Dixie's Forgotten People

Dixie's Forgotten People: the South's Poor Whites
© 1979 Wayne Flynt
200 pgs

Just poor people is all we were, tryin' to make a living out of black land dirt..

When Franklin Roosevelt referred to the forgotten man, he was likely thinking of those men in the city's breadlines. The South, however, was home to a host of forgotten men: poor whites, who lost in the land-grab and who industrialism largely left behind. Dixie is a quick survey into the realm of rural white poverty,  succeeded wholly by Flynt's own Poor But Proud. Despite its brevity,  it provides both flavor and substance.

Myths about displaced Norman cavaliers fleeing England to restore the old order in the South not withstanding, most poor whites came from the same stock as those men who became the masters -- at least those in the 'core south', where Flynt primarily draws from.  They emerged as economic losers, families who either arrived late and got the leftovers or soil that had already been picked clean, or who were out-done by the rising gentry creating their vast fiefdoms.  The Civil War left them with even more crushing poverty in the form of tenant farming, and the ruined south was hard to transform into the "new", industrialized south.  A fierce contempt for accepting charity from outsiders frustrated well-meaning missionaries and social reformers, but they were not altogether left behind.  Some tried to escape rural poverty by working in the mills, which were often more dangerous and no guarantor of comfort, and others lobbied for more political power.   Some even overcame racism to create an race-blind tenant farmers union;  from such a union came the latter Civil Rights marching song, "We Shall Overcome".   Racial cooperation in the realm of labor was one of the dashed hopes of the 19th century populist age, however.  The world wars were kind to the South, bringing more industry and money, but the interwar years consisted of an economic slump so dismal that the Great Depression wasn't even noticed.   While the South as a whole became more productive with the advent of machinery,  added jobs constituted only a quarter of those lost to the machines. After World War 2, the Southern economy finally quickened, but many still remain left behind -- especially in Appalachia, which receives a section unto itself.

Dixie's Forgotten People isn't two hundred pages of labor struggles with a southern twang, though, for he also shares the genuine life of the people. Using interviews with adults remembering their youth, Flynt records here folk stories and music. The music shared is that which is fraught with meaning -- melodies that comment on the plight of the family, of working for nothing but trouble, of hoping for rest and relief in the world to come.  The religion of the rural poor was overtly otherworldly,  constantly challenging the elite with the threatening promise that one day the first would be last, and the meek would inherit the earth.  (If "meek" is the  right word for  estatic snake handlers and Pentecostal preachers in unions..) Some of that culture even became mainstream, in the form of country-western, but as it became popular it lost the edge born of desperate poverty and anger. (This is a trend that has fast continued, with 'country' singers slipping into the pop charts with ease, a la Taylor Swift.)   Despite their poverty, the subjects retain a spine -- they are, to borrow Flynt's later title, 'poor but proud'.  Some of that pride, in racial myths, is misplaced, but much of it is legitimate, invested in the rich musical and artistic heritage that was saved from homogeneity by the mountains of Appalachia and dismal transportation.  Now, with interstates and cookie-cutter suburbs sprawling across the South's coastal plains and rugged hills, one wonders if that heritage itself will become the forgotten Dixie instead of just its poor -- lost to ticky-tacky McAmerica,

In short, Dixie's Forgotten People was a quick and varied survey, albeit one supplanted by the weightier Poor But Proud.  Considering that most people think of that obscene film Deliverance when they think of the country poor, Flynt's time spent with them is well needed among American readers.


Related:

• Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites, Wayne Flynt
• The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad
• Salvation on Sand Mountain, Dennis Covington

Taxi!

Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver
©  2007 Graham Russell Gao Hodges
225 pages

No film set in New York City is complete without scenes of Manhattan traffic, dense with yellow cars -- the patrolling ranks of the cabs, shuttling a third of the city hither and yon.  Taxi! is exactly as it describes itself, a social history of New York cabbing.  The author begins in the early days of the automobile and moves forward to 2001.  Much of it is predictable but as-yet unexplored, the tale of cabdrivers' woes throughout the economic turbulence of the 20th century, their struggling to make ends meet against declining social status.  The author has a keen interest in unionization, devoting an entire chapter to it and touching on it several other times.   He sees a failure to successfully unionize as part of static or declining fortunes among cab drivers, although the failure is less political than structural. Cabs are not factories, and the abundance of independent owner-operators sapped what strength was found in bringing together the drivers for the large taxi fleets.  When economic pressures prompted the fleets to reduce their men to independent contractors, the attraction of cab-driving was further diminished as a career, and it became more the occupation of those looking for part-time work, or (in the case of immigrants) for any entrance into the American economy.  That grim economic trend is slightly offset by the author's continued examination of cab drivers in popular media, from the first days of film on. Who knew Babe Ruth once did a cameo in a taxi film?   The films tend to portray cab drivers as lonely commentators on the social scene, and sometimes shed light on cabbys' interesting connections with the criminal world.  In the roaring twenties and the Depression, cabbies sometimes earned extra money by connecting interested passengers to prostitutes and liquor.  The contentious relationship between cabs and cops that Melissa Plaut commented on in her Hack evidently has a long history, though where it begins is a chicken and egg quandary.  Taxi! is  quick read, dry in parts but largely informative and entertaining on the whole, aided by the author's latent passion for a job he once undertook himself.

Related:
Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, Melissa Plaut

Picking Up

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City
© 2014 Robin Nagle
304 pages

When young Robin Nagle stumbled upon a communal dumpsite in the middle of an otherwise picturesque meadow, she was astounded by the thoughtlessness of her fellow campers. Who did they think would take care of their rubbish, the  garbage fairy?  People rarely give thought to their garbage service, unless it hiccoughs, but sanitation workers are arguably more indispensable than police or firemen.  Given individuals can get by for decades without calling for fire or police services, but try going decades without the garbage man. Sure, if you have a suitable vehicle you can haul your own bags to the dump, but how do you feel about living in everyone else's rubbish?  A city like New York, a hive of millions of souls, would choke within days were it not for an efficient army of men and women in white trucks and olive uniforms hauling their refuse away.In Picking Up, Ms. Nagle joins those men, delivering stories and an inside look at a sanitation department working overdrive in New York City with unexpected humor.

Garbagemen are, despite the lack of a caste  system in the United States, our untouchables. We pretend not to notice these men and women whose job it is to take care of that which we have decided is beneath our attention. Certain aspects of their work can't fail but be noticed: garbage haulers and mechanical sweepers are work trucks, loud and odoriferous, and their working environment places them in the middle of every aspect of urban life.  The men and women themselves, however, are overlooked, unless they're being held as the subject of derision.  Ms. Nagle's time spent with the department -- first as an anthropology student, then as an actual worker --  looks at san-men square in the face. Through the details of their lives, Nagle teaches readers the ins and outs of keeping city streets clean.

Nagle begins with a brief history of garbage collection in New York, moving forward to present day municipal waste services. There are distinct operations;  the most prized work is picking up actual bags of trash, preferably dumped in one massive pile called a flat.  This is heavy and sometimes dangerous work, depending on what is being disposed, but it pays well.  Crews assigned to travel down a street dumping its public waste baskets into the truck face far more tedious hours, and street sweepers present their own challenge.  This work is constant;  sanitation never sleep, operating two shifts, and on some streets the the job is never done. As soon as a collection truck has finished its route, so many pedestrians have thrown their fast-food rubbish into the bins that they're already full and the truck makes the round again, like a very smelly bus stop.   In the winter, sanitation workers assume a second job -- clearing the streets after every snowfall.   Keeping the New York economy running on ice-free streets is such a demanding task that some DSNY planners regard plowing or preparing for plowing their first duty, with rubbish-hauling merely something to occupy time with during the summer.    What doesn't change with the seasons is the danger: sanitation work is the fourth-deadliest in the United States, behind airline piloting, logging, and commercial fishing. Spending eight to twelve hours working on city streets alive with traffic exposes sanitation workers to being mowed down by cars, and their crushing equipment is a peril to their limbs if not life.

Picking Up makes for fascinating reading; it's not so much about trash as the men who take care of it. Nagle's journey always stops at the transfer station; what happens to it after that, who else is involved in making it go "away", is not her concern.  This is a study of men (and a few stray women) at work, constantly keeping the commercial machinery of the City from  being clogged by its own refuse. It ventures to muse on waste and consumerism, slightly, but sticks mostly to regaling the reader with the diverse day to day experiences of the sanitation department -- navigating traffic in massive trucks, manhandling bag after bag of mysterious waste, dealing with unions, government bureaucracies, a distant city government, and a hostile if not dismissive public -- and how the men adapt.


Related:
Gone Tomorrow; Garbage Land.  What happens to trash after the transfer station.
Hack, Melissa Plaut.  Another account of driving/working in New York.
Pedal to the Medal,  a truck-driver turned sociologist's similar treatment of truck drivers

The Horse in the City

The Horse in the City
© 2007 Clay McShane, Joel A. Tarr
242 pages

To the American imagination, horses are the stuff of country dreams, of farms and cowboys. This is a recent conceit, however, as for most of American history humans have shared their cities with a sizable if silent population of beautiful creatures, serving as engines of transportation and industry. They lived in herds of thousands inside the city, housed in stables that covered entire city blocks -- to say nothing of their leavings, which covered the streets. They were not thought of as pets, but tools, machines which happened to breathe. Their strength was calculated, their life's worth counted to the penny, and when electricity arrived, off they trotted into history to be forgotten. The Horse in the City is, in a word, unique; a social and economic history of how horses helped shape the American urban landscape in an age of transformation.

On the backs of horses have been mounted both commerce and war, but The Horse in the City examines equine contributions to peaceable ends alone. Transportation predominates, with horses pulling the carts and wagons that were the lifeblood of commerce, being the very means of exchange. People, too, were transported by horses, but rarely as single riders:  horses tied up at the saloon may be a staple shot of westerns, but in the city most walked or traveled in carriages, either private or in 'omnibuses'.   Omnibuses were a primitive form of public transportation, generally transporting people (slowly) between the city to a fixed point beyond comfortable walking distance. They didn't exist as networks, though after trains arrived the lines took on some semblance of greater connectivity.    Most horses pulled two-wheeled carts, not wagons; they were cheaper and made deliveries easier.  Mixed in with the social history are chapters of more scholarly importance, addressing the growth of equine breeding in the United States, the dispersal of stables in select cities, the development of veterinary  medicine, and the agricultural impact of having to feed so many horses.  Horses were the backbone of the economy, supporting a variety of industries directly, and providing the means for all others to be transacted. Their presence prompted city streets to widen; their pounding hooves influenced which materials were used in paving. Horses were not displaced by the industrial revolution; they were part of it. The first rail lines in cities were used not by steam engines, but horsecars replacing the calamitously bumpy omnibuses.When machines became prevalent on the farm, horses did the pulling -- machines and horses together displaced human labor long before machines displaced horses.   Ultimately, electricity would out-do the complementary relationship between steam and horses, but the mark of horse hooves lives on

Some exceptional history texts can nearly take a reader back into time, and this is one; so thorough are the authors that the urban world which horses created comes alive. We are there, in streets covered in horseflesh -- horses plodding along with their wares, leaving fresh material for the manure industry in their wake, horses  sometimes collapsing in the street under the burden and promptly being carried off to rendering factories, there to continue being grist for the economic mill.  Endings were not always so grisly; horses were often retired to less strenuous occupations. (Their training stuck, however:  horses employed by fire brigades retained the habit of running to their old station at the sound of a firebell, long after leaving the service!)   The grim scenery is countered with more lighthearted imagery, like the joy of sleighing season in winter.    The Horse in the City is excellent  history, with social appeal but loaded with invaluable information to research students of the period, like charts on equine food consumption.

Related:

• Horses at Work,  Ann Norton Greene. The introduction thanks McShane and Tarr for their research assistance, so these two books may belong together, in a sense.
• Cattle: An Informal Social History,  Lauri Carlson
• Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter Norton

Called to Serve

Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America
© 2013 Margaret McGuinness
277 pages

Long before the suffrage and feminist movements allowed women to assume a more publicly active role within society,  women religious were taking an active role in shaping the American landscape.  Although predominately a Protestant country, the United States was never without Catholic citizens,  whether through acquiring land originally settled by France and Spain, or by developing its own through immigration from Italy, Poland, and other parts of Catholic Europe.  The American landscape was for all a great mission, a place to build civilization anew, and  nuns were there nearly from the beginning.

Though some orders restricted themselves to prayer,  more active communities bounded, providing teachers and nurses to areas just being settled, which would have otherwise gone without. The sisters provided religious instruction, naturally, but also taught reading, mathematics, and other educational fundamentals. They also trained people for work, giving the margins of society -- impoverished freedmen and immigrants. especially their women --  the resources to begin building a life for themselves. America's religious sisters were not simply Europeans transplanted to the frontier; their rules of life had to be altered to take the harshness of the wilderness into consideration, though some adaptations were perverse. In the early 19th century,  religious orders owned slaves, for instance, even orders which were filled only with African-American nuns The nuns were far more conscious of the evil nature of slavery, however, ameliorating it as best they could and agitating for abolition much earlier than society at large, or even the Church proper.

Nurturing the margins -- the least of these -- was truly the prevailing mark of American nunneries.  When contagious disease swept American communities, women religious were often the only people willing to nurse the afflicted, sometimes at the cost of their own lines.  The rapidly urbanizing eastern seaboard provided plenty of diseases to battle, and nuns were at the forefront,   managing Catholic hospitals at every level and developing new methods to prevent infection.  As waves of courageous or dispossessed people from Europe swept America, nuns provided settlement houses that welcomed newcomers and helped them find a place for themselves in a new country. Nuns were strangers themselves, often ridiculed and sometimes even attacked by nativists who feared their papish influence.  Ultimately, though, their extraordinary compassion  and proven talent won respect -- and sometimes, even converts.   Despite these accomplishments, however, as the 20th century continued the ranks and influence of religious women fell precipitously, possibly because the gap they served was filled in: religious orders were no longer the sole means of a meaningful career for women, for instance. America's rising  secularization -- both in the sense of diminished religiosity and  the growth of medical, educational, and immigrant-handling government programs -- also diminished their attraction. They continue to serve America,  but frequently have been reduced to the rule of mere social activists, instead of the very creators of civil society as they once were.

A Renegade History of the United States

A Renegade History of the United States
 © 2010 Thaddaeus Russell
402 pages

"All of you, you think there's someone just gonna drop money on you? Money they could use? ...well, there ain't people like that! There's just people like me!"  (Jayne Cobb, Firefly )

In A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn delivered the hitherto-untold story of the common man, the poor and oppressed, fighting nobly for equality, liberty, and justice.  Chumps! Thaddaeus Russell's A Renegade History is a celebration of the unruly side of the common man, a tribute to those who just don't behave the way they oughta.  It's a prickly history, guaranteed to irritate to some degree just about everyone who reads it. At its best, it demonstrates how 'progress' is a subjective label, and something that happens herky-jerky, from a maelstrom of confusion and strife; at its worst, it hails man's cravenness as heroic.

The stage is set when, in the first chapter, Russell delights in how utterly depraved pre-revolutionary America was. There were more taverns than churches;  prostitution, drugs, and dancing abounded, and whatever appetites existed in man's nature could be fed. And then came the American Revolution, and there went freedom. With the war came sternness, moral discipline, and announcements that men must gird their loins not only for the martial fight against the Royal army, but for war against the sins of sloth, cowardice, and gluttony that would smother  liberty in its cradle.   After independence, the nation's leaders were not distant bureaucrats in London, turning an indulgent eye toward the shenanigans of their colonists, but influential scolds like John Adams, who strolled the harbors noting with pleasure the growing American navy, and ignoring with great dignity the whorehouses behind him. The American nation took another direction, a more disciplined one -- but ever since, there have been those who swam against the current, who attempted to turn the drums of a forward march into the beat of a ragtime dance.

Russell's offensive is two-fold, first sneering at both great men and the dignified minorities fighting for rights,  and then Russell's chapter titles give away his delight in overturning expectations -- "The Freedom of Slavery", "How Gangsters Made America a Better Place",  and "How Juvenile Delinquents Won the Cold War".   Although the Founding Fathers might, in defining freedom, look back to the hoplite-citizens of Greece and wax poetic on freedom'z ennobling effect on the human character, for Russell freedom is the ability to gorge, drink, rut, and sleep.  Slaves, he writes, were often better off than free men. To be sure, they were beaten for misconduct, but their legal status as property meant owners were bound by self-interest. They couldn't dismiss a slave, or stop feeding him for slacking on the job:  they would forfeit every dime paid, every resource given before. Compare that to the northern factoryman, Russell urges, who worked long hours to the ruin of his body, who -- if he was injured, sick, or otherwise unable to continue -- was dismissed into the cold entirely. The apparent perversity continues throughout, as when Russell honors the Mafia; their fun habits of extortion, murder, and theft aside,  they saw profit in opening gay bars in the 1970s, so more power to them.  That they were doing this for selfish motives (a la  Adam Smith's butcher) is Russell's concealed point:  humans at their worst can create an environment where people are 'better off' in general.  The obscene becomes the respectable, as when First Ladies began sporting the makeup that once  belonged exclusively to Ladies of the Night.  'Better off' will be a point of contention, however, since Russell's idea of a good life is Pleasure Island from Pinocchio.

Civilization is the taming of human nature, the domestication of it -- perhaps even its suppression. If there is any hope in A Renegade History, it is that human nature is simply too wild to remain in fetters for long: regardless of the dystopian nightmares of Orwell and Huxley, or dreams of politicians to inflict their favored order on us,  humans are an unruly race. A Renegade History is infuriating, but I knew even as I held my nose going through, utterly unforgettable. Not only are there gems to be found shifting through the garbage of history -- startling facts, like that the FBI raid on the Stonewall Inn had more to do with its Mafia-owned status than a campaign of anti-gay persecution, or that Martin Luther King's success was predicated on being the alternative to the violence already sweeping American streets -- but there's some slight comfort in knowing how contrary we are. Russell's heroes aren't protestors; they don't whine. They retaliate. They kick over tables, throw up middle fingers,  and charge off. There's ferocious energy here, the energy of a riot. But while it was  a disorderly, drunken mob that initiated the violence of the American Revolution in Boston, the prosperity that sustained them came from the peaceful, disciplined farms of civilization. It's refreshing to take a draft of the human spirit here -- there's such a kick to it --  but   as always our best hope is the path of moderation -- a little work, a little play.

Related:
The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad

The Long Loneliness

The Long Loneliness
© 1952 Dorothy Day
288 pages (Harper Collins, 2009(

            Dorothy Day came of age amid the Great War, a child of struggling parents whose labors to make ends meet stayed with her even after they had achieved some success. Caught up by the social upheaval of the early 20^th century, Dorothy moved among the ranks of Communists, anarchists, and draft-resisters. Her determination to fight for the poor changed directions after she joined the Roman Catholic Church, however, and in The Long Loneliness she recounts the efforts of her comrades, both radical and Catholic, as they worked to create a better world for the impoverished. Day’s autobiography is a beautifully written response to the early 20^th century’s social turmoil, the story of a hell-raiser on the verge of sainthood. 

            Although overtly pious as a child, Day recounts here falling away from religion as she aged;  what did faith have to offer the poor, she thought, except meaningless promises of a happier afterlife?  Why should the impoverished and oppressed remain meek and serene when they could throw off their chains? Dismissing religion as the opiate of the people, Day recounts how she threw herself into the struggle for social justice. Her faith in inexorable progress was tested, however, during repeated periods of imprisonment, periods which she worsened by engaging in hunger strikes. In the despair of those hours she turned again to the God of her childhood, and when she was finally set free,  her Christian faith would be reborn and strengthened. Ultimately,  her yearning for comfort and  order led her to the Catholic church, and so strong was her desire for inner peace that she converted despite knowing it would mean leaving her common-law husband, who refused to submit to a church marriage. 

            The Long Loneliness is by no means a comprehensive biography; even if Day were blessed with total recall, constructing a narrative means leaving some facts behind to focus on others.  From this account she seems to have accepted the Church on its own terms, rather than being able to embrace it after learning about its social doctrine, which is by no means passive concerning poverty. I suspected the social doctrine might be the  draw for her, but she gives it scant mention and indeed passes over a discussion of Distributism. Instead, she mentions its similarity to the Southern Agrarians and similar movements as her own. The distributist ideal is hers, “a world where it is easy for people to be good”, where people are not destroyed by their work but ennobled by it. There is no escaping poverty in The Long Loneliness, either material or spiritual; it is to escape spiritual poverty that Day finds herself almost revering the material. She and her great ally, Peter Maurin, both emphasize voluntary simplicity as a means of not only focusing on what really matters, but in saving money to create self-reliance. “Self” is misleading, however:   The Long Loneliness is often a book about creating community.  Her rich collections of her neighbors, regardless of where she moved,  and the emphasis she and Maurin both place on experience life communally – through group discussions on philosophy, or establishing cooperatives and charity houses – demonstrate how  vital being with and working with others was to her life, to her worldview.  Day’s journey here ends on a farm, where she, Maurin, and other staffers of The Catholic Worker would be self-sustainable, she writes, if they did not give so much food away.  

            What a fascinating work this is, quoting from church fathers and personalities like Emma Goldman in the same breathe; what a life she lived,  as a journalist and nurse and agitator during a most interesting period of the 20^th century, when workers were brawling in the streets with the forces of  establishment and winning victories even as they were imprisoned and beaten en masse. Many of the  laws they fought for, Day writes, are now on the books.  At the time of this writing she was no doubt by what had been achieved, not by her but by the people she served, the people who took the ideas of The Catholic Worker – pacifism and libertarianism among them --  and spread them across the world.  Hers is a dream still unrealized, but a life such as hers is a testament as to what is possible. 

Related:

• A Life of Her Own, Emile Carles. Also the biography of a driven young woman whose response to seeing her village and its boys swallowed up by the national government during the Great War is to become increasingly sympathetic toward anarchism and the libertarian left. 
• The Story of my Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi, which also ends in a newsletter staff being run from a communal farm. Pacifism and self-reliance are also common motifs, though Day is more sensual.
• Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, Shane Claiborne, whose 'new monasticism' brings Day to mind..
• I’ll Take my Stand, various authors. She frequently mentions the southern agrarians who penned their defense of a culture rooted in the land.
• Red Emma Speaks, Emma Goldman

The Redneck Manifesto

The Redneck Manifesto: How Hicks, Hillbillies, and White Trash Became Amerca's Scapegoats
© 1998 Jim Goad
272 pages

Rednecks of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your bills.   Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto is a raucous mixture of southern pride and Marx-esque social criticism which examines the plight of working whites. Although few would take seriously the concept of white plight,  in Goad's eyes 'privilege whites' constitute a minority of American whites;  most are working-class slobs like himself who have been treated as miserably throughout American history as any minority,  even slaves.  His aim is to expose anti-prole bigotry, by shock therapy if need be, and demonstrate that America's big problems are rooted in class, not ethnic tension.

His history might echo A People's History if Howard Zinn had focused on working whites and were give nto telling the reader to "f*** off".  It is a history rooted in class conflict: since time immemorial, a wealthy few have kept most of the power in their hands, and America is no different. Though our national legend involves Pilgrims seeking liberty, in the fact of the matter is that most whites who immigrated came against their wills; they were the poor pushed off the fields, scraped off the streets, and shanghaied across the Atlantic to toil as indentured servants.  Volunteering or conscripting in the Revolution, they died to help create a Constitution which had no place for them, and the centuries of progress that followed brought only more of the same. The Civil War destroyed the economy of the south, but did little to displace the power-elite; industrialism proved even more lethal than the killing fields of Europe's Great War, at least for Americans,  as thousands died every year from factory and mining accidents. The rest of the century was no better;  homes were blown apart as companies tried to crack open the Appalachian mountains like a walnut, with no mind given to the people who lived there, and free trade agreements saw the disappearance of jobs which remained.  To add insult to injury, institutions that persecuted blacks, like slavery and Jim Crow laws, were somehow blamed on the impoverished working class, despite it being just as disenfranchised by local elites. (Documents like the 1901 Alabama Constitution remain equal-opportunity oppressors of the working poor.)  While the 20th century saw various populations gain media shielding and political protection, the white working class remained a common horse to beat on,  a pleasure shared by both formerly-marginalized minorities and the elite.

Against all this, Goad doesn't call for sensitivity; no self-respecting working man would whine. What he does want is for everyone to leave rednecks the hell alone. Making fun of his kin on TV is one thing; everybody likes their scapegoats. What he has his sights on is excessive tax burdens; let the government be paid for by people who receive the services, or the propertied --  and the United States' foreign policy, which typically involves sending the sons and daughters of the poor to fight  to fulfill the elite's ambitions.  War is the harvester of the home, and nothing else.  In addition to calling for an end to death and taxes, Goad celebrates the culture of the white working family,  with chapters given over to "Playing Hard" and  even to "Praying Hard", despite Goad's firm belief that religion and politics are both full of it.

The Redneck Manifesto may have a serious intent, but it's hard to take the delivery as such. Goad is deliberately and enthusiastically vulgar, employing racial slurs throughout to goad the reader, hopefully forcing them to see 'redneck' and 'hillbilly' as pejoratives on the level as  kike, Chink, and yea, even the dreaded "N-word".  That's artistic license,  but his seemingly schizophrenic style --  alternating between informal if serious analysis and seemingly insane ranting,  throwing in nicknames for personalities and employing colloquial spelling randomly  --  can easily throw a reader off. It's surely deliberate; Goad's whole purpose in writing the  book is defy conventional attitudes.

The Redneck Manifesto is a fascinating if problematic book; it's not a perspective I'm used to hearing. Class is a taboo topic now, relegated only to Marxists -- and few working men would give Marx's conflict theory of society a moment's consideration after a half-century of being assured by the TV that in America we're all one big happy middle-class family.  Good luck, too, finding the self-described Marxist who would go anywhere near ethnic consciousness if they are white. As a product of the white working class with a sympathy for Marxist social critique, I had a ball reading this -- even while wading through the eccentric treatment of the English tongue. It's funny, cringingly inappropriate, and yet thoughtful at the same time; a tirade with a point. There's tremendous value in looking at an often ignored segment of the impoverished population, but considering the abuse Goad hurls out, readers other than southerners looking for a sympathetic voice -- of which Goad's is surely one -- might put it down early.

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 Box

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
© 2006 Marc Levinson
376 pages

It’s not every day an invention completely revolutionizes its industry, let alone the world. And yet that’s what the shipping container, a mere  box, did. Within a few years’ time, it rose from one ambitious entrepreneur’s scheme for expediting freight shipments into the global standards, one which completely replaced methods of shipping which had endured for thousands of years. Gone were the huge numbers of longshoremen required to pack and unpack hundreds of pallets per ship, and the 'inventory shrinkage' that accompanied it. Within a decade of its introduction, mighty ports like London and New York had been completely humbled, outmoded by containerization – a technology which offered seamlessly integrated freight distribution across sea, rail, and road, but at a price of wholescale adoption of it and the new equipment produced to carry it. The Box details shipping containers’ genesis, their rise in use, and the effects of their adoption, like greater concentration of shipping interests into a few big lines and increased government involvement in the service – both results of the amount of resources needed to earn  greater profit-by-volume.  The account is sometimes dry (there’s a considerable section on the problems of finding just the right corner fittings for the Box), but enlivened by some of its personalities – especially Malcolm McLean, the truck driver who introduced containers in the United States because it allowed him to bypass his competitors. An unruly risk-taker, McLean appears throughout the volume, which almost chronicles his taking over world trade: every time containers made prodigious advances, like becoming the American standard or moving into international routes, he was there. (The fact that the entire volume of traffic between the United States and Britain could be handled by five container ships should give modern readers an idea of how containerization allowed a few large lines to begin dominating the industry. Container ship lines are truly the 'big box' stores of the seas.)  To  begin appreciating how  world-unifying globalized trade began, look no further than The Box.

The Working Poor

The Working Poor: Invisible in America
© 2004 David Shipler
352 pages

"Like my daddy used to say -- 'Son, life's hell to pay for when you're poor -- cause  always just outside the door's another Hard Time.'"    (Jerry Reed)

The United States is simultaneously one of the richest and poorest countries in the world, a land marked by both obscene waste and desperate poverty. Explanations vary as to the cause of the widening income gap; some blame a deteriorating culture, others globalized free trade, and still others maintain it's a classic case of exploitation.  Poverty may be endemic to economics, but the great tragedy is tragedy's juxtaposition with the American dream of success: work hard and you will prosper. Reality is more complicated than that. In The Working Poor: Invisible in America, David Shipler shares the lives of people who, despite long shifts, can't get ahead.  They are black, white, Hispanic and Asian; some have lived here for generations, others are newly arrived immigrants. The reasons for their quicksand desperation are complex and varied: although many mire themselves in self-destructive cycles of behaviors, others are truly and continually ensnared by cycles of poverty -- poor housing that leads to bad health that leads to spotty employment and debt that lead to poor housing.  It's not as if they don't try, but the odds are against them: even a small hiccup, an unexpected dilemma, can completely derail hopes of progress.

  Shipler's work doesn't propose any grand national agenda like the War on Poverty, and his account demonstrates how problematic proposed solutions have been so far.  Welfare offers intrusive, obtrusive bureaucracy and distorted incentives;  public education for impoverished areas is largely a failure, and while there are a great many incompetent teachers, whose talent is less about communicating with children and more memorizing what Has to be Taught,  the reality of poverty is that it isn't just material. There's a greater cultural poverty present that Shipler details as well: a loss of hope, of ambition. Some of the stories here are outright depressing in demonstrating how failure can run in a family, with unparented children growing up to have babies who grow up likewise unparented. They lack not just the data accumulated in twelve years of schooling, but ordinary life skills.  There are also hopeful stories, like the single parent who embraced poverty of the material kind by refusing to work two jobs, deciding that devoting time to her children, giving them the attention and instruction they need, was more important than a financial cushion.  Though raising two children on a single  wage was hard, her children were success stories who later escaped poverty.

The Working Poor is a valuable book, demonstrating that there is more to financial security than simply working hard -- and more to insecurity than bad personal choices. Although Shipler is probably more sympathetic to the progressive, he's by no means convinced that government can be a decisive solution here. His work illustrates how complex the problem of poverty is, communicating to the reader that it would take more than a money dump in one program or another. The problems of poverty -- dismal education,  the costs of healthcare and housing, access to transportation, availability of jobs, the shattered status of a family life -- are all connected, and there is no Gordian solution.  As grim as it can be, the book is girded with hopeful stories of struggle and resilience. Based on extensive interviews and Shipler's own research (including  time spent observing schoolrooms), it's as close to a comprehensive understanding of working class poverty as one will find without living it.

Related:

• Nickle and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenrich. This is the author's account of attempting to live on minimum wage in three different states, with little success. Her experience demonstrated many of the problems here (the costs of housing and expense of transportation, especially)  though family life was not an issue and she never had to deal with state welfare offices. 
• Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser, which also shone a light into the dirty business of migrant agricultural labor. 

No Logo

No Logo: the Case Against the Brand Bullies 

© 1999, 2009; Naomi Klein

544 pages

The political and financial turmoil of the past few years have seen a rising tide of anger targeted against the political power of wealthy corporations. Little wonder: since the crisis erupted in 2007, millions have lost their jobs, yet the corporate officers of these failing businesses continue to award themselves extravagant bonuses, in some cases with taxpayers' money.  And there is no help to be found in the government;  anti-corporate protesters in New York and elsewhere have been set on by police, and the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be "people", whose freedom of speech in the form of campaign donations should not be limited in the least. (And those actual people who express their own freedom of speech by impeding corporate actions? If their protests are judged to have caused $10,000 in losses, they are deemed domestic terrorists and join the 10% of Americans already in prison.) No Brand  is a sharp criticism of corporations, but one from a different era. First published in 1999, she scrutinizes brand corporations first for their business model, which emphasizes style rather than substance, before examining their invasion of public space and notorious legacy of abusive labor practices.

As a child, I scoffed at my classmates’ obsession with the Nike brand. My derision was born not of any preternatural consumer consciousness; my parents simply were not the kind to pay for overpriced t-shirts. For that is what they were; a Nike t-shirt is not made of magic cotton that repels water, heals wounds, or bestows upon its wearer +2 Armor. The same is true of its synthetic products, aimed toward actual athletes: while they may wick sweat and keep users comfortable, they do it no better than those manufactured by Champion or generic brands. Nike has never advertised its gear on the basis of superiority, like washing detergent. And yet early this spring, when shopping for athletic clothes, I went to Amazon and simply typed in “Nike”. I was interested in all manner of sports apparel, and Nike…was sports.

Therein lies the basis of Klein’s criticism.  Brand companies aren’t about quality, they’re about Ideas, and consumers are not paying money for superior merchandise but are instead buying into an image of themselves, of something they want to be. It’s a formula that has given religions and political ideologies success for thousands of years, and today it is the approach of almost every major corporation. But because their products don’t advertise themselves the way quality products might, these brand corporations have to push their product aggressively, and in the section “NO SPACE”, Klein details how brands are using not just conventional media, but putting up advertisements in schools. While parents might merely resent a company taking advantage of a financially struggling school system to hawk its shoes,  this branded invasion is literally dangerous when school cafeterias become hosts to McDonalds annexes and Coca-Cola gains exclusive distribution rights. Children become a captive audience to advertising; their values are those introduced not by parents or concerned teachers, but marketing execs who are grooming the next generation of consumers.

 Because the companies chiefly concern themselves with pushing their Image, and give little attention to the manufacturing side of things, rampant labor abuses escape their notice completely. The abuses are familiar to anyone conversant with the term sweat shop:  long hours, marginal pay, no rights, and no tolerance for anyone who resists the abuse. Even in countries which have something resembling human rights laws, they are often moot where corporations are concerned. In the Philippines, for instance, there exist economic development zones, little islands of virtually zero regulation where the only rules governing corporations are those they impose upon themselves. Shockingly, with their only motivation being profit margins, exploitation is rife.

But in the United States and Europe, citizens’ groups are working to give these companies another motivation. In “NO LOGO”, Klein covers the growth of activism against these companies, showing how boycotts and government actions have forced Nike and other companies to take responsibility for the labor costs involved in their products. This activism isn’t limited to aging hippies or idealistic college students, either: certain groups have met success in stirring up anger in decaying urban areas, among young black men who dream of making a success of themselves by wearing Nike shoes.

 No Logo is as mature a critique of brand corporations as one might ask for – sharply pointed, but not a screed. She builds her arguments up slowly and steadily, allowing the facts to present the case instead of passion.  The result is disturbing and damning, yet encouraging. Definitely a work to remember. (For those who have read the original, Klein updates it with a section that declares President Obama to be the first superbrand president...with the problems therein.)