American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  “Pure heroin”: Campaign memo from Celinda Lake, Oct. 1, 1992.

  “guiding star”: Jason DeParle, NYT, May 8, 1994.

  “Greyhound therapy”: Paul Peterson and Mark Rom, Welfare Magnets: A New Case for a National Standard (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990), 25.

  6 Twelfth and Vliet: Carlen Hatala, City of Milwaukee Historic Preservation Commission, interview by the author. The department store was Schuster’s.

  7 Cuomo struck back: Joe Klein, New York, Nov. 18, 1991.Clinton feared Duke: Greenberg diary, Oct. 20, 1991.

  8 “half this election,” “major deal”: Greenberg diary, Dec. 1, 1991.“The welfare message”: Memo from Celinda Lake to Stan Greenberg, undated.

  “single most important,” voters “stunned”; Stan Greenberg, “Bill Clinton: New Hampshire, Exploratory Focus Groups,” Sept. 27, 1991, 8.

  8 “taken aback”: Greenberg memo to Clinton, March 7, 1992, 3.“The strongest media”: Greenberg memo to Clinton, March 2, 1992, 4.

  “No other message”: Greenberg memo to Clinton, April 22, 1992, 4.

  Democratic convention: Greenberg memo to Clinton, July 19, 1992, 6. Most effective answer: Greenberg memo to Clinton, Aug. 18, 1992, 2.

  9 “Get a job”: Bush in Riverside, California, July 31, 1992. Clinton wasn’t the first Democrat to get to Bush’s right on welfare. In a 1970 Senate race, Lloyd Bentsen attacked Bush for voting for Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan; in a statewide advertising campaign, Bentsen, who won, told Texas voters that a vote for Bush was “a vote for big welfare.” Jonah Martin Edelman, “ The Passage of the Family Support Act of 1988 and the Politics of Welfare Reform in the United States” (PhD dissertation, Balliol College, Oxford University, 1995), 211.

  14 “Biological as it gets”: Though Angie and Opal aren’t related, Greg Logan, the father of Angie’s first three children, is Opal’s second cousin.

  15 children “sleeping on grates”: Moynihan, 104th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec. 141 (Sept. 5, 1995): S 12705.“greatest social policy”: Thompson, HHS press release, Feb. 4, 2002.

  “greatest advance . . . since capitalism”: Editorial, WSJ, April 2, 2004.

  16 racial composition: Nationally, in 1991 the rolls were 38 percent white, 39 percent black, and 17 percent Hispanic. 1993 Green Book, 705.nearly 70 percent of the city’s caseload: John Pawasarat and Lois M. Quinn, “Demographics of Milwaukee County Populations Expected to Work Under Proposed Welfare Initiatives” (University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, Employment & Training Institute, Nov. 1995), 1, 26.

  six times as likely: In 1991, 2.3 percent of whites received Aid to Families with Dependent Children, compared to 15.5 percent of blacks and 9.3 percent of Hispanics. (Unpublished analysis by Wendell Primus, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee.)

  nearly seven of ten long-term: Greg Duncan of Northwestern University calculated the number from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal study of nearly eight thousand families. He defined “long term” as any recipient who, upon enrolling in AFDC, received payments in sixty of the following eighty-four months; among people in that category, 68 percent were black. Communication with Duncan by author.

  2. THE PLANTATION: MISSISSIPPI, 1840-196020 Percy kept her from being run out: Hortense Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 129.“Negroes are innately inferior” to “there may be good”: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom (1939; repr., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 22-23.

  21 “capable of being mobilized” to “it is more or less assumed”: Powdermaker, After Freedom, 68, 69, 208, 363.welfare didn’t exist: Powdermaker started her fieldwork in 1932; Aid to Dependent Children (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was created in 1935 and didn’t reach the rural South for years.

  “Every aspect of underclass culture”: Nicholas Lemann, “The Origins of the Underclass,” The Atlantic, June 1986, 35.

  In the exchanges that followed: Part of the controversy stemmed from Lemann’s argument that there was a “strong correlation” between sharecropper experience in the South and underclass status in the North. Demographers have failed to show that sharecroppers fared worse than other black migrants (perhaps because the data are poor), and Lemann dropped the word correlation from The Promised Land, his acclaimed book on the black migration. There he presents the sharecropper thesis in a more diffuse form, arguing simply that black sharecropper society “was the equivalent of big-city ghetto society today in many ways.” The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991), 31.

  22 James Eastland took over: Current Biography, vol. 10 (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1949), 184.

  23 Pie Eddie Caples arrived in 1927: Interviews with Mack Caples (his son), Ruth V. Caples (his daughter-in-law), and Virginia Caples (his granddaughter).Pie Eddie Caples’s wives: Interviews with Mack Caples and Ruth V. Caples, along with decennial census records, identify three wives: Virgie Caples, Alice Caples, and Hattie Chapman Caples. An 1892 marriage certificate shows an earlier union to Savanah Watson Caples. Divorce papers in the Scott County, Miss., courthouse list Eastland & Nichols as his lawyers in his 1923 divorce from Alice. The Eastland in the law firm was Woods’s brother Oliver, supporting Mack Caples’s recollection that his father, Eddie, had ties to the Eastland family before moving to the Delta. (See main text page 28.)

  labor killed her: Mayola Caples’s death certificate, April 10, 1939. Samuel Caples arrived in about 1843: The 1840 census has him still living in Fayette County, Alabama, a fifty- to sixty-year-old man with seven slaves. By 1843, he and his slaves appear on the tax rolls of Scott County, Mississippi. He is identified as a tavernkeeper in a genealogical reference book, Looking Back: Fayette County, Alabama, 1824-1974 (Fayette, AL: Fayette County Historical Society, 1974), Part III, 68. Frank Caples’s age can be deduced from the 1855 loan agreement (see below) that lists him as about twenty years old.

  24 “detestable”: John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Free Press, 1977), 7.

  24 abandoned life in middle Tennessee: In tracking Samuel Caples, I got help from two members of his descended family, Joyce McFarland and Kathe Hollingshaus. Their records show him as a “bondsman” in a Wilson County, Tenn., marriage in 1806 and selling land in Lincoln County, Tenn., in 1815 and 1821. The 1830 census places him in Fayette County, Alabama. A surviving log of a dry-goods store there shows him sending someone named Frank, presumably Hattie Mae’s great-grandfather, to buy pins and tumblers on credit.

  25 “my Negro boy Hyram”: Bill of Sale, Samuel Caples to Bird Saffold, Jan. 1, 1849, on file at Scott County, Miss., Courthouse, Deed Book E, 38. The clerk of probate court who witnessed the sale happened to be Alfred Eastland, Senator James Eastland’s great-great-grandfather.“Caples has this day executed”: Mortgage, Samuel Caples to A. J. Wright, April 17, 1855, on file at Scott County Courthouse, Deed Book F, 585-86.

  Jefferson Davis Caples: He is listed as eight years old on the 1870 census.

  joined a local militia: Service records at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History list Caples in “Capt. Thacker Vivion’s Company, Mississippi Cavalry,” a unit of volunteers whose members were all over fifty.

  “ten miles of negros” to “hegira”: Margie Riddle Bearss, Sherman’s Forgotten Campaign: The Meridian Expedition (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1987), 238-40.

  26 lost the homestead and family left: Tax sale recorded in Newton Weekly Ledger, May 16, 1872, and referenced in Jean Strickland and Patricia Nicholson, Newton County, Mississippi Newspaper Items 1872-1875 & W. P. A. Manuscript (Moss Point, MS: self-published, 1998), 12; Arkansas, interviews with Kathe Hollingshaus and Joyce McFarland.policemen, letter carriers, and “eliminate the nigger”: Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1989, 5, 43.

  In 1876, Frank had a son: The 1890 Enumeration of Educable Children for Newton County, on fil
e at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (microfilm #14292) lists Eddie Caples as fourteen years old.

  Oliver Eastland launched a plantation: Dan W. Smith Jr., “James O. Eastland: Early Life and Career, 1904-1942” (master’s thesis, Mississippi College, 1978), 7.

  27 mob death every 5.5 months: James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 114.What prompted the dispute: White newspapers reported that Holbert was being evicted for harassing another worker over a woman. A black publication argued that “Holbert had persuaded a Negro whom Eastland held in involuntary servitude” over a debt “to leave the white planter.” “The Doddsville Savagery,” The Voice of the Negro 1, no. 3 (March 1904): 81. I am grateful to Todd Moye for pointing out these competing accounts.

  27 Holbert’s “young master”: The Memphis Commercial Appeal, Feb. 4, 1904, which reported that the posse pursuing Holbert and his wife was “determined to burn the wretches at the stake.”“The blacks were forced”: Vicksburg Evening Post, Feb. 13, 1904.

  28 “intention of W. C. Eastland”: Commercial Appeal, Feb. 8, 1904.swept from the courthouse: New Orleans Daily Picayune, Sept. 22, 1904.

  named for his slain brother, James: Although the Holbert lynching is often cited as a particularly gruesome example of the practice, its link to the Eastland family was largely forgotten at the height of Senator James Eastland’s power, which is odd, since Eastland attracted a scathing liberal press.

  civil rights bills went to die: Robert G. Sherrill, “James Eastland: Child of Scorn,” The Nation, Oct. 4, 1965, 194.

  “Mr. Woods” persuaded: Interview with Mack Caples.

  29 eight in ten, “congenitally lazy”: Powdermaker, After Freedom, 86, 88.fell from a roof and died: Interview with Mack Caples; Ed Caples death certificate, Dec. 6, 1930.

  drew her name: Oddly, at her birth, Hattie Mae was named Robert, for her father, Robert Logan. She grew up known as Hattie Mae, after her grandmother, but she didn’t make the legal switch until the 1980s.

  children that Pie Eddie left behind: Stories of Frank, Lula Bell, Pop, Vidalia, ’Lij, Wiley, and Will Caples from interviews with Hattie Mae Crenshaw, Mack Caples, Ruth V. Caples, and Virginia Caples.

  31 the Eastlands’ cook: Interviews with Hattie Mae Crenshaw and Ruth V. Caples. Woods Eastland, Senator James Eastland’s son, was six when Mama Hattie died in 1951 but told me he recalls seeing a picture of himself as a young child with a housekeeper or cook named Hattie Mae.“I was the troublemaker”: Hattie Mae left the Eastland plantation for good smuggled out on the floor of a car; she had gotten some new dresses from a black boyfriend, but the wife of a white plantation boss, assuming only a white man could afford such goods, accused her of sleeping with her husband.

  32 Woods Eastland persuaded his friend: Chris Myers, “Delta Obsession, World Power” (chapter in forthcoming PhD thesis), 21; Smith, “James O. Eastland,” 37-39.the price of cottonseed: Myers, “Delta Obsession, World Power,” 24-26; Smith, “James O. Eastland,” 48-54.

  James Eastland helped kill FEPC: Chris Myers, “Reconstruction Revisited: James O. Eastland, Germany, and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, 1945-1946,” forthcoming in 2004, Journal of Mississippi History.

  32 “an inferior race”: 79th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec. 91 (June 29, 1945): S 7000.“mental level”: Robert Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South: Stars of the New Confederacy (New York: Grossman, 1968), 211.

  “pro-Communist” decision: Patricia Webb Robinson, “A Rhetorical Analysis of Senator James O. Eastland’s Speeches, 1954-1959” (master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 1976), 29.

  33 J. W. Milam: After his acquittal in the Till case, Milam said, “I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. . . . Niggahs ain’t gonna vote where I live. . . . They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids.” Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 219.“far more dismaying phenomenon”: Time, March 26, 1956, 26.

  alter its way of life: For a fuller account of both the mechanical cotton-picker and the far-reaching effects of the black migration on American life, see Lemann, The Promised Land, from which I’ve drawn the references to fifty field hands, the Citizens Council’s tickets, the quadrupling of wages, and the movement of five million southern blacks: 5, 95, 41, 6.

  34 “dean of Mississippi”: My interviews with Virginia Caples took place in the summer and fall of 2000 on the Eastland plantation, where her mother and her uncle Mack still lived. Virginia Caples was measured in her critique of plantation life, but she grew angry when her brother suggested that James Eastland had financed her education by loaning their father the money and forgiving the loan. “Senator Eastland didn’t help my father do anything,” she said. “Anything he did, my father earned ten times over. Anything Eastland had, my father and Uncle Mack helped him get.”

  35 “twelve-year-olds having babies”: The line was part of Gingrich’s stump speech in the mid-1990s; Katharine Q. Seelye, NYT, Oct. 27, 1994.

  37 midnight raid: Under so-called man-in-the-house rules, a boyfriend, even the most casual one, could have been deemed a substitute father, rendering the family ineligible for aid.

  3. THE CROSSROADS: CHICAGO, 1966-199138 60 percent of manufacturing jobs: William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996), 30.Henry Horner Homes et al.: Lemann, The Promised Land, p. 92.

  39 rolls quadrupled: From 984,000 cases in 1964 to 3.97 million in 1990. (Baseline, table 2.1.)“social pathologies”: William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vii.

  39 underclass: Erol R. Ricketts and Isabel V. Sawhill proposed a four-part definition of underclass neighborhoods, as those with high levels of high school dropouts, nonworking men, welfare recipients, and single mothers. In 1980, 1 percent of the population lived in such census tracts. The difficulties of codification can be seen, however, in the case of Jeffrey Manor, the rough neighborhood where Angie and Jewell grew up; it fits only one of the four criteria—single-parent families. Ricketts and Sawhill, “Defining and Measuring the Underclass,” Journal of Policy Management and Analysis 7, no. 2 (1988): 316-25.

  41 Levi Gillespie: The 1880 Census lists Levi Gillespie, seven, as the son of Alfred Gillespie, forty-one, and his wife, Ella, twenty-seven.contract to buy 110 acres: Deed on file at Monroe County Courthouse, Trust Book 1-Q, 167. The land was purchased on Nov. 24, 1941, and transferred to Levi’s son Henderson for $1 on Jan. 25, 1954. Charity Scott said she grew up hearing “Papa Levi,” her grandfather, urge his family to own land, warning that sharecroppers would always be in debt.

  poorer, more troubled family: Angie and her mother both have a hazy, negative view of Roosevelt’s family background. About Roosevelt’s father, Charity said: “He might a got killed or just walked away—they don’t know what happened.” Angie recalls visiting the Mississippi Jobes as a child and encountering her first outhouse.

  found out she was pregnant: Interview with Charity Scott.

  42 “My mother is the nicest”: Charity kept the May 6, 1980, essay, in which Angie describes her as the ultimate role model: “She is always telling me how much she loves me but she doesn’t have to tell me because I can see it. I say if she didn’t love me she wouldn’t be out there working herself half to death trying to give me the best in life.”

  44 signature of Joseph Merrion: Interviews with his son, Jack Merrion, and grandson, Ed Merrion. Merrion built Jeffrey Manor shortly after serving as president of the National Association of Homebuilders.1968 graduates of Luella: See www.netaxs.com/~jeff/luella.html (accessed May 25, 2004); also, Marja Mills, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 3, 1989.

  whites fought housing integration: One of the most infamous battles was fought just a few blocks south of Jeffrey Manor, at Trumbull Park Homes, where the arrival of a single black family in white public housing set off a huge riot.r />
  race of Luella students: Chicago Public Schools, annual student racial surveys, 1968-71.

  45 demographics of Jeffrey Manor: The data cover Census Tract 5103 for 1980 and were supplied by Chuck Nelson and Marie Pees of the Census Bureau.

  46 “crossroads” to “merge styles”: Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6, 11, 119. Elizabeth Fenn of Duke University points out to me that crossroads also had special meaning in black folklore, as dangerous, exciting places populated by badmen and tricksters.

  46 “any way any day”: Mary E. Pattillo, “Sweet Mothers and Gang-bangers: Managing Crime in a Black Middle-Class Neighborhood,” Social Forces 76, no. 3 (March 1998): 753.a third in female-headed households: 1980 Census, Tract 5103.

  statistical risks of single-parent homes: One example of the large social science literature is Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

  “I wanted to join”: Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences, 145.

  47 beginning of the end: Charity said that she prayed at length about her marriage. Then “the Lord just laid it out for me. ‘Well, you’re paying the house note; you’re buying the groceries.’ I was the one sending them to private school. What did I need him for? The next day I was at the lawyer’s office, after saying ‘thank you Lord’ all night long.” The property settlement gave Charity the “encyclopedia set,” “china set with glasses,” and “library books for Angela”; Roosevelt drove off with a late-model Lincoln and three other cars. Settlement agreement Feb. 4, 1981, Charity Jobe v. Roosevelt Jobe, case #80-4683, Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. I am grateful to Margaret Stapleton for her research assistance.