Living Downtown

Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States
© 1994 Paul Groth
399 pages

Although today hotels are thought of as places for travelers, at its most basic level a hotel is simply a rented room; an apartment without a kitchen. For much of American history,  the 'huddled masses' filling the cities found homes not in detached houses, but in residential hotels.  Buildings giant and small, dilapidated and grand, they catered to the rich and poor alike. Living Downtown examines what lives were like, as lived in different classes of hotels, and tracks their struggle through the 20th century as they became the target of reformers.  This is a social history of urban life in American cities' boomtime.

Suburbanized America thinks of apartments and the like as exceptions to the rule of privately-owned homes, but as Living Downtown reveals, communal life has a strong history in the nation. Wealthy families saw in hotels a place to enjoy servants without the bother of managing them; ambitious middle-class couples could claim a fashionable address and the opportunity to network with their betters; and the working class found a certain independence in cheap rents that allowed them to move easily in pursuit of work, or maintain lodgings even if they were laid off for a short time. Hotels ranged from grand palaces to 2-penny a day flophouses that even the indigent could afford, provided they found an odd job now and again. Hotels also offered more inherent opportunities for socialization;  those midrange and above typically came with cafes, restaurants, and shops attached;  the wealthy could even find rooms reserved for smoking and lounging about.  Lowly flophouses wouldn't sport such facilities, of course, but they were enmeshed in an urban fabric that catered to the needs of their guests.

Living Downtown finds in hotels abounding interest. After  discussing the lifestyles and attractions of the different classes of hotels, Groth moves on to hotels' place in the overall American fabric. Hotels attracted negative attention beginning the Progressive era, where helpful reformers took it upon themselves to clean up American cities and inflict morality upon them.  The idea that rich society wives could lounge about in hotel parlors, not even bothering to keep house, was too much for reformers to bear, as was the inevitable use of hotels of all kinds as playgrounds for prostitution. Establishing and advancing the ideal of American society being rooted in privately-held, detached homes,  the progressive era saw hotels first constricted in growth by regulation, then smothered altogether by aggressive zoning laws that would eventually attempt to deconstruct American cities, turning smartly-organized social arrangements into sprawl. Granted, there were areas that needed attention -- especially in the area of waste sanitation in poorer hotels -- but more has been lost than gained by idealistic zeal.  In addition to social history, there's a little discussion of business practices.

In 21st century America, where the market for cheap housing  has been all but obliterated by aggressive Federal support for welfare tenements of the kind that destroy cities, Living Downtown is a vivid reminder of the variety of housing approaches that once existed, and a look back into American cities when they were truly dynamic from the ground up.

Daily Life in Early America

Daily Life in Early America
193 pages
© 1988 David Freeman Hawke

            Daily Life in Early America examines up-close the new world European colonists were discovering and recreating for themselves.  A social history, focused on daily life, the author begins first in England, reviewing quickly what work and social customs the colonists would have been accustomed to.  It begins and continues as a study in variety, for there was no ‘average’ English colonist; manners and means of living varied widely from county to county, even before they combined with German and Dutch settlers on the North American seaboard.   Although I read this as background for Independence Day readings,  early America well and truly means early.  Hawke tells the tale of men creating a civilization from the wilderness, often borrowing largely from the disease-vanquished native cultures which collapsed or retreated following exposure to European guns, germs, and steel. Although they attempted to recreate what they left behind in North America, creating a  New England on the model of the old,  the challenges and opportunities presented by the vast frontier spurred the evolution of a different culture. Covering everything from floor plans to the art of war, from superstition to politics, Daily Life in Early America delivers an abundance of information in lively style. This is definitely an author to look more into..  

Related:

Life in a Medieval Village,  Life in a Medieval City, Daily Life in a Medieval Castle, Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages;  Frances and Joseph Gies

DailyLife in Anglo-Saxon England, Sally Crawford

More Work for Mother

More Work for Mother: the Ironies of American Housework

© 1985 Ruth Cowan           

288 pages

       Throughout the 20^th century,  households were transformed by a new abundance of labor-saving devices, from washing machines to toaster ovens, and processed goods that reduced housewives’ workloads, leaving them free to learn trades and professions of their own and fully participate in the modern world.  But in the second decade of the 21^st century, American women are just as  chore-taxed as ever, lamenting of the ‘second shift’ that awaits them upon arriving home. Despite the many machines now investing our homes,  most of the work still has to be done by hand, for Parkinson’s Law holds true there as well as anywhere  else: work expands to fill the time available for its completion. In More Work for Mother, author Ruth Cowan demonstrates how gadgets and goods created new work while eliminating others, and argues that women will not be free from drudgery until housework is freed from the realm of ‘femininity’ to the point that men won’t feel emasculated by laundry.

            The devices and goods of the 19^th and 20^th century – refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves,  convenient bags of flour, even more convenient no-bake cheesecake mixes, even more convenient instant cereal --  did indeed reduce a lot of labor. In fact, for men they reduced virtually all household work.  More Work for Other opens with a history of housework. Although modern readers might  be aware that women’s traditional role was in the home, men’s traditional role was in the home, as well;  prior to industrialism, men didn’t pack a lunch pail and disappear into the country for a day at work. The home and the work of most families were intimately connected,  typically inseparable. Women may have baked bread, but it was men who gathered and ground it;  women may have washed clothes, but men chopped the wood and let children lug in the water.  But while men’s roles in the household largely vanished, women found that work remained constant.  The availability of affordable clothing reduced the need for sewing and repairing, but increased the burden of laundry, and standards of cleanliness climbed as the ability to clean increased. Laundry and scrubbing agents meant that minor stains could no longer be tolerated, necessitating near-daily cleaning regimens.  And those new labor-saving devices were often fragile things, needing frequent cleaning to avoid their works being gummed up.  Additionally, for middle class or wealthier women, the availability of do-it-yourself machines meant that retaining maids and other servants was a sinful waste – never mind that doing it themselves meant more hours of their own time spent doing the labor, regardless of advertisers’ claims of quick ease-of-use.   There  were options that might have truly revolutionized household chores –  commercial kitchens with thrice-daily delivery,  commercial laundries, cooperatives, apartment hotels – but most fell by the wayside, either because of cultural imperatives or because of market forces.  

         Although not as sweeping as Susan Strasser's Never Done,  what's lost in extensive narrative is replaced by more serious analysis and an abundance of good points made. Cowan notes, for instance, that the increase of standardized products destroyed easy class differences:  while in the mid-19th century a street urchin and the scion of a wealthy businessman would look as different as night and day just judging from their clothes' cleanliness, today both could wear the same products, and the fact that vitually all homes have water and heating means that no one is denied the ability to shower every day.  The interior of homes, too, are far closer than they once were; the absence of gadgets and electricity might have once marked a hovel, but these days not even campers will tolerate going without a refrigerator.  Her driving point is that the fact that homes are now filled with gadgets and manufactured articles doesn't mean that homes are no longer productive; mothers are still 'producing' clean bathrooms, fed children,  and presentable clothing. If the labor women perform was priced as though they were in the open market, people would never assume homemaking to be unproductive. Ultimately, Cowan believes women will be freed from drudgery only when we relax fanatic standards regarding cleanliness and the housework that remains is stripped, through cultural or technological means, of its traditionally female association so that men will pitch in more.  If that argument, made in 1985, has lost some of its edge in a 21st century peopled by "Mr.Moms" , most of the work has not.

Look Homeward, America!

Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists
© 2006 Bill Kauffman
250 pages

"The Little Way. That is what we seek. That -- contrary to the ethic of personal parking spaces, of the dollar-sign god -- is the American way. Dorothy Day kept to that little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not beautiful, at least it is always human."  p. 39

           Look Homeward, America collects the stories of eccentric individuals who, in a century marked by the advance of corporate and state power, rebelled against the machine. Planting their flag above small towns and in the countryside, they held on what they regarded as valuable and defied or attempted to resist the march of a more inhumane world. Bill Kauffman is a sympathetic soul, a die-hard "placeist". He calls himself the anarchist love-child of Henry David Thoreau and Dorothy Day, and Look Homeward is his tribute to peaceable troublemakers like his 'parents'. They are farmers and social workers, politicians and miners, men and women whose faith is the family and the local community. They champion self-reliance, local interest, and peace; they scorn war, industrial agriculture, big business, and government bureaucracy.  The expression thereof varies; some are hands-on activists, like Day and Mother Jones,  others very frustrated political candidates, still others authors who sing the song of their places and peoples in novel and verse.No political labels apply here; although most are out to protect traditional expressions of civil society, or are vigorously insisting that the powerful leave them be, these conservatives and libertarians are joined by men like Eugene Debs. A book that can honor the six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist party in the same breath as Wendell Berry (a Kentucky farmer, novelist, and proponent of agrarianism)  is wonderfully eclectic. A strong sense of the meaningful life pervades and is carried forth by both religious personalities (Catholic Dorothy Day, featured prominently) and the irreligious, like Robert Ingersoll.   (The great agnostic only receives a mention, which is too bad; his view of the American republic was quite Jeffersonian.) The expression of this common spirit differs from In essence, Look Homeward is a lively championing of localism, a tribute paid to people whose lives were a great raspberry in the face of war and modern alienation. It's a ball to read, not only because Kaufman is so personable,  but because of his colorful-but-not-obscene vocabulary.

Related:

• The Plain Reader,  assorted authors (including Berry)
• Crunchy Cons; The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rob Dreher.  Like Kauffman, a writer at Front Porch Republic
• Any of Wendell Berry’s works
• Review: "All American Anarchists"

"....this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship."  - G. K. Chesteron, What's Wrong with the World?

What's Wrong with the World

What's Wrong with the World
© 1910 G. K. Chesterton
200 pages

What’s wrong with the world? Too many people are proposing answers to the wrong questions.  What’s Wrong is a curious collection of thoughts, voiced at the turn of the 20^th century, in response to the merry hell industrialism was wrecking on traditional forms of human society as the fields became the province of machines, not people, and the cities swelled with displaced farmers. Such urban swelling led to mass movements – spectator sports, popular politics,  and the odd mob, and sociologists, economists, and the like began to view society as one great machine, with ordered parts.   Written in opposition, What’s Wrong is a defense for the human-ness of people,  which examines flaws in the way men, women, children,  education, and politics were being handled – and have been handled further, from our  viewpoint. 

What’s Wrong with the World is from the start an eccentric book, for its author was an eccentric man, a personality given to wandering around in a cape and swordstick. He is neither ‘conservative’ nor liberal, and not moderate;  unlike Russell Kirk-esque conservatives, he scorns practicality and preaches the values of ideals and the abstract. How can we change society, he writes, if we do not have a conception of what it is supposed to look like?  What is the picture of health for human society, and what prescription might be writ to achieve it?  Chesterton’s goal here is not prescription, however, but description, and in several sections he writes about  the mistakes we have made concerning man, woman, and child.  The arguments he builds are steeped in religion and tradition, and a kind of sexual psychology.  They probably do not credit his reputation today, for he writes in defense of traditional gender roles and against female suffrage, but to dismiss him as an mere traditionalist is to miss the point.  The question, he writes, is not whether women deserve the vote, but whether the vote deserves women.

The prevailing spirit of What’s Wrong is, as its title suggests, that there is something wrong with the world of progress the people of the West were creating in the 19^th century.  Civilization is a forced endeavor in specialization;  at least since the agricultural revolution, certain groups of men have had to make their life’s work a matter of doing one thing; one man is a farmer, another a potter.  This is sad, since the good life consists of a variety of experience, but required. What is not required is the way industrialism forced that monotask tendency to become so extreme that one man might spend his entire day doing the same simple movement over and over again. Such work is not fit for men, and the idea of  taking women from the home – where they are masters of many different tasks, from sewing to cleaning to teaching  -- and forcing them into the place of a machine-cog is beyond the pale.   The same applies to politics, and here Chesterton plays the anarchist as he criticizes all governance as being based on the use of coercion. It is bad enough that men have to participate in such foulness; they at least can enjoy the war-like antagonism of party politics, which allows them to bear it.   The solutions to societal problems have been in the main a case of more of the same, a case of eating the hair of the dog;  to counter the monopolization of property by big business trusts, people  propose letting it be monopolization by the state.   The issue is monopolization;  the bigness of society itself has to be addressed.

While Chesterton doesn’t go into any solution, he does address the ideal form that society ought to have: people need to be regarded as the image of God, not a mass to be managed; property must be distributed  more equally across the population so each man will have his Home. The home is enormously important to Chesterton; it is a sanctuary of natural law, of the order of ancient anarchy; it is where children ought to receive their education, to learn from their father and mother’s wisdom and trade;  public education is good for nothing more than becoming than little coglets. It is the accumulation of trivial information, grounded in neither tradition nor skills.   What’s Wrong with the World is thus considered one of the fountainheads of distributism, with its  emphasis on decentralization, locality, and widespread property ownership.

Although some of its points are moot now (women’s suffrage is not a political issue these days),  What’s Wrong still has lingering relevance; we are more specialized these days than the 19^th century, not less; the gulf between the propertied and the poor is wider, not diminished;  education is wholly institutionalized, and considering how much time adults spend at work and children in school, even if parents knew a great deal about anything in particular they haven’t the time to teach it.  We are even less the image of Chesterton’s god;  even more ants on the anthill he predicted with such dread.  The book has its varied flaws; Chesterton’s opposition to evolution is on ideological grounds, for instance, as he abhors anything that looks on people as a mass, even as a biological ‘population’. His enthusiasm for writing about something he clearly does not understand (his perception of evolution resembles Lamarkianism, with the rich breeding bow-legged stable boys and such)  casts doubt on other criticisms, but he did live in the age of the insidious dream of eugenics, so his intentions were not terrible.  Discussion of actual evolution would have out of place in a work like this, loaded with literary references, chatty social critiques, and aphorisms aplenty. (This is the source of his “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has  been found difficult and not tried.”)  

What’s Wrong with the World is a peculiar book, dated but relevant, hopelessly old-fashioned but in an endearing way. The author’s convivial contrariness makes considering his arguments possible,   as does the fact that he is seemingly against modern work and modern politicking in general, not just women doing them. But in his day,  the political and labor arguments were a lost cause as far as men went, at least barring the distributive revolution, but the women and children can or could still be saved.  I think he is serious in his criticism, but I am predisposed to like him given my own contempt for inhumane work and corporatism. Readers will find Chesterton odd, but personable and thought-provoking, even if they have objection against his ideas. It’s not the easiest read, but considering his chattiness  the work isn’t difficult, either; just look out for the flourishing sword-stick and  spectacular prose.

The Gift of Good Land

The Gift of Good Land
© 1981 Wendell Berry
281 pages

Wendell Berry is a philosopher, poet, and more, but before all else he is a farmer. He is a faithful son of Kentucky devoted to the land, to the stewardship of the Earth, to the obedience to the first commandment given in his religious tradition: to dress and keep the garden. Berry has produced other collections of essays that focused primarily on agriculture, but this is the first I've read, and while I haven't set foot on a proper farm since elementary school, Berry's crafted hand makes a man ache to experience the gift of land he writes on here.  Although these essays primarily address farming, life is the subject; when Berry writes on the virtues of mowing with scythes, the essay is on man's relation with his tools. Does he use them to his intended ends or is he compelled to use them toward theirs?  A piece on the role of horses addresses the need for appropriate solutions, for sensible and sustainable approaches to the cultivation of food. A few essays simply reflect on the thoughts a farm naturally brings to mind, like those of motherhood when Berry is helping deliver a calf; he is profoundly grateful, not annoyed, to have been able to play a part in bringing the new life into the world.  Berry is an author who radiates wisdom; he notes, in considering the discovery of the New World, that we, like our ancestors come "with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but we destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired."  The partial purpose of these essays is to generate an understanding, not of what we know, but of how little we know.  As Berry muses on the patterns of nature, and attempts to teach readers how to discern and plan within those patterns -- to solve agricultural problems through agricultural means, for instance -- his study reveals how painfully arrogant we have been in the 20th century, to simply decide life was a machine that could be engineered to produce whatever outputs we wanted. Life remains stubbornly organic, temperamental even,  and responding to it requires the watchful eye, gentle hand, and sharp mind of a careful husband of the flock, a steward of the land; a farmer.

Related:
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin