How did it happen that I researched and observed these neighborhoods between 1970 and 1973 when publishing my first book, Politics and Poverty? I grew up acutely conscious of race and the battle for civil rights. My white Jewish family moved to Washington, D.C., for my father to take a job, and we lived in an all-black neighborhood before moving to a mostly Jewish one. When the D.C. schools were required to integrate, my whole sixth-grade class was transferred to a formerly black school where my teacher there was black. My junior class trip took us by bus across the South to New Orleans, where we witnessed separate water fountains and had arguments with the tour guide. The summer before going away to Miami University, I worked at a factory during the daytime with workers from West Virginia; blacks were segregated in the shipping department. At night I volunteered at the NAACP office on U Street and watched Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial from the organizing tent. The following summer, I would give my tickets to the Democratic Convention to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers I had worked with.
That I ended up as a pollster was pretty improbable. For my senior project as a government major in 1967, I conducted a mail survey with undergraduates at Miami University, and based on that, I was hired the following summer before starting graduate school at Harvard by Professor Ithiel de Sola Poole at MIT to analyze a survey on student housing, using new technology that allowed you to produce cross-tabulations on your desktop. Based on that, I was hired by a private research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to lead a project that engaged with the poor themselves in a national evaluation of the War on Poverty for the Office of Economic Opportunity. It included an innovative leadership survey of one hundred poor neighborhoods and a survey of the poor themselves in five of them. That ended up as my Harvard Ph.D. thesis and first book.
I conducted this research in the period after urban riots convulsed most American cities, and I was looking to see whether a more radical, anti-systemic black politics was now dominant, rather than a “culture of poverty,” implied in the work of Edward Banfield, Herbert Gans, and James Q. Wilson, all of whom I studied with at Harvard.28 Wilson was my thesis adviser. In fact, I was rooting for a more developed class consciousness, given the half century of rural impoverishment, mass migration to cities, and industrialization that had shaped these communities.29
All these hypotheses perished before the diversity of political consciousness in these neighborhoods. My hope for a developed class consciousness fared worst of all, as black auto workers thanked Henry Ford for their five dollars a day, equal to that paid a white worker, and Kentuckians thanked Champion Paper for their parks.30 The very different consciousness and mostly empowering politics in the black and Mexican-American neighborhoods left the culture of poverty in disrepute, too. Culture was a very large part of the story where Vance grew up. He just did not realize how exceptional it was.
The Appalachian migrants from Kentucky took up and moved into a neighborhood with some of the lowest priced housing in Hamilton. That neighborhood is intersected by the highway, river, and Peck’s Addition outside city boundaries, with one-room houses made from converted chicken coops. The streets were paved, however, and the better houses had enough land for a corn patch. The migrants took up jobs at Champion Paper, Fisher Body, and Beckett Paper starting with World War II and ending by 1970, as manufacturing employment began to decline.31
One could hear barely a murmur of politics. Only 12 percent indicated membership in any organization. The Hamilton Journal found only one instance in which the community had joined together for a common cause. The only visible organization was O-Tuck—Kentuckians in Ohio providing entertainment and relief for flood and mine victims—but few from Belmont got involved. One of the leaders of the O-Tuck said, “What they have is in hand. They don’t try to build up anything. They want it right now.”32
The mayor was from Kentucky and operated a store in Belmont, though he lived on the richer West Side. He may have had a house, but his “home” was in Harlan County. Once he made his fortune, he headed home. A police officer said the Kentuckians do affect things, because they go on holidays and weekends.33
In the surveys, Belmont residents scored the lowest by far on trusting people in their neighborhood; on whether “the wise person lives for today and lets tomorrow take care of itself,” they scored at least twenty points higher than any other neighborhood.34 That is why the mayor took for granted how much they suspected him of having corrupt motives and how apathetic they were. You gain perspective when you see what people are thinking and doing organizationally at the same time.
Those in the Mexican-American poor community were among the most organizationally engaged: 6 percent belonged to three organizations, six times that in Belmont. These included mutual benefit societies, electoral organizations, political pressure and civil rights groups, and government-funded advisory groups. One in five belonged to fractious organizations, with very different views on how to relate to the Anglo-American mainstream.35
The poor neighborhood of Detroit’s East Side was a more stable community, reflecting the fact that the auto industry and Ford Motors in particular recruited blacks and gave them pay equal to that of whites. Its organization and elected leaders were suspicious of the intentions of whites, suspicious of city government and the unions, and protective of its interests. It was a womb for black politicians, made possible by the three quarters of residents who were registered voters, 60 percent who voted in congressional elections, and 50 percent who voted in local ones. No other community I studied came close to this level of political participation. The funeral homes, Baptist churches, and indigenous and independent black organizations advocated for black interests, even in the UAW, which together supported liberal and political leaders. The Model Cities board listed 150 member organizations, and many got funding from the churches, the city, and the federal government.36
That was very different from the Summerhill area of Atlanta where black organizations and people lent support to the progressive business alliance that allowed Atlanta to offer a more accommodating response to civil rights. There were few institutions and no YMCA or political clubs in the neighborhood. Voter turnout was modest, but attitudinally, residents scored very high on receptivity to politics and a sense of personal efficacy.37
It could not have been more different from North Central Philadelphia and its “frenetic politics,” I wrote at the time. Blacks have a prominent and early history in this city, and 22 percent in this poor neighborhood belonged to an organization, the highest among the communities studied. It had vital tenant and welfare rights organizations, large churches and church-sponsored social welfare programs, a large NAACP chapter, and Model Cities Program. It had strong citywide party electoral organizations, rooted in a neighborhood that delivered patronage for votes. This poor community had high electoral turnout and scored highest on my receptivity to politics scale.38
So, we are right to be in awe of the amazingly durable hillbilly culture, as Vance describes it, but his book does not offer much insight into our poor and working-class communities writ large or what kind of policies could really make a difference to their life chances and quality of life.
THE REAL WORKING-CLASS STORY
America’s developing industries and cities were dominated by the influx of Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, Polish, Slavic, and Jewish immigrants from the late nineteenth century to 1920, when immigration to the United States was legally halted. Campaigns against Chinese and Japanese laborers were also successful in halting migration to the West Coast after the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. The cities of the Rust Belt were then shaped by immigrants who lived in homogeneous neighborhoods, usually working their way from the poorest and most crowded inner cities to the inner suburbs. The triumph of the unions in manufacturing after World War II allowed many to climb into the middle class.
In Detroit, America’s fourth largest city early in the twentieth century, Catholic immigrants f
rom Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Italy, as well as the Slavic states, worked in the auto plants. They were passionately pro-union and, after violent strikes, the United Automobile Workers won recognition in the big three plants by 1941; membership peaked by 1981.39 They lived in various city neighborhoods, but began moving heavily to the white suburbs from 1970 to 1985, Macomb County among them, home to “Reagan Democrats.”
Starting during the Depression and then heavily from World War II until the early 1960s, poor people began fleeing Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia for Detroit, taking the Appalachian Highway. Most lived in North Corktown in 1960, though those who could afford to buy land would, by the 1980s, move to suburbs like Taylor Township.40
There was plenty of contemporaneous evidence that the culture in these Appalachian white communities was distinct and viewed as distinctive by other ethnic and working-class Americans at the time. While the residents’ observations were full of prejudice, my polling at the time in another Appalachian community in Hamilton, Ohio, showed residents scored much higher on believing life was fated and that they were powerless compared to both poor black and Mexican-American communities. And those prejudice observations were consistent with Vance’s characterization of the values and motivation that were dominant in multiple generations of his family during this very same period.
There are reasons the Appalachian white experience is exceptional and unhelpful in understanding the working-class experience and challenges.
Henry Ford bought coal mines in Appalachia and recruited Appalachian whites to come to Detroit because they were “safe,” that is, much less likely to join a union—a struggle that was being violently fought in 1937 and 1941. Vance’s grandfather appreciated Armco Steel in Ohio, and many of the Appalachian whites in Detroit memorialized Henry Ford. And since many viewed their work in Detroit as seasonal or temporary, they were content to accept lower wages and compete for jobs with UAW members. In any case, they resisted putting down roots and sent more money back home to Kentucky and elsewhere. And as in Hamilton, commentators wrote about their holiday exodus to Kentucky.41
In 1934, a Wayne State University survey asked Detroit residents, “What people in Detroit are undesirable?” The respondents ranked “poor Southern whites; hillbillies, etc.” as the second most undesirable group, behind “criminals” who topped the list. Given Detroit’s storied black-white history, “negroes” ranked fourth.42
About the same time that I conducted interviews in Hamilton, community papers’ reported interviews with local residents described an Appalachian white community in the 1960s that was clannish and religious. Landlords revealed the tenants were always having plumbing problems and taking out the plumbing. A bar owner from the neighborhood noted a lot of fights: “There’d be a few throwdowns in there once or twice a week.”43 Over the next decades, most Appalachian whites came to realize they were not moving back to Kentucky, and they became part of the exodus in the 1970s and 1980s to the suburbs, to places like what others pejoratively called “Taylortucky.” Again, that is prejudicial, but also a data point on hillbilly exceptionalism.
Vance and his reviewers readily equate hillbillies with the white working class, but the Appalachian white community in Detroit makes clear that equation could not be more off. I conducted my research with the “Reagan Democrats” in Macomb County, Michigan, in the mid-1980s when J.D. was born. The white working class I researched and wrote about believed in rewarding hard work, taking personal and family responsibility, owning a home with a yard, and being engaged in church, civic groups, and unions. It welcomed government that balanced corporate power with initiatives that gave working people greater security, opportunity, and mobility. They benefited when government was supportive of unions and created a system of social insurance that allowed workers to retire with security. The next generation climbed up the social and economic ladder when all had access to education.
But then what happened?
Detroit’s inner city in July 1967 erupted into five days of rioting and looting that required the National Guard and U.S. paratroopers to regain control and took forty-three lives, the largest toll of any city in the country that year. Detroit was the most segregated metropolitan area in the country, and in 1971, a federal judge ordered the use of school busing to integrate the suburbs. Macomb was the center of anti-busing protests and organization. George Wallace got 66 percent of the Democratic primary vote in Macomb and Ronald Reagan 67 percent in 1984 against Walter Mondale, the candidate of organized labor.
The hardworking middle class was increasingly vulnerable as unemployment reached near 20 percent in the county, their lives threatened by a contracting auto industry and auto companies demanding givebacks, as their way of life was literally threatened by foreign imports, technology, and companies moving south. Yet Democrats seemed to care more about the blacks in Detroit and protesters on campus, more about equal rights and abortions, than about their mortgages or their kids’ future. They thought blacks lacked virtue, yet the government understandably was under pressure to help minorities, while the middle-class poor footed the bill for free-spending government.
Robert Kennedy, whom I worked for in 1968, advanced a formula to win black and ethnic Catholic voters, but that formula died with him until Bill Clinton, whom I also worked for, resurrected it in 1992. Clinton was embraced early on by black voters in Detroit and elsewhere in the primary and nearly won Macomb’s white voters in the general. He attacked the 1980s as a “gilded age of greed, selfishness, irresponsibility, excess and neglect,” and said, “I want the jetsetters and featherbedders of corporate America to know that if you sell your companies and your workers and your country down the river, you’ll get called on the carpet.”44 All the while, “millions of decent, ordinary people who worked hard, played by the rules and took responsibility for their own actions were falling behind.”45 Clinton declared those at the top must pay their fair share of taxes, but also that hardworking Americans were right to be upset about welfare, like the black ministers and most in the black community. When Clinton announced for president he promised “to end welfare as we know it.” That meant new work requirements, but also major government initiatives to make work pay, including big investments in education, a higher minimum wage, a greatly expanded EITC, and health insurance for all. Clinton’s offer was both “responsibility and opportunity,” and that is what both white and black working people wanted and voted for in 1992.46
They were all dealing with the sudden retrenchment of manufacturing jobs from 1970 to the 1990s due to automation and technology, foreign competition, foreign buyouts, and shifts of companies to the non-union South. National political and business leaders embraced the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. NAFTA’s passage in 1993 and China opening up for business in 2001 each produced almost immediate job losses, becoming an irresistible wave. America lost a million and a half manufacturing jobs during the 1980s, when many working-class voters turned to Ronald Reagan, but in the three decades since NAFTA and China joining the WTO, the country lost 4.5 million more. Michigan lost 182,288 manufacturing jobs.47
How political leaders dealt with globalization broadly and trade specifically was a big choice that accrued to the benefit of business, professional and skilled workers, and many larger cities. They turned a blind eye to China’s abuses and mercantilism and did precious little to help those whose lives and communities were disrupted. And as Joseph Stiglitz painfully pointed out in People, Power, and Profits, “Anybody who believes in the law of supply and demand should understand why globalization (in the absence of government programs to ameliorate its effects) hurts low-skilled workers.” It reduces real wages, and “if wages don’t fall, employment will.”48
So when Macomb County voters were deciding whether to support Barack Obama in the summer of 2008, surprisingly, the candidate never brought up Detroit or black people, and he wasn’t running on “black issues,” like Jesse Ja
ckson. Only a third thought he would put the interests of blacks ahead of other Americans and only a small minority thought affirmative action and blacks not taking responsibility for themselves were threats to the middle class. But they were nearly venomous in their critique of corporate CEOs, politicians, and elites of both parties who promoted global trade at the expense of American jobs and by far said “outsourcing of jobs to other countries” and “NAFTA and international trade agreements” were the biggest economic problem. They embraced the message that the middle class was “threatened by global trade, CEOs who care more about their companies than their own country and politicians who support free trade agreements backed by corporate special interests.”49
The financial crisis of 2008 and the following Great Recession took a huge and enduring toll on working people, black and white, but so did the elites rushing to bail out the banks whose irresponsibility had led to the crash and bailing out the auto industry that had proved uncompetitive. Bank bonuses continued to be paid and nobody went to jail, while home foreclosures went on unabated. Middle-income Hispanic and black households lost over 40 percent of their wealth.50 The new jobs after the crash paid 17 percent less, and median income did not recover for the whole decade up to 2016, when President Obama and business elites were pressing for passage and entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with working people expecting to become collateral damage again.51
And all through these decades, the working-class family was under growing pressure. The acceptance of birth control and the sexual revolution had led to a surge of women entering the labor force starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s.52 Family income gains were due entirely to women working more hours, even as wages stagnated.53 The traditional family with the male breadwinner role was increasingly under siege, particularly working-class men who struggled to find jobs that would put them on the ladder to the middle class.54 Working women faced extraordinary stress, too, as they moved fully into the workforce with no assurance of equal pay and virtually no help with childcare and no paid family leave or guaranteed health insurance for themselves and their kids.55
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