Bridging the Divide

Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society

Jack Metzgar

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501760310, 9781501760310
• eBook ISBN: 9781501760327
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

In Bridging the Divide, Jack Metzgar attempts to determine the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of multidisciplinary sources, Metzgar writes as a now middle-class professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the various ways the two cultures conflict and complement each other, illustrated by his own lived experiences.

Set in a historical framework that reflects on how both class cultures developed, adapted, and survived through decades of historical circumstances, Metzgar challenges professional middle-class views of both the working-class and themselves. In the end, he argues for the creation of a cross-class coalition of what he calls "standard-issue professionals" with both hard-living and settled-living working people and outlines some policies that could help promote such a unification if the two groups had a better understanding of their differences and how to use those differences to their advantage.

Bridging the Divide mixes personal stories and theoretical concepts to give us a compelling look inside the current complex position of the working-class in American culture and a view of what it could be in the future.

Part I

NOSTALGIA FOR THE THIRTY-YEAR CENTURY OF THE COMMON

Men and women cannot be really free until they have plenty to eat, and time and ability to read and think and talk things over.

Henry Wallace, “The Century of the Common Man,” May 8, 1942

In 1982 I turned thirty-nine and was making $15,000 a year, having recently given up a somewhat higher-paying administrative job to take my first full-time teaching position. My brother-in-law Albert Mikula had just been laid off as a machinist at U.S. Steel in Johnstown, where he had been making $26,000. (In today’s money—2021—that would be the difference between $42,000 and $72,000.)

I remember these amounts because at a meeting of progressive academics in Chicago, I made reference to the prospects of Albert and his family if the United Steelworkers union accepted the kind of wage concessions the steel companies were asking for in the fall of 1982. I was taken aback when Joe Persky, an economist who was skeptical of our anticoncessions stance given the potential danger of mills closing, made a crack that Albert “probably makes more than you do as a professor.” I responded too concretely at first, revealing Albert’s wage and my salary and pointing out that Albert and Judie’s sister, Peg, had six kids, while Judie and I had only one. Joe made a face that immediately alerted me to my concreteness fallacy, and I then went off in self-righteous Lefty mode about Albert’s and other steelworkers’ working conditions (the alternating heat and cold, the hard physical labor standing all day, the crazy swing shifts, the tight supervision) compared to my job, which hardly seemed like real work at all during the academic year and with the summers off. It was only fair that Albert should be paid more and be able to retire earlier than people like me and Joe.

Joe, as I remember, responded that fairness had nothing to do with it, arguing that steelworkers made more than we did because they were productive labor, whereas we were living off the economic surplus they produced; plus they had a union, and we didn’t. Joe’s point was not that we should necessarily make more than steelworkers but that the spread was large enough to allow steelworkers to take a financial haircut if it meant saving jobs and entire mills. In retrospect, Joe was probably more right than I was, but my view of fairness was popular then among our small group of academics—and was not outrageously out of whack with general professional middle-class opinion at the time. Today, of course, it would seem outrageous in middle-class settings for a factory worker to be paid more than a professor, as higher education is now a key measure of every kind of worth, including financial.

Moments such as this stick in memory for a reason. This one stuck, I think, because it occurred at a turning point in both my and Albert’s lives, and part of the remembrance is about what we did not know then but do know now. I didn’t know that I was at the beginning of the best decade of my life, followed by some other pretty good ones, or that Albert was at the beginning of his worst decade, followed by some more bad ones. I also didn’t know the Glorious Thirty had ended seven years earlier—or indeed that it had been glorious.

My nostalgia for the Glorious Thirty and the brief glimpse of a “century of the common man” it provided is not based on how great those three decades felt at the time or even on how much was accomplished during those thirty years (which was a lot). Unlike my parents’ generation, who often reminded us youngsters of how good things were in comparison to the preceding years of the Great Depression and World War II, my appreciation for 1945–1975 is founded on what has happened since: an initially dramatic but then steady erosion of working-class living standards and working conditions that by now has seeped into the standard-issue part of the professional middle class. What’s more, working-class culture is not as strong and proud or as sure of itself as it once was, and middle-class culture is more crabbed and tense, more self-centered and less willing to acknowledge and explore more than its “one right way.”

“Nostalgia” is a word that often has no real meaning, just a strongly negative connotation. Like “liberal,” “petty bourgeois,” and “mediocre,” “nostalgia” simply evokes something you don’t want to be and is often used to dismiss someone else’s point of view without having to explain why.¹ Insofar as it has meaning, the negative aspect of nostalgia is appropriately defined as “the sentimental yearning for an irretrievable past,” and this is thought to be backward-looking in a way that is unproductive for moving forward.² I admit to some yearning for key elements of this past, but I don’t think those elements are irretrievable, and in part 1 I argue that my yearning is rational, not sentimental—or at least not only sentimental.

I have not directly experienced what Geoff Bright calls the “social haunting” of those who lost their livelihoods and have lived through the deterioration of their communities and ways of life.³ Sometimes nostalgia is not a self-indulgent, gauzy remembrance of good old days but instead is a powerful, often overpowering, process of grieving for what has been palpably lost. I am a witness to that grieving, not a participant in it. As such, I have observed stages of grief that often end up with what I’d call a restorative nostalgia: a spontaneous sorting out of what could be and what cannot be retrieved, often expressed at the end of a reverie as “at least we ought to be able to …”⁴

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, when both Albert and I retired, I was making about $67,000, and he was still somewhere around $25,000—a spread in 2021 dollars between $87,000 and about $33,000 and a complete and utter reversal of where we had been in midlife.⁵ Both the U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel mills in Johnstown were long gone, though pieces of them were still in operation by various smaller companies. Albert went back to work, after nearly three years of unemployment, at one of these pieces—back to a severely speeded-up job at a much-reduced wage and with meager benefits.⁶ His younger son got work at one of the pieces that had been Bethlehem Steel’s, and his older son works at a furniture store, both making less than the median wage for all full-time US workers now. Three of his four daughters have worked sporadically for Walmart, usually for much less than the median, and the other has had steady work as an administrator at a credit union with what all describe as “decent wages and benefits”—though what counts as “decent” is not what it was when she was born in the late 1960s. Albert and Peg subsist on Social Security and a collection of very small pensions, the largest one from his eighteen years at U.S. Steel before it closed, a tiny one from his twenty sporadic years at U.S. Steel’s successor companies, and another bit from the National Guard for his decades as a weekend warrior operating several generations of tanks.

Albert has been through his stages of grief, and I have spent some incidental bar time with him as he expressed and recounted some of it. Shortly after he retired, he told me he was finally at peace because “there’s nothing left they can take away.” The “they” who had taken so much away from him was ill-defined and impersonal but clearly was not intended to include me. I had a vague but powerful sense, however, that it should.

We were once roughly equal—Albert had a higher income and a more plentiful standard of living, and I had much better working conditions and work that didn’t wear me down day by day as I got older. I had greater prestige as the world goes, but in our extended working-class family he had a lot too as a decidedly better hunter of game and fixer of physical objects that had a tendency to break. Likewise, he was thought to have more common sense than me. Even though my various credentials were respected (even bragged on), my actual book learning was generally seen to be of doubtful relevance. Now I have everything—more income and more wealth as well as much better working conditions when we were working and now a more secure and fulsome retirement that includes expensive vacations (from retirement!). Even my relative prestige is enhanced, certainly as the world goes but also within their working-class culture. Four decades of deterioration in the material conditions of their lives and in the prospects for their children and grandchildren have sowed doubt about their ways of doing things and living a life.

I only occasionally feel guilty about this, and I have little inclination to give up much of what I now have. But I do have a profound sense of regret and loss and of intellectual embarrassment at not having appreciated what our society had when we had it. I really can’t say it was a better world then, as a great deal was worse, much worse, especially for African Americans, women, and gays. But our trajectory, the direction we were going during those thirty years, was better, way better than the direction we are going now and have been going for the past forty years and more. It’s not just the increasing standard of living and expansion of free time for what you will among the working classes that I’m nostalgic for but also the way shared prosperity from the bottom up tends to enhance both aspiration and generosity across the board.⁷

I have my own class interests to protect, and a good part of what I’m nostalgic for is a time when middle-class professionalism had not only its characteristic status-anxiety and competitive success ethic but also a countervailing willingness and drive to conscientiously explore what a good life might be in the absence of scarcity. Today there’s little time for that, as nearly all our conscientiousness is forced into mobilizing our social and cultural capital so we can maintain our position and pass on our class advantage to our children and, in my case, grandchildren for fear they might fall into that swirling downward economic spiral that is working-class life today. But with middle-class professionalism’s increasing isolation from and active avoidance of working-class life and culture, it’s harder and harder for middle-class generations to see the attractions and value of working-class ways, let alone learn from and borrow some of those ways. This was not always so, and that too is a reason to be nostalgic for thirty years that were not so bad in themselves and actually pretty glorious compared to the directions we’re heading now.

This is the nostalgia I feel, and my argument is that you should feel it too—or at least acknowledge it as a legitimate spur for the kind of golden age thinking that has long been productive in informing the present and charting a future. Since at least the Renaissance in Europe, golden age thinking has been used to criticize present situations, find past examples of better ways of doing things, and urge the work of recovery, restoration, and renewal.⁸ Seldom has it been a simple pining for a past that is experienced as irretrievable. More often, golden age thinking has spurred serious intellectual and practical endeavors to imitate some admired quality or aspect of the past, whether an ineffable spirit or a gritty capacity for working with stone.

Golden age thinking is rife today and very much focused on various parts of the Glorious Thirty. Conservatives wish to recover the “family values” and religiosity of the 1950s along with its rigid gender and sexual “normalcy.” Liberals point to the widespread benefits of labor unions and an active government in bettering people’s lives especially in the 1960s, with many grieving for the passing of a “social democratic moment” that extends back to the 1930s. Much of the reaction against nostalgia—the counsel to forget the past, get over it, and forge ahead—is based on the supposed exhaustion of this debate. But on the progressive side of this nostalgia, my side, a formidable literature has developed that picks through the specific policies of those times and calls for their restoration as part of a renewed commitment to shared prosperity. Much of it is golden age thinking at its best, and I hope to build on it in what follows.

The exhibits here are too numerous to mention, but Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper is a recent progressive compendium of golden age thinking across a wide front. Hacker’s earlier The Great Risk Shift and, with Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics use the history of postwar prosperity as a kind of touchstone for compelling critiques of what is often called “neoliberalism,” whereas American Amnesia is a thorough reconstruction by nonhistorians of the policy history from the Progressive Era (1896–1916) through the Glorious Thirty.⁹ For Hacker and Pierson “the goose that laid the golden age” is a “mixed economy,” which is very like what Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land defines as “social democracy,” an “acceptance of capitalism—and parliamentary democracy—as the framework within which the hitherto neglected interests of large sections of the population would now be addressed.”¹⁰ A somewhat more politically ambitious history by a nonhistorian, Sam Pizzigati’s The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class, 1900–1970, focuses on popular movements that won explicit policies to redistribute income, wealth, and opportunity especially through progressive taxation.¹¹ Other nonhistorians nostalgically reference a golden age of shared prosperity, not to yearn for an irretrievable past but instead to advocate for practical political economic programs of restoration and renewal, adjusted for current circumstances. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for example, is positively wistful, like Pizzagati, for the steeply progressive and “confiscatory” income tax rates in the United States under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bob Kuttner, Robert Reich, and Paul Krugman all advocate massive stimulative investment in public works (now called “infrastructure”), harkening back to Eisenhower’s long-term investment in the interstate highway system and President John F. Kennedy’s space program. The living wage movement is nostalgic for steady increases in the federal minimum wage like we had until 1968. David Weil’s The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It harkens back to a time before workplaces were cracked apart with part-time, contingent, temporary workers and “independent contractors,” a time when high turnover and quit rates were not goals for low-wage employers but rather symptoms of problems that needed to be addressed.¹² Even financial writers such as Steven Pearlstein fondly remember the good old days of “managerial capitalism” versus today’s narrow-minded, mean-spirited “shareholder capitalism.”¹³ Kuttner’s Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? is especially compelling in showing how what he calls the “vulnerable miracle” of the Glorious Thirty was based on “suppressing speculative finance” at both national and international levels.¹⁴

These authors and many others are insistent, often passionately so, on remembering this historical period not to pine or yearn for it—and not, like many progressive historians, to uncover opportunities lost and construct narratives of what went wrong—but instead to use this past to expand the range of the possible in our current circumstance and make arguments for practical proposals for future action based on past successes. Some or all of them may be wrong, but they cannot be simply dismissed as nostalgic and therefore irrelevant. Their nostalgia is justified, even necessary. Without it, the future is narrower and meaner in prospect.

My goal in part 1 is to add...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Achieving Mediocrity
• Part I: Nostalgia for the Thirty-Year Century of the Common
• Part II: Free Wage Labor and the Cultures of Class
• Part III: Strategies and Aspects of Working-Class Culture
• Epilogue: Two Good Class Cultures
• Notes
• Index