A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  In 1967, near the end of his career, Prima renewed his fame by performing a role in a film that was perfectly suited for him: as an orangutan. The character of King Louie in Disney’s animated Oscar nominee The Jungle Book is the leader of the jungle apes and the host of a perpetual jazz party. In the film’s most memorable scene, he sings, “I’m the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP,” while dancing with what Prima’s biographer calls “hip abandon.” Prima admired his character: “This cat really rocks the jungle,” he said. “In fact, the whole monkey tribe in the picture really swings. And they look a lot like me and Sam Butera and the Witnesses.”

  In the 1970s, Italian Americans appeared for a time to have regained their rhythm. Disco was incubated in underground parties in New York City that were attended largely by African Americans but which were run by Italian Americans. According to music historian Peter Shapiro, “Italian Americans mostly from Brooklyn largely created disco from scratch.” Most of the DJs who developed the music in the early 1970s were of Italian extraction: Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Michael Cappello, Steve D’Aquisto, Tom Savarese, Bobby “DJ” Guttadaro, Frankie Strivelli, and Richard Pampianelli. By the middle of the decade, disco dancing spread to nightclubs in Italian American neighborhoods, from where it moved into mainstream American culture. The 1977 film Saturday Night Fever tells the story of the young Italian Americans who ruled the dance floor at 2001 Odyssey in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, the most famous early disco club in the city. In the first scene at the club, Tony Manero and his four buddies seem to be aware that they are living on a racial edge. One of them admires his own hair and new clothes and asks, “Looking sharp, huh?” to which another replies, “Any sharper, and you’d be a nigger.”

  Other, more recent Italian Americans have made careers out of crossing the racial and dancing divides. Scott Ialacci, better known as DJ Skribble, and James D’Agostino, who operates as DJ Green Lantern, are two of the most successful hip-hop producers in the early twenty-first century. And, of course, Madonna Louise Ciccone has made more money by singing and dancing to black-influenced music than any other American in history.

  Despite the transgressions of these renegades, official Italian America remains willfully ignorant of its people’s history. In 2002 Chuck Nice, an African American deejay at the hip-hop radio station WAXQ-FM in New York City, commented on air that “Italians are niggaz with short memories.” The Order of the Sons of Italy in America, which eighty years earlier had insisted to Congress that Italians were inherently white, promptly announced that they were “puzzled by the statement” and demanded an apology from the station.

  Of course, given the renegade history of Italian Americans, Chuck Nice’s statement is hardly puzzling. But more importantly, let us use that history, as well as the histories of all the “primitive” and “black” European immigrants who contributed so much to our freedoms and pleasures, to turn what the Sons of Italy viewed as an insult into a compliment.

  Part Three

  FIGHTING FOR BAD FREEDOM

  9

  SHOPPING: THE REAL AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  If you were a typical American living in the early part of the nineteenth century, you had to plant, tend, harvest, slaughter, and process your own food. You had to make your own clothing, and all of it had to be strictly utilitarian: no decorations, unnecessary colors, or “style.” You worked from before dawn until late at night. Your only source of entertainment was books, and most that were available were moral parables. You spent your entire life within a fifty-mile radius of your home. You believed that leisure was bad. There was no weekend.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, you as a typical American bought most of your clothing from stores. You owned clothes whose sole function was to make you attractive. You ate food that had come from all over the country. You drank cold beer and ate ice cream. If you lived in a city, you went shopping at Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck, Macy’s, Abraham & Straus, Jordan Marsh, Filene’s, or Wanamaker’s. If you lived in the country, you shopped from the same stores by mail order. You read dime novels whose sole purpose was to provide you with fun. If you lived in a city, you went to amusement parks, movie theaters, and vaudeville shows. You went dancing. You rode on trains. You worked fewer hours than your parents and many fewer hours than your grandparents. You believed that leisure was good.

  Who was responsible for this revolution in everyday American life? Scholars have attributed it to the vast natural resources of the North American land mass; the lack of trade barriers among the states; the building of mass, integrated industries such as railroads, steel, oil, wheat, lumber, and meat; the early development of the modern corporation in the United States; technological advances in production such as rubber vulcanization, the sewing machine, refrigeration, the Bessemer and open-hearth steel processes, the assembly line, and electric light and power; as well as the assistance of the federal government to economic development in the form of protective incorporation laws, land grants, the authorization of stocks and the backing of bonds, protective tariffs to shield American companies from foreign competition, and armed intervention against labor strikes.

  And yet not a single consumer good would have been produced if people did not want them or did not allow themselves to seek them. Without desire there would have been no demand. Without demand there would have been no production. What was necessary for the consumer revolution to take place was a radical change in the way Americans thought about desire, pleasure, leisure, and spending. Without renegades, we’d all still be farmers.

  THE “AMUSEMENT PROBLEM”

  Looking back from the twenty-first century, it may be hard to imagine that most Americans in the nineteenth century believed that materialism was evil, thrift was virtuous, and the pursuit of pleasure was dangerous at best. But American politicians, clergy, intellectuals, business leaders, and labor leaders were virtually unanimous in condemning “indulgence.” Francis Wayland, a prominent theologian, antislavery activist, and longtime president of Brown University in the decades before the Civil War, spoke for many of the cloth when he warned that “thoughtless caprice,” “sensual self-indulgence,” and “reckless expense” were not only sinful but also socially ruinous. “We consume values in the lower gratifications of sense when we expend money for shows, for mere delicacies of the table, and for any thing which the only result is, the gratification of a physical appetite.” The first markets for consumer goods were merely “new avenues to temptation” that undermined the virtue on which the republic depended. To Wayland, “objects which yield no other utility than the mere gratification of the senses, or, which are rendered necessary by command of fashion, or the love of ostentation” were worthless. Henry Ward Beecher, another major religious thinker and social reformer, argued in his widely read Lectures to Young Men (1848) that “satisfaction is not the product of excess, or of indolence, or of riches; but of industry, temperance, and usefulness.” Secular thinkers were no less hostile to the buying of things for pleasure. The great writer Henry David Thoreau represented an entire generation of American intellectuals who denounced “games and amusements” and embraced “Spartan simplicity” as the only condition for happiness. These and other spokesmen for the American way of life agreed that the people should resist food that exceeded what one needed to function, clothing that was fashionable not functional, homes that provided more than just adequate shelter, and goods that were mere playthings.

  The first study of the spending habits of ordinary Americans, authored in 1875 by Carroll D. Wright for the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, found an increasing and alarming amount of purely pleasurable items in American homes. Most troubling was the quantity of alcohol being consumed, its effects on general spending habits, and the resulting aggressiveness of workers for higher wages. Wright argued that temperance “induces frugal habits, and frugal habits prevent strikes.” What was needed was the creation of the “sober, industrious, and thrifty” worker who reje
cted “riotous living,” “the display of enervating luxury,” and “the insane attempt to keep up appearances which are not legitimate.”

  Even the wealthy attacked spending. Andrew Carnegie amassed one of the largest fortunes in history but renounced the pleasures it could bring. Carnegie’s family emigrated from Scotland and settled in Pittsburgh in 1848, when he was thirteen. To help support the family, young Andrew worked as a steam engine tender, a messenger, and a telegraph operator. A Pennsylvania Railroad official noticed his talent and drive and offered him a job with the railroad. Carnegie quickly worked his way up the company hierarchy, earning enough money to invest in his own businesses. After the Civil War, he decided that steel was the future of America, and in 1873 he invested all of his assets into developing the first steel mills in the United States. Over the next twenty years, as the chief of the global steel industry, Carnegie made himself into one of the wealthiest men in the world. And yet he worked nearly every day of the year, normally beginning before first light and finishing near midnight, and rarely indulged in luxury. By the end of his life, he had given away almost all of his fortune to charities.

  In 1889 Carnegie wrote an article that supported the system of industrial capitalism but attacked the pleasures it produced. “The Gospel of Wealth” preached a fundamental tenet of what some have called “bourgeois” culture: that one must accumulate wealth but not enjoy it. The only “proper use” of one’s money was “for public ends” that “would work good to the community.” Rather than spend money for his own pleasure, the rich man should “attend to the administration of wealth during his life, which is the end that society should always have in view, as being that by far most fruitful for the people.” To ensure that “the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life” would be redeemed, Carnegie proposed massive estate taxes on the wealthy so that they would be forced to “have enormous sums paid over to the state from their fortunes.” Rich men should be self-sacrificing patriarchs:

  This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: first, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves …

  The only man wealthier than Carnegie was John D. Rockefeller, the “titan” who during his career from 1870 to 1897 as head of Standard Oil Company owned most of the world’s petroleum supply. Rockefeller never smoked, drank, or traveled for pleasure. He neither attended nor gave parties. He taught his four children to abstain from candy, forced them to share a single bicycle, and dressed them in hand-me-downs. His son, John Jr., was the youngest and the only boy, and so until the age of eight he wore only dresses. Rockefeller’s biographer Ron Chernow calls him “a prisoner to the Protestant work ethic” who “attacked recreational interests with the same intensity that he had brought to business,” “engaged in strenuous rituals of austerity,” and “grimly sought to simplify his life and reduce his wants.” Curious that men with such great wealth refused to enjoy it, the German social scientist Max Weber concluded that they became capitalists not so that they could enrich themselves, but because they felt a responsibility to manage society—to be superpatriarchs. To them, this was a religious “calling” that, if fulfilled, would grant them redemption and grace.

  Ordinary Americans who preferred leisure over work had no spokesmen. All the major American labor organizations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were as deeply committed to the work ethic as were the first Puritan settlers. In 1866 William H. Sylvis founded the National Labor Union, the first federation of trade unions in the United States, not only to protect the economic interests of its members but also to “elevate the moral, social, and intellectual condition” of all workers. This meant, above all, instructing them that to labor was to “carry out God’s wise purposes.” The Knights of Labor replaced the National Labor Union as the major national labor organization in the 1870s and 1880s but carried forward the commitment to work over leisure. In 1879, when Terrence Powderly, a Pennsylvania machinist, took over the Knights, he opened its ranks to women, blacks, immigrants, and unskilled workers. This was a radical step in a period when most craft unions would admit none of them. But Powderly’s intention was to spread a conservative message to the uninitiated. All new members of the organization were required to recite a “Ritual of Initiation” that declared, “In the beginning, God ordained that man should labor, not as a curse, but as a blessing.” The purpose of the organization was “to glorify God in [labor’s] exercise.” Powderly and the Knights advocated reducing the number of labor hours but only because they believed excessive work undermined the work ethic—men became machines unable to appreciate the glory of labor.

  The American Federation of Labor, which dominated the labor movement from its founding in 1886 to the 1930s, was no less committed to the work ethic. The AFL’s longtime president, Samuel Gompers, derided “unmanly, dishonorable, puerile” avoidance of work. Like the Knights, the AFL campaigned for shorter hours not to increase the leisure and freedom of workers but to keep them from hating work. Even radicals loved work and hated leisure. Eugene Debs, the principal leader of the Socialist Party at the turn of the century, declared it his mission to “plant benevolence in the heart of stone, instill the love of sobriety into the putrid mind of debauchery, and create industry out of idleness.”

  This ascetic ideal was one of the criteria of respectability in nineteenth-century America. Indulgence in luxury was seen by both the wealthy and large portions of the working class as un-American.

  The generation of “progressive” intellectuals—the founders of what is now called liberalism—differed with business, religious, and labor leaders on many issues but shared the belief in the evils of leisure and consumption. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, during the first great thrust of industrial production, these thinkers hoped to find a way to keep a society newly awash in pleasure from sinking into chaos. They faced what the historian Daniel Horowitz calls “the dilemma materialism posed to the values of hard work, saving, and self-discipline.” Simon Patten, one of the most influential economists of the early twentieth century, argued for an increase in the material wealth of ordinary Americans, but only so that they would not seek solace from their poverty by succumbing to “debasing appeals to pent-up passions.” With stomachs full and heads adequately instructed, workers would be able to resist the temptations of the nickelodeon, the burlesque show, and the amusement park. “Raised above grinding necessity,” as Horowitz describes Patten’s argument, “immigrants and the poor would become willing puritans.” Thorstein Veblen produced the most influential progressive critique of consumption in a series of books and articles, most notably the scholarly classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Like Patten, Veblen feared that the impoverishment of workers was leading them to lives of undisciplined pleasure-seeking. He found “a substantial ground of truth in the indictment” of working-class Americans as “improvident and apparently incompetent to take care of the pecuniary details of their own life.” The miserable conditions of workers produced a “growing lack of deference of and affection for” the “conventional features of social structure.” Untrained in the art of restraint, when workers did gain more than subsistence wages, they spent it on useless fun. What others had “euphemistically spoken of as a rising standard of living,” Veblen saw as simply the “cumulative growth of wasteful expenditures.”

  A host of progressive studies of working-class spending habits aimed to determine the exact degre
e of material wealth—and not one dollar more—that would provide “the power to ensure one’s primary faculties, supply one’s essential needs, and develop one’s personality.” The conclusion of most of these studies was that to avoid socially harmful “excesses,” the “minimum amount of goods and opportunities” should also be the maximum amount. Typical was Robert Chapin’s The Standard of Living Among Workingmen’s Families in New York City (1909), which labeled “visits to cafes, ale houses,” tobacco, gambling and lotteries, “ornaments (personal),” “theater and public festivities,” and even candy, soda water, and ice cream for children as “luxuries” and “extravagances.” Progressive investigators such as Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch called for a reduction in working hours so that workers would have less fun, not more. “The hotter the pace at which work is set, the more recreation will sink to the sensual and the exciting,” she concluded.

  The longer and the intenser the hours of labour, the more debasing the forms of recreation become … the saloon will exist as long as there is overwork… . Dancing is another of the pleasures of the senses, innocent and delightful in itself but often debased to the most vicious uses, and, when accompanied by drinking, as is often the case with the public dance halls, is frequently provocative of sensuality. Dancing often is loved as drink is loved. It is the element of abandon, of relief from the absolute deadness that comes from overwork that can find pleasure only in the most highly stimulating forms of amusement.