial. Shacks, really, some with
rickety front porches, doors half off their hinges, paint peeling
like bark on a tree, perched precariously on a short rise above
the “avenue” so they wouldn’t get washed away when rainwater
coursed down the road. Sometimes garbage floated by. Inside,
the homes were dingy and ill lit. I became familiar with these
dreary interiors later on when I was old enough to be a news-
paper delivery boy and came by weekly to collect. But I knew
what the insides were like much earlier than that because I made
friends with a boy who lived there. I can’t remember his name.
We were buddies, but I also sensed we were different from each
other. And I don’t mean because he was black, but rather because
he was so damn poor.
I felt sorry for him, and even now I get queasy recalling
this. I asked my parents if I could invite him home to eat with
us because I somehow intuited he wasn’t eating right or enough.
They readily agreed. Looking back, I wonder if the invitation
was really their idea. They were Depression-era people who had
become left-wing political activists. Their days of activism were
fading, but their social conscience about class and racial ineq-
John Smith Visits Suburbia 177

uity lived on. Moreover, it turned out that others of that same
persuasion had migrated like we had from the city to this par-
ticular suburban outpost. Gatsbyville was undergoing a make-
over, becoming less Jazz Age glamorous and more a haven for
an upwardly mobile middle class whose more modest social
origins and moral seriousness would make the town well known
for its enlightened attitudes.
To suburbia they had fled, carrying with them, along with
their bags and baggage, beliefs from another time and place.
They were drawn, like millions of others, by the allure of a
class-free affluent society, yet marked by still-fresh memories
of the old world they were fleeing. Lee Avenue was an anach-
ronism and, for my parents, an embarrassment, too close by to
ignore. So, by the time I was in the fourth grade I had exported
my own version of the Kitchen Debate to my classroom, where
I argued with my teacher—a secular version of Billy O’Brien’s
sisters named Mrs. Pingree, a party-line Cold War Republican
with silver-gray hair and a face as stern as Stalin’s whose with-
ering glance was as frightening as any nun armed with a ruler—
that the Russians weren’t so bad as she was painting them. I had
learned at home what she apparently wasn’t aware of: that in
no time at all, a people once so poor had acquired washing
machines, refrigerators, and every other convenience Mrs.
Pingree said they went without. Then back home I went, now
armed with the other side of the argument, and had it out with
Mom and Dad. That was the setting in which one day there we
were: me, my little outlier friend, and my parents, sitting around
a table in a dining room nearly as big as his house.
Lee Avenue was one of several byways sprinkled here and
there throughout Gatsbyville where the servant class of that
bygone era were consigned. A whole micro neighborhood of
this kind, tucked away on the outskirts of town (but close
178 John Smith Visits Suburbia

enough to be available when called upon) bore the picturesque

name of Steamboat Road. Precincts like that were customary
enough in the upper-class world Gatsby aspired to belong to.
Not so in the “new world” of Nixonland, where classes and
castes of all kinds supposedly went to die, especially so in the
peculiarly configured left-wing version of my parents’ own
suburban idyll.

The Snake in the Crabgrass

Lee Avenue and Steamboat Road might be stark anomalies from
another age. Yet for just that reason, they shed a lurid light on
what otherwise remained a dark secret about the postwar sub-
urban romance. Not only were most of these settlements all
white, they were also the locus of intricate social hierarchies,
social science word pictures notwithstanding. Some were rooted
in disparities in wealth and income that distinguished one sub-
urb from another: Levittown from Gatsbyville. Some were
stratified internally by the same disparities, by the varying life-
styles they could finance, and by an inherent culture of invidious
distinctions that had long been part of the American makeup at
least since De Tocqueville first observed them. Egalitarian ano-
nymity bred its opposite, a yearning for recognition fueling a
chronic racing after social esteem to buoy up a fragile self-respect:
“Where everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody.” C. Wright
Mills described “status panic” as the distinctive affliction of this
world. Like the numerous mock architectural styles that were
reinvented on these suburban flatlands—neo-colonial, neo-
Georgian, neo-Tudor, neo-cowboy, neo-bungalow—suburbia
itself was in some measure a façade. It concealed social fissures
while embellishing the American Dream. Arguably that was
its function.14
John Smith Visits Suburbia 179

Romances of this historic magnitude are inherently over-

blown. From the outset the postwar suburban phenomenon
was riddled with class divisions, status anxieties, and racial
exclusion. So too was it a bastion of patriarchy. For example,
veterans were overwhelming male. The GI Bill opened up
higher education and housing to men; moreover, it helped far
more middle-class than working-class men. Demographics
displayed far less social mobility than advertised. Credit agen-
cies, banks, and mortgage brokers favored middle-class white
people. A study of blue-collar workers in suburban Michigan
conducted in the 1950s found them less excited by their pros-
pects than Nixon. Anomic, uncertain about their purpose in
life, not so driven by the quest for upward mobility that was
supposed to be an American birthright, they weren’t living the
dream. In Michigan, they were more prone to vent their frustra-
tions in wildcat strikes. The belief, widespread, that suburbia
anesthetized union or class consciousness was at best a half
truth.
Golden ages age. As the suburban one proceeded, it be-
came ever more, not less, class and racially segmented. Hierar-
chical identities, now defined by the market and consumption
patterns, became pervasive. The suburban ideal rested on a
culture that had at first presumed a kind of classless unifor-
mity. William Levitt himself was a liberal as well as builder and
quite conscious about the class issues at stake in his revolution-
ary construction. His dream of life beyond class notwithstand-
ing, the opposite increasingly marked real life on the crabgrass
frontier.
Distinctions in housing styles and size, both conspicuous
and subtle (prefabricated starter or mansard-roofed mansion),
downtown architectural flourishes (strip mall or gothic
façades), select country clubs or public parks, postage-sized
180 John Smith Visits Suburbia

mowed lawns or acres of exotic landscaping, tonier residential

estates elbow to elbow with more down-market subdivisions
within a single suburb, as well as racial and ethnic composition
mapped the social terrain. Marketing departments became more
attuned to and indeed helped create these newer, status-inflected
identities. Identity politics, which would later erupt in a far
different form, owes some of its psychological makeup to this
formative experiment in consumer living.15
Dissonant as well was the role of the government. The
native version of utopia, deeply embedded in the American grain,
is an exaltation of the self-reliant individual. John Smith was
fully prepared to enforce martial law over a colony verging on
mayhem. But he did so in the hope that one day the land would
support a society of free-standing citizens roughly equal in
condition, requiring only a common moral character to cohere.
Suburbia might be metamorphosed to resemble that kind of
setting in the imagination of its promoters and ideologues.
In reality, however, the suburban mass migration was not
born de novo. Its existence depended on an elaborate array of
government facilitators. The infrastructure of roads and high-
ways, public utilities and commuter rail lines, schools and
hospitals, was constructed by local, state, and federal govern-
ments. Building this infrastructure employed capital and labor
and was part of the reason the era was called “affluent.” Neither
Levittown, USA, nor the posh environs of Orange County would
have happened without what American utopians might decry
as the heavy hand of the leviathan state. Indeed, those avatars
of the free market in Southern California were utterly dependent
on the military-industrial complex located close by for their
material wherewithal.
In Moscow, Nixon suggested that the ranch house, its
model kitchen, and the techno-wonders, material pleasures,
John Smith Visits Suburbia 181

and social security that went with them were universally avail-
able. Instead a whole phalanx of government housing programs,
private-sector financing, local zoning protocols, and state and
federal tax subsidies and shelters guaranteed that those options
were really only practicable for families of more than modest
means and of the right complexion. The suburban dream, like
the American Dream more generally, turned out to be part real,
part hallucination: class (and race) mattered, no matter the
efforts to make it go away.

The Masses and the Classes

Flaws of this magnitude did more than call into question sub-
urbia’s egalitarian prospect. They also illuminated the inner
dynamics of a capitalist political economy and culture that
continued to rest on distinctions of caste and class. Eventually
these “imperfections” would become apparent, widen the space
separating more and less well-off segments of the wage-earning
population, create lifestyle envies picked apart by Madison
Avenue, and now and then erupt in violent outbursts against
those rash enough to try to breach the invisible walls of racial
exclusion. The eminent American historian David Brion Davis
observed, “We have entered another era when race has pre-
empted class,” but he went on to prophesy that down the road
Americans will have “to confront the underlying reality of class
division in America and the destructive myth of a classless
society.”
Suburbia’s alleged virtues, however, not its failures and
social underside, first commanded the attention of its earliest
critics. It was precisely the apparent uniformity, the glacial
surface calm of the new classless America that inflamed its most
passionate early critics. On the one hand, the ranch house and
182 John Smith Visits Suburbia

its amenities were a haven of intimacy where the private life

could be cultivated, secured against the dangers of the concrete
jungle. But Galbraith’s best seller was partly a jeremiad about
the “affluent society,” how it crowded out public goods and
corroded social consciousness.
Abundance was a blessing. But The Hidden Persuaders,
another blockbuster book, by Vance Packard, vividly described
the black arts of the advertising industry and its remarkable
ability to manipulate desire. His examination of how motiva-
tional research and other subliminal psychological tactics
choreograph expectations and cravings was especially chilling
as Packard demonstrated their deployment in the political
arena as well. So too, men in gray flannel suits, the uniform of
the new “salaritariat,” seemed securely ensconced inside a white-
collar world no longer vulnerable to the brutalities of their
proletarian forefathers. But William Whyte in The Organization
Man depicted them as wracked by anxiety, combatants in the
cold war of preferment, climbing up and sliding down a slippery
slope of corporate one-upmanship.
Consumer culture enticed everybody; it dazzled and de-
lighted, it gratified and seemed inexhaustible. Yet, according
to David Riesman, it reproduced something he called “the
lonely crowd.” Here was a reconfiguration of the social psyche
so hollowed out and vulnerable that it needed to be confirmed
in its existence by outside authority. But that authority had
become so amorphous, ambiguous, and diffused it left its
subjects in a chronic state of anxiety. While this “new man” was
by necessity open to the world, no longer a slave to tradition,
made self-conscious about his “right to choose,” he was infi-
nitely pliable, paying obeisance to taste or opinion makers in
the realm of material goods as well as in moral and intellec-
tual matters.16
John Smith Visits Suburbia 183

Nixon’s utopia pledged to level away the old pecking or-

ders, snobberies, and deferential barriers that once distanced
the hoi poloi from their more sophisticated betters, leaving the
former feeling somehow inadequate, shut out. Mass culture
ended that alienation. Among its many wonders the industrial
revolution had made universal literacy possible. Everybody,
more or less, had access to common forms of entertainment,
knowledge, art, and literature. Parochial folk cultures were left
by the wayside.
Yet people like Dwight McDonald lamented what they
saw as the stupefying spread of mass culture and “mid-culture.”
Regarding the former, McDonald credited the “Lords of Kitsch”
for reproducing “the deadening and warping effects of long
exposure to movies, pulp magazines, and radio.” Mid-culture
was worse. A form of “sophisticated kitsch,” it catered to the
aspirational high-mindedness of a middlebrow audience, self-
satisfied and self-deluded, integrated into mass society by a
debased form of an older high culture. It invited a flight from
social stratification into an encompassing zone of some educa-
tion and some conversance with arts and letters, a region of
perpetual aspiration satisfied by shrink-wrapped consumer
intangibles. Life magazine was McDonald’s exhibit A; he noted
that it appeared “on the mahogany library tables of the rich,
the glass cocktail tables of the middle class, and the oil-cloth
kitchen tables of the poor.” It offered up a homogenized content
to its “homogenized circulation” so that the same issue might
“present a serious exposition of atomic energy followed by a
disquisition on Rita Hayworth’s love life; photos of starving
children picking garbage in Calcutta and of sleek models wear-
ing adhesive brassieres.” Yet in the same breath the critic ac-
knowledged the enormous proliferation of genuine artistic
venues in the years following the war—theaters, musical groups,
184 John Smith Visits Suburbia

literary magazines, bookstores, records, art museums, fellow-

ships, reading salons, and art films. The deeper problem was
that “our Renaissance, unlike the original one, has been passive,
a matter of consuming rather than creating.” McDonald labored
to counterbalance his cultural snobbery with the remains of his
earlier leftism—with mixed results.
Class consciousness lived a shadow life, a matter of cul-
tural taste, varying standards of dress, food, and furniture,
audible in accents, visible now and then on the big screen, but
without purchase in the realm of power and privilege. Mass
culture and mid-culture were, for McDonald, more than a
dumbing down. Under the guise of democratizing the culture,
they insidiously undermined the capacity to criticize it. Without
that resource, democracy was a dead letter and so was any dream
of proletarian emancipation. Mass culture became an instru-
ment of domination. Social scientists objectified this atomized
mass of solitary individuals as if they were congeries of condi-
tioned reflexes to be manipulated.17
Acquiescence took the place of resistance and revolt. Han-
nah Arendt also wrote darkly about “mass society,” one me-
ticulously regulated and calibrated like some organic machine
that reproduced routinized behavior without anyone exercising
conscious control. There an atomized individual—“mass
man”—achieved a frightening form of freedom, one lacking
moral responsibility, at the mercy of impersonal forces, pacified
and passive. Something vital had been lost in the process. “The
very pathos of the labor movement in its early stages . . .
stemmed from its fight against society as a whole.” It had spo-
ken for all humanity, its “force of attraction was never restrict-
ed to the ranks of the working class.”
When class society became mass society, the horizon of
the possible shrank. Phillip Murray, once the head of the mili-
John Smith Visits Suburbia 185

tant steelworkers’ union, testified to the shrinkage: “We have

no classes in this country; that is why the Marxist theory of
class struggle has gained so few adherents. . . . In the final
analysis the interests of the farmers, factory hands, business and
professional people and white collar toilers prove to be the
same.” President Eisenhower made that point more bluntly
when addressing the convention at which the country’s two
labor federations merged to form the AFL-CIO. He told the
delegates, many of whom had fought the fiercest battles against
their heavily armed corporate employers during the Depression,
“The Class Struggle Doctrine of Marx was the invention of a
lonely refugee scribbling in a dark recess of the British Museum.
He abhorred and detested the middle class. He did not foresee
that in America, labor respected and prosperous, would con-
stitute—with the farmer and the businessman—the hated
middle class.”18
Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man somberly ob-
served the decline of revolutionary potential in the West gener-
ally as a sedated population became the captive of “false needs”
nurtured in the emporiums of consumer society. The very
aptitude for critical opposition had withered, especially on the
part of a working class that no longer recognized itself as a
working class. Once, its honor and mission derived from its
exclusion and misery in a society that promised its elevation
but degraded it instead; now, that had mutated into an endless
pursuit of happiness that left behind the faint taste of endless
unhappiness. “The political needs of society become individu-
al needs and aspirations” in a world that seemed the perfect
expression of “Reason” yet was “irrational as a whole.” How
mad a predicament, in which “the people recognized themselves
in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile,
hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”
186 John Smith Visits Suburbia

The philosopher concluded that “the containment of

social change was perhaps the most singular achievement of
advanced industrial society.” Class existed but had become
invisible. “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television
program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as at-
tractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro
owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this
assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the
extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the pres-
ervation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying
population.” In that new world “the administered life became
the good life.” Even in the industrial workplace, where the
modern class struggle was born, management no longer
dominated but administered; bosses vanished, bureaucrats
took their place, “the technological veil conceals the reproduc-
tion of inequality and enslavement,” but the slaves of modern
industry were “sublimated slaves,” mere instruments of a class-
less rationality.
One-Dimensional Man was a tragic creature and an
ironic one. In the mass, he formed “the people.” But “the people,”
previously the fomenters of social upheaval, had “moved up”
to become the vessels of social cohesion. Marcuse would inspire
a young generation of “new leftists.” But his book sounded a
note of deep pessimism. It closed with these drear words from
the Marxist social critic Walter Benjamin: “It is only for the sake
of those without hope that hope is given to us.”
More upbeat and just as much an intellectual hero as
Marcuse, sociologist C. Wright Mills also eulogized the labor
metaphysic. That made sense to an embryonic New Left in
search of new “agents of social change.” They shared the view
that categories like capitalism and socialism were outmoded,
at best merely different ways of describing a technocratic in-
John Smith Visits Suburbia 187

dustrial order run by a state bureaucracy. Mills and his young-

er co-activists looked abroad to anti-imperial revolutions like
the one in Cuba as a source of inspiration or back at home to
America’s internal colonial subjects inhabiting its urban ghet-
tos and the rural outback of the dispossessed.
Even Marcuse saw some light ahead emanating from a
world of outcasts and outsiders, “the exploited and persecuted
of other races and colors, the unemployed and unemployable.
They exist outside the democratic process . . . their opposition
is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. . . . It hits the
system from without and is therefore not deflected by the sys-
tem; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the
game.” As for the mainstream, that was dead water. The gloomy
if not quite dystopian pessimism of people like Bell, Marcuse,
Mills, and others seemed a somber commentary on the deeper
significance of Nixon’s utopia.
But like Nixon’s, their view too would prove ephemeral.
The notion of “mass society” was a compelling intellectual
conceit more than it was a full-bodied portrait of social reality.
In its own way, it was the obverse of the techno-liberalism it
excoriated. It conceded that underlying social fissures had been
effaced and it excoriated modern liberalism for that. The ac-
cusation was a trenchant one. As an instinctive expression of
unease with the way things were, it was seductive; it seduced
me.19

Professor Billshot and the Rules of the Game

“Administered” and “contained,” subterranean social discontent
nonetheless found circuitous outlets to the surface among
coming-of-age middle-class people like me. Those eruptions
could be curious indeed.
188 John Smith Visits Suburbia

On February 11, 1965, the Barnard Bulletin (the student

newspaper of Barnard College) ran a story with the headline
“Unknown Teacher Changes ‘Shapes.’ ” Something very odd
had happened. Students arriving for the first class of a course
called The Shapes of the American Experience had “found their
instructor stalking to and fro at the front of the room.” He
identified himself as Professor Graham A. Billshot. However,
the course, otherwise catalogued as English 52, was supposed
to be taught by Professor John Kazvenhaven, a well-regarded
scholar of American studies. As Professor K. later observed to
the Bulletin, “Shapes of the American Experience has been tak-
ing on a new shape.”20
Indeed! The whole class had gone missing. Professor K.
spent a week hunting for it. By the time the newspaper re-
ported the vanishing, Professor Billshot had taught three
classes and then himself vanished, never to be heard from again.
The registrar had never heard of him, nor had the English
department.
The case of the shifting shapes of the American experience
turned out to be a college prank. It was funny, but also conceived
in anger and with more than a touch of cruelty. Plotted for
months by a half dozen disaffected students (some attending
Columbia or Barnard, some dropouts), the plan to kidnap a
class and teach it was audacious at a time when audacious was
beginning to supplant acquiescent.
In its own peculiar way, the scheme was designed to de-
liver a poke in the eye to Arendt’s Mass Society, to Marcuse’s
repressive sublimation, to McDonald’s midcult, to the whole
opaque fabric of the suburban consensus, to the closing up of
the political and intellectual horizon, to the infantilizing and
psychologizing of social malfunction. Something was seething
beneath the deadening uniformity. Grandiose rhetoric, one
John Smith Visits Suburbia 189

might say. It is grandiose. The conspirators would most likely

not have articulated their motives with such high-falutin’ lan-
guage. We were having too good a time, after all, not authoring
a manifesto. Still, there is no question in my mind that for me
and my co-conspirators, we were also after bigger fish, if in a
small pond.
Marcuse’s book had been published the year before. I
hadn’t read it (and never became a big fan of it). I don’t remem-
ber if my comrades had. In any event, the kidnapping might be
thought of as an attempt to implement what Marcuse’s grim
treatise considered close to undoable. In his typically rather
ponderous prose, he put it this way: “Thus the question once
again must be faced: how can the administered individuals—
who have made their own mutilation into their own liberties
and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on an enlarged scale—
liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their mas-
ters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious cycle can be
broken?” We decided that Professor K. had provided us that
chance.21
Sad to say, I was not Professor Billshot. I was too young
looking, beardless, small in stature. We picked instead the one
of us with a beard, a deep voice with an English accent he picked
up from his British mother, dressed him in a de rigueur tweed
jacket and tie, and equipped him with a pipe. We also christened
him with that wonderful name. (To this day, I marvel at the fact
that no one, no student, not the Barnard Bulletin, the registrar,
or the English department thought his name strange or amus-
ing or had one of those “Oh!” epiphanies.)
Everything about the kidnapping, including Professor
Billshot’s name, was carefully thought out. We considered the
whole academic enterprise a Panglossian form of bullshit, of a
piece with a society that seemed deaf, dumb, and blind to its
190 John Smith Visits Suburbia

own hypocrisies and social inequities. We had scoured the

Columbia and Barnard course catalogues for days before choos-
ing what we decided was the apt expression of that kind of
academic pulp. “The Shapes of the American Experience”
seemed just vaporous enough to fill that bill. What in the world
did it mean? We intended to tell.
It takes a village not only to steal a class but to keep it
hidden, not just from the registrar but from the student body.
We all had our parts to play. One problem was how to keep
Professor K. from showing up before we had a chance to spirit
away the students. It turned out he was away at a conference.
We didn’t know that at the time, so we were prepared. One of
us was missioned to show up at his office before class to delay
Professor K. by pleading with him for a better grade for an
earlier class. This person was a woman and she was supposed
to cry because we needed to eat up time and because we were
sexist. Another one of us was supposed to call him on his office
phone, pretending to be a professor from another university
who was calling to invite him to join a presidential commission
studying “the shapes of the American experience.” Meanwhile,
another plotter was scouring the campus for an empty room
to which we might transport the class.
Harder than these logistics, however, were the psycho-
logistics. Democratic and egalitarian boilerplate notwithstand-
ing, we knew in our bones that all the great institutions that
made up the Establishment, whether in the political realm, at
the workplace, in the media, or in academia, rested on an un-
spoken deference. This was the central deception concealed
beneath the flawless exterior of the liberal consensus; that’s the
way we saw it, anyway. The bureaucracies that kept all these
realms afloat enjoyed a kind of sacred authority. I don’t know
if I was familiar with it at the time, but Marx had long ago of-
John Smith Visits Suburbia 191

fered a relevant critique: “The bureaucratic spirit is a Jesuitical,

theological spirit through and through. The bureaucrats are the
Jesuits and theologians of the state.” He spoke to where we lived:
“Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The top entrusts the
understanding of detail to the lower levels whilst the lower
levels credit the top with understanding the general, and so all
are mutually deceived.”
So Professor Billshot needed something more than a
beard, a tweed jacket, an English accent, and a pipe. He needed,
and only he could supply it, a je ne sais quoi presence, and that
he had to ad lib. What the Barnard Bulletin failed to report was
that when the first student entered the classroom and saw
somebody “stalking to and fro at the front of the room,” there
was no reason she should have assumed this stalking character
was the professor, although no doubt the stalking helped. But
there was also a brief conversation. It was a drizzly, gray day in
January and this first student observed as much, out loud.
Professor Billshot was silent at first, pondering her words, and
then in a brilliant flash of Delphic absurdity replied, “Yes, but
the pigeons will always be with us.”
That sealed the deal. Only a great mind could speak like
that. Act 1 of the plot was mission accomplished as the rest of
the students filed in and did as the first one had done, taking
their seats and looking expectantly Professor Billshot’s way.
Deference duly established, the structure of authority in place,
things would go swimmingly from here on. The member of our
team assigned to find an available classroom had succeeded and
Professor Billshot marched the class across the Barnard campus
to room 211 Milbank Hall, which before this had been used only
by geology students. There he began to teach.
But by this point the cruelty at work in this prank must
be already apparent. Our fellow students, just as much as
192 John Smith Visits Suburbia

Professor K, the institution he worked for, and the larger net-

work of power in which it nested, were the enemy and deserv-
ing of our contempt. We harbored not a scintilla of sympathy
for their position, for their powerlessness, for the plain fact that
had we been in their position we probably would have behaved
as they did, docile in the face of presumed legitimate authority.
They might be, in Herbert Marcuse’s lingo, repressively subli-
mated, but that earned them no mercy from our anger.
On the contrary. Perhaps the greatest pleasure we derived
from our coup was the collective writing of Professor Billshot’s
lectures during the days and nights leading up to the next class.
These might have been written by Professor Irwin Corey, a
hilarious comic of that time, known as “the world’s foremost
authority,” whose specialty was a kind of professorial buffoon-
ery, a profundity consisting of a torrential downpour of rain
forest–dense nonsense.
Professor Billshot began by striding to the blackboard,
where he drew a square, a triangle, a circle, and cube. Pausing
for a pregnant moment, he turned to his students to tell them
that those were “the shapes of the American experience.” Our
team, which had joined the class as fellow learners, watched as
everyone copied those shapes into their notebooks. For us it
was a moment of silent triumph and, like many a triumph, not
an entirely kind one.
Three lectures followed. They made Professor Billshot’s
opening graphics seem a model of rational coherence by com-
parison. They consisted of endless run-on sentences and sen-
tence fragments, made-up words, allusions to famous people
who had never existed, and titillating descriptions of “bundling”
in colonial America. So, for example, Professor Billshot might
wander off into a description of the founding of the country
in which settlers faced daunting challenges including the de-
John Smith Visits Suburbia 193

velopment of a mahascodene at the heart of their flabbadario.

A fornescrone interrupted a hunting party in Jamestown, leav-
ing all those who witnessed it with an indelible memory of its
awful shape. And so on. There is no honey-coating the mean-
ness of this prank.
All good and bad things come to an end. The registrar
went hunting for Professor K’s missing class and we were found
out, but forewarned by a sympathizer in the English department
in time to make our getaway.
So concluded what might be considered the high point
or low point or both of my academic career, such as it’s been.
Comic and nasty, to be sure. But what in the world has it got
to do with class? On the surface, nothing at all. But that was,
after all, the point of the suburban romance, the erasure of class
from the national vocabulary, its submergence in the mass
society and mass culture that Nixon invoked in his own way at
the kitchen in Moscow.
It is the premise of this book, however, that class will out,
that it always has in configuring “the shapes of the American
experience.” What a group of late (arrested?) adolescents living
on Manhattan’s Upper West Side dimly sensed was being felt by
groups just like them all over the country. We were the unantici-
pated and unwelcome offspring of a society in denial. Affluent
and complacent, yet somehow ill at ease, sensing trouble in para-
dise. And far larger groups utterly un–middle class, living outside
the perimeters or even within the borders of Nixon’s arcadia, were
becoming or long had been disabused of the consoling myth that
America had turned into a classless utopia. Instead, social and
racial divisions, moral hypocrisy, imperial ambition, faux democ-
racy, and bureaucratic arrogance, like an acid bath, were corroding
the innards of a society hiding from itself. The utopia embodied
in my kitchen and Nixon’s was already imploding.
 6
Free at Last?
“I Have a Dream” and Involuntary Servitude

March 15, 1964:

I apply as simply another Northern white college

student, intent on assuaging his paranoid, stricken
conscience by doing his good deed for the summer.
I realize how justified you are in assuming that. . . .
All I can say is that I want to work in Mississippi
very badly. There’s a limit to how long you can par-
ticipate in a vast orgy of reconciliation. I’m aware
of the tremendous amount of work to be done in
education. I realize the crucial importance of uti-
lizing the political devices particularly on a local
level. And I’m especially concerned with striking at
the economic roots of the most abhorrent human
perversion, racism, by organizing and uniting black
and white workers. At the same time, I understand
the risk you take in allowing me to take an active
part in the movement. . . . I know it’s essentially
Free at Last? 195

your fight, but I would like to help as fully as I can.

. . . One last thing—I don’t feel especially qualified
to teach and I would rather be involved in voter
registration. Thank you.

I was eighteen when I wrote this. Along with thousands

of other middle-class college students from the North, I was
applying to participate in what would soon become known as
Mississippi Freedom Summer. I don’t know how much my own
brief essay accompanying my application resembled others. I
imagine it did in its essentials: the earnestness, the barely con-
cealed white guilt and self-effacement, the audible embarrass-
ment about being middle class, and the sense of impending
confrontation that would lay to rest that “vast orgy of recon-
ciliation.” Uniting black and white was, as well, a hymnal shared
by the whole congregation of one thousand that ended up serv-
ing in Mississippi that summer.
However, going after the “economic roots” of racism and
targeting “workers” as the particular people to unite and orga-
nize showed up less frequently, I suspect, in these essay applica-
tions. Loaded phrases like those signaled my own left-wing
upbringing. That echo of the past was hardly unique to me.
Other “volunteers” hailed from similar backgrounds. Nonethe-
less, it was not the universal civil religion that all of us subscribed
to. Achieving equality before the law was our common objective;
after all, we were traveling to Mississippi to register people to
vote. “Economic roots” would for the most part remain buried.
Far more dissonant to modern ears might be the phrase
“orgy of reconciliation.” Beside the fact that I can’t help wincing
when I read it now—its adolescent straining for effect is cringe
producing; then again, I was an adolescent—it also hits on
something that might seem mystifying now. What “orgy of
196 Free at Last?

reconciliation”? Why the eager anticipation of ending it? Why

did I see it as a way of winning over whoever it was judging the
merits of my application?
Less than a year earlier I had marched with hundreds of
thousands of others on the Mall in Washington, DC. Was the
March on Washington a moment of combat, a moment of
reconciliation, perhaps both? When Martin Luther King Jr.
revealed his dream from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was
it a call to arms, a reverie of brotherhood, perhaps both? For
me and, I would guess, for most or even all my fellow “volun-
teers,” the answer was not in doubt. We were embarked on a
second civil war. Enough with reconciliation!
A loosely adhered to philosophy of nonviolence might
suggest otherwise, might offer up the prospect of penetrating
hostile hearts and minds. But we were headed to Mississippi,
where it was prudent to heavily discount such illusions. When
we gathered first early in June for a week’s training at the West-
ern College for Women in southern Ohio (surely the oddest
college orientation session on record) Bob Moses, a remarkable
Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
leader from Mississippi (via New York, where he’d been a
math teacher at the Bronx High School of Science), delivered
a grim forewarning: “When you’re not in Mississippi, it’s
not real, and when you’re there, the rest of the world isn’t
real.” I remember well, although at the time barely understood,
the late-night dialogues between Moses and Mario Savio
(later to become the leader of the Free Speech Movement at
Berkeley) that drew on Camus and what was then a campus
fascination with existentialism. Back and forth, they pondered
the choice each of us faced as we set our minds on Mississippi:
“If for any reason you’re hesitant about what you’re getting
into, it’s better you leave.” Moses was practically begging us
Free at Last? 197

not to go (three civil rights workers had just disappeared

in Philadelphia, Mississippi), a plea not likely to register with
an eighteen-year-old who anyway thought he would live
forever.1
When they were happening, the March on Washington,
King’s speech, and Mississippi Freedom Summer were all un-
derstood as sites of battle in a long-fought war that appeared
to be climaxing. For all the chords of mystic memory about the
nation’s consecration to equality sounded in King’s sermon,
the dream remained unredeemed, the speech an anthem of
the second civil war. Listeners could only expect more conflict
ahead, the marshalling of armies on both sides, despoilers of
the dream gathering above and below the Mason-Dixon Line,
on the alluvial plains of the Delta, in the hollows and mountains
of Appalachia, along the corridors of power in Washington and
the state capitols of the old Confederacy. Just a month after
King’s oration, four black children were slaughtered in a Bir-
mingham church. Reconciliation someday, perhaps, but not
yet.
Indeed, these moments even carried with them faint
echoes of past confrontations. If I felt it wise to allude to the
“economic roots” of racism, the conveners of the March on
Washington were likewise motivated. The march was for “Jobs
and Freedom.” That must seem an odd locution nowadays.
What did one have to do with the other? For that matter,
were they linked at all, or rather merely two good causes
worth fighting for? Could you have a job and not be free? Could
you be free and not have a job? Why mix them together? Was
there a time not so long before all this when it had been more
or less axiomatic that the race question and the labor question
signaled interrelated pathologies afflicting the same social
organism?
198 Free at Last?

Today these legendary moments no longer give off the

acrid aroma, the smoke and heat of battle. They have become
legendary, part of American mythic memory, mainly as the
stepping-stones to reconciliation. Perhaps not an orgy of rec-
onciliation, but still the soothing bathwater saturating what had
once been a painful bad conscience. Those events and those
words redeemed the dream in law, at the polling place, at work,
in neighborhoods, all across the public landscape of everyday
life from barrooms to bathrooms, at eating places and water
fountains, and most of all deep in the interior where personal
humiliation and indignity once festered.
Numerous poisonous violations of this idyll disfigure our
common life even now; racial and homophobic outbursts are
commonplace. But these can’t obscure what was a historic
transformation. “I Have a Dream” is a sacrosanct, essential part
of the American credo. In some sense, it outdoes virtually every
other literary reliquary lodged in the national dictionary, per-
haps with the sole exception of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence. The writer Garry Wills has called it “the greatest speech
given since Abraham Lincoln’s time.” The March on Washing-
ton long ago shed whatever combative reputation it once bore.
No public assemblage, conceived originally as an act of defiance,
retains anything remotely like the exalted esteem in which the
march is remembered. When King’s birthday became a na-
tional holiday, Ronald Reagan was president. The “Great Com-
municator” quoted the celebrated line about being judged by
“the content of your character” to confirm his dedication to the
dream (quite a feat of verbal gymnastics for someone who had
opened his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Missis-
sippi, the site of Freedom Summer’s chilling murder of three
civil rights workers). Apple deploys the image of King along
with Gandhi, Picasso, and Einstein to pump up its “think
Free at Last? 199

different” sales pitch. An astonishing 97 percent of all teenagers

recognized the speech in 2008. In 1996, the California Repub-
lican Party used an image of King at the march to lend legiti-
macy to its campaign against affirmative action. Every public
figure, no matter otherwise impeccable conservative credentials,
honors the dream and the march, at least in public pronounce-
ments. Even William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh sing its
praises. Glenn Beck went so far as to stage a reenactment of the
March on Washington to promote his own ascendancy. If Beck’s
was a kind of political pornography, for most the rediscovery
of the march and the speech as all-American is genuine. Who,
after all, could object any longer to the universal bathos of the
speech’s dream “that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the
sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will
be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”2
How could that consensus be genuine, though, in a soci-
ety so infested with the most noxious forms of inequality, much
of it racially inflected, even if no longer prescribed by law? The
dream, the march, the summer signaled the triumph of formal
equality, equality before the law: “free at last.” They also turned
out to be way stations on the road to a great loss. Largely hidden
from view, what was abandoned still hurt, more and more as
decades of neglect deepened the pain. If the “economic roots”
of racism were still visible in Washington in 1963 and in Mis-
sissippi in 1964, then in the years that followed they would be
buried alive. New hierarchies emerged that kept them interred.
On the one hand, this season of emancipation led on to a recur-
ring national celebration of moral accomplishment. On the
other hand, it left behind an unsatisfied yearning to be “free at
last.” So it is that what has become a shrine to our national
unity and virtue conceals within an unresolved dilemma. There
the hidden injuries of class and race intermix and abrade.
200 Free at Last?

Parting the Waters

Not even a single generation separates the class upheavals of
the New Deal and World War II from the racial revolution of
the 1960s. Hardly a decade passed between President Roosevelt’s
promulgation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee in
1941 and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. The
March on Washington we memorialize happened a mere twenty-
odd years after another planned March on Washington aimed
at ending racial discrimination in defense employment was
called off because FDR felt its pressure and created the FEPC.
Yet our collective memory bank files away these two his-
toric epochs as if they had virtually nothing to do with each
other. The first might have taken place in some Dickensian dark
age, the latter just yesterday. The first was about white people,
the second about colored people. The first spoke the class-
inflected language of our long-dead ancestors, the second de-
ployed the metaphors of identity that consume us to this day.
The first in one way or another interrogated capitalism, the
second found that irrelevant. The first dreamed a new dream,
the second recalled to mind an ancient one first articulated by
the founding fathers. While the new dream faded away, the old
one prevailed. Both eras promised deliverance and emancipa-
tion. But the formidable enemies of the first freedom crusade—
big business—often became the allies of the second. Both as-
pired to be “free at last.” Still, the freedom struggled for in the
first epoch seems different in kind from the freedom from the
burdens of ascribed racial (or other) identities that electrified
the last half of the twentieth century. Their felt sensibilities seem
utterly alien, one from the other, as if the nineteenth century
ended in 1945 and the twentieth began in 1960. In between
America fell down the rabbit hole.
Free at Last? 201

Looking back, the liberation promised (if unfulfilled) by

the New Deal and its aftermath seems to live in a galaxy far, far
away from the liberation (itself still unfulfilled) that the Wash-
ington marchers and Mississippi volunteers hoped to see so
soon.
Can this be so? It defies common sense and historical
reason to think of events and movements happening practi-
cally elbow to elbow yet somehow free of any organic connec-
tion. And as it turns out, that was not true. Nor is this simply
a matter of seeking out the roots, economic or otherwise, of
the civil rights revolution. That is a worthy undertaking. It is
important and edifying to follow the footprints the New Deal
left on the trail leading to the second American civil war. Some
scholars have done that and we are richer for it, even if their
insights don’t ring loudly enough on the public register.
What might be more intriguing is to explore why those
footprints became so obscured, so lost from sight that they
ceased to be part of our common sense. Arguably, for the tri-
umph of the second civil war to be hailed by all Americans, of
whatever political persuasion, it was necessary to erase those
original footprints. Left in plain sight they might serve as a
disquieting reminder that “free at last” still only happened in
the bosom of Abraham.
The march, the speech, and the summer, unlike the other
iconic Americana touched on in this book, start their story
when their telltale signs of class still mattered, were still visible,
if growing fainter. Like a rapidly receding star in an expanding
universe, those insignia grew ever dimmer until class no longer
mattered. And this is surpassingly strange. Because from the
country’s beginnings racial and class subordination had always
and everywhere formed a Gordian knot no one could untie.
Class mattered, with a vengeance.
202 Free at Last?

Midnight’s Children
African American slavery and capitalism grew up together in
the New World. Precisely how we should understand their re-
lationship has long been a subject of debate. Did American
capitalism depend on slave labor in its takeoff phase, drawing
on the rich harvest of cotton plantation production to provide
the seed capital for mercantile and eventually industrial for-
tunes? Or did indigenous capitalism enjoy its own momentum,
one that drew on free wage labor and did not depend on (even
if it profited from) the capital originating in southern slave
agriculture? Was the assignment of African Americans to the
status of chattel a function of a preexisting set of racist presump-
tions? Perhaps, yet various kinds of unfree labor preceded black
bondage (including Indian enslavement), and slavery was an
ancient institution without any necessary connection to race or
other ascribed human qualities, and certainly not to capitalism.
Whether or not racism deserves the status of the nation’s
original sin, the “peculiar institution” that defined the South
established a caste system that lasted long after the Confeder-
acy died and the link to slavery had been severed. Is that post-
bellum system best treated as a form of racial exclusion? Or is
it best seen, like apartheid, as simultaneously a form of labor
and racial control run in the interests of what was becoming a
thoroughly capitalist society from coast to coast, above and
below the Mason-Dixon Line?
Resistance to the entwined mechanisms of racial and class
subordination marked the tumultuous decades prior to the
March on Washington. Moreover, that resistance showed itself
in the North and in the South. It arose just when and because
the distinct political economy of labor-intensive plantation
agriculture that had rested on this caste system of labor disci-
Free at Last? 203

pline was falling apart. That tectonic social disruption led to

both mass dispossession and mass migration. The mudsills of
the American Southland struggled to survive as the detritus of
an agrarian economy in which their labor was increasingly
superannuated but in which racial stigmata, legal and otherwise,
remained intact. Or instead they set out for the North and its
promise of industrial salvation. Once there, they had to mobi-
lize to resist the worst ravages of wage slavery.

Dixieland
Marching down the Mall that day in August 1963 were people
from all over the country. Most visible and audible, however,
were southern blacks. Not because they made up most of those
hundreds of thousands; they probably didn’t. Rather because
the movement that propelled them there was most conspicu-
ously associated with the South: the Jim Crow codes, the sicken-
ing incidences of legal and vigilante violence, the churches that
headquartered the organized protests, the preachers whose
dignity and passion and unmistakable southern vocalizing
inspired multitudes, the bus stations, restaurants, thorough-
fares, and state capitols where defiance and counter-defiance
made their presences felt were southern in the bone. Something
had been happening in the Southland in the run-up to the
march that had turned acquiescence—the normal state of affairs
even under the most appalling circumstances—into rebellion.
Rebellion against what, precisely? Before the guns of the
Civil War had time to cool, peonage had replaced slavery. Share-
cropping and tenant farming comprised a complex network of
economic and social dependencies, one not restricted to African
Americans but in which they were disproportionately enmeshed
and with fewer escape routes than those available to their white
204 Free at Last?

counterparts. They were indebted to planters and merchants

for everything from seed and tools and essential livestock to
shelter and clothing.
Signatories to year-long or longer “leases” that severely
curtailed moving on, sharecroppers and tenants lacked even
the freedom to quit, with which mere wage laborers were
ironically blessed. People were confined by their isolation to the
captive markets for goods and services owned by their landlords
and furnishing agents. They often were without the basic lit-
eracy and numeracy to know when they were being chiseled by
their planter overlords, storekeepers, or loan sharks.
Education was a sometime thing, constantly interrupted
when kids were needed in the fields, and rarely lasted as long
as the eighth grade. Mississippi senator James K. Vardaman
explained what really mattered. Educating the black man “sim-
ply renders him unfit for the work which the white man has
prescribed, and which he will be forced to perform. . . . The only
effect is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent black
cook.” The peonage class was so mired in myriad forms of
contractual obligation and subordination that the prospect of
moving on was virtually a chimera. That was the point. Now
that slavery was dead, the master class of the new South could
rely on that immobilized workforce to sustain the southern
economy. More than incidentally, this half-free labor pool also
functioned to suppress the income and wage level of the South-
land’s “white trash.”3
Just in case someone seriously did entertain springing free
of this economic gulag (and of course many did), an intricate
system of legal and extralegal coercion made that virtually
impossible. This is what Jim Crow was in the first instance all
about, whatever its racist rationales helped justify. It was meant
to lock this system of caste peonage in place.
Free at Last? 205

“Color-blind” laws turned fraudulent “contracts” into

enforceable ones. Quit your leased land, walk away from your
crop commitments or your job, fail to pay the usurer, demand
that the landlord pay you for your “share” of the crop at the rate
agreed to, even question the amount you were due from or owed
to your landlord, and sheriffs would arrest you as a vagrant or
defaulter or for something more trivial or entirely made up on
the spot. Judges would sentence you to prison labor camps as
deadly as anything dreamed of by the most sadistic slave mas-
ters or Stalinist commissars.
Debt slavery became itself a lucrative system of public
finance and an ordinary business as planters and turpentine
extractors and coal mine owners and even southern steel mills
contracted with southern states for prison labor. In a rudimen-
tary way, there formed a kind of informal market in collateral-
ized debt obligations trafficking in the buying and selling of the
rights to indebted prisoners, or rather to their labor. The Thir-
teenth Amendment may have outlawed involuntary servitude,
but the redeemers who saved the South from Yankee Recon-
struction effectively outlawed the Thirteenth Amendment.4
Jim Crow closed off all political channels of redress. The
voting booth was shuttered. The Republican Party was neutered
once Reconstruction was overturned. The Democratic Party
was racially cleansed. Constitutional protections were worthless
in a region where juries, prosecutors, and judges were all white.
In 1960, .5 percent of black kids went to integrated schools in
the South. As late as 1962–63, there were no black students in
integrated public schools in Mississippi, South Carolina, and
Alabama. In the one hundred southern counties with the high-
est percentage of black residents, only 8.3 percent were registered
to vote. As of 1963 in Mitchell City, Georgia, not one of the city’s
nine thousand African Americans had ever served on a jury.5
206 Free at Last?

Even those unofficial arteries of democratic life and re-

sistance—newspapers, public forums, and religious assem-
blies—were hemmed in, censored by fear of what they could
say, why and where they could congregate. The black middle
class, rural and urban, that ran these institutions and account-
ed for the sliver of professionals, teachers, and small-business
people with some access to education beyond the most elemen-
tal found its influence and zone of freedom ghettoized. A
truncated black “elite” enjoyed a meager ration of privileges in
return for keeping the peace.6
Should all of this economic and political hardwiring
short-circuit, Jim Crow always could make resort to the extra-
legal blunt instrument: vigilante beating, terror bombing,
lynching. Often enough it was hard to draw a clear boundary
between the legal and illegal. That too was the point, as much
because it instilled a permanent preemptive atmosphere of fear
as because, when actually deployed, it worked. So it was that
caste-based peonage was frozen in place, its labor and racial
protocols forming a singular and coherent social organism.
Long after the southern Populist movement, which had
briefly challenged this state of affairs, had been killed off at the
end of the nineteenth century, this intermingling of class and
racial exploitation and disempowerment prevailed. Organizing
among tenant farmers (white and black) during the Great De-
pression put up some resistance. New Deal federal agricultural
programs offering aid to distressed farmers through price sup-
ports and subsidized acreage restrictions helped a bit, but only
a bit. These government agencies were supposed to be color-blind,
but in real life the old southern oligarchy ran the programs lo-
cally and made sure Jim Crow defined the rules. New Deal job
creation and welfare programs also loosened the confinement,
opening up alternative sources of income. But here too program
Free at Last? 207

administrators in the South made sure those alternatives didn’t

disturb the ready availability or subsistence wage level of the
black labor force. Moreover, thanks to the substantial political
clout of the South in Washington, national legislation like the
Fair Labor Standards Act excluded precisely those most critical
and vulnerable sectors of work—agriculture and domestic labor,
especially—from its wage, hour, and other protections.

The Machine in the Garden

Racial peonage still defined the southern status quo up to 1945.
Around that time, however, the fundamentals began to shift.
Nicholas Lemann’s book The Promised Land explored the sea
change. He argued that the introduction of the mechanical
cotton picker eliminated, though not all at once, the underlying
economic need for that system of labor. Cotton was the most
labor intensive and least mechanized branch of southern agri-
culture. An average field hand could pick twenty pounds of
cotton in an hour; the mechanical picker could harvest a thou-
sand pounds. The introduction of chemical weed killers after
World War II further reduced the need for stoop labor. New
technology did not, however, sweep away the whole apparatus
of Jim Crow legal, political, and social exclusion that had kept
class and racial hierarchies stable for generations.
Arguably, the fate of the freedmen had always been dispos-
session once the party of Lincoln abandoned the incendiary
idea of redistributing land in order to create an independent
landowning class of small farmers out of the population of
ex-slaves. What happened first during the Great Depression
and then in the wake of postwar mechanization amounted to
a second dispossession. In a population already suffering
immiseration, now even the means of cobbling together a bare
208 Free at Last?

livelihood might be beyond reach. Or if rural African Americans

managed to hang on, their conditions of work grew more bru-
tal, their conditions of life more abject. For African Americans
living under those circumstances, the sting of Jim Crow grew
sharper still as it accentuated their isolation and impotence.7
Isolation and impotence are not necessarily the breeding
grounds of social upheaval. On the contrary, despair is as
likely an outcome. But locked-away rural enclosures were at the
same time being opened up to other possibilities, both tangible
ones and ones born of a new national zeitgeist.
Migration, beginning just before and during World War
I and proceeding at an accelerated rate during and after World
War II, offered a way out of the southern gulag: an escape from
peonage, poverty, and dispossession as well as from social and
political pariahdom. Some stayed in the South but moved from
the countryside to the cities. One million black people made
that trek. The overwhelming majority found jobs as cooks,
common laborers, machine operators, janitors, and in other
kinds of unskilled labor. More than half of black women in the
cities worked as domestics. As late as 1890, four out of five Af-
rican Americans lived in the rural South; by 1950, somewhere
between 30 and 40 percent lived in southern cities.
While Jim Crow naturally prevailed there as well, oppor-
tunities for work were more plentiful both before and after the
Great Depression, especially in steel towns like Birmingham or
commercial entrepôts like New Orleans, in business centers like
Atlanta or in the textile towns of the Piedmont. Middle-class
African Americans likewise found more elbow room in these
urban spaces, larger terrain on which to cultivate their profes-
sional and business aspirations, and here their social status and
political influence grew weightier, albeit still within the confines
of the ghetto.
Free at Last? 209

A southern tributary of the great river of moral outrage

and political determination that inundated Washington, DC, in
1963 formed out of this rural/urban convergence of African
American desire and despair. If the southern city could speak for
the countryside, it was in part because the leadership class of
preachers and teachers and trade unionists in the South were
often not even a generation removed from the alluvial lands of
the black belt, the red clays of Georgia, and the uplands of the
Carolinas. Migration to the region’s cities was not only driven by
the desperation of dispossession from the land; migration carried
with it a promise of release. Marching for jobs and freedom in
this world would always entail liberation from involuntary ser-
vitude and from social extinction as much as it would relief from
the humiliations and disabilities of second-class citizenship.8

North Star
A second tributary rushing toward the Mall in Washington had
its headwaters in the South as well. It too was fed by disposses-
sion from the land. It too was a recombinant freedom movement
struggling to throw off the irons of class and racial servitude
all at once. It too was great migration away from agricultural
peonage. But it headed instead to the industrial North in num-
bers that dwarfed the exodus to the urban South. And once
there, it established a distinctive profile. In the memory of one
woman, “Chicago was a real place for colored people,” but not
quite the promised land. “No, indeed, I’ll never work in any-
body’s kitchen but my own, any more,” she happily reported,
but “that’s the one thing that makes me stick to this job.” More
free, but not yet free.9
What historians have called the Great Migration happened
in two stages. First came the exodus to the North during and
210 Free at Last?

after the First World War. Defense industries, industries con-

verted to defense, and all those contiguous industries that
sprang to life to feed the war machine or that were fed by it
hungered after labor. Southern planters and other regional
commercial interests did what they could to staunch the flow
of cheap black labor out of Dixie. So southern economic and
political elites tightened the noose when and where they could,
using every available means—legal coercion and violence—to
keep the labor pool frozen in place. Nonetheless, hundreds of
thousands of African Americans flooded the mills and plants
and packing houses of the industrial heartland.10
Greater in scope was the second phase of migration north
that happened during and after the Second World War. Begin-
ning in the early 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, more than
5 million African Americans left the South. While the movement
was driven by the same insatiable demand for labor, it was also
portentously different.
Mechanization of cotton agribusiness made the old racial
peonage arrangements increasingly superfluous. Rather than
keep sharecroppers, tenants, and field hands on the premises,
southern oligarchs and politicians wanted them gone. They
preferred that rather than to have to pay even the meanest sum
for their upkeep. Now the dispossessed threatened to become
a burden rather than a blessing. If once rural African Americans
were pulled north by the lure of escape, now they were pushed
there as well. And by the mid-1950s the push exceeded the pull
as the demand for industrial labor up north began to slacken.
By the time of the March on Washington, it was becoming
clearer day by day that the prospects of economic opportunity
up north, once so alluring, were drying up. You might say de-
agriculturalization in the South (at least as a labor-intensive
system of production) preceded the deindustrialization
Free at Last? 211

that would eventually await the region’s dispossessed in the

North.11

The Footsteps of the Deliverer

Before that reality began to bite, however, the experience of
industrial insurgency and New Deal reform in the 1930s and
1940s left a permanent imprint. The trade union establishment
had long been lily white. But the uprising of the industrial
working class during the New Deal years upset many encrusted
ways of doing things. It called into question, for example, the
absolute sanctity of private property. It interrogated the viabil-
ity of capitalism. Instead of warding off government intrusions
into the labor market, it invited them. Once itself a hierarchy
defined, first of all, by craft and skill, one that excluded millions
of the less lettered, the new labor movement of the 1930s down-
graded those divisions in favor of a more ecumenical embrace
of all working people.
Accustomed to behaving on behalf of its own parochial
interests, the insurgency appeared on the stage of public life as
the champion of all those exploited, abused, and discarded by
the collapse of the market system. In a nation that had always
assumed that rights inhered in the individual—a bedrock
principle of constitutional dogma and jurisprudence—the new
labor movement helped author a strikingly original notion of
collective rights that commanded the attention of lawmakers,
judges, and constitutional scholars. Indeed, the labor rebellion
along with the New Deal made rights where there had
been none before; collective economic rights entered that pan-
theon of sacred national obligations once solely occupied by
those civil liberties and civil rights that inhered in the indi-
vidual.12
212 Free at Last?

But what about race, that ageless and obsidian barrier to

freedom? Here too the emancipatory desires that enflamed the
labor movement disturbed the ancien régime. Those universal-
ist yearnings and the ground-level social solidarity character-
istic of the new industrial unions broke through to the other
side. Black workers not only flooded into the auto industry and
meatpacking plants, into the rubber and electrical factories,
into the steel mills and coal mines, but also into the United Auto
Workers, United Packinghouse Workers, United Rubber Work-
ers, United Steel Workers, United Mine Workers, United Electri-
cal Workers, and dozens of other organizations. And this was
before they were even organizations, while they were still com-
bat formations in a countrywide series of class conflicts, fluid
social creations where old identities, including race-based ones,
could dissolve and liquefy.
But not entirely. Segregated unions remained, especially
in the older skilled trades. Barriers to membership remained.
Even the most audacious of the new unions, often led by radi-
cals, were tainted by racial privilege. Hierarchies of wages, op-
portunities for promotion, degrees of security all remained
pockmarked by racist accommodations and inequities. The
flood tide of black migrants was met by race riots in cities like
Detroit. As for the New Deal administration, it was of course
premised on not disturbing its relations with the entrenched
racial order in the South. No frontal assault on Jim Crow was
contemplated in those quarters, especially once the attempt to
purge southern Democrats in the 1938 primaries failed.
Nonetheless, it is hard to exaggerate the transformation
in African American working-class life ushered in by the eco-
nomic democracy of the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) and the New Deal. The CIO reconfigured the country’s
economic and political landscape by unionizing the unorganized
Free at Last? 213

who comprised the core of the labor force in American indus-

try. Half a million African Americans joined the CIO. In the
South, the new labor movement was “the lamp of democracy,”
a beacon of class-based rights consciousness. Talk of an eco-
nomic bill of rights (assurances of a job, housing, health care,
education, security in old age, a living wage), of the “Four
Freedoms,” including freedom from want, and of the collective
right to organize unions became part of the lingua franca of
the new order. Where once “employment at will” and the ab-
solute rights that attached to private property had prevailed,
now the protocols of industrial democracy penetrated the black
box of the workplace, curtailing the powers of the old indus-
trial autocracy.
A letter from Colonel Elton D. Wright VI written in 1943
to the Justice Department conveys the convergence: “I am only
asking for my rights the above named men violated the citizens
rights bill of the constitution of the U.S.A. by compelling me
to work for them at low wages, unfair and inhuman treatment,
and threatened me with death.” Letters like this from cotton
pickers, sugarcane choppers, workers in turpentine stills and
lumberyards filled up the files of the Justice Department and
the NAACP. “Slavery,” “involuntary servitude,” and “peonage”
made up their common vocabulary.13
Social justice, economic democracy, collective rights and
obligations established a remarkable new way of life and belief,
a fresh way of reacting to the inequities and iniquities of mod-
ern life. This was true not only for the nation as a whole but for
the ex-peons and dispossessed fleeing the American gulag. For
a time, the struggle for civil rights was conducted within that
context. A journalist observed the way the ground was shifting:
“The crucial struggle for civil liberties today is among tenant
farmers and industrial workers, fighting for economic
214 Free at Last?

emancipation and security.” Fortune magazine called civil rights

“the irrepressible conflict of the 20th century.” When FDR or-
dered the creation of the FEPC, the Amsterdam News com-
mented, “If President Lincoln’s proclamation was designed to
end physical slavery, it would seem that the recent order of
President Roosevelt is designed to end, or at least to curb, eco-
nomic slavery.” Civil rights had to be simultaneously econom-
ic rights, collective rights, the rights belonging to the working
class tout court, or they would fail at freedom. During the
Second World War, black protest movements combined “claims
to racial equality with still-robust claims of labor and eco-
nomic rights.”
Case law reflected the sea change. The Justice Department
prosecuted civil rights complaints from the standpoint of eco-
nomic as well as racial justice. This amounted to a deliberate
repudiation of the individualist foundations of previous racial
and workplace jurisprudence. Where judge-made law once
nullified efforts to regulate wages and hours or undermined
union organizing and strikes on the grounds that they interfered
with the freedom of contract between employer and employee,
the new dispensation established a fresh foundation upon which
lawmaking might recognize collective rights.
With respect to civil rights grievances especially, the Jus-
tice Department now excavated the long-buried Thirteenth
Amendment against involuntary servitude (and with frequent
backup references to the Emancipation Proclamation) as a le-
gitimate basis for adjudicating these accusations. This was
particularly the case in litigation involving agricultural workers
subjected to what amounted to debt slavery. Under Francis
Biddle as attorney general (and onetime head of the National
Labor Relations Board), the Justice Department welcomed this
convergence of labor and civil rights principles. Strange as it
Free at Last? 215

may seem now, this was the common sense of mid-twentieth-

century jurisprudence.
Even the NAACP, which for many years had rested its case
against segregation on the “equal protection” clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment, adopted this new approach. Question-
ing of racial injustice had for a long time targeted individual
attitudes—in a word, white prejudice. Inequality was presumed
to root in individual psychology, not in society’s social structure.
And violations could therefore be educated or litigated away.
But now that industrial individualism (the singular relationship
between an employer and employee) had become suspect, so
too had racial individualism, no more a matter of settled law.
But this new state of affairs would not endure. While the Justice
Department persisted longer than did the NAACP, by the
early 1950s this unorthodox way of addressing racial injustice
as a matter of economic and collective injustice had begun to
fade away. Why?14

The Empire Strikes Back

Cold War America was a study in intolerance. Ironically, the
nation’s legendary faith in American exceptionalism—the no-
tion that the New World had afforded humankind a second
chance at freedom—provided the rationale. As the American
government went about consolidating its victory after World
War II, as it laid down the rules and erected the institutions that
would entrench U.S. political and economic dominance in the
West and across broad stretches of what soon became known
as the “third world,” it offered a distinctive justification for that
empire building. It was to be a heroic project having nothing
to do with material self-interest or the antimonies of class
conflict. Instead, it was undertaken to stop the onrush of
216 Free at Last?

Communist tyranny, to create a fortress of freedom and de-

mocracy, a transatlantic society where class no longer mattered,
where the very language of class conflict made no sense.
America, not the Soviet Union, had achieved a classless nir-
vana, Richard Nixon reminded Nikita Khrushchev in that
Moscow kitchen. The rest of the Free World would follow.
One consequence of this ideological legerdemain was to
sever the race question from the labor question since the latter
was no longer to be asked. Blunt instruments could be used to
drive the point home. McCarthyism was a political plague
(laboratory tested in the highest circles of the Truman admin-
istration before being released into the general population by
the senator from Wisconsin). It infected every facet of social
justice movements, legislative reforms, government agencies,
ideological convictions, constitutional protections, civil liber-
ties, civic organizations, school curricula, and channels of
popular culture, including especially Hollywood; all had been
in one way or another touched by the egalitarian zeitgeist of
the New Deal era. Once again, the fear and denial about class
indigenous to the American makeup worked its black magic,
turning a defense of democracy into its mad undoing.
Whether mad or crazy like a fox, the lions of the Cold War
knew the enemy: the root of the problem was this lingering
preoccupation with class, that hidden tumor that had sud-
denly surfaced and metastasized during the Great Depression
and that had to be excised. Symptoms appeared everywhere
across the body politic: here in union demands for universal
medical care, there in the talk in legislative chambers about
government economic planning, popping up in classrooms
where syllabi included The Grapes of Wrath. And the tumor was
also infiltrating organizations ostensibly committed to racial
equality.
Free at Last? 217

Civil rights groups and their allies had to contend with

this suffocating atmosphere, the relentless assault by innuendo,
rumor, lie, and congressional witch hunt. To challenge the racial
status quo had always been risky. Now it risked a deadly asso-
ciation. One group after another, some leaning further left than
others, felt the sting and looked for cover. Walter Reuther, for
example, had earned his bona fides in part by his record as a
committed enemy of the Communist faction within his own
union. In that connection, he explained his advocacy of civil
rights as the best way to fight the red menace abroad: “We
can’t defend freedom in Berlin so long as we deny freedom in
Birmingham” was the way he put it that day at the Lincoln
Memorial. Even the NAACP, which had grown distinctly more
moderate and respectable since its founding at the beginning
of the century, made haste to disassociate itself from anything,
however remote, that carried the curse of class consciousness.
Indeed, the organization engaged in a purging of its own ranks
to get free of the stigma.
It became unwise, under these circumstances, to pursue
a legal strategy against segregation that pointed out its connec-
tion to the labor question and to the collective rights Jim Crow
violated. A return to racial individualism was in deep harmony
with the bromides of a classless America that were quickly be-
ing born again and broadcast around the world. The formal
equality with which every individual was alleged to be endowed
was far safer ground upon which to carry on the fight. When
King later argued on behalf of what soon would be known as
affirmative action, he remained mindful of Cold War atmo-
spherics, suggesting that it would be a good idea to take
“affirmative action . . . to remove the conditions of poverty,
insecurity, and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the
seed of Communism grows and develops.”15
218 Free at Last?

Ideological genuflections like this could also, by the way,

win the allegiance of Washington Cold Warriors. These manda-
rins confronted the global revolt against colonialism that fol-
lowed the war. Housing apartheid within their own borders was
an embarrassment for State Department bureaucrats. They might
win over third world hearts and minds by applauding a crusade
whose goal—the free and equal individual—was as American
as could be. That might work, but only so long as the crusaders
could not be confused with carriers of the red menace. (Before
I left for Mississippi early in summer of 1964, I was sent as one
member of a delegation of volunteers on a side trip to Washing-
ton, there to lobby members of Congress about the need for
federal marshals to monitor what was happening in the Magno-
lia State. Three COFO [the Council of Federated Organizations,
which sponsored Freedom Summer, consisted of SNCC, CORE
(the Congress of Racial Equality), the NAACP, and the SCLC
(Southern Christian Leadership Council)] workers—James
Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—had disap-
peared under mysterious and ominous circumstances from a
jailhouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Among other lawmakers,
we visited with Illinois senator Paul Douglas, a New Deal
Democrat with impeccable liberal credentials. The senator
applauded our general intentions in venturing south but warned
us to be wary of the “Commies.” I was stunned, embarrassed
for him.)
Debate inside the legal profession about “rights” had
never come to a stop, even in the halcyon days when “collective
rights” were in the forefront. But now the momentum shifted
back in the direction of racial individualism. Sober choices
about what might be most palatable to justices without factor-
ing in their political views was standard practice even in less
incendiary times. The basic desire to achieve something tangible
Free at Last? 219

in whatever way always carried weight. The class biases of or-

ganizations staffed and run by upwardly mobile African
Americans mattered too. Those for whom it was clear that their
own self-improvement might be achieved apart from a gen-
eral uplift of their racial brethren, if only certain legal barriers
were eliminated, could find that strategic approach compatible
with their own experience and without feeling qualms about
abandoning the cause.
In any event, the NAACP’s great triumph in Brown vs. Board
of Education marked a decisive change in the weather. The case
turned not on whether structures of economic and social power,
both in the public and the private spheres, embedded inequality
systemically. Instead, up for decision was whether government-
sanctioned segregation took an unfair psychological and cul-
tural toll on its victims, leaving behind a permanent wound to
their individual self-esteem. It marked a return to the middle-class
roots of the organization whose legal strategies during most of
its existence focused on gaining access to schools, railroad dining
cars, and middle-class neighborhoods, to the terrain on which a
classless modern civil rights struggle played out.
Working people bringing their complaints to the NAACP
had most often emphasized the dire economic consequences
of Jim Crow. The lawyers and activists who manned the orga-
nization, on the other hand, focused more heavily on the legal
category of segregation itself. The African American worker
began to disappear “as a relevant legal character.”
In general, the Cold War entailed a flight away from the
class dimensions of social dilemmas and their material founda-
tions. It was therefore also congruent with the effort to psy-
chologize away any disturbing allusions to the Emancipation
Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment or other memories
of a just then bygone era.16
220 Free at Last?

Alive in the Afterlife

Memorials to the Emancipation Proclamation and the amend-
ment that finally abolished slavery had been a staple of Amer-
ican public life for decades after the Civil War. Frederick Dou-
glass believed that Emancipation Day would outlast July 4th as
the best-remembered national holiday because it commemo-
rated a more fundamental realization of the freedom promised
in the Declaration of Independence. In Douglass’s view “what
is the slave to the Fourth of July” but “a thin veil to cover up
crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” For decades
prior to the march, black agricultural and industrial workers
had invoked the Thirteenth Amendment against involuntary
servitude in their legal battles against exploitation. When its
conceivers first planned the March on Washington, they thought
of it as “the climax to the peoples’ commemoration of the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.” Indeed, A. Philip Ran-
dolph, who was the godfather of the march, first thought of
calling it the Emancipation March for Jobs. Lincoln’s executive
order and the constitutional amendment did get mentioned
at the march itself. King alluded to Leviticus and its command-
ment to redeem the indebted bondsman, to restore his
alienated land. All this, however, was more metaphor than
program.
Already by the time of the march popular celebrations of
these historic landmarks of labor emancipation had largely
ceased to be. No one brought them up—not much, anyway.
Still, it might have been expected that in 1963, the one hundredth
anniversary of the proclamation, that historic moment would
command center stage. Arguably, the proclamation and the
amendment are the most profound testaments to the quest for
human freedom ever produced by the American political genius,
Free at Last? 221

far surpassing in significance the declaration of national inde-

pendence of 1776.
In 1963, however, these emancipatory landmarks didn’t
measure up. The public eye was no longer trained on the prob-
lem of labor exploitation, no longer concerned itself with unfree
labor, “involuntary servitude,” half-free labor, or the “free labor”
frequently referred to by earlier generations of Americans as
“wage slavery.” Instead, race, Christianity, the nation, the “be-
loved community,” and the South as the land of Nod made up
the moral framework of the freedom struggle in this new era.
Less lofty than these but more portentous about the
logic of King’s speech was its fraternizing with another meta-
phor: the “race of life” fit well within the imaginative comfort
zone of bourgeois America. It presumed class stratification and
would become, a half century later, the axiomatic assumption
of the nation’s first African American president when he urged
all to join “the race to the top.” That was and still is what people
mean, what King meant, when he famously cried out, “I have
a dream. It is rooted in the American dream.” Its emancipatory
yearnings notwithstanding, it is a dream that, without thinking
about it, takes for granted class hierarchy; otherwise, what’s the
point of the race?17
Still, the past, so recent, still smoldering, could not be
extinguished entirely. The oratory at the Lincoln Memorial now
and then wandered into verboten territory. This was true par-
ticularly of the controversial (and censored) speech of John
Lewis, representing the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee. Lewis struck a more militant note. Referring to
hundreds of thousands not there that day, Lewis cried out, “They
are receiving starvation wages . . . or no wages at all. While we
stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi
who are out in the fields working for less than $3/day, 12 hours
222 Free at Last?

a day.” Criticizing the Kennedy administration’s civil rights

legislation then making its way through Congress, Lewis called
instead for a “a bill that will provide for the homeless and starv-
ing people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the
equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a fam-
ily whose total income is $100,000 a year.”
More telling than that, however, was the young student
activist’s call for “a serious social revolution.” In what he said
and how he said it—the lack of verbal polish, the drawl liquefy-
ing his vowels, the perpetual scowl—the visage of the Georgia
sharecropper showed through. Red clay still figuratively cling-
ing to the put-upon field hand, up from peonage as a student
seminarian, Lewis was not about to forget where he hailed from.
Nor did he fail to remind his audience that beneath all the hal-
lelujahs for the freedom and equality promised by the nation’s
founders, a harsher, more intractable economic reality festered,
one if left unchallenged would subvert the most exalted aspira-
tions, turn them into hollowed-out abstractions.18
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech largely
consisted of those homilies and abstractions. It was delivered,
however, with eloquence. And at the end it took flight with an
unscripted but well-rehearsed peroration into a realm familiar
to the world Lewis was still attached to, that spiritual mountain
landscape where the black dispossessed of the cotton plantation
and the northern ghetto communed. This was the common
ground of traditional millennial release from racial bondage.
An exalted vision, to be sure, but one so airborne it lost sight
of the down below.
Yet even in King’s speech, with which nearly everyone
outside Dixie could shout amen to, there were the occasional
hints of something else. The line between a version of Christian
theology and secular leftism could be a fluid one. King’s book
Free at Last? 223

Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story acknowledged

the insights of Marx about the great divide separating wealth
and poverty arising from capitalism’s Mammon worship. Would
equality before the law do much for those left hopeless in the
ghettos of the North, where eating where you wanted to or
voting if you wanted to might leave the status quo intact, the
Man still the Man, the powers still with the power?19
Black leaders standing at some distance from the civil
rights establishment echoed or enhanced these views. Julius
Lester, Amairi Baraka, and even James Farmer, the head of the
Congress of Racial Equality, noted that the speech mainly
elided the plight of the urban poor of the North. For this omis-
sion, Malcolm X likened King to a “house negro.” Claude Brown,
the author of Manchild in the Promised Land, noted that no
milk and honey awaited black migrants in the North, only
poverty and despair: “For who does one run to when he’s already
in the promised land?”
Malcolm’s fiery denunciations notwithstanding, King
himself flirted with these same insights, a flirtation that grew
more serious over time. For years before the march, King had
been importuned by Randolph and Bayard Rustin to speak
about the labor problem, to reach out to the labor movement.
Rustin had always believed the long-range objectives of the
march should focus on economic justice: “What is the value of
winning access to public accommodations for those lacking the
money to use them?” Those pleas registered. King’s remarks
devoted to employment discrimination and poverty observed
that while some progress was visible in the South, in the North
all he could see was “retrogression.” The speech itself called out,
“We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot
vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which
to vote.” Just a month before people gathered on the Mall, King
224 Free at Last?

described for reporters the two purposes of the march: “to

arouse the conscience of the nation on the economic plight of
the Negro one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclama-
tion and to demand strong forthright civil rights legislation.”
Addressing a demonstration in Albany, Georgia, well before the
march, King compared the civil rights sit-ins to the CIO sit-
down strikes of the 1930s.20
Practically since its founding, the CIO had pressured the
Democratic Party to embrace the cause of racial justice. Many
trade unions endorsed the march (even though the AFL-CIO did
not). They did more than offer a go-with-god verbal piety; they
went themselves in enormous numbers. Unions chartered buses
and trains, bringing thousands of their own members and others
to the Mall. The bodyguards protecting the speakers at the po-
dium were union members. Posters announcing, “We march for
minimum wage coverage for all” lined the walkway. Much of the
music that inspired the movement derived from earlier labor
conflicts, including Bob Dylan’s “Power Is Their Game,” Woody
Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer,” “We Shall Not
Be Moved,” “Which Side Are You On?” and of course “We Shall
Overcome”—all were adaptations of old labor songs.
Most important among these labor organizers was the
conceptual godfather of the march, A. Philip Randolph. Ran-
dolph was then the head of the Negro American Labor Coun-
cil (NALC), which had formed rather recently to carry on the
fight to desegregate the labor movement. He was also a social-
ist and founder of the Sleeping Car Porters Union. And it was
Randolph who threatened to mobilize a march on Washington
in 1941 to desegregate defense employment until President
Roosevelt hurriedly created the FEPC. For Randolph and his
colleagues, the intermixing of the race and labor questions was
a given. The NALC under his leadership issued the first call for
Free at Last? 225

a new March on Washington that we now treat with reverence.

In its early incarnations, the march was to include as well mas-
sive civil disobedience around the country.
And it was to be a march for “Jobs and Freedom.” On the
one hand, that demand for jobs is a straightforward reminder
that the march conceivers and organizers retained a living con-
nection to an era just gone by when racial and economic free-
dom were consciously conjoined. This would hardly be worth
mentioning were it not the case that popular memory has
largely erased that from the event’s genesis and purpose.
Not only jobs but other proposals were included in the
call to the march that reflected the same outlook. Thus, there
was talk of raising the minimum wage, about initiating public
works and building low-cost housing, of establishing a perma-
nent Fair Employment Practices Commission whose reach
would extend into the private sector, of extending the jurisdic-
tion of the Fair Labor Standards Act to embrace those occupa-
tions in which black workers predominated, in agriculture,
domestic work, retail services, and so on. These demands were
the stock-in-trade of the New Deal’s achievements, or at least
of its aspirations. Their presence on the Mall, even if uttered
sotto voce, was familiar enough. Yet they also signaled that
something had changed.21
Demanding jobs in this context was as much new as it was
old. When the two great migrations unfolded, finding work was
not the burning issue. (Of course, during the Great Depression
work was scarce but for just that reason migration north slowed
considerably.) During and after both world wars jobs were
plentiful, which is why migrating was enticing at all. By the
1960s, however, the economic fate of northern ghetto dwellers
had deteriorated. King noted this and so too did others,
including people like Malcolm X who mocked the march. The
226 Free at Last?

national economy was operating at a high voltage, but the first

signs of what over the ensuing decades would become a more
general malfunctioning that would afflict the white as well as
the black working class was taking its toll especially on those
always first to feel the hurt. It was as if the Great Depression
had returned or threatened to return and settle down perma-
nently in Harlem, South Chicago, North Philadelphia, Watts,
and so on.
Creating jobs could address this, of course. But this de-
mand—and the other proposals about minimum wages and
labor standards and universal protections—was now normal-
ized. Such propositions had lost their once insurgent energy.
When the labor uprising first detonated, the question was less
about getting a job than about what happened to you on the
job once you had one. At the work site humiliation and fear
were daily fare. This was the land of the voiceless, a world of
invisibles compelled to move to the rhythms of the labor mar-
ket, featureless machine tenders, there to conform to an alien
discipline designed for purposes indifferent to their material
or spiritual well-being. Behind each aggrieved complaint about
wages or the speed of the line or the favoritism and insults of
the foreman or compulsory overtime or the surveillance by
company spies or the bullying by company thugs lay a deeper
determination to be free of all that and thereby create a new
definition of what it meant to be human.
A quarter century later, that metaphysics had vanished;
only the physics remained. Interrogating the justice and viabil-
ity of capitalism per se was no longer part of the agenda, even
implicitly, as it once had been. The new postwar order of state-
managed Keynesian capitalism had put those kinds of questions
to bed, or it thought it had. Keynesian economists and social
engineers would make sure jobs and income were available.
Free at Last? 227

What else mattered? The labor movement had made that ac-
commodation along with others. If jobs and income were not
available in the ghetto, then that would be seen to but without
seriously disrupting the functioning of what was otherwise
perceived as a well-lubricated machine.
An afterlife of the “labor question” nonetheless continued
to haunt the proceedings in Washington. The spectral presence
of the marginalized ghetto and the abused remains of the
southern peon looked on and wondered.

Starkville
Lomax’s Café was a one-room dilapidated wood shack—prob-
ably put up not long after the Civil War—set down in a sandy
depression off the main paved road running through Starkville,
Mississippi. It was nestled in the town’s poorest black neighbor-
hood, a wooded enclave traversed by dirt roads featuring
houses just as frail and just as aged as Lomax’s place, some with
backyard vegetable gardens and a pig or chicken or two, and here
and there a plain style, rickety church. Some homes had indoor
plumbing; many did not. This was the left-behind world of a
peonage system already in an advanced state of disintegration.
Outwardly it reminded me of the Lee Avenue of my childhood,
a drab poverty barely softened by its more natural surroundings.
There were dozens and dozens of Lomax Cafés throughout the
black Mississippi South: inviting places where people drifted in
and out during the day and gathered at night to eat fresh-made
pork rinds saturated in hot sauce, drink corn liquor from
countryside stills (Mississippi was a dry state back then), and be
together.
The café was a natural place for our fledgling local freedom
movement to assemble that summer of 1964 to plan efforts to
228 Free at Last?

register people to vote and to discuss putting together a

Starkville branch of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party, which at the end of the summer would challenge the
legitimacy of the all-white state delegation to the Democratic
Party presidential nominating convention in Atlantic City. Or
we would go over “smaller” matters like what to do about the
daily harassment (insults, firings, threats, false arrests) that
trailed after anybody bold enough to associate with me and my
fellow northern student volunteer assigned to Starkville, an
African American undergrad from California. Or we just gath-
ered at Lomax’s because for some strange reason its lopsided
front door, the savory aroma of coffee, moonshine, and hot
sauce, the shack’s makeshift counter put together from nearby
logs, the cool darkness inside on even the most broiling summer
days, made it feel like a haven, a sanctuary, its fragile walls
somehow capable of protecting us against a very hostile white
world just across Route 82.
Above all we gathered at Lomax’s Café because Frank
Lomax let us. Not just let us, he welcomed us, despite all the
completely self-evident risks he was taking. I can still see Frank’s
face: very dark and round, a scar across his forehead, small
boned, smiling in a sardonic sort of way, gentle beneath its
weathering. Frank knew the risks, far better than I and my
comrade; how could he not, growing up black in Mississippi
and now hanging out with meddling Yankee “Freedom Riders”?
An atmosphere of danger and powerlessness made up the oxy-
gen of everyday life. Lomax knew the risks but took them, made
himself a target.
Plenty of others were not prepared to do likewise. The
African American community was as riven by social divisions
as any other. There were black preachers who were friendly and
those we were told would be but weren’t. There were doctors
Free at Last? 229

and lawyers and storekeepers who also drew back, guarding

what little they had, not wanting to endanger their already
precarious tightrope- walking acrobatics with white elite
Starkville.
All during the era of segregation the politics of racial
advancement had expressed the aspirations and anxieties of
this precariously positioned black middle class. Lomax’s neigh-
borhood was a study in rural poverty, but other black areas were
faring better. There the roads were paved, diets included more
than pork rinds, corn bread, and chitlins, including on a good
day locally caught catfish. Yet local activists were more likely to
be recruited there than from among the most down-and-out
whose fear and abject dependency shaped a coffin of passivity.22
Outside of town, the African American countryside
formed yet another world entirely. If there was work, it was
casual—a bit of sharecropping but mainly stoop labor for
wages. Corn liquor stills (“white lightning” captured well the
way it hit your brain pan if you weren’t used to it) cropped up
here and there, hidden in the woods. There I visited Pentecos-
tal churches with dirt floors, where congregants spoke in
tongues, where swooning into unconsciousness or supra-
consciousness was common, and where “freedom” had little or
nothing to do with voting. I trembled with the strangeness of
it all. Yet I was more than welcomed; I was treated as a hero. I
don’t know why—a mixture of traditional racial deference and
belief in deliverance, maybe. My reward included sex offered
on fallow farm fields under a vast black but starlit sky, an of-
fering so startling it left me shaken, unable to accept . . . and
mortified.
Jim Crow notwithstanding, African American Starkville,
like every other black settlement in the South, did not make up
a unified social organism. It was not some categorical expression
230 Free at Last?

of racial apartheid, an identity not chosen but imposed. Under

normal circumstances, black Starkville, whatever its shared
experience of exclusion, did not constitute, even metaphori-
cally, a tribe. Instead it lived its life enmeshed in a complex if
stunted hierarchy left behind by a bygone moment in southern
political and racial economy. Yet under extraordinary conditions
it could re-create itself.
One twilight we collected together at Lomax’s. The occa-
sion was special but not so special. It was fairly late in the sum-
mer and we had convened a meeting of our embryonic Missis-
sippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) group—as we had
many times before—this time to plan for the Atlantic City
convention. We had made enough progress in Starkville that
sending a delegation to a statewide meeting of our new party
seemed possible. For that reason, fellow COFO workers had
come down from Columbus (where I had worked earlier in the
summer—a bigger town, a bigger project, and only about half
an hour away). They joined the two of us and about fifteen
people from the black community of Starkville.
And then the police joined us as well. That wasn’t un-
usual. Just a few days earlier my buddy and I had arrived home
late at night to be greeted by a police car, lights flashing in the
rural pitch black (there were no street lights in the black bot-
toms of Starkville), filled to overflowing with one officer and a
half dozen vigilantes. Not pausing to inquire, we jumped out
of our car, dashed into the surrounding woods—I fell into a
pig bog along the way, which everybody but me thought was
very funny—and finally holed up in a friendly house where
every window and door had someone stationed at it with a gun,
waiting for the officers of the law and their “deputies” to attack,
which they didn’t. Nonviolent resistance was suspended for the
evening (it had always been for most more a tactic than a
Free at Last? 231

philosophy; even King kept guns). I was scared that night, as

on other nights, and my first and last thought was flight, not
fight.23
When the police showed up a few nights later at Lomax’s
Café, we were therefore not surprised. And we had all grown
accustomed to an omnipresent undercurrent of menace from
a summer’s worth of jailing, beatings, being followed or chased,
everyday nastiness, even one or two shootings that missed. But
on this occasion the police had turned out in unusual force.
Two carloads of local and state highway patrol officers pulled
up outside Lomax’s. They had dogs, clubs, and guns. We were
in a wooded cul-de-sac. No one would witness whatever they
did next. Flight or fight?
Well, we did neither. We were outside the café when they
came at us, looking nasty, the dogs growling, crowding around
our knees and thighs. I knew the police chief. He’d locked me
up earlier in the summer and had his brother, the town tax as-
sessor, come by the underground all-white cell to yell to my
fellow inmates that I was a “nigger lover” from the North and
they should beat the hell out of me. Luckily, my cell mates were
not particularly fans of the sheriff ’s so they demurred and I,
acquiescing with every bone in my body, denied what the sher-
iff ’s brother had said and claimed my own ardent hatred of
“niggers.” That day they left me alone. Now, at Lomax’s Café,
Chief Josey bellowed at us to disperse pronto. The dogs, circling
us hungrily, echoed his bellow. The sheriff ’s posse catcalled and
pounded their clubs into their palms.
Without forethought, we arranged ourselves in a large
circle, clasped hands, and sang—also not an uncommon thing
to do in those uncommon times. We sang the soulful lyrics of
spirituals that had become the combative anthems of the move-
ment, Jesus at the barricades. Two things happened. Like an
232 Free at Last?

electric current running around our charmed circle, the fear

that I think I can safely say possessed us all at that moment was
alchemized, rechanneled, and became instead a power in all of
us to prevail—and to prevail together. This was not something
ethereal, otherworldly; on the contrary, the feeling was posi-
tively tactile, sensual, even erotic. The world—this darkening,
abandoned mote in time, humid with menace—suddenly
looked different because our collective eyesight had improved,
giving us X-ray vision. We could see and act inside the body of
fear, confront it, peer into a more civilized world beyond it, only
because each of us found that strange superpower in our living
relationship to each other.
Long ago Robert Burns named this “social love.” An au-
toworker occupying a GM plant in Flint, Michigan, in 1937,
remembered the exaltation he experienced when he and his
fellows managed to subdue all the anxieties, the inner terrors,
that had disabled them until then: “It was the CIO speaking in
me.” Marx spoke of “species consciousness,” not as an idea but
as a way of life. In Starkville at that moment outside Lomax’s
Café, something like that was created. It was not race conscious-
ness. Nor did it “forget” the deep social divisions that had always
configured black Starkville, dissolving them into a form of
Christian universalism. It was much too earthbound to be that,
and too combative; agape was not our message.
So we sang and we waited. Then the second thing hap-
pened: nothing. The police left. That was truly uncommon, and
a lesson in the psychodynamics of resistance and acquiescence.
Tyranny, whether industrial or racial or grounded in some
other form of subordination, often enough resorts to blunt
instruments when challenged. But it doesn’t rest on that. It
depends instead—unless autocracy is prepared to live in a
chronic state of civil war, which is really not feasible—on an
Free at Last? 233

anterior atmosphere of intimidation and a fatalistic resignation

that this is the way life is, there are no alternatives. Dread and
awe in the face of power, obedience to its obsidian mystery, even
when it’s out of sight, become the custom of the country. In
Mississippi people on both sides of the racial divide breathed
that belief, their cultural oxygen, so to speak, day in and day
out. The Starkville Police had every right, every long-standing
reason to anticipate we would back down—that had almost
always been the way things were. To suddenly be faced in the
flesh with the repudiation of those axioms of everyday life can
be so shocking, so disarming, if only for a moment, that it may
impair the will to act. Through that fractured will can slip the
new world. Just for an instant, that’s what happened at Lomax’s
Café on that August night.
How does that experience converge on the ostensible reason
we were all there? Mississippi Freedom Summer was an attempt,
in the first instance, to resurrect the Fifteenth Amendment (the
one assuring the right to vote) from its Jim Crow burial ground.
Written into the Constitution, it was a primal right. Exercising
it, moreover, was not only a fundamental expression of formal
equality before the law. In theory, it might open a pathway to
power and social change. In other words, struggling against the
farrago of reasons, excuses, traps, hurdles, fictions, and humili-
ations devised to stop black people from registering in Missis-
sippi could be perceived as an assault on the entire racial and
class order of southern peonage. Doing so, like our little confron-
tation outside Lomax’s, called upon hidden resources of courage
by people who had decided that asserting the right to vote, al-
though far from a guarantee that it would remedy the misery of
their material circumstances or the routine exploitation of their
punishing labor, nonetheless carried with it the highest moral-
existential as well as social significance.
234 Free at Last?

Voting may well be the weakest expression of democracy,

often enough next to useless, merely a pacifier at times. Not
then and there, however. And so we tried to uphold voting
rights, usually without success, often lucky just to escape with-
out injury. One day we set out to register some people at the
courthouse in Columbus—me, a few would-be voters, and a
volunteer lawyer just arrived from the North that day. We made
it as far as a parking space across the street when a pickup truck
carrying two young white men parked about fifty yards in front
of us, just for a second. Then the driver floored the truck in
reverse and smashed into the front of our car. The windshield
shattered, glass and shrapnel from the hood flew everywhere.
No one was registering that day. We went back to our COFO
house and the lawyer back to New Jersey that same night. We
would try again another day. Because it was important.
Still, as one local Alabama activist observed some years
later when the revolutionary temper of the civil rights move-
ment had cooled: “A ballot is not to be confused with a dollar
bill”—as true in Starkville as in Harlem. Freedom may sustain
you but, according to this veteran organizer, “you can’t eat
freedom.” What then?24

The Great Deletion

Up north as well as throughout Starkville, USA, those “eco-
nomic roots” I’d wondered about in my plea to become a sum-
mer volunteer kept showing themselves. But then they got re-
interred.
Ghetto rebellions flamed up everywhere as the decade
wore on. Malcolm X likened the dilemma to a kind of internal
colonialism whose purposes were as much about exploitation
as racial domination. The Black Panther Party (the one started
Free at Last? 235

in Oakland, not in Alabama), its theatrics and posturing not-

withstanding, upped the ante. Its Marxist-inflected street lingo
and martial parade dress confronted the “Man” about the de-
spoiling of the inner city. Meanwhile, the party’s “soldiers” fed
kids free breakfasts. Was that a “freedom” you could eat? Black
autoworkers faced off against the UAW leadership to compel
that bureaucracy to proceed with the unfinished business of
democracy and equality on the shop floor and in the wider
world. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, a man of much milder tem-
perament than the Black Panthers, would later note that “grim
clocks were ticking in the wretched ghettos of the North where
nothing was changing.” During the riot in Watts, one resident’s
sardonic take summed up the views of many: “I had a dream,
I had a dream. Hell, we don’t need no dream. We need jobs.”25
Martin Luther King’s dream, even to the reverend himself,
began to seem more and more improbable unless the “labor
question” was addressed head-on. As the times continued to
darken, he looked to other sources of the country’s original sin;
in particular, the failure of Reconstruction to deliver on its
promise of land to the freeman meant that “the oldest peas-
antry, the Negro, was denied everything but a legal status he
could not use, could not consolidate, and could not even de-
fend.” He explicitly described white workers as “the derivative
victims” of slavery, and when raising the demand for reparations
for past injustices, he noted that “millions of the white poor
will also benefit.” Desegregating lunch counters had been a
worthy undertaking, but “now we are grappling with basic class
issues between the privileged and the under-privileged . . . now
we are saying everybody ought to have a job and everybody
ought to have a guaranteed annual income and everybody ought
to have the right to live in a decent house wherever he wants to
live and everybody ought to have an adequate education. This
236 Free at Last?

is the problem. There are those who are not willing to have this
come about.”
Echoes of the collective rights demanded two decades
earlier increasingly sounded in King’s rhetoric. He took up the
call for a “GI Bill for the Disadvantaged,” arguing that it “must
give greater emphasis to the alleviation of economic and cul-
tural backwardness on the part of the so-called ‘poor whites.’ ”
“It is my opinion that many white workers whose economic
condition is not far removed from that of his black brother, will
find it difficult to accept a ‘Negro Bill of Rights’ which seeks to
give special consideration to the Negro in the context of unem-
ployment, joblessness . . . and does not take into sufficient ac-
count their plight.”
After the outburst in Watts in 1965, King grimly com-
mented, “Northern ghettos are the prisons of the forgotten
man.” And the reverend had this to say: “A riot is the language
of the unheard.” A year later he concluded that the civil rights
movement “had not gotten down to the lower levels of Negro
deprivation” and talked about the need to “put an end to the
internal colonialism” that best captured the dilemma of Africa
America. Change ushered in by the civil rights acts was “lim-
ited mainly to the Negro middle class.” To probe deeper than
that meant “messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this
means we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means
that we are saying something is wrong with capitalism . . .
maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.”
Addressing an SCLC convention not too long before his assas-
sination, King insisted to his compatriots that the movement
must reorient, must address “restructuring the whole of Amer-
ican society,” a scheme that meant “raising questions about the
economic system, about the broader redistribution of wealth”
and therefore “questioning the capitalist economy.” His dream
Free at Last? 237

had turned into a “nightmare” he depicted as “an air-tight cage

of poverty amidst an affluent society.”
A warrior, King inaugurated a “Poor People’s Campaign.”
It was conceived as an answer to the economic subordination
afflicting millions north and south and explicitly embraced
both black and white. Plans were to include Mexicans, Puerto
Ricans, Appalachian whites, and Indians. King called it his “last,
greatest dream.” Sunnier yesterdays were fading. “I’m not only
concerned about streets flowing with milk and honey. I’m also
concerned about the fact that about two-thirds of the peoples
of the world go to bed hungry at night. . . . It’s a nice thing to
talk about long white robes over yonder, but I want some clothes
to wear right down here.” Hard to endure as the earlier struggle
for “freedom” had been, this one would be harder still. “It is
much easier to integrate a lunch counter . . . than it is to erad-
icate slums. It is much easier to integrate buses than it is to
create jobs.” The task would require a “radical redistribution of
political and economic power,” and “many of the allies who
were with us during the first phase will not be with us now.”
How true that was he hardly knew. While visions of the
“beloved community” continued to resonate for some, for oth-
ers the focus was on power, as much about which class had it
as about which race, and how best to challenge that “ruling
class.” King’s assassination amid a bitterly fought sanitation
workers’ strike in Memphis that he helped champion suggests
one road traveled following the march on the Mall.26
But it was the road less traveled. It’s impossible to grasp
today, but by the time of King’s death his reputation had dark-
ened so deeply that the speech had largely vanished from public
memory. Then the ghetto uprisings spent themselves, leaving
little in the way of enduring organized resistance. Malcolm X
was killed, and anyway it was far from clear where his fledgling
238 Free at Last?

movement was headed. The Panthers were run to ground by the

police, their rhetoric often exceeded the party’s reach, and free
breakfasts were also on offer from the welfare department.
Radical caucuses of African American autoworkers and others
(whose membership sometimes overlapped with the Black
Panthers as, for example, in Detroit) operated with more lever-
age than enjoyed by people on welfare but not enough to dislodge
an entrenched bureaucracy that could still summon up consid-
erable political power. King’s Poor People’s Campaign rested on
an impoverished population with little organizational experience
or resources. And the campaign was at best only halfheartedly
supported by higher-ups who once treated the reverend like a
saint. Indeed, like many a saint, King found his credentials air-
brushed clean of the muck and mire, in this case of the detritus
of southern cotton fields and northern street squalor. All these
people and movements comprised a left-behind remnant giving
off a dimming afterglow from the March for Jobs and Freedom.27
Anyone predicting at the time of the great march which
of those two objectives—jobs or freedom—was more likely to
be achieved might reasonably have chosen jobs. Freedom, after
all, is always a long time coming, far off, never quite at hand.
Jobs, on the other hand, are, well, just jobs. As it turned out,
however, that forecast would have been wrong. Freedom arrived,
but the jobs didn’t. Or if the jobs did, they were not the ones
expected, nor were they suited for most of those who made up
the ranks of the dispossessed.

The Paradox of Freedom

Passage of the historic civil rights bills of that era and the vari-
ous pieces of enabling legislation and court and executive orders
that gave them teeth left equal rights closer to legal reality than
Free at Last? 239

had once seemed imaginable. In that regard, King’s dream came

true. Yet that was certainly not so as part of the warp and woof
of everyday life; spotting the kind of kumbaya moment of white
and black children embracing in brotherly love invoked by the
speech remained a very sometime thing: certainly not when it
came to where you actually lived or went to school as opposed
to where you had the right to live or go to school; certainly not
measured in jail time served or trips to the electric chair; cer-
tainly not when you toted up your paychecks or estimated how
long you were likely to live.
These were the interstitial zones where formal freedom
bled out. Here prejudice ceded pride of place to the imper-
sonal dynamics of empowered wealth as an explanation for how
subordination got reproduced. Discrimination lived on where
it was useful and died away where it no longer served to buoy
up the bottom line, or it festered among white working
and lower middle classes whose own ways of life were also
jeopardized by the machinations of the power elite. “Freedom”
was weightless in black precincts or felt like an affront across
town.
But the answer to whether freedom had finally arrived
was a lot closer to emphatically yes in the voting booth, at the
lunch counter, in the department store, riding on the train or
bus, sitting on a jury, testifying in court, marrying whom you
wanted to, being buried where you wanted to, holding public
office, and so on. True enough, in these arenas the new freedom
was constantly resisted, evaded, or violated. Ingenious ways
were devised to circumvent the law at school, in the neighbor-
hood, on the job. The big difference, however, was that now
what was once lawful had been outlawed. There is no way to
minimize that accomplishment. “Freedom now!” indeed. It had
come true, so long as what was meant was honoring the rights
240 Free at Last?

of the individual as our founding fathers had suggested was an

immanent possibility (even if they didn’t intend or enjoin such
equality).
Winning jobs, however prosaic, turned out to be a differ-
ent matter entirely. That issue wasn’t abandoned, but underwent
translation. Not long after the march disbanded, a “War on
Poverty” began. Hardly a shock, given the chronic turmoil in
northern cities. However, the war turned out to be a distinctive
one in ways that would further erode the connections between
the labor and race questions. And its relationship to jobs was
at best a problematical one.
Poverty was once treated as a function of exploitation at
work—say, in the sweatshops, coal mines, iron forges, straw-
berry fields, and logging camps of old. Now it was reconceived
as originating in the exclusion from work. That was a real dis-
tinction, but one that also exonerated those commanding the
capital resources of the country; poverty was something that
happened outside the black box of the workplace.
The enemy was reconceived as well. As the Kerner Com-
mission investigating the ghetto riots of the period concluded,
the root of the problem was “white racism.” This was in some
sense true, but it was also a grand evasion. Off the hook were
those circles of power and wealth with the wherewithal to direct
the flows of income, wealth, and liquid capital that everyone
else depended on. Instead the whole tribe of whites, from
bottom-dwelling “trash” to “privileged” blue-collar “aristocrats”
and on upward into the guilt-ridden ranks of the well-off sub-
urban middle class, was to wear the hair shirt. “The basic cause
of Negro poverty is discrimination,” declared Business Week in
1964. Policy memos advised that for political reasons any leg-
islative assault on poverty should avoid “any use of the term
‘inequality’ or the term ‘redistribution of income or wealth.’ ”
Free at Last? 241

Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz hadn’t seen the memo. He

proposed a jobs program costing way, way beyond what LBJ
was prepared to spend waging war. So it never surfaced again.28
A spiritual makeover of the country’s soul was alleged to
be the first and, given the legal triumphs of the era, perhaps the
last and surely indispensable step necessary for remediation.
That became the conventional wisdom.
Furthermore, the War on Poverty was peculiar insofar as
it reimagined poverty’s victims as their own victimizers. Pov-
erty was a pathogen lodging in the collective DNA of the ghetto,
where it multiplied into a set of cancerous behavioral growths—
idleness, chemical and other forms of dependency, familial
dysfunction, learning aversions, aborted capacity to think be-
yond the moment, atrophy of the disciplined will, instincts for
the predatory run amuck. Although a socialist and the country’s
most prominent rediscoverer of poverty in America, Michael
Harrington made use of this thesis about a “culture of poverty”
(first introduced by Oscar Lewis in 1959) in his own best seller
The Other America, published not long thereafter.
Medicalized and psychologized just so, and immersed in
the oddly consoling moralizing of “white guilt,” poverty and its
racial manifestations sprang free of their origins in the political
economy of midcentury capitalism. This up-to-date ideology
banished from consciousness the grittier social and economic
realities so apparent just yesterday. Part founding credo, part
vanguard social and psychological science, this new view de-
fanged the outrage before it ventured too far. It comprised a
kind of intellectual dark matter. That is to say, its purveyors
could recognize neither in their “science” nor in the universal
truths of their political morality the hidden hand of their own
class outlook on life. As an ideology, it was the thought per-
formance of a liberal bourgeoisie imagining itself free of any
242 Free at Last?

tincture of class interest or bias even as it beat itself up about

“white skin privilege.” It worked simultaneously as an expiation
and a purgative.29
With this diagnosis in hand, the weapons with which to
fight the war followed suit. The arsenal consisted largely of
educational ventures, vocational training for jobs (either not
there or disappearing), job counseling (for those same phantom
jobs), welfare counseling on how to get with the program of
upward bound, free food, although with humbling caveats, and
a multitude of projects promising grassroots community con-
trol (that when they were implemented left the ghetto virtu-
ally intact). Vital exceptions included Medicare and Medicaid
which, if they didn’t go after the sources of indigence, nonethe-
less lightened the burden.
By and large, however, this was a war conducted by social
and psychological engineers. Class animosities would subside
in a carefully choreographed economy whose steady growth
had become a matter of applied technique. Social adjustments
made by experts along with a commitment to full equality
before the law would together weaponize the War on Poverty.
Social malfunctioning generally was now susceptible to dispas-
sionate management. Class conflict need not intrude.
Nor should it, because to enter that force field instead
might lead into the unknown. The white-collar armies of the
War on Poverty weren’t about to engage with the raw social
unrest of the ghetto (except to find inventive ways of deflecting
it), or mix in with the mud-encrusted tent dwellers in King’s
Resurrection City, or seek out some improbable common
ground with shop-floor black militants with access to their own
sources of power, or edit their view of young ghetto youth
dressed in guerilla regalia into something less exotic and fear-
some than their fevered imagination allowed. Even more bizarre
Free at Last? 243

and unthinkable would have been finding a way to embrace the

simmering hostility of white working-class people experiencing
their own material decline and social insults. None of that was
about to happen.

Jobs at Last
Nor were jobs going to happen. Poverty rates fell for a time.
That was a victory. Jobs, however, remained scarce, especially
what we now call decent, well-paying jobs. Here and there jobs
appeared. Some people qualified for work after job training.
Union apprenticeship programs were on occasion forced open.
In the main, however, the landscape remained bare. People
worked, to be sure, in the ghetto’s underground economies, at
a vast array of low-wage sweatshops, in the interstices of black
commercial life, as the urban servant class, at nonunion work
sites. But the Great Migration and the early symptoms of dein-
dustrialization produced a deficit only a major overhaul of the
distribution of wealth and power could address. At the outset
of the War on Poverty black unemployment was about 10 per-
cent; by 1971 it was basically the same. As for inequality, the
median income of blacks relative to whites over this same pe-
riod remained stationary.30
Ironically, however, the achievement of “freedom” did
generate “jobs” of unexpected kinds in unexpected places.
Someone had to man this rapidly expanding social engineering
bureaucracy. This was true in Washington as well as in a thou-
sand town and cities. Openings for civil servants of all types—
clerks and technicians, administrators and managers, case
workers and psychologists, economists and schoolteachers,
lawyers and mediators, policy creators and policy assessors—
were now accessible to a sliver of upwardly mobile African
244 Free at Last?

Americans (among others). Freedom had made that mobility

possible by eliminating those legal barriers that had once fenced
African Americans off; especially, it pried open the schoolroom
doors from kindergarten to graduate school. King’s dream come
true for some meant a wider (if still rocky) road leading to lives
as doctors, journalists, house builders, electricians, middle
managers, and nurses in both the public and private sector.
Great Society programs generated in the neighborhood of 2
million government jobs manning federal programs in educa-
tion, health, and housing. Here was the raw material quickly
forming itself into a new black middle class.
Moreover, because the War on Poverty made a commit-
ment to community participation and governance, many of the
new agencies charged with running the war were staffed or even
run by blacks. Semi-independent, these community groups also
enjoyed ties with established political circles (local Democratic
Party machinery, for the most part) and with the world of non-
profits (most conspicuously the Ford Foundation). Entrenched
Democratic Party apparatchiks at first resisted this incursion.
They had relied for generations on their ties to white ethnic
bailiwicks to keep them in office. Black constituents were either
ignored or patronized while the walls of the ghetto were pre-
served (public housing projects reinforced patterns of residential
segregation, for example). Now challenged by a rising generation
of black political activists with their own machinery, the old
guard was compelled to adapt and recarve the political terrain.31
No conclusive evidence exists that the community action
agencies of that era accomplished either their original goal of
reducing juvenile delinquency or their subsequent goal of re-
ducing poverty. But around vehicles like Mobilization of Youth
(a Ford Foundation favorite) or the Model Cities program more
widely, there gathered the raw material of a new black political
Free at Last? 245

class. For some it served as another exit ramp out of the ghetto.
The number of black officeholders exploded. In 1964 about three
hundred African Americans held elective office. By 1970 nearly
fifteen hundred did and by 1989 over seven thousand. (Yet at
the end of the 1960s three-quarters of black men were working,
but only 57 percent were employed by the end of the 1980s).
Hardly a ruling class, to be sure. But African Americans
began to exercise real influence within local and even national
political circles that their forebears—the preachers and teach-
ers, lawyers and doctors and storekeepers from Jim Crow
days—could only dream of. One might view the young college-
bound activists who ignited the sit-ins at Winston-Salem lunch
counters and all through the Deep South as the vanguard of
this new class, taking up the torch left behind by the decimated
ranks of the black industrial working class of the New Deal era.
Aspirations forged in the crucible of class struggle of that ear-
lier time were now to be realized by a new generation. That
would happen, however, not by opening up new terrain of class
conflict but by shying away from it.
More portentous still, members of this new political mi-
lieu (together with the black clergy, which retained much of its
potency from the past) not only assumed leadership of the
emerging black middle class but, as “race men,” they presumed
or were presumed by others to represent as well the mudsills of
Afro-America, however far removed these risen men and
women otherwise were from those gulags of exploitation and
dispossession. In the view of one scholar, the “singular class
vision” of this newly empowered upward-bound world was
“projected as the organic and transparent sensibility” of the
whole race.
Naturally enough, those in this milieu partly identified
with, enjoyed innumerable ties to, and shared an ideological
246 Free at Last?

outlook with the state-managed liberal capitalism run by the

Democratic Party that had marched alongside them in the
march and made war on poverty. Liberals all, they held in com-
mon a meritocratic worldview of social justice. Establishing the
right to compete in the “race of life” would usher in precisely
the kind of freedom King’s speech pined for.
If it took affirmative action, as Lyndon Johnson and even
Richard Nixon noted it would, to overcome the crippling lega-
cies of slavery and Jim Crow to achieve that realm of true
freedom, then so be it. Meanwhile, from the standpoint of the
Fortune 500, segregation not only unsettled political stability
but erected obstacles to the smooth functioning of the labor
market and access to its nether regions. Whatever differences
separated this newly empowered African American world from
the inner circles in Washington and from corporate executive
suites where ultimate power resided, this expanded and deseg-
regated welfare state was their common creation.32
The March on Washington and the War on Poverty it
helped mobilize might be considered, then, both triumphs and
tragedies. Together, they opened many doors to the excluded.
They made the everyday struggle to get by more manageable.
They altered the nation’s cultural atmosphere so that no matter
how many racist-inspired outrages continue they are perceived
as ignominies rather than business as usual. They elected a
president.
Since the march and the speech and the summer, how-
ever, and in part because of the logic set in motion then, atten-
tion to the class dimensions of black oppression has been driven
further and further underground.
Identity politics, the ideology of the new Afro-American
middle class, was first formed on the battlefronts of that era. At
times its atmospherics suggested something different: defiant,
Free at Last? 247

more militant, an opening to the left of “Da Lord.” However,

its most fundamental cry for equality before the law was com-
pletely compatible with the predominant message of the speech
and its dream. Black power, whatever emotional intensity drove
it, no matter its talk of controlling the institutions of the
ghetto or carving out space for black businesses, was only a
power so long as it fit within the wider sphere of a color-blind,
state-administered capitalism.
“Black power” mimicked notions of community control
first conceived in the ateliers of white liberal policy wonks. (The
War on Poverty was cobbled together without the participation
of the civil rights movement.) A kind of masquerade, it left the
ghetto as disempowered as ever. But it was at the same time a
vehicle of empowerment for those enjoying the fruits of the
civil rights breakthrough. Andrew Young, who as a young SCLC
activist helped author that vision (and would go on to become
UN ambassador) summed up its accomplishments, outlook,
and limitations many years later: “I quantify revolution in dol-
lar terms.” “Now I see black people driving around Atlanta in
cars that are worth one hundred thousand dollars. That’s inte-
gration. I keep running into young people who are starting their
own businesses. That’s integration. I used to know everyone in
black Atlanta who could afford to take an airplane. Now I see
black folks I don’t even know flying first class. These people are
carrying on the struggle.”33
Black power indeed! The dream was a worthy one. Yet its
realization came at a steep price.
 Conclusion
The Homeland

E
ven though we now have a Homeland Department of
government, the word homeland strikes a dissonant
note here in the United States. Scarcely ever used
before September 11, 2001, it’s a locution far more
familiar abroad and has been for centuries. It connotes blood-
lines and points to the familial, ethnic, and racial foundations
of nation-states. It is interchangeable with references to the
fatherland or the motherland. Such references have always
seemed more than faintly foreign here. In the New World, the
nation was seen more as a confected than a natural creation.
Colloquially, it is common to think of America as the nation of
nations. As in any other place on earth, there have been mo-
ments when that cosmopolitan openness has closed. Then the
“foreigner” (either located abroad or here at home) has taken
on the characteristics of some alien other, looming up as a
primal threat not just to our way of life but to our native stock.
So it is today that we grow increasingly comfortable with a word
that once conjured up bellicose patriotism and much worse.
What usually has defined the American nation, however,
has been precisely those core beliefs and desires we have come
to see embodied in its colonial beginnings and constitutional
Conclusion 249

genius, in its cowboy self-reliance and in the Statue of Liberty’s

global promise of liberty, in material abundance for all and a
color-blind egalitarianism lauded by Nixon and King. The
American, in her or his ideal state, was bloodless—or if not
bloodless, then a representative human endowed by his or her
creator not with organic ties to this or that community of skin
or ancestry, but to the inalienable rights of the individual. So
compelling were those elements of the national identity that
they have managed to conceal from view a largely subterranean
reality of social conflict. The pristine free individual of Ameri-
can myth was a cultural triumph that buried that discomfiting
alternate reality. The chapters assembled here have thus been a
work of disinterment.

Is There a Future for the Proletarian Metaphysic?

Our native notion of an immaculate nation, virginal, without
classes, and for that matter without any telltale signs of earth-
ier origins or makeup, has an odd affinity with what sometimes
passes as the orthodox Marxist view of class. Precisely because
the pure proletarian is stripped of all parochial attachments to
kith and kin, to traditional customs and local loyalties, to spe-
cific work cultures and skills, to a “homeland,” race or church
denomination, he or she becomes the raw material of species
consciousness: human, nothing less. The proletarian’s loss
would become humanity’s great gain, or so the dialectic decreed.
Yet, like the mythic American, the mythic proletarian
has turned out in real life to be pockmarked by all those his-
torical bruises. Nothing could make that clearer than the 2016
presidential election. On the one hand, American workers were
up in arms, hostile to the political class and to the financial/
corporate elite it enabled. Some, however, seemed equally
250 Conclusion

exercised to defend their racial and gender “identities.” Trump

fed on misogyny and racial fear as much as he did on the revul-
sion for the naked selfishness of the country’s ruling classes.
His revanchist patriotism rooted its appeal in masculine no-
menclature reveling in muscular “greatness.” Opinion articu-
lated through the outlets of mainstream news and culture de-
picted workers not so much as a class but as members of rival
tribes: white workers were alleged to be first of all white; blacks
were not even considered as workers, which, of course, is the
class they overwhelmingly belong to, but as members of a vic-
timized race. It was as if the zeitgeist was working overtime to
transmute proletarian angst into something more primeval.
Utopian notions notwithstanding, American society al-
ways has had to come to grips with social conflict. A favored
way of doing that has been to reconceive class divisions rather
as ones involving race or other forms of inherent or ascribed
or volitional identity. That has clearly been the case over the
last half century, with special emphasis on race; indeed, as its
biological underpinnings weakened and then vanished en-
tirely, race as a social category grew ever more robust. This has
led, on the one hand, to great gains in recognizing the basic
humanity of nonwhite people, women, and others. It has also
functioned as an evasion. Class in this context can be made to
not matter. To speak of “wage slavery” and the “emancipation
of labor” today is to use a language far more foreign to Ameri-
can ears than it was a century ago. Meanwhile, the vocabulary
of racial and other difference grows ever more lush.1
Identity politics to one side, the disfigurement of the
proletarian as savior is further abetted by the vanishing of many
of the customary traits that once composed his profile. “He,”
for instance, is just as likely to be a “she.” That runs up against
the distinct masculinity that for ages characterized the hero of
Conclusion 251

proletarian emancipation. Moreover, “she” as well as “he” is far

less likely to work in heavy industry (due to deindustrialization),
whose “heaviness” contributed to that muscular image of the
hammer-wielding arm. Workers were collected together in
mega-sized factories that were easy to conceive as the mobiliza-
tion points for the great army of the proletariat aided by but
not composed of or captained by women. The industries they
“manned,” if stopped, could unman the economy, the army’s
big weapon.
Now “wage slaves” are scattered about, employed in thou-
sands of small retail operations or subcontracting firms, work-
ing at home as telecommuters, as “free-agent” truck drivers or
freelance technicians, as home care nurses, at call centers or in
the chronically shifting world of temporary employment. Not
only does that dispersal reduce the leverage once exercised by
industrial labor, more profoundly it eliminates that concen-
trated social geography that encouraged multitudes to get to
know, trust, and depend on each other, to see themselves as a
“class” at odds with another class.
Indeed, employment itself has become a sometime thing,
a condition without any long-term assurance it will continue
or, if it does, still carries with it a sense of permanent imper-
manence. A precariat has replaced or grown up alongside the
proletariat. Can its footloose existence allow it to cohere as an
organized presence in the public arena the way an older work-
ing class once did? Also, some suspect, the information econ-
omy has or will soon consign millions to marginalization, living
outside the perimeters of gainful employment entirely. The fate
long endured by the African American mudsills of American
society threatens to descend on others. Estimates of the percent-
age of current jobs apt to be automated over the next two de-
cades range from 47 percent to 80 percent. The very meaning
252 Conclusion

of the word proletariat may revert to what it once was in ancient

times: not a “working class” compelled to earn its keep in a
capitalist production process it has no control over, but rather
a surplus population without any means of support—superflu-
ous, inessential, yet socially explosive. Under these circum-
stances, it is much harder to foresee a “red army” of the class
conscious. Yet, as I hope these essays have suggested, class has
always been an essential part of the warp and woof of American
society. Sometimes squirreled away, at other times bursting onto
the surface of public life, it has always mattered. Clearly it mat-
tered in our recent electoral surprise, if it’s not so clear just how
it mattered and what it signifies for the future.2

The Utopian Dilemma

Because the American myth is a peculiarly utopian one, the
understructure of class division has been a reality hard to rec-
oncile. Capitalism is allegedly hardheaded. It is supposed to rest
on animal appetites that the mechanisms of the market have
domesticated. It disdains utopias as wooly-headed pipe dreams,
socialism perhaps most of all. Yet in the New World, utopianism
has always been there on the surface, sometimes even as a na-
tional boast.
Plymouth and Jamestown persist in memory as founding
moments of democratic consent and self-reliance, pathfinders
for the world. Yet they rested on forms of dependency and
exploitation. The Constitution is thought to be the fruit of
political genius, a near-perfect clockwork mechanism ensuring
equilibrium in a society subject to chronic imbalance. Yet it was
written in the full knowledge that some social groups would
benefit and others lose if it were adopted. We have grown ac-
customed to believe that the Statue of Liberty commands New
Conclusion 253

York Harbor because its creators meant it as an offering to the

rest of the world to come here and live the American Dream.
Yet its conception and architecture were fueled by fears of class
turmoil and a wariness about “huddled masses” from abroad.
No figure has better captured the essence of Homo Americanus
than the cowboy: free, on his own, brave, graceful, unpreten-
tious, at one with nature, steely-eyed but with his heart in the
right place. Still, he was after all a “boy,” unlikely to mature into
the self-sufficient manhood his popular reputation depicted, a
rootless proletarian of the range more honored in his mythic
afterlife than on the punishing cattle drives feeding global
markets for meat. The Moscow kitchen and the kitchen I grew
up with in suburbia were meant to prove that the New World
housed the only society without classes: utopia realized. But
within a few short years of the vice president’s debate with the
Soviet Union’s premier, the United States was fissured by con-
frontations on all fronts. From the Lincoln Memorial, Martin
Luther King Jr. called on the nation to redeem the promissory
note issued at its founding, to let freedom ring. Yet even as he
spoke, the freedom he dreamed of would fail to touch the
sources of subjugation that left millions powerless and in slav-
ish subordination.
Is this a case of utopia deferred, perhaps? Or is it utopia
as obfuscation? Utopias often, if not always, may seem to be
about emancipation. And they often are remembered for that
inspiration. Less noticeable, however, is that they are also about
control, about how to reconfigure the social cosmos so that
harmony reigns. This can be said of Thomas More’s famous
book and even more emphatically about the most renowned
literary utopia of the American imagination, Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward. Something is amiss in the old order, which
is socially disruptive, morally delinquent, politically corrupt,
254 Conclusion

and which corrodes human relations. A new world can be re-

engineered into being. Utopia offers salvation not by licensing
the unfettered will but by reconstructing the social order—that
is, by instituting a new system of control more likely to result
in the general welfare.
Control as much as freedom is what the American utopia
fantasized. The propertied individual was the atomic nucleus
where that control was born, resided, and exercised its energy.
And that control carried with it distinctly male genetics. Utopias
rarely (although there have been exceptions) envisioned
women wielding the command mechanisms of their new soci-
eties. And that was true too here in the New World. John Smith’s
“every man a master” was a man. To be without property was
to put manhood at risk.
Because the New World seemed to promise that propertied
mastery could become a universal condition, the peculiar nature
of the American utopian dream of individual freedom and
self-reliance took on a deeply male coloration. Naturally,
women can, did, and still do aspire to that same form of uto-
pian control. There is nothing sexually essentialist about this
New World utopia. Still, its traits, perhaps best exemplified by
the cowboy, have historically been carried through time by the
traditions of male culture. They have been reinforced by law
and custom over generations. They imply or openly proclaim
a domination over nature, over others, and above all over the
self.
Dominion inhered in the colonial expedition. It breathed
life into the Constitution. Liberty’s statue presided over a
national ideal purged of lower-order discord. Cowboys were
nature’s supermen. A benign American imperium, armed to
the teeth, tutored the world in democracy and equality from
Conclusion 255

its suburban kitchen. Equality under the law effaced persistent

inequality and submission outside the law.
All of this was and remains plausible—indeed, more than
plausible. As an ensemble, it comprises an article of faith.
Women are invited now to swear allegiance to that faith and
enjoy its empowerments. Many do, suggesting that after all there
was never anything inherent but only something historical in
that masculinized way of being. But at its heart is still that lone
figure, the solitary self-sufficient, the new human unfazed by
any impediment whether raised up by custom, social hierarchy,
or political coercion. To keep that utopian vision aloft has re-
quired heavy labor. To honor its promise of individual eman-
cipation, it has had to repress or deny the social emancipation
of millions. The American utopia is a house divided against
itself.
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 Notes

Introduction. The Enigma of Class in America

1. This line is borrowed and slightly modified from a song called “Forget
It” by Sixto Rodriguez, originally released in 1971, which appeared in the
documentary film Searching for Sugar Man.
2. Correspondents of the New York Times, Class Matters (New York: New
York Times Books, 2005); David D. Kirkpatrick, “New Populism Puts Old
Guard on Defensive,” New York Times, December 11, 2015.
3. Nelson D. Schwartz, “Economists Take Aim at Wealth Inequality,” New
York Times, January 3, 2016.
4. Smith, quoted in Stephen Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vision,” in
Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1988).
5. Terence McCoy, “How Joseph Stalin Invented ‘American Exceptionalism,’ ”
Atlantic, March 15, 2012.
6. Max Lerner, American Civilization: Life and Thought in the United States
Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957).
7. Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Status System (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 15. If I were writing about why class matters
in general, not only here in the United States but elsewhere in the Western
world and outside the West as well, this approach would not make as much
sense. Other nations have labored less hard or not at all at this work of denial.
They are not thought of as “exceptional,” nor do they think of themselves that
way, at least insofar as acknowledging the presence and importance of class
in their social physiognomies, political makeup, economic divisions, and
cultural tastes and prejudices.
258 Notes to pages 21–37

8. Chris Lehmann, Revolt of the Masscult (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm,

2003), 67; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 218; André Gorz, quoted in Paul Mason, Postcapital-
ism: A Guide to Our Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015),
179; Louis Menand, introduction to Masscult and Midcult: Essays against the
American Grain, by Dwight MacDonald, ed. Louis Menand (New York: New
York Review Books, 2011).
9. Joshua Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London:
Verso, 2016), 27.
10. Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana, “America’s
Failed Promise of Equality Opportunity,” Salon, December 2, 2012.

Chapter 1. East of Eden

1. Godfrey Hodgson, A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the
Myth of the First Thanksgiving (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 38–40.
2. Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and
Their World (New York: Knopf, 2010), 51; Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vi-
sion”; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 24, 65–67.
3. Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 61–63, David A. Price, Love and
Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 7, 16–17; Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vision.”
4. Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vision,” 3; David Vickers, “Working the
Fields in a Developing Economy,” in Innes, Work and Labor in Early America;
Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 55.
5. Vickers, “Working the Fields.”
6. Ibid.; Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 240, 250; Price, Love and Hate
in Jamestown, 36, 51, 55; Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 144–46, 357–58.
7. Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 45, 47, 54, 55; Bunker, Making Haste
from Babylon, 240, 250; Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown, 16–17.
8. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology
of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 73–75.
9. Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vision”; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed.,
Captain John Smith: A Selected Edition of His Writings (Williamsburg, VA:
Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1988), 194.
10. Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 248; Price, Love and Hate in
Jamestown, 7–8, 77, 108, 230–31; Kupperman, Captain John Smith, 20–21, 187.
11. Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 99; Price, Love and Hate in
Jamestown, 70–71, 77–78, 129; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 100.
Notes to pages 38–66 259

12. Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 45, 47, 54–55; Bunker, Making
Haste from Babylon, 13, 250.
13. Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 144–46.
14. Ibid., 57; Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 284–86.
15. Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 284–86; Hodgson, Great and Godly
Adventure, 43–45, 74–75.
16. Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 57, 74.
17. Eric J. Sundquist, King’s Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s ‘I
Have a Dream’ Speech (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 110; Cronon,
Changes in the Land, 109; Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown, 1–5, 112, 127, 129,
146–47; Innes, “Fulfilling John Smith’s Vision.”
18. Alan Axelrod, A Savage Empire: Traders, Trappers, Tribes and the Wars
That Made America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2011), 7–13.
19. Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 232–40, 246–48, 262; Axelrod, A
Savage Empire, 7–13.
20. Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 246–48, 351–52.
21. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 83, 92, 94–95; Hodgson, Great and Godly
Adventure, 45; Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 9, 350.
22. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 92–102.
23. Ibid., 83, 90, 91.
24. Ibid., 95–99, 101–4; Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 113–14, 115.
25. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 64–65, 67–68, 102–4, 118, 170.
26. Ibid., 162, 165.
27. Kupperman, Captain John Smith, 141–44; Cronon, Changes in the Land,
53, 55, 56, 57, 90; Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 115, 120.
28. Hodgson, Great and Godly Adventure, 47, 120.
29. Ibid., 63, 115, 120; Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon, 289.
30. Kupperman, Captain John Smith, 8, 23, 144, 145.
31. Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown, 7–8, 36, 40–41, 70–71, 77, 108,
128–29, 186, 87, 196–97; Kupperman, Captain John Smith, 8, 10, 154, and in-
troduction.
32. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 73.
33. Ibid., 73–77, 83; Vickers, “Working the Fields”; Hodgson, Great and
Godly Adventure, 136, 139, 140, 141–43; Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown,
230–32; Kupperman, Captain John Smith, 45.

Chapter 2. We the People in the City of Brotherly Love

1. Woody Holton, The Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 1–2.
260 Notes to pages 67–87

2. Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 72–73.
3. Ibid., 10.
4. Holton, The Unruly Americans, 12; Gary B. Nash, The Unknown Ameri-
can Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create
America (New York: Penguin, 2005), 448; Alan Taylor, “Agrarian Independence:
Northern Land Rioters After the Revolution,” in Beyond the American Revolu-
tion: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred E. Young
(De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993); Maier, Ratification, 15.
5. Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution,
1781–1788 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 103, 104–5.
6. A fictional but deeply researched and richly descriptive and evocative
portrait of this hinterland can be found in John Ehle’s novel The Land Break-
ers (New York: New York Review Books, 2014), originally published in 1964.
7. Holton, The Unruly Americans, 276–77; Main, The Anti-Federalists, 116.
8. Maier, Ratification, 12, 72–73.
9. Adam Smith, quoted in Holton, The Unruly Americans, 453.
10. Holton, The Unruly Americans, 4, 5, 7, 23, 25–26, 64, 87.
11. Main, The Anti-Federalists, 162 (quoting “Plato” in the U.S. Chronicle,
April 10, 1787), 163.
12. Holton, The Unruly Americans, 9; Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion:
The Paradox of American Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2016), 21; Maier, Ratification, 32, 52.
13. Holton, The Unruly Americans, 10.
14. Ibid., 11–12.
15. Maier, Ratification, 69, 134; Holton, The Unruly Americans, 13.
16. Main, The Anti-Federalists, 103–5, 106, 131, 132–33, 142, 165–66; Virginia
Independent Chronicle, October 31, 1786; Maier, Ratification, 121.
17. Main, The Anti-Federalists, 270–72, 277; Maier, Ratification, 72–73.

Chapter 3. Wretched Refuse

1. Edward Berenson, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 98, 120; Edward Burrows and Mike Wal-
lace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 1115; Candace Falk, ed., Emma Goldman: A Documentary
History of the American Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008);
Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931; repr., New York: Arno, 1970), 2, 716–17;
Alexandra Kollantai, “The Statue of Liberty,” in Articles and Speeches (New
York: Progress, 1984).
Notes to pages 89–109 261

2. Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 8–9, 13, 25–26; Yasmin Sabina Khan,
Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2010), 109; Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty: A
Centenary Edition of a Classic History and Guide (New York: Penguin, 1986), 29.
3. Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 13, 25–26.
4. James B. Bell and Richard I. Abrams, In Search of Liberty: The Story of the
Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 18; Be-
renson, The Statue of Liberty, 13–14; Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty, 28–29.
5. Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 11, 13, 16, 28; Bell and Abrams, In Search
of Liberty, 25.
6. Bell and Abrams, In Search of Liberty, 85; Berenson, The Statue of Liberty,
11–14, 28; Khan, Enlightening the World, 2–4, 109; Trachtenberg, The Statue
of Liberty, 29, 32.
7. Bell and Abrams, In Search of Liberty, 19–21; David Glassberg, “Re-
thinking the Statue of Liberty: Old Meaning, New Contexts,” University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, December 2003m archives.inpui.edu/b. + stream/
handle/2450/0781/Rethinking the Statue—Glassberg; Berenson, The Statue
of Liberty, 69.
8. Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 35, 39, 69, 76.
9. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Reminiscences of Gotham,” Atlantic, February 1999.
10. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1033–34, 1037.
11. Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 33, 35, 76; President Grant’s letter of
January 1884 is at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York.
12. Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American
Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown, 2015),
169, 171.
13. Bell and Abrams, In Search of Liberty, 75; Burrows and Wallace,
Gotham, 181; Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 70, 80, 88; Kathy Weiser, Legends
of America: New York Legends: “Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty,”
May 2012, legendsofamerica.com/aboutus.html; “Happy 100th Birthday,”
National Park Service Centennial: “Native Americans and Historic Uses of
Liberty and Ellis Islands,” National Park Service Centennial; Bell and Abrams,
In Search of Liberty, 75.
14. Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 3, 76, 80, 81, 83, 95, 98; Bell and Abrams,
In Search of Liberty, 35, 36, 41, 73.
15. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1117; Fraser, Age of Acquiescence, 54–55;
Bell and Abrams, In Search of Liberty, 73; Berenson, The Statue of Liberty,
104, 108.
16. Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, 108, 110; Marianne Debruzzy, “A Nation
Intended for a Race of Free Men,” in In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty:
262 Notes to pages 110–131

Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920, ed.

Marianne Debruzzy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 232, 234.
17. Bell and Abrams, In Search of Liberty, 55, 58; Burrows and Wallace,
Gotham, 123; Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty.
18. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 1115.
19. Khan, Enlightening the World.

Chapter 4. There Was a Young Cowboy

1. Contemplator.com/tunebook/Laredo.htm; Frank Maynard, Cowboy’s
Lament: A Life on the Open Range (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press,
2010), 134–35.
2. Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choate, The American Cowboy: The
Myth and the Reality (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), 3–6;
Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the
American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 613; Patricia
Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New
West (New York: Norton, 2000), 283–85.
3. Andy Adams, The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1903), 1, 7, 14; Tom Engelhardt, The
End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Genera-
tion (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
4. Harold McCracken, The American Cowboy (New York: Doubleday, 1973),
74–75; Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 34, 73; Charles A. Siringo, A Texas
Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1886; repr.,
New York: Penguin, 2000).
5. McCracken, The American Cowboy, 70, 73, 75; Frantz and Choate, Ameri-
can Cowboy, 16, 32; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 236.
6. John Williams Malone, The Album of the American Cowboy (New York:
Franklin Watts, 1971); McCracken, The American Cowboy, 137; Frantz and
Choate, American Cowboy, 16, 33–34; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 26, 150.
7. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; Frantz and Choate, American
Cowboy, 133–34; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 57, 59, 127–28, 150; Jane Kramer,
The Last Cowboy (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 10.
8. Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 114–15, 117.
9. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; McCracken, The American
Cowboy, 99, 102, 106; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 222–23.
10. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; McCracken, The American
Cowboy, 123, 132, 134–36; Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 52, 55; White,
It’s Your Misfortune, 261–62, 268, 270–71; Kramer, The Last Cowboy, 38–39.
Notes to pages 132–147 263

11. White, It’s Your Misfortune, 271–73; Kramer, The Last Cowboy, 38–39;
J. Evetts Haley, The XIT Ranch of Texas; and the Early Days of the Llano Es-
tacado (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1929), 3, 5, 56–57, 69, 72, 77,
88, 96–97, 103, 125.
12. Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 114; White, It’s Your Misfortune,
270, 344–46; McCracken, The American Cowboy.
13. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; McCracken, The American
Cowboy, 119–30; Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 34, 36–37.
14. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; McCracken, The American
Cowboy, 16, 87, 95; Adams, Log of a Cowboy, 105–6, 123–25, 210, 275, 364.
15. Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 5, 36, 39, 41, 46, 55, 56–59, 60–61;
Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; McCracken, The American Cowboy,
87; Adams, Log of a Cowboy, 77–81, 105–6, 211; Haley, The XIT Ranch, 116.
16. Adams, Log of a Cowboy; Malone, Album of the American Cowboy;
McCracken, The American Cowboy, 137; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 345–46;
Kramer, The Last Cowboy, 7, 10.
17. Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 74, 77, 80, 117; White, It’s Your
Misfortune, 344, 346; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as
Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 81, 109;
Adams, Log of a Cowboy, 77–81.
18. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; Adams, Log of a Cowboy, 14,
180–81, 182.
19. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York:
Macmillan Reference, 1967).
20. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; McCracken, The American
Cowboy, 11, 12; Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 80, 81–83; White, It’s
Your Misfortune, 310–12, 330.
21. Malone, Album of the American Cowboy; Frantz and Choate, American
Cowboy, 155; Smith, Virgin Land, 110–11; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 620,
621–22, 626; Eric Hobsbawm, “The American Cowboy: An Intellectual Myth?”
in Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century (New York: New
Press, 2013); Limerick, Something in the Soil, 277; E. N. Feltskog, introduc-
tion to The Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman, ed. E. N. Feltskog (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
22. Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 13, 65–66, 80, 85, 155, 200; Smith,
Virgin Land, 81, 84, 107, 109, 111; McCracken, The American Cowboy.
23. Wister, The Virginian; Frederic Remington drawings in Malone, Album
of the American Cowboy.
24. William MacLeod Raine, A Texas Ranger (New York: Grossett and
Dunlap, 1911), 226–27.
264 Notes to pages 150–161

25. Frantz and Choate, American Cowboy, 59–60, 60–61.

26. McCracken, The American Cowboy, 12–14, 106–7, 119–32, 137; Wister, The
Virginian; a novel by Oakley Hall entitled The Badlands (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1978) provides a vivid depiction of these conflicts; Frantz and
Choate, American Cowboy, 3, 52; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 223–25, 345–46;
Smith, Virgin Land, 109.
27. Hobsbawm, “The American Cowboy”; White, It’s Your Misfortune,
560; Limerick, Something in the Soil, 81; Kramer, The Last Cowboy, 51, 69, 133.
28. Kramer, The Last Cowboy, 4, 51, 113.
29. Richard’s descriptions of his odyssey out west come from two letters
written to the author.

Chapter 5. John Smith Visits Suburbia

1. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 20–21.
2. Ibid., 20–21; “Better See Once,” Time, August 3, 1959; William Safire,
“The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen,” New York Times, July 23, 2009; “The Nixon-
Khrushchev Debate,” July 24, 1969, CNN Transcript Cold War, at Temple.edu;
Andrew Glass, “Nixon and Khrushchev Hold ‘Kitchen Debate,’ ” Politico, July
24, 2009; Monte Olmsted, “Nixon, Khrushchev, and Betty Crocker at the 1959
Kitchen Debate,” Taste of General Mills, at General Mills.com; Ruth Oldenzied
and Karen Zachmann, introduction to Cold War Kitchen: Americanization,
Technology, and Europe, ed. Ruth Oldenzied and Karen Zachmann (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Kevin D. Bodin, “The American National Ex-
hibit and Kitchen Debate: How the World’s Superpowers Portrayed the Events
of 1959 to Meet National Needs” (senior thesis, Gettysburg College, 2015).
3. Safire, “The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen”; “Khrushchev-Nixon Debate”;
Glass, “Nixon and Khrushchev Hold ‘Kitchen Debate.’ ”
4. Safire, “The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen”; “Better See Once”; Bodin, “The
American National Exhibit.”
5. Victor Lebow, “Price Competition in 1955,” Journal of Retailing, Spring
1955; House Beautiful, quoted in Lizbeth Cohen, The Consumer’s Republic: The
Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003),
125; U.S. Labor Department, How Buying Habits Change (Washington, DC:
Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1959); Eisenhower, quoted in Cohen, Consumer’s
Republic, 125; “Worker Loses His Class Identity,” Business Week, July 11, 1959;
May, Homeward Bound, 20–21.
6. What might be described as a nonfiction novel by Francis Spufford,
entitled Red Plenty (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010), captures the striking
Notes to pages 163–182 265

self-confidence about the future characteristic of the Soviet nomenklatura

in this period.
7. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic.
8. Ibid., 121–32, 195–96; “The New America,” Newsweek, April 1, 1957.
9. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 292; “USA: The Permanent Revolution,”
Fortune, February 1951.
10. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of
American Political Thought since the Revolution (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1991); David Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime in the
American Republic: The Origins of the American Tradition of Political Liberty
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders
(New York: D. McKay, 1957); David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the
Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); Bell,
End of Ideology; Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon,
1964); Chris Lehman, Revolt of the Masscult (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003),
38–39; R. Jeffrey Lustig, “The Tangled Knot of Race and Class in America,” in
What’s Class Got to Do with It?” ed. Michael Zweig (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2004); Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 33.
11. Marx, quoted in Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution from
Kant to Marx (London: Verso, 2003), 294; George Lichtheim, New Europe:
Today and Tomorrow (New York: Praeger, 1963); Howard Brick, Transcend-
ing Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern America (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006), 6, 8, 199–200, 207–8, 229, 248–49, 268.
12. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 282; Riesman, Lonely Crowd;
Lehman, Revolt of the Masscult, 38–39, 67.
13. Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democ-
racy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 223–32.
14. Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Status System (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 18, 19, 21, 39.
15. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 159, 161, 195, 309–10.
16. David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our
Heritage of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 357; Packard, Hid-
den Persuaders; William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1956); David Riesman, “Work and Leisure in Post-industrial
Society,” in Mass Leisure, ed. Eric Larabe and Rolf Meyersohn (Glencoe, IL:
Free Press, 1958).
266 Notes to pages 184–211

17. MacDonald, Masscult and Midcult, 8, 11–13, 56; Lehman, Revolt of the
Masscult, 29–30, 38–39, 67.
18. Arendt, The Human Condition, 218, 219; Lipsitz, Rainbow, 192; The
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower,
1955 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 852–53; Cohen,
Consumer’s Republic, 152.
19. Fraser, Age of Acquiescence, 305–7; Lehman, Revolt of the Masscult;
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, ix, x, 8, 9, 31, 48–49, 56–57, 61, 79, 241, 256–57.
20. “Unknown Teacher Changes ‘Shapes,’ ” Barnard Bulletin, February
11, 1965.
21. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 250–51.

Chapter 6. Free at Last?

1. Drew D. Hansen, The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech
That Inspired a Nation (New York: Ecco-HarperCollins, 2003), 159; Taylor
Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1998), 362, 374.
2. Eric J. Sundquist, King’s Dream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),
1–3, 8, 15; Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin
Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000), 26; CNN.com/2013/011/19/us/
mlk-conservative.
3. Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How It
Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991), 17–18, 47; Greta de Jong, You Can’t
Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice After the Civil Rights Movement
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 1–2.
4. Steve Fraser, “The Politics of Debt in America: From Debtor’s Prison to
Debtor Nation,” tomdispatch.com, January 29, 2013.
5. Hansen, The Dream, 1–4.
6. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Com-
munities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), 3–8.
7. Lemann, Promised Land, 5–6, 10, 17–18, 50.
8. Morris, Origins, 41; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Oppor-
tunities Found and Lost: Labor Radicalism and the Early Years of the Civil
Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, December 1988; Lemann,
Promised Land, 17–18.
9. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the
Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 213, 243, 244.
10. Lemann, Promised Land; Grossman, Land of Hope, 213, 243.
11. Lemann, Promised Land, 70; de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom, 3–4, 12.
Notes to pages 211–234 267

12. Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 5, 7, 9, 11, 17.
13. Reuel Schiller, Forging Rivals: Race, Class, and Law and the Collapse of
Postwar Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Korstad and
Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost”; Goluboff, The Lost Promise,
11–12, 17, 37, 38, 51.
14. Goluboff, The Lost Promise, 5, 6, 9, 17, 18, 27, 29, 35, 52, 56, 113, 139, 143;
“New Attack upon Liberties,” Social Action, January 10, 1936.
15. Sundquist, King’s Dream, 51; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America
in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 883; Goluboff,
The Lost Promise, 217–20, 225.
16. For a treatment of how intellectual and academic discussion of the “race
question” was similarly hobbled, see the excellent study by Leah N. Gordon,
From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Goluboff, The Lost
Promise, 12, 14, 16, 104, 105–7, 137, 212–20, 235, 237, 239, 264–65, 269.
17. Sundquist, King’s Dream, 45, 102, 154, 156; Hansen, The Dream, 13, 16;
Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 19–24; Goluboff, Lost Promise. The
stature of the proclamation endures despite the caveats that accompanied
its passage: it was issued as a “military necessity,” it was preceded by a one-
hundred-day grace period during which emancipation would be forestalled if
the South laid down its arms, and it did not apply in the border states fighting
for the Union or in southern states already under Union control.
18. Hansen, The Dream, 44–48; Branch, Parting the Waters, 880.
19. Sundquist, King’s Dream, 15; Clayborne Carson, “Rethinking African-
American Political Thought,” in The Making of Martin Luther and the Civil
Rights Movement, ed. Brian Ward and Tony Badger (New York: New York
University Press, 1996); Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The
Montgomery Story (Boston: Beacon, 2010); Dyson, I May Not Get There with
You, 6, 19; Grossman, Land of Hope, 243.
20. Sundquist, King’s Dream, 61, 63, 73, 110–11, 138; Dyson, I May Not Get
There with You, 19; Hansen, The Dream, 16, 183; Lemann, Promised Land,
159–60; Branch, Parting the Waters, 539.
21. Richard Yeselson, “When Labor Fought for Civil Rights,” Dissent, Winter
2017; Schiller, Forging Rivals; Branch, Parting the Waters, 269, 847; de Jong, You
Can’t Eat Freedom, 1–2, 12; Hansen, The Dream, 13, 14, 40.
22. Adolph Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post Segregation
Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
23. For King and others keeping guns, see Lemann, Promised Land, 160–62.
24. De Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom, 3.
268 Notes to pages 235–252

25. Sundquist, King’s Dream, 20, 59, 61.

26. Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 21, 28–29, 77–79, 83–88; Sundquist,
King’s Dream, 150, 211–12; Hansen, The Dream, 185–86, 190–92, 201, 220–21.
27. Hansen, The Dream, 167; Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 6, 80;
Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot, 112–13.
28. Lemann, Promised Land, 112, 154.
29. Ibid., 131, 149, 151.
30. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, 57; Lemann, Promised Land, 201.
31. Lemann, Promised Land, 90–94, 195.
32. Ibid., 192, 195; Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, xi, 5–6, 15, 47, 49, 57, 60–63, 67.
33. Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, 87–88, 92; Lemann, Promised Land,
159, 164; Goluboff, Lost Promise, 264–69; Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, 62–63, 67, 70.

Conclusion. The Homeland

1. Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 2–3.
2. “The New Non-workers—Uber, et al.,” New York Times, February 13,
2016; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism
and the World of Work (London: Verso, 2015), 88.
 Index

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 27 suburbia, 176–78; as public

Abenaki tribe, 44 office holders, 245; social
Abilene, Kansas, 125, 127, 139, 142 divisions among, 228–29;
Adams, Andy, 122–24, 127, 134, unemployment of, 243, 245;
140 urban migration in the South,
Adams, Henry, 108 208–9; voter registration effort
Adams, John, 23, 80 in Starkville, Mississippi, 227–34.
Adams, John Quincy, 77–78 See also race and racial
Adams family, 75 exclusion
adventurers, use of term in Agawan tribe, 49
England and colonies, 38 agriculture: agricultural crisis
affirmative action, 217, 246 (1980s), 152, 154; agricultural
affluent society, 164, 167, 168, 180, rural economy vs. mercantile
182 economy, 67–68, 71–72; cotton
AFL-CIO, 185, 224 industry changes in methods,
African Americans: black power 207; New Deal subsidies, 206;
and, 247; in civil service jobs, plantation agriculture’s use of
243–44; as cowboys, 139–40; slaves, 54, 56; sharecropping and
ghetto rebellions of, 234–38; tenant farming, 203–4
Great Migration of, 208–11, 243; Algonquin tribes, 53, 101
in Inwood, New York, 26–27, 29; Alien Land Law (Minnesota 1887),
job prospects in the North for, 130
210; labor movement and, Allen, Ethan, 70
212–14, 217, 223–27, 235, 238; Allen, Woody, 28
middle class during era of Alliance for Jobs, Housing, and
segregation, 229; in northern Education, 62, 82
270 Index

American Dream: consignment to material gratification and, 166;

class as temporary status, 24–25; middle class life and, 11
“I Have a Dream” speech rooted Autry, Gene, 119–20
in, 221; immigrants beckoned by,
105; inequality lurking in, 5; Bantam Books’ publication of
suburbia and, 178, 181 westerns, 120
American exceptionalism, 6, 7, 59, Baraka, Amairi, 223
109, 170 Barnard College prank in course
American Federation of Labor, 108 “Shapes of the American
American Fur Company, 151 Experience,” 188–93
American imperialism, 7 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste
American National Exhibition (sculptor of Statue of Liberty),
(Moscow 1959), 156–58. See also 86, 90–91, 97
“Kitchen Debate” Beck, Glenn, 199
American Revolution. See Bedloe’s Island, 93, 101–2, 104
Revolutionary War Bedloo, Isaac, 101
American studies departments, 171 Bell, Daniel, 187; The End of
Amsterdam News on New Deal as Ideology, 169
end to economic slavery, 214 Bellamy, Edward: Looking
André, John, 123 Backward, 253
Anglican Church of England, 31 Belmont, August, 103
anti-alien sentiment, 106–7, 143 Benjamin, Walter, 186
anti-capitalism, 85, 103 Bennett, James Gordon, 100–101,
anti-Federalists, 78–79, 81–82 142–43
anti-Semitism, 107, 111 Bennett, William, 199
Appelton family, 33, 56 Biddle, Francis, 214
Arbella (ship), 34, 35, 40 Bill of Rights, 66, 82
Arendt, Hannah, 184, 188 Billy the Kid, 124, 144
armories built after Great black liberation, 13
Insurrection, 95–96 Black Panther Party, 62, 234–35
Arnold, Benedict, 123 Black Panthers, 235, 238
Arthur, Chester, 139 Blanton, Henry, 154–55
Articles of Confederation, 67, 74 Bloodworth, Timothy, 78
Astor, Mrs., 99 blue-collar workers. See working
Astor, John Jacob, 151 class
Astor, John Jacob, IV, 99 Boorstin, Daniel, 170
Astors, 96, 101 Boston Brahmin, 107
automation, effects of, 21, 251–52 Boyd, William, 120
autonomy: iconic events and Bradbury family, 33, 56
images chosen for study and, 15; Bradford, William, 40, 52, 58
Index 271

Bradley-Martin Ball, 15 outmoded term, 186–87; slavery

Britain: explorers’ treatment of and, 202; stability of capitalist
indigenous Americans, 52–53; society, 81; venture capitalism,
Indian alliances with, post- 34; viability of, 2, 162, 211, 226;
Revolutionary War, 69; work as defining activity of, 21
ownership of cattle companies Carelton, Guy, 75
in American West, 129–32. See Carlin, George, 5
also Plymouth and Jamestown Carnegie, Andrew, 25, 98, 101
settlements; Revolutionary War Carroll, Lewis: Alice in
Brown, Claude, 223 Wonderland, 41–42
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Carson, Kit, 144
200, 219 Carver family, 32–33
Bryan, William Jennings: “Cross of Catholicism, 31, 107, 176
Gold” speech, 15 cattle ranching. See cowboys
Buffalo Bill, 144 censorship of media in the South,
Bureau of Indian Affairs, 127 206
Burns, Robert, 232 Chaney, James, 218
Business Week on evolving classless Chaplin, Charlie: Modern Times
society, 160 (film), 133
Cheyenne, Wyoming, 127, 130, 151
Camus, Albert, 196 Cheyenne Club, 131
Capital Freehold Land and Cheyenne tribe, 127, 151
Investment Company, 132 Chinese Communist view of
capitalism: black power and, Soviet Communism, 161
247; class hierarchy and, 20, Chinese exclusion, 108
171, 181; corporate capitalism, 17; Chisholm trail, 129, 134, 142
Darwinian capitalism, 94; early Christianity as guide to successful
America and, 16; emergence of living, 173
American capitalism, 30, 252; CIO (Congress of Industrial
evolution of, 171–72; extractive Organizations), 185, 212–13, 224,
capitalism of the West, 124–28, 232
144; family capitalism, 16–17, 24; Cisco Kid, 119, 140
finance capitalism, 13; green “city on a hill” image, 17, 38, 40, 52
capitalism, 13; Keynesian civil rights movement, 194–247;
capitalism, 168, 226; King class division and, 235–36;
questioning, 236; melding collective rights and, 214,
Indians into global capitalist 218; criticism of civil rights
economy, 44–50; mercantile legislation, 222; economic rights
capitalism, 30, 71–72, 79–80; and collective rights, 214;
New Left considering as education in the South and,
272 Index

civil rights movement (continued) class consciousness, 7–9, 11–14, 27,

204–5, 219; labor movement and, 168, 179, 184, 217
212–14, 217, 223–27, 235, 238; classless society, goal of: civil
political backdrop to, 216–17. See rights movement and, 217, 219;
also “I Have a Dream” speech; cowboys’ attempt to live in,
March on Washington; 121–22, 140–46; egalitarian
Mississippi Freedom Summer achievement of America in Cold
civil service jobs, 243–44 War rhetoric, 23, 156–63, 166,
Civil War, 16, 123, 142 167, 193, 216, 249, 253; Founding
Civil War Amendments, 82 Fathers and, 64–65, 83; promise
class: constitutional elitism and, of American Dream, 6, 249;
39, 58, 65, 78, 82, 252; suburbia and, 170, 179, 181
consumerism and, 21, 182, 186; Cleveland, Grover, 104
continuing to matter, 1, 3–5, 9, Cleveland Gazette on illusion of
13–18, 24–25, 252; democracy Statue of Liberty, 86
and, 22, 216; denial of relevance Clinton, Theophilus, 34
in American life, 4–5, 9, 14, 181, Coates, Ta Nehisi: Between the
257n7; distinct meaning of, World and Me, 18
19–20; in early America, 4, 10, COFO (Council of Federated
57, 64; fixation with, whether Organizations), 218, 230, 234
in affirming or repudiating, 8; COINTELPRO (FBI operation), 61
social strata used instead of Cold War, 156–63; civil rights
term “classes,” 20; Statue of movement capitalizing on
Liberty and enigma of class, ideology of, 217–18; as departure
105–8, 253. See also classless from class dimensions of social
society, goal of; elites; lower dilemmas, 219; third world
class; middle class; race and outreach of United States and,
racial exclusion; upper class; 215–16. See also “Kitchen
working class Debate”
class animosity: affluent society colonial America. See Plymouth
no longer plagued by, 168–69; and Jamestown settlements
conservatives viewing as colonialism, 24, 53, 218, 234
sacrilege, 4; cowboys harboring Comanche tribe, 126
against financial outsiders, 132, commercialism, 29, 34, 71–72
143; presidential election (2016) Congress, U.S.: characterization at
and, 1, 250; revolts in early time of founding, 79; Statue of
America and, 70–71; Statue of Liberty and, 93, 101
Liberty funding as example of, Congress of Industrial
97–105; War on Poverty and, Organizations (CIO), 185,
242 212–13, 224, 232
Index 273

Congress of Racial Equality 253, 254; class hostility against

(CORE), 218, 223 financial outsiders, 132, 143;
Connecticut, class differences in, 71 economics of, 133–34; ex-
Constitution, drafting and passage Confederates as, 123; fraternal
of, 65–83; amending Articles of relations of, 137–38; hierarchies
Confederation vs., 74; Article 1, of skill and authority, 135–37;
section 10, 75–76; checks and Hispanic vaqueros and, 139–40;
balances in, 76; class differences homoeroticism and, 145–46;
and, 39, 58, 65, 78, 82, 252; iconic image of, 14, 16–17,
counterrevolutionaries and, 78; 121–22, 249, 253; job assignments
federal powers in, 76; as iconic of, 136–37; life of, 134–35;
image, 14, 16, 65, 248–49; power omnipresence in 1950s media,
and subordination in, 254; 119–20, 139; “poor cowboy”
ratification disagreements, 77–81; image, 117–18, 154–55; power and
republicanism and, 70, 71, 76–77; subordination in relation to, 23,
rural economy vs. mercantile 133–38; race and ethnicity of,
economy and, 66–68, 71, 79–80; 139–40; Richard’s story (friend
secrecy of, 65, 75; state and of author), 147–55; Robin Hood
regional interests clashing in, 66, quality attributed to, 144;
73; unrest as background to, Roosevelt, Teddy, as rough-
68–71. See also Bill of Rights; riding example of, 141; as
specific amendments rootless outsider, 121–22, 131,
Constitutional Convention, 73 140–41, 143–45; self-sufficiency
consumerism: class linked to, 21, of the West and, 125; in Texas
182,186; criticism of, 185–86; U.S. cattle country, 131–32; trail
economy linked to, 159–60 driving’s heyday, 124; violence
Continental Congress, 67 and conflicts in, 128, 132–33,
Cooper, Peter, 93 139–42, 151
CORE (Congress of Racial “The Cowboy’s Lament” (song),
Equality), 218, 223 117–19, 121
Corey, Irwin, 192 Cromwell, Oliver, 33
Cotton, John, 34, 52 Cuban Revolution, 187
Council of Federated culture of poverty, 241
Organizations (COFO), 218, 230, Cushman, Robert, 58
234
cowboys, 117–55; Adams, Andy, as Dahl, Robert, 170
example of, 122–24; “boy” image Darwinian capitalism, 94
of, 122–24; cattle drives, 129–33; Davis, David Brion, 181
characteristics attributed to in Deadwood (television series), 118,
popular culture, 121, 138–46, 152, 121
274 Index

debt: in colonies, 38, 41; debt agricultural rural economy,

slavery in the South, 205; in 67–68, 71–72; Shays’ Rebellion
early America, 67–71, 74–76, 78 (1786–87), 15, 70, 80; Whiskey
Declaration of Independence, 17, Rebellion (1794), 80. See also
64, 198, 220–21 Constitution, drafting and
Delacroix, Eugène: Liberty Leading passage of
the People, 91 Earp, Wyatt, 142, 144
democracy: American economy: agrarian economy’s
exceptionalism linked to, 7; in demise in the South, 203;
constitutional drafting and agricultural crisis and beef
ratification debates, 73, 80; trade decline (1980s), 152, 154;
iconic events and images of, 15; agricultural subsidies of New
mass culture’s effect on, 184; Deal, 206; Constitution’s drafting
mobocracy vs., 73; obscuring in light of, 67–68, 73, 75;
class boundaries, 22, 216; search depression in late nineteenth
for utopia of classless society in, century, 93–100; English collapse
6; upper class’s role in, 10; voting of early 1600s, 31–32; growth from
and, 234 1946 through 1970, 166; iconic
Democratic Party: black events and images capturing
community participation in, America’s economic evolution,
244, 246; labor unions and, 167; 16; information economy, 251;
in post-Reconstruction South, linkage to class, 4–5, 57–58; meat
205; Pulitzer and, 103 business and cowboys, 129–30,
dependency, 21–22. See also power 134; mercantile economy vs.
and subordination agricultural rural economy,
De Pew, Chauncey, 104 67–68, 71–72; post-industrial
Detroit, race riots in (1968), 212 economics, 168–70; profit-
discrimination. See class; race and making purpose of settlements
racial exclusion in New World, 36, 40–41; race
Disney, Walt, 120 and, 226; slave-plantation
Dodge City, Kansas, 127, 134, 139, economy of the South, 56. See
142, 144 also capitalism; debt
Douglas, Paul, 218 education: integration in, 244;
Douglas, Steven, 220 segregation in, 204–5, 219; War
Douglass, Frederick, 220 on Poverty and, 242
Dutch East India Company, 30 Ehle, John: The Land Breakers,
Dylan, Bob, 120, 224 260n6
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 160, 185
early America: lawlessness in, elites: class consciousness of, 8;
69; mercantile economy vs. Cold War political elites, 163,
Index 275

168; in colonial America, 23, ethnic bias, 22

34–35; cultural pretension of, 21; extractive capitalism, 124–28, 144
governing role assumed by, 57,
70; social role of, 10; in Southern Fair Employment Practices
politics, 210, 229; Statue of Committee (FEPC), 200, 214,
Liberty and, 87, 88, 92, 105, 108, 224
114; subordination and power, Fair Labor Standards Act, 207,
role in, 239; Vietnam War and, 225
82–83 family capitalism, 16–17, 24
Ellis, Samuel, 102 Farmer, James, 223
Ellis Island, 102, 106, 108 Faulkner, William, 19
emancipation: drafting of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation
Constitution and, 66; labor (FBI), 60–61, 81
movement and, 212–13; in Federalist No. 10 (Madison), 76
New Deal and subsequently Federalists, 80
in civil rights, 200–201; social Federal Reserve, 152
psychology of, 12–13; Statue of Fencl, George, 82
Liberty as embodiment of, 110. Ferdinand Maximilian (emperor),
See also civil rights movement 88
Emancipation Day, 220 Fifteenth Amendment, 233
Emancipation Proclamation, 16, Flint sit-down strike (1936–37), 15,
214, 219–21, 267n17 232
Endicott family, 34 Ford Foundation, 244
Enlightenment’s humanistic Fortune article, “USA: The
ideologies, 169 Permanent Revolution” (1951),
environmentalists, 13 167
equality: American Dream and, 5, Forverts, 26, 113
7; in civil rights movement Founding Fathers, 65–66, 200;
rhetoric, 197, 199, 214, 216, 222, ruling class and, 23. See also
235, 240; Constitution’s failure to Constitution, drafting and
provide, 82; cowboys and, 143; passage of
iconic events and images and, 15, Fourteenth Amendment, 215
255; Statue of Liberty and, 102; France: bourgeois class struggle
War on Poverty and, 242. See in, 89, 114; Second Empire, 89;
also classless society, goal of; Statue of Liberty as gift from,
inequality 87–92, 114–15; Third Republic,
Equal Protection Clause, 215 88–89, 99
Equitable Life, 96 Franco-Prussian War of 1870, 88
“Essay on the Ordering of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, 103
Townes,” 56 Franklin, Benjamin, 76
276 Index

Fraser, Steve: arrest in West Garfield, James A., 94

Philadelphia, 60–65, 81; Barnard gender bias, 22, 250–51
College prank in course “Shapes General Electric, 158
of the American Experience” General Mills, 158
and, 188–93; college job in gentrification, 28–29
garment factory, 115–16; with Geological Survey, U.S., 127
“cowboy” friend, Richard, 147–49; George, Henry, 104; Progress and
immigrant grandfather (Max) of, Poverty, 94–95
110–14; Lee Avenue’s ethnic and GI Bill, 168, 179
racial groups and, 175–78, 227; “GI Bill for the Disadvantaged,”
living in Inwood, New York, King calling for, 236
as outlier, 26–28; March on GI Joe, 121
Washington participation by, Gilded Age: class consciousness of
19, 196; Mississippi Freedom nouveau riche, 7–8, 95, 98; class
Summer participation by, 194–95, warfare during, 107; robber
218, 227–34; O’Brien, Billy, as barons and tycoons’ lifestyles, 15,
childhood friend of, 175–76; run 95–99; second, 2; yellow
for Philadelphia city council, 81; journalism and, 101
singing “The Cowboy’s Lament” Glazer, Nathan, 170, 174
to his children, 117–18; in Godkin, E. L., 96
Starkville, Mississippi, 227–34; gold fever, 36–37, 41
Statue of Liberty’s associations Goldman, Emma, 85–86
for, 114; suburban upbringing of, Goodman, Andrew, 218
173–78 Gordon, Leah N., 267n16
Free Speech Movement (Berkeley), Gorz, André, 21
171, 196 Gould, Jay, 94, 98, 102, 103
Fremont, John, 144 government of early America:
French Revolution, 89 debate over nature of, 73–74;
frontier of early America, 67–70; lawlessness and, 69. See also
cowboy picking up mantle of, Constitution, drafting and
140; vs. East Coast passage of
commercialism, 24; grangers, 128
republicanism and, 71; social Grant, Ulysses S., 93, 97
conflict and, 69 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck
fur trade, 42–45, 47, 69, 126 novel), 216
Great Depression, 20, 109, 162, 167,
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 164, 169, 206–7
171, 182 Great Gatsby, 174, 178
Galveston, Texas, 112 Great Insurrection (railroad strike
Gardener family, 56 of 1877), 94, 95
Index 277

Great Migration, 208–11, 243 iconic events and images chosen

Great Society programs, 244 for study, 14–15; dispelling
Greeley, Horace, 68, 93 assumption that class did not
“Green Mountain Boys,” 70 matter, 15; other possible
Grey, Zane, 120 choices, 15–16; power and
Gunsmoke (television series), 120 subordination in, 20–23;
Guthrie, Woody, 224 rationale of choices, 16–18. See
also Constitution, drafting and
Hall, Leonard, 170 passage of; cowboys; “I Have a
Hall, Oakley: Warlock, 121 Dream” speech; “Kitchen
Hamilton, Alexander, 74–77, Debate”; Plymouth
79, 81 and Jamestown settlements;
Hanna, Mark, 98 Statue of Liberty
Harper Brothers, 96 identity politics, 180, 200, 246–47,
Harrington, Michael: The Other 250
America, 241 “I Have a Dream” speech (King,
Hartz, Louis: The Liberal Tradition Jr. 1963): achieving supposed
in America, 169 reality of, 238–40, 246, 253;
Haymarket bombing (Chicago), American dream and, 221; effect
94, 104 of, 196; framework of, 221–22;
Haymarket Massacre, 15 ghetto rioters’ view of, 235; as
Hearst, William Randolph, 101 iconic event, 14, 17, 198–99, 249;
Henry, Patrick, 79 power and subordination in
Higginson, Frances, 51 relation to, 23
Higginson, Henry Lee, 100 immigrants: in Chicago of 1870s,
Higginson family, 34 85; deportation in Palmer raids,
Hispanic vaqueros, 139–40 85; Depression decline of, 109;
Holliday, Doc, 144 Ellis Island as landing point, 106;
homeland, use of term, 248 exclusionary acts, 108; in
Homestead Act, 129 Galveston, Texas, 112; opposition
Hoover, J. Edgar, 82, 83 to quotas, 107; return to home
Hopalong Cassidy, 119–20 of origin, 110. See also anti-alien
House Beautiful, 160 sentiment; Statue of Liberty
housing discrimination, 218, 244 Independence Hall, 64, 66
How American Buying Habits Indians: on Bedloe Island in
Change (Labor Department New York harbor, 101; British
study 1959), 160 alliances with, post-
Hudson, Henry, 30 Revolutionary War, 69;
Hunt, Richard Morris, 101 colonists’ dealings with, 37,
Hunt, Thomas, 53 43–45, 47; colonists’ views of
278 Index

Indians (continued) Inwood, New York, 26–28

lifestyle of, 50–55; cowboys’ Ipswich, Massachusetts, 49
dealings with, 139, 142; economy Irish immigrants, 26–28
and trade among, 44; forced
into reservations, 127; in fur James I (English king), 40
trade, 43–44, 126; genocide of, James, Henry, 15
24, 29, 45; Plains Indians, fate Jefferson, Thomas, 23, 164–65, 171
of, 127; property concepts of Jewish Daily Forward, 26, 113
colonists, effect of, 48–50, 56; Jewish immigrants, 26, 28, 107,
social conflict with colonists, 45; 110–14
social stratification of tribal life, Jewish Messenger on Eastern
55; way of life eroded after European Jewish immigrants, 111
colonists’ arrival, 45–49, 56, 126; Jim Crow codes, 203–8, 212, 217,
Western settlers, encounters 219, 233
with, 126–27 jobs: automation, effects of, 21,
indigenous peoples. See Indians 251–52; civil rights movement
individualism: American and, 243–47; loss of class
resourcefulness related to, 170; identity due to decentralization
of colonialists, 58; iconic images of, 251; unemployment of
representing, 16; industrial African Americans, 243, 245;
individualism, 215; lost in mass War on Poverty and, 243. See
society, 184; racial individualism, also cowboys; labor movement;
215, 218 March on Washington for Jobs
Industrial Workers of the World, and Freedom
138 “Jobs and Freedom” march. See
inequality: concerns raised over, March on Washington for Jobs
2; Fourteenth Amendment and Freedom
targeting of, 215; hidden in Johnson, Lyndon B., 241, 246
American Dream discourse, 5; Johnson County War (Wyoming
in median income of blacks vs. 1892), 133, 151
whites, 243; race vocabulary Journal of Retailing, 159–60
and, 213, 250; rise as political jury duty by African Americans in
incendiary, 8–9. See also class; the South, 205
race and racial exclusion Justice Department, civil rights
information economy, 251 violations filed with, 213–14
Interior Department, 127 juvenile delinquency, 244
intimidation, 3, 31, 112, 233
inventiveness, 170 Kazvenhaven, John, 188, 190
involuntary servitude. See Kennedy administration, 222
Thirteenth Amendment Kerner Commission, 240
Index 279

Kerr, Clark, 171 217, 223–27, 235, 238;

Keynesian capitalism, 168, 226 decentralization of jobs, 251;
Khrushchev, Nikita, 156, 158–61, evolution of, 13; immigration
173. See also “Kitchen Debate” and, 107; strikers, 15, 142, 163, 232;
King, Martin Luther, Jr.: on wage increases and, 167; War on
affirmative action, 217; Poverty and, 243; working
assassination of, 237; birthday conditions and, 104. See also
made national holiday, 198; on AFL-CIO
class divisions, 235–36; guns and, Laboulaye, Édouard de, 90–91
231; labor problems of African Laramie, Wyoming, 127, 139, 151
Americans as focus of, 223–25; Laramie County Stock Association,
“Poor People’s Campaign” 151
inaugurated by, 237–38; Stride Lauren, Ralph, 152
toward Freedom: The Lazarus, Emma: “The New
Montgomery Story, 222–23. See Colossus,” 84–85, 87, 109–10
also “I Have a Dream” speech; Lee, Lighthorse Harry, 72–73
March on Washington Lemann, Nicholas: The Promised
King Ranch (Texas), 130 Land, 207
Kishinev pogrom (1903), 111 Lenape Indians, 29
“Kitchen Debate” between Nixon Lerner, Max, 174; American
and Khrushchev, 156–63; Civilization, 170
egalitarian achievement of Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 90
America (as described by Lester, Julius, 223
Nixon), 156–63, 166, 193, 216, 249, Leviticus, 220
253; egalitarian achievement of Levitt, William, 179
America and, 174, 180, 183; as Levittown, 165, 178, 180
iconic image, 14, 17, 161, 249; Lewis, John, 221–22
power and subordination in Lewis, Oscar, 241
relation to, 23, 254–55; “right to liberal consensus, 190, 241–42
choose” as Nixon’s summing liberty: born amid class conflict,
up of American way of life, 73–74, 83; as classless ideal,
159, 182; suburbia as basis for 64–65, 83; constitutional concept
Nixon’s argument of classless of, 65–66; Louisiana Purchase
society, 163 and, 165; meaning of Statue of
Knights of Labor, 108 Liberty and, 84, 87. See also
Kollontai, Alexandra, 85–86 Statue of Liberty
Liberty Bell, 64–65, 81
labor movement: of 1930s, 211; Liberty Bonds (World War I),
author’s grandfather Max and, 109
113; black workers and, 212–14, Lichtheim, George, 172
280 Index

Life (magazine): on American Marcuse, Herbert, 187, 188, 192;

consumers achieving classless One Dimensional Man, 185–86,
society, 160; homogenizing of 189
classes into mid-culture, 183; on Marlboro Man, 121, 146
Statue of Liberty’s need for Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 6, 8, 160,
funding, 103 163, 171, 185, 190–91, 223, 232, 235,
Limbaugh, Rush, 199 249; The Communist Manifesto,
Lincoln, Abraham, 97, 105, 106, 138, 1–2, 162; The Eighteenth Brumaire
220 of Louis Napoleon, 114–15
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 170 masculinity: of American Dream,
literature: cowboy stories, 120–21; 254; of cowboy image, 145–46; of
males depicting class struggle in, proletarian emancipation,
5–6 250–51; of Trump campaign, 250.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 108 See also patriarchy
Lomax, Frank, 228 Maskonomen (Indian sachem), 49
Lomax’s Café (Starkville Massachusetts Bay colony. See
Mississippi), 227–28, 230–33 Plymouth and Jamestown
Lone Ranger, 119–20; Tonto and, 140 settlements
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 93 Massachusetts debt relief in early
Louisiana Purchase, 165 America, 75
lower class: blue-collar stigma of, mass culture, 182–85, 187, 193
12; cowboys as part of, 154; Masterson, Bat, 142
internalizing contempt of upper Mather, Cotton, 40
class into feelings of shame, 12; Matthews, Adonijah, 77
machine politicians controlling, Mayflower, 32–33, 34
96–97; racial discrimination Mayflower Compact, 39–40
and, 239; resentment of, 12, 20; Maynard, Frank H., 117
in suburbia, 176–78 McCarthyism and politics of fear,
162, 216
Madison, James, 74–76 McCauley, Jim, 145
Malcolm X, 223, 225, 234, 237 McCoy, Joseph, 125
Manhattan, purchase of, 29–30 McDonald, Dwight, 183–84, 188
March on Washington for Jobs and McMurtry, Larry, 155; Lonesome
Freedom (led by King 1963), Dove, 121
196–200; author present at, 19, McNamara, Robert, 83
196; Emancipation Proclamation Medicaid, 242
and, 220, 224; as iconic event, 14, Medicare, 168, 242
17, 198–99; objectives of, 223–25, Melville, Herman, 99
238, 246; Southern blacks’ mercantile capitalism, 30, 71–72,
representation at, 203, 209 79–80
Index 281

Mexican-American War, 144 NAACP: avoidance of class

MFDP (Mississippi Freedom consciousness by, 217; civil
Democratic Party), 228, 230 rights violations filed with,
Miantonomo (Narragansett 213, 215; middle-class goals of,
sachem), 50 219; in Mississippi during
mid-culture, 182–84 civil rights movement (1964),
middle class: America as land of, 9; 218
black middle class during era of Napoleon III, 88–90, 114
segregation, 229; black middle native Americans. See Indians
class rising from civil rights Negro American Labor Council
movement, 219, 244–46; (NALC), 224–25
disappearance of, 2; evolution Netherlands, explorers from, 30
of, 24, 172; fiction of individual New Deal, 16, 109–10, 162, 167,
autonomy and, 11; infinite 200–201, 206, 211–12, 216, 225
frustration of, 10; Marx on, 185; New Left, 186
mass society and, 185; NAACP New Orleans, 112
goals and, 219; political Newsweek on property ownership’s
malleability of, 10; psychological rise, 166
make-up of, 11–12; suburban New World: class as remnant from
domesticity of, 163–73 Old World, 8, 55; delusion of
migrant workers, 3. See also Great exemption from class conflict, 6,
Migration 59, 67; as escape from Old World
Mills, C. Wright, 178, 186–87 hierarchy, 4, 7, 24; as forgotten
Minuit, Peter, 29, 30 legend, 86; iconic events and
Mississippi Freedom Democratic images capturing economic
Party (MFDP), 228, 230 evolution of, 16; national unity
Mississippi Freedom Summer, of, 18; natural resources sought
194–95, 197, 198, 218, 227–34 by explorers in, 30; utopianism
Mobilization of Youth program, of, 252; wealth accumulated in,
244 changing Old World order,
Model Cities program, 244 34–35, 57, 59. See also Plymouth
More, Thomas, 253 and Jamestown settlements
Morgan, J. P., 96, 98 New York (state), class animosities
Morgans, 96 in, 70
Moses, Bob, 196–97 New York City: Eastern European
movies of 1930s vs. postwar Jewish immigrants arriving in,
movies, 172–73 111; Knickerbocker elites, 108;
Murray, Phillip, 184–85 Tompkins Square hunger riots
“My Heart’s Pastureland” (song), (1874), 94. See also Statue of
155 Liberty
282 Index

New York Daily Advertiser on social outlier in Inwood, New

conflict, 70 York, 28
New York Herald Tribune on class Philadelphia: in 1969, 60–65;
leveling, 167 interest in Statue of Liberty, 93
Nixon, Richard, 23, 156–63, 166, 174, Philadelphia Police Department,
180, 183, 187, 193, 216, 246, 249. 60, 82
See also “Kitchen Debate” philanthropy, 98
nouveau riche, 7–8, 95, 98. See also Pierce, Shanghai, 123
Gilded Age Pilgrims, 32, 35, 39–41, 52. See also
Plymouth and Jamestown
O’Brien, Billy, 175–76 settlements
Occupy Wall Street, 2, 13 Pingree, Mrs., 177
Ohio Valley, 69 Pinter, Harold, 114
Old World hierarchy. See New Plains Indians, 127
World Planet of the Apes (film), 84
one percenters, 2–3 Platt, Boss, 109
Oregon Trail, 126, 151 Plummer, William, 74
origin story. See Plymouth and Plymouth and Jamestown
Jamestown settlements settlements, 30–59; aristocrats
outsiders: author living in Inwood, and elites, 34; colonial views on
New York, as outlier, 26–28; Indian lifestyle, 50–55; debt
cowboys as, 121–22, 131, 140–41, incurred by, 41; debunking myth
143–45; democracy’s outsiders, of, 252; English monarchy as
187; in suburbia, 187 accepted government of, 39–40;
The Ox Bow Incident (film), 121 entitlement of colonists to
Indian lands, 51; fur trade in
Packard, Vance: The Hidden colonial times, 42–45; as iconic
Persuaders, 182 images, 14, 16, 248; indentured
Palmer raids, 85 servants, 32–33, 53, 54; investors
Paris Commune, 88–89, 94 in, 34–35, 38; Mayflower
patriarchy, 33, 55, 138, 179, 254 Compact, 39–40; Mayflower
Peale, Norman Vincent, 173; The settlers maintaining social
Power of Positive Thinking, 173 ranks, 32–33; original settlers’
Pennsylvania State House. See origins and social ranks, 31–35,
Independence Hall 55; power and subordination in
peonage, 125, 202–10, 213, 222, 233 relation to, 24; profit-making
Pequot War, 53 purpose of, 36, 40–41; property
personal and political views concepts of colonists, 35, 48–50,
of author as part of class 56; slavery, introduction of, 54;
discussion, 18–19; author as social conflict within and with
Index 283

indigenous people, 45, 52; race and racial exclusion:

“the Starving Time,” 37, 54; affirmative action, 217, 246;
transference of Old World social capitalism and, 181; class bias
order, 38, 55, 67; voting rights and, 22, 219, 239, 246, 250;
contingent on property cowboys and ranchers, 139–40,
ownership, 35; wealth 151; economic roots of, 181,
accumulated in, as determining 199; education in the South
class, 34–35, 57. See also New and, 204–5, 219; housing
World discrimination, 218, 244;
Pocahontas, 53, 54 incarceration of people of color,
“Poor People’s Campaign,” 237–38 22–23; Indians considered as
Populist movement and populism, inferior race, 52; Jim Crow codes
22, 206 and, 203–8, 212, 217, 219, 233; jury
post-industrial economics, 17, 20, duty and, 205; New Deal keeping
168–70 status quo, 212; peonage as
Potter, David: People of Plenty, 170 slavery’s legacy, 202–10, 213, 222,
poverty, 240–44 233; racial individualism, 215;
power and subordination, 20–22, vocabulary of, 213, 250; voter
237, 254–55 registration and, 195, 204–5,
Powhatan (chief), 53, 54 227–34; in West Philadelphia,
Powhatan tribe, 37, 53 61–62; white immigrants
Prairie Cattle Company, 130 joining in racism, 109; white
presidential election (2016), 1, responsibility for race
249–50 discrimination and black
prisoners used for labor in the poverty, 240–41. See also civil
South, 205 rights movement; “I Have a
property rights: colonists and, 35, Dream” speech; slavery
48–50, 56; growth in home railroads: strike (1877), 94,
ownership, 166; Western lands 95; Western construction of,
and ranches, 127–28, 130, 143, 151 127
Protestantism, 107 Raine, William MacLeod: A Texas
psychological manipulation of Ranger, 147
advertising industry, 182 Randolph, A. Philip, 220, 223–25
Puck cartoon on immigrant Randolph, Edmund, 76
problem, 109 RCA-Whirlpool, 158
Pulitzer, Joseph, 100–104, 115 Reagan, Ronald, 121, 152, 198
Puritans, 31, 51–52, 171. See also Reconstruction, 235
Plymouth and Jamestown Reed, Lou: “Dirty Boulevard,” 87
settlements “Regulators” of North Carolina, 70
Pynchon, William, 49 Reid, Whitlaw, 96
284 Index

“relations of production,” 21–23 self-reliance, 180

religious discrimination, 107 self-sufficiency, 125, 255
Remington, Frederic, 143, 146 “Separatists,” 31, 58
republicanism, 70, 71, 76–77, 102 Shays, Daniel, 70
Republican Party: of California, Shays’ Rebellion (1786–87), 15, 70,
199; Nixon and, 162; in post- 80
Reconstruction South, 205 Singer Sewing Machine, 96
Reuther, Walter, 217 Singletary, Amos, 78
Revolutionary War, 23, 67–68, 88, Sioux tribe, 127, 143, 151
102, 123 Siringo, Charles: A Texas Cowboy;
Rhode Island, debt moratoria in, or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane
70 Deck of a Spanish Pony,
Riesman, David, 172, 174, 182 123–24
Riis, Jacob, 16 Sisyphus complex, 10
Rizzo, Frank, 61–62, 82 slavery: counting of slaves for
Robinson, Gilbert, 158 congressional representation,
Rockefeller, John D., 98, 101 66; debt slavery, 205; peonage as
Rodriguez, Sixto, 257n1 legacy of, 202–10, 213, 222, 233;
Rogers, Roy, 118–20 plantation agriculture’s use of,
Rolfe, John, 54 54, 56; in tandem with
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 200, 214, capitalism, 202; wage slavery,
224. See also New Deal 165, 203, 221, 250, 251
Roosevelt, Theodore, 16, 95, 141, 143 Sleeping Car Porters Union, 224
Rossiter, Clinton, 170 Smith, Adam: The Wealth of
ruling class, 23, 34–35. See also elite Nations, 73–74
Rustin, Bayard, 223 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 95
rustling and rustlers, 128, 131, 135 Smith, John: on British explorers’
treatment of indigenous
Safire, William, 157 Americans, 52–53; class
Sage, Russell, 98 background of, 33; on imposing
Saltonstall family, 34 discipline on colonists, 36–37, 41,
Sanders, Bernie, 13 180; on Indian lifestyle, 51; on
Santa Fe trail, 129 individualism, 58; on New
Savio, Mario, 196 World presenting new social
Schwerner, Michael, 218 world, 4, 162, 171; patriarchy of
SDS (Students for a Democratic New World and, 254; Powhatan
Society), 61 and, 53; return to England to
Seeger, Pete, 224 advocate for writ to seize Indian
segregation in education, 204–5, land, 54
219 Smith, Tom, 142
Index 285

SNCC (Student Non-Violent 109; liberty as meaning of, 84,

Coordinating Committee), 61, 87; “Liberty Enlightening the
196, 218, 221 World” as original name of, 92;
socialism, 186–87, 236 pedestal design, 101; power and
Socialist Party, 108 subordination in relation to, 23,
Social Security, 168 24, 254; symbolism of, 91–92,
social welfare state, 167–68, 206–7. 109–10, 253
See also New Deal Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of
Southern Christian Leadership Wrath, 16
Council (SCLC), 218, 236, 247 stereotyping, 28
Soviet Union, 157, 161–63. See also Stewarts, 96
“Kitchen Debate” “The Streets of Laredo” (song),
Sparkes-Harrell spread (Nevada & 117–19
Idaho), 130 Student Non-Violent
Spencer, Massachusetts, and Coordinating Committee
ratification of U.S. Constitution, (SNCC), 61, 196, 218, 221
80 Students for a Democratic Society
Spufford, Francis: Red Plenty, (SDS), 61
264–65n6 suburbia, 163–73; author’s
Sputnik (Soviet satellite), 157 suburban upbringing, 173–78;
squatters, 125 class divisions in, 179–81;
Stalin, Joseph, 6 classlessness of, 170, 181; critics
Standish, Myles, 32, 52 of, 181–82; distinguishing among
Starkville, Mississippi, 227–34 suburbs by income levels, 178;
State Department, 158, 218 government reliance of, 180;
Statue of Liberty, 84–98, 101–10, lower class in, 176–78; patriarchy
114–15; American bourgeoisie and, 179; white nature of, 178
associated with, 115; author’s Sumner, Charles, 93
association with, 114; class “sunshine patriots,” 68
enigma and, 105–8, 253; delay in surplus population, 252
installation, 93; democracy and, Sydney, Phillip, 38
104–5; French origins of, 87–92,
114–15; funding solicitations for, taxes, 67–68, 74, 75, 77, 80, 167
101–3; Gilded Age tycoons Temple University, 62
refusing to make donations for, terrorism, 82, 83
101; as iconic image, 14, 16–17, 84, Texas: cattle companies in, 131–32;
114, 249; immigrant experience migration to, 123–25
connected to, 109–10; “There was a Young Cowboy”
installation (1886), 103–4; (song), 117–19
Lazarus poem inscribed on, 87, Thiers, Adolphe, 88–89, 99
286 Index

third world outreach of United Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 98

States, 215–16 Vanderbilt, William, 102
Thirteenth Amendment, 205, 214, Vanderbilts, 96, 101
219, 220–21 Vardaman, James K., 204
Tiananmen Square, 84 venture capitalism, 34
Tilden, Samuel, 101 victory culture, 121
Time magazine on “Kitchen violence: against African
Debate,” 159 Americans in the South, 203; in
tobacco production and trade, 54 cowboy life and the West, 128,
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 10, 178 132–33, 139–42, 151; ghetto riots,
Tonto, 140 213, 235–36
Trotsky, Leon, 167 Virginia Company, 34–35, 37, 39, 54
Truman, Harry S., 216 vocabulary: expungement of class
Trump, Donald, 1, 10, 21, 29, 250 from, 5; race vocabulary, 213, 250
Twain, Mark, 104, 143 voting rights: African Americans,
voter registration of, 195, 205,
“The Unfortunate Rake” (Irish 227–34; democracy and, 234;
ballad), 117 Fifteenth Amendment and, 233;
Union League, 97–98 property ownership as
Union Pacific Railroad, 130 qualification for, 35
United Auto Workers, 212, 235
United Labor Party, 95 wampum, 29, 45–47
universal literacy, 183 War on Poverty, 240–44, 246–47
University City Science Center Washington, George, 69, 80–81
(University of Pennsylvania), Watts riot (1965), 235–36
61–62 welfare system, 167–68, 246
University of California at westerns on television and radio,
Berkeley, 171 118–20
upper class: contempt for lower Whiskey Rebellion (1794), 80
class, 12; role in democracy, 10; Whyte, William: The Organization
vacillating in their self-view, Man, 182
9–10. See also elites; Gilded Age Wichita, Kansas, 142
U.S. Land Office, 127 Wilkins, Roy, 235
utopia, 6, 55, 180, 183, 187; American Williams, Roger, 52
myth’s utopian nature, 252–55; Wills, Garry, 198
emancipation and, 253; New Wingfield, Edward Morris, 33
World settlements viewed as Winthrop, John, 33, 34, 49, 51–52;
land of plenty and ease, 36–37, “A Model of Christian Charitie”
59; reconfiguring control and, (sermon), 40
253–54; salvation of, 254 Wirtz, W. Willard, 241
Index 287

Wister, Owen: The Virginian, 120, blue-collar workers, 165; white

141, 145 rebellion in 2016 election, 1, 250;
women: in American utopia, “white trash” vs. African
254; black women, jobs held by, Americans in Southern labor
208; first woman ambassador pool, 204; yellow journalism
(Alexandra Kollontai), 85; aimed at, 100. See also labor
gender bias and, 22; as workers, movement
250–51 World War I and II, effect on
working class: black members of, black migration to the North,
250; collective mobilization of, 209–10
167, 211; cooling of resentments Wright, Elton D., VI, 213
held by, 167; creation of Wyoming cattle companies, 130–32
industrial revolution, 20–21; Wyoming Stock Growers
immigrants constituting cheap Association, 151
labor, 106; in Inwood, New York,
29; Michigan blue-collar XIT Ranch (Texas), 131–32, 137
workers (1950s study), 179; in XX Ranch (Wyoming), 150, 153
Philadelphia, 64; upward
mobility of, failure to Yeats, William Butler, 121
materialize, 21; wage slavery, 165, yellow journalism, 100
203, 221, 250, 251; white-collar vs. Young, Andrew, 247