Class Matters
Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion
by Steve Fraser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018)
Book Review by Steve Leberstein. Steve is a social historian of the modern era, who taught history at the City College Center for Worker Education, where he was its Executive Director. He is active in his union, the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY, where he serves on its executive council and as chair of its academic freedom committee.
Is the United States the exception among the world’s nations in being a classless society, the fabled city on a hill without the social and economic conflict that mars the old world? Steve Fraser, historian and author, takes on the task of shattering this delusion, spurred to action by the “inconceivable” election of Donald Trump riding a wave of the resentful anger of a rebellious white working class.
In his telling, part historical analysis and part memoir, he chooses what he terms six “iconic events” that exemplify why class matters: the settling of Plymouth and Jamestown, the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, the Nixon/Khrushchev “kitchen” debate, the cowboy, and King’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But Fraser deconstructs each one to show how class defines this mythic America, “precisely because the country has labored so hard to pretend it doesn’t.”
The task is especially important now, he says, because we live in a time of psychic turmoil “when elites feel it necessary to stir up incendiary passions directed at themselves…the abyss looms…” Fraser begins chapter 1 with his own story as a New York boy of middling class status growing up “East of Eden,” that is Inwood, once the rural border of Manhattan where Peter Minuit on behalf of the Dutch West India Company bought the island for 60 guilders from the native Lenape. In Fraser’s boyhood it was populated mainly by Irish immigrants with whom he sometimes played pick-up basketball, “an outlier among outliers”. Does ethnic identity displace class identity?
The early 17th century Dutch and British settlements in America were financed by banks in their home countries in search of natural resources. Economic distress in England resulting from land enclosure and religious persecution sent to America farmers, dissidents and what Fraser calls “the vagrant underclass” in search of better lives. The financial backers of these settlements, however, sought a return on their investment resulting in an all too familiar class hierarchy. Fraser demolishes the myth of the Mayflower Compact, for example, as the basis for a Plymouth colony more democratic than the country from which Winthrop and his band of Pilgrims came.
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Fraser points out in chapter 2, worried that “our rights and property are now the sport of ignorant, unprincipled state legislators,” and were tired, as Alexander Hamilton was, “of an excess of democracy.” Such early debtor insurgencies as the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays Rebellion illustrate the incipient class conflict that worried Hamilton. Fraser tells his own story to illustrate the fallacy of the Constitution as a set of checks and balances to make “We, the People” a classless sovereign. As a student activist at the University of Pennsylvania agitating on behalf of poor neighbors faced with displacement by Penn, he came home one day to find the police with a warrant to search his apartment where they “discovered” hidden explosives used to frame him on phony charges of terrorism. The court found that the evidence had been planted by a police squad commanded by the notorious Frank Rizzo, and dismissed the charges. Did the rule of law prevail here, or was he just lucky to escape the charge meant to favor interests determined to raze the neighborhood for a new science center.
A chapter on the Statue of Liberty puts the lie to the myth, as Emma Lazarus put in her poem, The New Colossus:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Erected in 1886, the statue was not welcome to the American aristocracy in the wake of a decade of labor unrest beginning with the Great Insurrection (railroad strike) of 1877 and continuing bloody conflicts. In their eyes the statue was besieged by a “tidal wave” of immigrants, first Irish, Chinese, until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and then “mongrel hordes” from southern and eastern Europe, first Italians, then Jews. Rather than contributing funds to build the base for the statue, the grandees built a eugenics research institute on Long Island that laid the foundation for the immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924. The immigrant prejudice of the grandees spread to the ”native working classes” fearful of downward pressure on their wages and loss of jobs, a signal of what was to come.
Fraser goes on to demolish the myth of the quintessentially American cowboy (no indigenous people involved). For folks of my generation who grew up on a diet of cowboy and Indian movies, this is an interesting portrait of the heroes of our childhood. But the essence of the demolition is his account of the displacement of the independent cowboys by the rise of ranchers allied with corporate wealth, the “cattle barons.” Cowboys become workers subordinate to the rancher. There goes a childhood myth.
The funniest story Fraser tells is that of the 1959 Nixon-Khruschev Kitchen Debates at an international exhibit in Moscow. Standing in a model American suburban house in Moscow, the two debated the relative merits of Russian v. U.S. kitchens, and of their dishwashers. Nixon stood his ground on American superiority, proclaiming that capitalism would be the first to achieve a classless society, something akin to immaculate conception in Fraser’s telling.
Recounting his own efforts to de-bunk notions of American exceptionalism for the then current generation, Fraser tells the story how he and some un-named co-conspirators literally kidnap a class at Barnard College for a special lecture on the “Shapes of the American Experience” by a visiting scholar, a Professor Billshot. The guerilla theater succeeded for a couple of sessions, the students at the elite school listening to his banal nonsense until the authorities caught on and the bogus Billshot escaped.
A final chapter, “Free At Last”, is a critical account of the Civil Rights Movement, based on identity politics, unlike the New Deal, which was based on class. Fraser tempers his critique by telling movingly about his own youthful, naive participation in Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964. By the time of the Memphis sanitation men’s strike in 1968, he sees that Martin Luther King had undergone a transformation that led him to question the class basis of the American economic system and to recognize that class oppression afflicted both black and white, however unequally.
In concluding, Fraser suggests that the mythic beliefs of American exceptionalism constitute “those elements of the national identity that…have managed to conceal from view a largely subterranean reality of social conflict.” While acknowledging that “the proletariat has been disfigured” to such an extent that it no longer looms as the harbinger of a new era, he leaves unexamined how the U.S. working class can play a role in creating a more just society. Class Matters may be one step toward that goal of de-mystifying the American delusion, but one wonders if this erudite, often as much amusing as enlightening a book published by Yale University Press, is the appropriate vehicle. But for members of the N.Y. Labor History Association it is very much worth reading.