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PART ONE
Keynesianism
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ONE
The Old Families
When older Prairievillers talk of their city’s public life, the old families who once dominated it are seldom far from their minds. One such resident I spoke to was Shannon, who moved to Prairieville when her husband Frank, an engineer, took a job in one of the city’s homegrown industries. They bought a house in Sheppfield, a tree-lined neighborhood at the city’s northern edge that was inhabited by many old families. As was customary then, Frank’s new employer counseled him to first drive his family into town from the north to avoid the stench of a meatpacking plant—owned by one of Frank’s new neighbors—that skirted environmental regulations and stunk up the city’s working-class South End in summer. Shannon never quite found her place among her new neighbors.
“This town has a lot of history, and it is a hard town if you move here,” Shannon said. She sat on a dumpy couch with a home-knit blanket laid across her lap. “‘Old money,’ they call it—my daughter used to always laugh and say that there is ‘old money’ and ‘new money’ in Prairieville and that we were ‘new money.’ Prairieville does not welcome newcomers; it’s a gossipy little town. It is just full of these old families that have been here forever and got a million kids everywhere. Like here in this neighborhood we got some, a Browning that lives maybe six or seven houses down from us, and another past that—the Bloor family.”
“But you know,” Shannon continued, leaning in to share a delicious piece of gossip, “their kids aren’t all that successful now either. They may have the backing, but the ones that don’t take up the family business, [many] don’t make it. Like we had one family two houses down. They were into [warehousing] and had been around the city a long time—so financially they were doing great. But he was a gambler and not a great husband and not a good daddy to the little kids. Eventually, he sold the business and the wife divorced him and moved down to Florida, and I heard those little kids did not make anything of themselves at all.”
Such pieces of seemingly apolitical gossip, common among transplants like Shannon and more generally those who identified with the new, cosmopolitan, and partner-dominated city that they hoped Prairieville was becoming, were one way in which Prairievillers discussed changes in their city’s public sphere. At the center of such narratives was a particular kind of public actor: a member of the city’s business-owning families, or simply old families. Sometimes, people told stories focused exclusively on the old families and sometimes ones about their public struggles with union leaders—the latter type was especially common in working-class neighborhoods. In these stories, members of the old families appeared frequently as villains: they were clannish, conservative, jealously guarded their interests, opposed unions, and kept Prairieville frozen in time. “These old-timers—the city fathers—these old families with their names everywhere and in everything, they did not want change,” a former factory worker told me. “General Mills, or maybe General Foods, some big company wanted to move in here, but whatever it was, the old-timers did not want the union. They said, ‘No thank you, we like it just the way it is!’”
But sometimes, people remembered the old families fondly, too: as generous and giving, dependable, and—above all—committed to Prairieville. “I don’t see Prairieville’s prospects as too rosy,” one of Prairieville’s former Labor Council presidents told me, looking kindly now on his old enemies. “We’ve got five-, six-dollar-an-hour jobs hanging out our ass, and they can dress that up all they want but hell, even the businesses aren’t here, their corporate offices, the majority of that money goes back there,” he added, pointing into the air toward imaginary corporate headquarters. “[We’re missing businesses] like Glover’s Manufacturing, Prairie Tools. The people who started those businesses were part of the community. [Now] you have [these corporate subsidiaries] with no ties. What do they give a shit about Prairieville, Iowa? They have no commitment. We’re giving away the goddamn farm to get them here, but there is nothing to keep them from making a drastic decision that affects the entire community.”
After hearing many such stories, I came to realize that they were about the particular role that the old families played within Prairieville’s public life, not about wealth or business owners per se. In fact, many of members of the old families still resided in Prairieville and were still wealthy; a few even continued to run the business associated with the family name. But older Prairievillers insisted that only a handful of them were really like the old families had been; most had “made the transition” along with other leaders during the 1980s. To older residents, the old families signified a particular form of control that this group once exercised over the city’s economy, voluntary associations, municipal decision-making bodies, and Republican politics.
In contrast to today, the past influence of the old families is undeniable. It appears everywhere in the historical record and is even written into the city itself. If one walks down Prairieville’s Main Street, for example, the brown and red brick buildings that once housed the economic engines of the city are still marked with their names: Berkin’s Department Store, Klueger and Son’s Brick and Tile, the Peelmer Building, Browning Construction, the Wheeler Building. Stopping mid-walk in Prairieville’s public library, one sees the same names in the picture-filled encyclopedias that document Prairieville’s past. Regardless of the time period, the leading citizens’ family names and sometimes even first names are the same. In one photo from the 1970s, one sees Charles Springer, Charles W. Browning, and Gilbert F. Jones Jr. posing at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new manufacturer or greeting a visiting Republican dignitary. Another from the early 1950s, features Nick Springer, Charles R. Browning, and Gilbert F. Jones leading the city’s Fourth of July parade or beaming proudly while receiving the newspaper’s first citizen award. Even further back, the same names appear among the original operators of Prairieville’s stockyards. Leaving the library and continuing along Main, one reaches a circular plaza that marks the city’s symbolic center. It is dominated by the Willis fountain, a gift from the prominent meatpacking family. Built of imported Italian terracotta that tastefully complements the reddish coloring of the district’s surviving warehouses, the fountain’s style is classical, but the theme is unapologetically local: a bull on each pillar sprays water from its mouth into the fountain’s center, and the fountain itself is inset with plaques showing images of work in the old stockyards. An inscription reads, “A gift to Prairieville and its people, who have brought us so much good fortune” Symbolically and actually then, the old families are central to historic Prairieville and—appropriately—announce themselves in the language of gift and reciprocal obligation: you gave to us so we give back to you.
In this chapter, I explain why the old families emerged as a cohesive actor in Prairieville’s public sphere, one that locals perceived as opposed to—or even the polar opposite of—union leaders and their allies. This conflict was important to the public imagination of Prairievillers, because it structured how they thought about politics. Indeed, many older residents still use the division between the old families and union leaders as a heuristic for making sense of national politics, much like the subjects of social scientists’ first election studies in 1940s Elmira, New York, who understood politics as a blue-collar/white-collar conflict.1 My central argument is that there is nothing natural about older residents’ tendency to equate politics with a conflict between working-class and business-class sides, or even with sides at all. People saw politics this way—and some older residents still do—because the public actors of their day happened to organize their activities this way. The puzzle in this chapter, then, is how the old families got to be a “side” in the first place. My answer is twofold and focuses, first, on the way that members of the old families organized their public activities and, second, on the broader system of Keynesian-era regulations that supported, and even encouraged, the old families’ mode of public engagement.
The cohesive, factional relations that bound Prairieville’s old families resulted from the particular way that individuals strove for public prominence or, more simply, the game for public esteem they played with one another. Within this traditional game, members of the old families rose to prominence by giving or—more exactly—by creating a social system akin to one that social theorist Marcel Mauss identified as a total system of gift and counterobligation.2 Prairieville’s old families monopolized economic, civic, and political resources, and doled these out to one another and their supporters, who effectively became their clients.3 The old families thereby created networks of generosity and reciprocal obligation that penetrated deeply into Prairieville’s economic, civic, and political life and, in the minds of Prairieville’s residents, blurred th...
