A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  On the great American work ethic, postwar country music expressed a deep and painful ambivalence. Songs such as Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons,” Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove it,” and Johnny Cash’s “Oney” and “One Piece at a Time” told of small-scale rebellions against the dictates of the boss—similar to many of the wildcat strikes and other forms of individual workplace resistance discussed above—but did not challenge the moral obligation to work. Rather, country music lyrics simultaneously expressed a hatred of work and a pride in doing it. Merle Haggard, one of the biggest country stars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, best represented this contradiction. In the hit song “Workin’ Man Blues,” Haggard sings of the hardship of working with his “nose to the grindstone” to support “nine kids and a wife,” which leads him to the tavern every night and a longing to “catch a train to another town.” But family and the respectability of work keep him from leaving:

  I go back working,

  Gotta buy my kids a brand new pair of shoes …

  I ain’t never been on welfare

  And that’s one place I won’t be

  I’ll be workin’

  Long as my two hands are fit to use.

  This attachment to the work ethic was demonstrated in several songs scorning welfare. Loretta Lynn’s argument that “They Don’t Make ’Em Like My Daddy Anymore” is supported by her claims that her father was “one heck of a man that worked for what he got” and that he “never took a handout.” Guy Drake was more explicit when he mocked the owner of a “Welfare Cadillac” who “never worked much” but who was able to purchase his luxury automobile with payments “from this here federal government.” That these enormously popular songs represented the attitudes of broad sections of white America seems undeniable. But they may also point us to an explanation for the lack of a widespread or sustained shorter-hours movement in the twentieth-century United States, as well as for the fact that by the end of the century, American employees worked on average from one hundred to three hundred hours more per year than did workers in western Europe.

  It was certainly no coincidence that country music became the soundtrack to the rise of the “new right.” The Alabama segregationist George Wallace, who promised the “average citizen who works each day for a living” that he would bring tax relief, an end to welfare and foreign aid, a strengthened military, and a crackdown on antiwar protesters, made country music bands a central feature of his presidential campaign tours in 1964, 1968, and 1972, and received endorsements from several country performers. One of the most notable aspects of the Wallace campaigns was the enthusiastic support he received in the industrialized North, in particular among automobile workers. The movement for Wallace within the United Automobile Workers in 1968 was so great that the liberal UAW leadership mobilized six hundred full-time staff members and devoted a half million dollars to stop it. Nonetheless, four years later, Wallace won the Democratic primary in Michigan, by most estimates taking the largest share of the union vote. Many of Wallace’s working-class supporters were moved by his implicit attacks on African Americans in his references to welfare cheaters, crime, and busing, just as many country fans no doubt attached black faces to the loafers and urban predators mentioned in their favorite songs. But Wallace’s explicit attacks were always directed at the white elite, “bureaucrats” and “theoreticians,” who, like the New Deal liberals who had dominated American political culture since the 1930s, imposed their grand schemes of social management on the hard-workers and taxpayers of the country.

  Richard Nixon, who virtually repeated Wallace’s pledges in his successful campaigns in 1968 and 1972, was endorsed by country stars Tex Ritter and Roy Acuff and invited Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash to perform at the White House. Likewise, Ronald Reagan found the winning formula in 1980 when he declared that “work and family are at the center of our lives; the foundation of our dignity as a free people,” and vowed to protect that foundation with tax cuts and an aggressive military. The year of Reagan’s victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter, more than two hundred radio stations switched to all-country formats, and between 1977 and 1983, the number of country stations doubled from 1,140 to 2,266. Reagan, who as governor of California had pardoned Merle Haggard for his previous conviction on felony burglary charges, invited the “Okie from Muskogee” to the White House on several occasions.

  The “new right” and its cultural expressions combined a renegade rejection of elite social control with a fierce defense of obligations—to nation, family, and work—that comprised the responsibilities of American citizenship in the postwar period. As in earlier periods, citizenship and whiteness were constructed in tandem, with African Americans serving as the model of the noncitizen. Moreover, this dual investment in Americanness and whiteness was always presented as a self-regulating paternalism. The (normally male) individual would work hard to support his family without assistance from the state, and would sacrifice himself to protect the family from its enemies, be they loose women, criminals, or communists.

  BACK TO THE (AMERICAN) LAND

  While a majority of white Americans followed the route of Merle Haggard into a half-renegade, half-citizen contradiction, others—like white zoot-suiters, rock-and-rollers, and the Beats—hoped to break entirely from their heritage.

  The best-known offshoot of the rock-and-roll movement, the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, are well known for their libertine attitudes but, ironically, they found themselves in the same contradictory place as their redneck archenemies. We typically think of hippies as free-loving, work-avoiding, pot-smoking, acid-dropping, nature-loving vagabonds. And indeed, many hippies—especially those who remained in cities and did not fully realize the hippie commitment to “natural living”—did maintain an essentially renegade lifestyle of avoiding labor, monogamy, and service to country. But those who carried out the logic of their creed ended up living lives that in many ways were more constrained, more onerous, and less free than the lives of the “square” Americans they shunned.

  In the late 1960s, hundreds of hippies left the cities and suburbs to establish self-sustaining communes. These “intentional communities” were typically established in remote locations so as to re-create agrarian, preindustrial society. Such remoteness also made necessary agrarian levels of work. Though they disparaged the “rat race,” hippies on most rural communes—at least those that were not funded by the inheritances of independently wealthy members—were forced to work more than the average American worker. Water was hauled from natural sources, wells were dug with shovels, food was grown without farming machinery, daily quotas of bread were baked in homemade ovens, clothes were made without sewing machines, and dwellings were built, log by log and brick by brick, by hand. Labor-saving technology was generally eschewed for more “authentic” means of production. In many hippie communes, according to sociologist Gilbert Zicklin, “the naturalists stood opposed to the use of advanced technology, preferring at times to substitute the muscle power of people and beasts.” In one intentional community, some members grew tired of deliberately avoiding labor-saving devices and called for the use of a gasoline-powered tractor to pull the plow, but they were denounced by those who believed that the use of anything but the hoe and rake would violate the founding principle of the commune. At Haney, a commune in the mountains of northern Oregon, members traveled by donkey several miles to the nearest town for supplies. Other communes sought to go back to even before the agrarian era. Lelain Loren-zen remembered her experience of “gathering wild foods. Sometimes we would go gather a lot of walnuts, and we would gather sorrel, you know sheep sorrel, kind of sour. We’d make a soup out of that.”

  At many communes, the sexual division of labor was violated only enough to increase the amount of work done by everyone. At the Total Loss Farm in Vermont, one of the more famous communes of the 1960s, most of the cooking and cleaning was done by women and most of the hauling, carpentry, and wood splitting was done by men. But because the modern
sexual division of labor did not yield sufficient production for agrarian survival, additional work was required for both sexes. On top of their traditional labor, women helped slaughter the pigs, milk the cows, and dig the well, while many of the men worked in the kitchen after a day of outside labor. One woman remembered the amount of work required just for preserving food:

  It seemed like that’s all we did during September and October. If you figured up the hours and multiplied our labor by a dollar-sixty an hour, I suppose that economically we didn’t come out that far ahead of buying our food. But we’re not living this way just to do things cheaply.

  Indeed, it seems that they were living that way also to do things arduously.

  Though professing to be radicals, many hippie women proudly recalled their lives as similar to the experiences of the paragon of American conservative virtue: the pioneer woman. Ayala Talpai, who lived off the land with her husband and five children, remembered that when it was “time for supper, I’d pick up a basket and go out to the garden, that’s how it started… . I just milked twice a day. So I was making cheese and butter and cottage cheese and yogurt and buttermilk and whipped cream and ice cream and everything… . But that was a major dent in my time, you know. I was cooking on a wood stove. So I was doing everything on this wood stove, and I was knitting my husband’s socks out of yarn that I’d spun and dyed myself, and he’d go off to work with his sandwiches of homemade bread and mayonnaise and homegrown lettuce and homemade cheese and a hand-knitted hat on his head and homemade shirts, and oh my God.” Nonie Gienger also lived “naturally” with her husband and children and gathered “seaweed and nettles, plantain and dandelion, berries and wild apples, too… . But we were even grinding our own flour to make bread. I was a pioneer housewife, and we were living off very little money. But it felt good because I knew where everything came from.” One of her sons contracted dysentery from contaminated water: “One day I found him outside crying, and his intestine was hanging out. I didn’t know what happened. I was horrified.” Gienger then treated him with herbal remedies.

  Marylyn Motherbear Scott described her life as a back-to-the-earth hippie in language reminiscent of countless pioneer novels: “When we went up there, there was nothing on the land except a cattle trough. So we were building homes, building water tanks, building roads, just building, building, building. And having babies still … I had my babies at home. I nursed my babies. I slept in the same bed. I schooled them at home. We’d get up and do the gardening, build houses, and cooked from scratch. Everything. I made my own bread. I made my own cheese. I made my own tofu. I gardened and had vegetables. I was even the first person I knew who grew blue corn and a lot of new food stuffs like that. I raised every kind of seed, every kind of bean, and every kind of vegetable.”

  Some members of naturalist communes aligned themselves with the image of ascetic Native Americans against the consumerist ways of other peoples of color. “Lakshmi,” a woman who lived in an adobe hut on a commune near Taos, New Mexico, acknowledged the local Indians who “showed us how to build our houses, and how to plant the crops. We couldn’t have made it without them. The Indians and the Chicanos, they’re really on different trips. I mean, the Chicanos want all kinds of things, they really want to make it. But the Indians just want to live close to the land. They don’t want very much, and they understand our trip.”

  Charles Reich, one of the first scholars to write about the hippie counterculture, noted that his subjects shared the dominant culture’s commitment to work. “Unsympathetic observers of the new generation frequently say that one of its prime characteristics is an aversion to work. The observers are prevented by their disapproving, puritanical outlook, from understanding the real significance of what they see… . The new generation is not ‘lazy,’ and it is glad enough to put great effort into any work that is worthwhile, whether it is hours of practice on a musical instrument, or working on a communal farm, or helping to create People’s Park in Berkeley.” Judson Jerome, who with his wife, Marty Jerome, founded Downhill Farm in rural Pennsylvania and later became one of the leading scholars of 1960s hippie communes, noted that in communes “a strong work ethic has been established, but the bias against profit … is as rigorous a discipline as the old culture’s bias in its favor.” Jerome cautioned that the work ethic of “the new culture” was “not to be confused with the ‘Protestant work ethic.’” Yet he nonetheless defined it as did the Calvinist settlers of New England: “The work ethic of the new culture is one in which work is valued for itself, indeed becomes a form of leisure.”

  Though some communes expelled members for seeking “exclusive possession” of love partners, most were made up of essentially monogamous heterosexual couples. According to Gilbert Zicklin, “Sexuality in communes, at least in naturalist communes, was often confined to couples who were attempting to make it together into the very indefinite future, rather than practiced promiscuously or en groupe.” Virginia Stem Owens, a member of the Moriah commune in New Mexico, remembered that “what we desired was innocence, not debauchery.”

  Among the small number of ordinary white Americans who avoided the self-imposed obligations of rednecks, hippies, and American citizens and embraced the gift of renegades were the workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, who in 1972 staged a walkout in rebellion against their employer and their union, the UAW. The national media noted that the strikers did not resemble the typical white workers of the time. Rather, they wore long hair and shaggy beards, indulged unreservedly in drugs and alcohol, opposed the war in Vietnam, and listened to rock every minute they could. Most stunning of all, they unashamedly rejected the work ethic. Many spoke publicly about committing acts of sabotage on the assembly line, spontaneous slowdowns and shutdowns, showing up late to work or not at all, general “goofing off,” and “fucking up any time I can.” While the immediate issue in the strike was a speedup imposed by General Motors, the workers quickly turned it into a rebellion against the UAW—“our union, Miss Goody Two Shoes”—which they accused of being more concerned with maintaining high production standards than with defending the freedom of the members. The rebels at Lordstown rejected not only the notion promulgated by New Deal liberals that they should take responsibility for their workplace, they also refused to abide by the cultural obligations of Americans.

  If we allow ourselves to step out of the desire to be “good” and to appreciate the desires that have been called “bad,” we have much to learn from the strikers at Lordstown. Like so many of the renegades in this book, they said very little but did a great deal that many of us envy. For at least a moment, they let themselves be free of the society in which they lived. There may have been other times in their lives when they wished to sacrifice themselves for their community or their nation. But if that is all they had ever done, how much would have been lost? How much would we have lost? Indeed, if Americans throughout history had only sacrificed themselves and made themselves “good,” what kind of society would we live in now? To answer that question, you might count the things in this book that you value in your own life or wish to enjoy, then imagine them as impossibilities. Renegades made illicit joys not only possible but real. They didn’t intend their actions as gifts to us. But now is our chance to accept them as gifts, take the side of the renegades when the guardians of social order try to keep them down, and take more.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped make a wild idea into this book.

  Casper Grathwohl, Bill Clegg, and Tim Bartlett gave early encouragement and advice. Victoria Hattam, Mark Carnes, Kevin Kenny, Joshua Brown, and my mother, Leslye Russell Larson, all read and commented on portions of the manuscript.

  Joshua Sperber and Mir Yarfitz read the entire manuscript and offered enormously helpful comments. Sasha Gronim provided wonderful research assistance.

  Kate Van Winkle Keller and Kerby Miller generously helped me track down sources.

  Dominick Anfuso, Bruce Nichols, Leah Miller, M
aura O’Brien, and Jonathan Evans at Free Press did an amazing job with a demanding manuscript and author.

  One of the best decisions I’ve ever made was to hire David Kuhn, the wizard of lower Fifth Avenue, as my literary agent. David changed my life. Billy Kingsland at Kuhn Projects not only gave me critical advice on the book but also inspired me to reach higher with it.

  The ideas presented here were developed from years of conversation with Jonathan Cutler, the most original and brilliant thinker I have ever known. They were first made public in the classrooms of Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, and the New School for Social Research. I simply would never have attempted this book were it not for my students.

  Sources

  CHAPTER 1

  Agresto, John T. “Liberty, Virtue, and Republicanism, 1776–1787.” Review of Politics 39 (1977): 473–504.

  Burg, B. R. Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean. New York: New York University Press, 1995.

  Cott, Nancy F. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.