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Exit Zero Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago

C H R I S T I N E J . WA L L E Y

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Christine J. Walley is associate professor of anthropology at MIT and the

author of Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 87179- 0 (cloth)

ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 87180- 6 (paper)

ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 87181- 3 (e- book)

ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 87179- 7 (cloth)

ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 87180- 0 (paper)

ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 87181- 9 (e- book)

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Walley, Christine J., 1965–

Exit Zero : family and class in postindustrial Chicago / Christine J. Walley.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978- 0- 226- 87179- 0 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978- 0- 226-

87180- 6 (paperback : alkaline paper)—ISBN 0- 226- 87179- 7 (cloth :

alkaline paper)—ISBN 0- 226- 87180- 0 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Steel

industry and trade—Illinois—Chicago—History—20th century.

2. Working class—Illinois—Chicago—Social conditions—20th century.

3. Deindustrialization—Social aspects. 4. Walley, Christine J., 1965—

Family. I. Title.

HD9518.C4W355 2013

338.4'76691420977311—dc23

2012007587

o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48- 1992

(Permanence of Paper).

Preface / ix

Acknowledgments / xi

Map of Southeast Chicago / xvii

I N T R O D U C T I O N / 1

O N E / A World of Iron and Steel: A Family Album / 18

T WO / It All Came Tumbling Down: My Father and the Demise of Chicago’s Steel Industry / 57

T H R E E / Places Beyond / 89

F O U R / The Ties That Bind / 117

C O N C L U S I O N / From the Grave to the Cradle / 153

Notes / 169

Bibliography / 199

Index / 209

C O N T E N T S

Plate 1. The sack in which my great- grandfather, John Mattson, stuffed his memoir

Map. 1. Map of Southeast Chicago. Created by Leland Belew.

Early one morning when I was fourteen years old, my mom entered my bedroom and shook me awake. “Don’t worry,” she said quietly, “it’ll be OK. They called the ore boat back, but it’ll be all right.” I wondered why we should be worrying about an “oar boat” being called somewhere but drows- ily accepted her reassurances and went back to sleep. In retrospect, I imagine my mother on that chilly March morning both trying to reassure me and seeking comfort to face what was ahead, even as she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell me what had happened. The real news was that the recall of the ore freighter from the middle of Lake Michigan meant that Wisconsin Steel, the mill in Southeast Chicago where my father worked as a shear op- erator, had shut down. The mill’s major lender, anticipating its imminent fi nancial collapse, had reclaimed its rights to the iron ore in the freighter’s hold—prompting the Coast Guard to meet the ship and prevent it from docking. The action spurred the mill’s other fi nancial lenders to foreclose, pushing Wisconsin Steel into bankruptcy. Although shrouded in confusion at the time,1 this moment would mark a crucial rupture for myself and my family. It sharply divided our lives into a time Before the Mill Shut Down and After the Mill Shut Down. My mother, it turned out, had hesitated to tell me what had happened for good reason: the recall of the ore boat would set in motion momentous changes that would transform us all.

The abrupt shutdown of Wisconsin Steel on March 28, 1980, was a har- binger of things to come for the Calumet region of Chicago and northwest Indiana, once one of the largest steel- producing areas in the world. Begin- ning in the early 1980s, the other steel mills in Southeast Chicago—mills that had employed thirty- fi ve thousand workers at their height—also began to close. A short distance across the Indiana state border, another fi fty- fi ve thousand jobs were lost. Even the pockets of the steel industry that survived

I N T R O D U C T I O N

2 / Introduction

in Indiana continued with vastly fewer workers. During the time that the re- gion’s steel industry was collapsing in the 1980s and early 1990s, my family and other stunned residents strove to make sense of what was happening. Some remarked bitterly that it was worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. At least after the Depression, they said, the mills had reopened and people went on with their lives. This time, the steel mills were gone for good. Their closing would tear through a social fabric that had sustained generations.

I write this book as a middle- class professor now living in a comfortable college town. The journey that led me here began not long after Wisconsin Steel’s demise. On my sixteenth birthday, I left Chicago to become a scholar- ship student at a wealthy East Coast boarding school with ivy- covered brick buildings and affl uent classmates. While my family’s situation was taking a dramatic turn for the worse, my own life was moving in what seemed like the opposite direction. This transition turned out to be a diffi cult one for a working- class girl from Southeast Chicago. Just as Wisconsin Steel’s demise had upended the world as my family knew it, this later journey turned my life upside down yet again. In a country where many are reluctant to speak directly about social class, it was diffi cult to fi nd language to describe the profound sense of rupture I experienced going back and forth between the radically different worlds of home and school, worlds that seemed to be actively growing ever farther apart.

Despite the American faith in the ability of individuals to remake them- selves, I have found that it is not so easy to leave this kind of personal his- tory behind. I continue to be troubled by the collapse of the world as I had known it in Southeast Chicago and by the impact that deindustrialization had on family and neighbors. I remain unsettled by the diffi cult transi- tions of my teenage years, when I shuttled between extreme ends of the US class spectrum that I previously only barely knew existed. I am conscious even now of how my class origins shape who I am: how I speak—or don’t speak—in the world, my outlook on life, and perhaps even, as I discovered when diagnosed with a now- treated cancer, the chemical composition of my body.2

But the reason I can’t let go of this history is not simply personal. It is because this journey illustrates in unusually stark terms something larger and more troubling. It reveals the costs of both the class divisions that have long existed in the United States and those associated with the increasing economic inequalities of more recent decades. My parents’ generation came of age in the immediate post–World War II era, when America’s middle class was expanding. They took for granted that greater economic equality

Introduction / 3

was the wave of the future. In contrast, many observers now see this period as a historical anomaly. In recent years, levels of inequality in the United States have reached heights not seen since the 1920s or even the “robber baron” days of the 1890s.3 Increasingly unequal lives have become one of the defi ning characteristics of our era. In the United States, conservatives and liberals have long debated the social implications of economic inequality. While liberals have tended to view high levels of inequality as inherently unjust and antidemocratic, conservatives have argued that inequality can lead to greater dynamism as long as it is accompanied by social mobility. Yet researchers suggest that social mobility in the United States has stalled. The chance to “move up” is now more common in what used to be thought of as class- bound Europe than in the United States, a country historically defi ned in terms of upward mobility and the “American dream.”4

Should the post–World War II hopes for an expanding middle class, then, be simply dismissed as a historical blip between two Gilded Ages? I would argue that such transformations instead suggest the need to pause, take stock, and consider how the United States ended up heading down this path and at what cost. In this book, I explore these questions in two ways. First, I consider how rising economic inequality in the United States is linked to a phenomenon on the opposite end of the class spectrum from the fi nancial excesses of Wall Street: the fallout of deindustrialization. And second, I ask what my own journey across classes suggests about how social class works more broadly in the United States.

In college classes, I teach statistics on deindustrialization, including the fact that, in 1960, one- third of all laborers in the United States outside agriculture had jobs in manufacturing, while in 2010, only a little over one- eighth had. It is even more striking that, in 1960, 62 percent of those jobs were unionized, while, by 2010, only 13.6 percent were.5 As a social scientist, I spend time poring over literature that conveys what most workers know all too well: that the manufacturing jobs lost in the United States had bet- ter pay, more benefi ts, and far greater security than those that remain. The jobs that are left are far less likely to serve as a rung up the social ladder to middle- class life for working- class and poor people. As a result, the loss of such jobs has been a major contributing factor in the hollowing out of the American middle class.

What such statistics do not convey are the human realities behind these numbers. When I return home to visit in Southeast Chicago, the fallout of this transformation once again becomes real to me. When I was a child and the Calumet’s mills were going full force, a thick dark haze hung over the region. Automobile travelers arriving in the area via the Indiana Toll Road

4 / Introduction

were assaulted by the acrid smells and soot of the steel mills. Although the vestiges of Indiana’s steel industry continue to produce steel with a tiny frac- tion of their once enormous workforce, the steel mills of Southeast Chicago are now all gone. The air is much cleaner, as residents ruefully note, but the sturdy prosperity of the region is also gone. Despite the deceptive glitz of Indiana’s waterfront casinos and a few neighborhoods that cling to a sem- blance of middle- class lifestyles, much of the region is now pockmarked with boarded- up houses, empty lots, and deserted storefronts.

The highway exit ramp for Southeast Chicago’s old steel mill neighbor- hoods is numbered “zero.” My father once explained that since Southeast Chicago begins at the state line where the Indiana Toll Road meets the ele- vated Chicago Skyway, the exit ramp is literally located at mile zero. However, there is something about the big “0” on the sign that captures a sense that this is a passed- over region. Even when the steel mills were going strong and when Southeast Chicago residents lived in economically vibrant neighbor- hoods amid an industry widely understood as the backbone of the national economy, the region was largely ignored by the rest of the city. For most Chicagoans, it was a little- known place best sped over on the skyway. When I was living in Chicago and told people from other parts of the city that I was from the East Side, one of Southeast Chicago’s neighborhoods, some would ask sardonically, “East side of what? Chicago doesn’t have an East Side! You live in Lake Michigan?” This perception has only become more extreme in the wake of deindustrialization, as toxic brownfi elds have replaced taxpay- ing industries. The Exit 0 sign all too aptly sums up a sense of being caught in the limbo of a postindustrial no- man’s- land, heading nowhere. Today, Southeast Chicago residents carry on with their lives below the exit ramp. While older residents often cling to memories of the past, newer residents bring alternative histories and hopes. However, the enormous abandoned industrial spaces, still empty decades later, serve as a visible reminder of how the past continues to dominate the present. The half- life of deindustrializa- tion is turning out to be a very long one.6

I studied sociocultural anthropology in graduate school because it spe- cialized in understanding human difference, and I needed to fi nd a way to make sense of the extreme disjunctures between the different class worlds I had experienced during childhood and adulthood. Although I am now a professional anthropologist, I have chosen not to write this book in a clinical academic voice. Instead, it is a book of stories.7 While some are stories of neighbors, friends, and others with whom I have engaged in con- versation over the years, most of these stories are about my family. For four generations, members of my family lived and worked in Southeast Chica-

Introduction / 5

go’s neighborhoods. Our lives have nearly spanned the rise and fall of the Calumet’s steel industry, from my great- grandparents’ generation, which was attracted to Southeast Chicago’s expanding industrial economy, to my parents’, which suffered the trauma of deindustrialization, to my own gen- eration, which has since scattered in divergent directions. These stories are of passing generations collectively bound up with an industry and with a place that could be experienced as both stifl ing and a refuge. Understanding the subsequent transformations of this region offers a window onto broader changes in American society as a whole.

Personal stories, like those told in this book, are, of course, never just about individuals; such stories are also about the social worlds in which we live. Those in the United States who celebrate the ideals of meritocracy often believe that an individual’s ability to transform himself or herself ultimately lies within. Such viewpoints ignore the fact that our lives only exist and take on meaning within the social worlds that have shaped us and through which we negotiate our paths in life. Our individual stories are also always com- munal ones. Consequently, telling personal stories means not only looking inward but also turning the self outward and tracing the links and relation- ships that shape and defi ne not only who we are as individuals but also the broader social worlds of which we are a part.

Some stories, however, are easier to tell than others. Social scientists would say that certain kinds of story lines are “hegemonic”—they are linked to dominant ways of thinking, talking, and acting in the world that become taken for granted as “just the way things are.”8 Hegemonic narratives reach us through mainstream media outlets, in the classroom, on the political cam- paign trail, in economic textbooks, and countless other ways. They shape the possibilities we can envision for thinking about the world, how we interpret our own realities, and, often, the kinds of stories we choose to tell. In many instances, our personal stories are built upon, and given meaning through, references to more dominant social narratives. Of course, people also regu- larly challenge hegemonic interpretations, but our alternative accounts often carry less traction or feel awkward or unimportant to tell precisely because they fail to fi t more familiar story lines.

In writing this book, I am drawn to the points of awkwardness and even confl ict between the personal stories I want to tell and the more common story lines through which I and many others have been encouraged to make sense of our experiences. Carolyn Steedman’s classic account of growing up working class in post–World War II London provides one example of what we can learn by paying attention to such tensions.9 By pointing to the gap between assumptions about working- class experiences and the realities of

6 / Introduction

women on the borders like her mother, Steedman’s raw, personal account shattered romantic, mythical stereotypes of a close- knit British laboring class then dominant among the left that paid little attention to the experi- ences of women. Although the stories we tell about ourselves are of neces- sity built upon, and given meaning through, references to more dominant narratives, it is the points of tension and omission that I hope to convey. As we attempt to narrate our lives, where do we feel constrained? What are the discrepancies between our own stories and those that others wish to tell for us? What do such gaps reveal about our social worlds?

In each chapter of this book, I tell family stories that fail to “fi t.” By letting such stories wrestle with more dominant understandings, I try to suggest alternative ways of thinking. The fi rst chapter chronicles the his- tory of Southeast Chicago through the life stories of my great- grandparents and grandparents. Such stories both reproduce and challenge commonplace narratives of immigration and labor in the early twentieth century, under- scoring what the more dominant accounts of both right and left ignore in the telling of such lives. The next chapter conveys the traumas of deindustri- alization in Southeast Chicago through the experiences of my father and the rest of my family in the aftermath of Wisconsin Steel’s shutdown. Instead of viewing the emergence of the nation’s “rust belt” as part of an evolutionary transformation in which the short- term costs of deindustrialization would give way to a more dynamic and expansive “new economy,” these stories underscore how deindustrialization has contributed to the far- reaching dis- enfranchisement of working people. This chapter calls into question the presumed causes of deindustrialization and asks who benefi ted and who lost from such transformations and why certain public responses won out over others.

In the third chapter, I explore my own experiences with upward mobil- ity traveling between Southeast Chicago and an elite East Coast boarding school. Conservatives often respond to critiques of class divisions in the United States by emphasizing possibilities for upward mobility. They depict upward mobility as a relatively straightforward process at the heart of the American dream. Yet such assumptions downplay both the personal and familial ambivalence that can accompany upward mobility and fail to ex- plain why the collective upward mobility that once characterized industrial regions like Southeast Chicago has been replaced by a narrower focus on isolated individuals getting ahead. The fourth chapter shifts the focus from stories about people to stories about place. It considers the environmental fallout of both industrialization and deindustrialization in Southeast Chi- cago and how its toxic legacy has become part of residents’ bodies even as it

Introduction / 7

also constrains possibilities for the region’s postindustrial future. Although the assumption that a new economy must inevitably rise from the ashes of the old has proven to be a mirage in many formerly industrial regions like Southeast Chicago, community activists continue to work toward their own alternative vision of the Calumet’s future. Such efforts are loaded, neverthe- less, with contradictions and remain an uphill struggle.

In short, each of these chapters explores the tensions between more dominant interpretations of key changes occurring for working people in the twentieth century and the alternative viewpoints evident within the sto- ries of Southeast Chicago residents themselves. Although the family stories told here were not originally intended as social critique, taken together, such stories become exactly that. Probing their points of tension suggests a larger perspective—perhaps even a counternarrative—that places social class in its many manifestations at its core. The stories told in this account aren’t always heroic ones, nor do they articulate an easily identifi able politics. Neverthe- less, such stories do suggest a complexity and richness to working- class lives that defi es conventional stereotypes and opens up possibilities for the kinds of alternative understandings our contemporary period so sorely needs.

Acknowledging that deindustrialization has knocked out a rung of the social ladder for many does not, however, necessitate romanticizing indus- trial jobs. Mill and factory labor was and is diffi cult and life- sapping work. It is also work that continues to become ever more elusive in higher- wage parts of the world, not only because companies often move factory produc- tion to other regions, but also because of the ongoing role of automation and computerization in replacing workers. Revisiting questions of deindus- trialization, in my mind, means paying attention to the kinds of jobs that have been lost: not whether such jobs were located in factories, but whether they were stable, decent- paying jobs around which strong working families and communities could be built. Acknowledging the impacts of deindustri- alization does not mean indulging in an act of nostalgia, but rather the need to take part in a hard- nosed critical exploration of where we have come from as a nation and where we are heading.

Defi ning Class

As a young person, I actively sought out a concept of “class” as a way to make sense of my life. But what does the concept of class come to mean in these pages? Observers have long noted that Americans across the economic spectrum tend to avoid overt discussions of social class. (This is one reason why some stories are harder to tell than others.) The fact that most Ameri-

8 / Introduction

cans prefer to think of themselves as part of an amorphous and all- inclusive middle class is not surprising in a country that has long defi ned itself as the embodiment of a meritocracy. For poor and working- class individuals, admitting to being less than middle class opens one to charges of being lazy, a failure, or, in some other way, personally at fault.10 For those who have inherited wealth, acknowledging an elite class status means that others may assume they have neither worked for nor deserve their own social posi- tion. For all such groups, claiming to be middle class can relieve awkward assumptions. Of course, people do talk about class, but they often do so in roundabout ways and through other kinds of language. Even though South- east Chicago is a region with a long history of labor confl ict, most people I knew tended to avoid talking about class too directly. Instead, people relied upon alternative vocabularies such as talk of “the little guy” or “fat cats” or such cultural markers of taste or lifestyle as someone’s “trashy” clothes or “snotty” demeanor. Such tendencies are widespread in the United States. Even our quintessential national narrative of the American dream, in which the United States embodies the chance to get ahead for all who work hard, is a way to talk about class without really talking about it.

As anthropologist Sherry Ortner has observed, Americans often use other social categories such as gender and race as surrogate ways of thinking and talking about class.11 In particular, class and race are often confl ated in the United States, or treated as if the two were the same thing, with African- Americans, regardless of their backgrounds, symbolically associated with poverty. In the Southeast Chicago of my childhood, this tendency played out in a particular way.12 Working- class whites, who were desperate to dif- ferentiate themselves from poor blacks living elsewhere on Chicago’s South Side, used race as a kind of shorthand for the poverty they wanted to keep at bay and that seemed all too close both geographically and generation- ally given many whites’ impoverished immigrant forebears. Confl ating race and class in this way exacerbates the intensity of racism. However, it does other things as well. It makes it diffi cult to acknowledge the experiences of middle- class blacks or working- class whites who do not fi t easily into such dualistic thinking. It also downplays class tensions within racial and ethnic groups, resulting in a polarizing perspective that makes it diffi cult to recog- nize other kinds of social fault lines.

In recent years, the tendency to avoid discussions of class and to defl ect it onto other topics has been central to a highly dysfunctional early twenty- fi rst- century American political culture. The failure to speak directly about social class means that, when class is acknowledged, it is often expressed in terms of cross- class cultural resentments that make it impossible to either

Introduction / 9

understand or remedy the underlying causes of growing economic inequal- ity.13 Such avoidance of direct talk about class has, for example, helped to transform the class resentments harbored by working- and lower- middle- class whites in response to expanding economic inequalities into resent- ment against less powerful minorities rather than the more powerful fi gures who may actually be calling the shots. My point is not that people’s eco- nomic interests are more real than their social and cultural outlooks. (As an anthropologist, I am all too attuned to the power of the latter.) Rather, as other critics note, there has been a cynical manipulation of the cultural in recent decades in order to obscure the economic and political, obfuscat- ing the powerful interests and policies that underlie this nation’s growing economic inequality. When serious questions are raised regarding who has benefi ted or lost out in the economic transformations of recent decades, it is summarily dismissed as envy or caricatured in hyperbolic terms as “class warfare.”

Acknowledging that we need more direct discussion of social class in the United States does not imply that “class” simply exists “out there,” an aspect of reality that we can take for granted. Like all concepts, ideas of class offer a particular interpretation of the world, rather than a mere description of it. Yet class as a concept is a compelling one that can offer penetrating insight into our contemporary world. It is a concept that I actively searched for as a teenager to make sense of what I experienced journeying between Southeast Chicago and a wealthy boarding school. It is a lens necessary to understand the history of both industrialization and deindustrialization in the United States. And it is a lens crucial to understanding early twenty- fi rst- century American society. Class is crucial to our contemporary national conversa- tion, not only because it addresses head- on the kinds of issues that Ameri- cans of all backgrounds so often avoid, but also because such issues are key to the contemporary dilemmas and choices we currently face.

The concept of class has been defi ned and used by academics in a variety of sometimes competing ways. For those working within the lineage of Karl Marx, class refers to the social divisions between people based on their economic location within the relations of a capitalist mode of production (capitalism itself being understood as continually in transformation, most recently from what contemporary theorists refer to as “globalization”). Class positioning, in this sense, stems from one’s job or the economic capital one possesses, and confl ict and exploitation between classes are at the center of historical transformation. Sociologist Max Weber challenged Marxian frame- works by arguing that class is crosscut by other kinds of status distinctions and social groupings not reducible to economic relations. For Weber, beliefs

10 / Introduction

exerted their own form of causality—the economic need not be the prime mover of history—and multiple factors could bring about historical change. Weber’s ideas created space for what theorists would later understand as “culture” and to explore the centrality of meaning in human lives, includ- ing how those within particular classes make cultural sense of the world. Weber’s legacy also encouraged academics to consider how, for example, the consumption of material goods among the emerging twentieth- century middle classes helped to determine people’s sense of identity and status, offering new arenas for understanding class beyond the realms of economic production.14

In the 1970s, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu sought to wed the view- points of both Marx and Weber by considering how class is bound up with the cultural tastes, styles, habits, and linguistic accents we acquire based on education or work experiences or by living within certain communi- ties. Such cultural proclivities are accorded different amounts of status, be- coming what Bourdieu refers to as a form of “cultural capital,” which helps reproduce our economic standing.15 Other scholars have countered that although the social and cultural dimensions of class can reproduce its eco- nomic dimensions, for example, when having the “right” tastes or hanging out with the “wrong” kind of people perpetuates our class position, things are not always this neat. For example, individuals sometimes consciously appropriate the cultural styles of different classes. As some scholars argue, we perform class, not only in ways that signal our existing economic location, but through attempts to link ourselves symbolically with those “above” or “below” us in class terms, often as expressions of either social aspiration or rebellion. For middle- class white teenagers who wore workingmen’s jeans in the 1950s or who, today, listen to hip- hop or date across class lines in ways that anger parents, such acts can be forms of cultural or sexual re- bellion against the social expectations and constraints of their own class positioning.16

In short, rather than thinking of class as a rigidly defi ned group of people or even a predetermined social position within an economic order, we might do better, as historian E. P. Thompson long ago noted in a different context, to think of class as a process. Class, I would argue, is about the trajectories of our lives—individually and collectively—that often play out in ways that we cannot infl uence, but sometimes in ways that we can. Class is also about our experiences of who we are in relation to more or less infl uential others and is bound up with both the economic and the cultural. However, linking class and “culture” in the contemporary anthropological sense does not imply

Introduction / 11

castigating the presumed bad habits of the poor that supposedly help keep them down, as the “culture of poverty” arguments of the 1960s suggested.17 Rather, the “cultural” here refers to the dynamic, constantly changing, yet power- laden resources available to us that constrain our actions and beliefs and that we also draw upon in order to make meaningful lives.

Finally, I would argue there is also a different kind of materiality to class than is often assumed in economic discussions. Class can make itself felt in our bodies in an overtly physical sense. Here, I do not simply mean the ways that class comes to be “embodied,” as anthropologists might say, in terms of our daily habits, tastes, and styles of living. Instead, I refer to how class can leave its mark on the actual chemical composition of our cells, organs, and biological processes as a result of environmental exposures to harmful pollutants and toxic substances, realities that are linked to the kinds of jobs that we do, the kinds of places where we live, and the kinds of food we eat. As environmental justice advocates and occupational safety experts recog- nize, some workers and communities experience considerably greater expo- sure to environmental hazards than others. Those most affected generally possess working- class jobs or live in working- class or poor neighborhoods, with people of color often, but not exclusively, most affected. In Southeast Chicago, environmental exposures have been historically widespread due to the nature of industrial work, the pollution found in air and water, and the proximity of homes to toxic waste. Such histories mean that we need to think literally about how our bodies are “classed.”

In order for the concept of class to do justice to the realities of our lives, I would argue, it must be a multifaceted one.18 Working with this kind of wide- ranging understanding of class, however, does not mean that class be- comes everything and, thereby, meaningless, as some critics might worry. Class remains that form of inequality linked to our relative economic po- sitioning in the world, even as it also carries social, cultural, and physical dimensions. Nevertheless, it is a form of inequality that takes on its meaning in relation to other forms of inequality. As some academics have argued, class, race, and gender are “mutually constitutive.” In other words, each is generated not along independent axes of experience unrelated to the others, but simultaneously and in mutual interrelationship.19 Specifying how each form of inequality works in relation to others remains a crucial task. In some instances, such inequalities may reinforce others, moving them in parallel directions. In other instances, such inequalities may work and be experienced in very different ways. In short, class is not a dominant vari- able that trumps others. Rather, it is one strand of inequality among others,

12 / Introduction

with some being more salient in certain social and historical contexts, even as all of these strands come together to defi ne who we are and our place in the world.

Although I had been obsessed with issues of social class for many years, I did not begin to fully explore these ideas until late in my schooling. Given my passionate desire for a concept of class as a teenager and young adult, I was excited to fi nd that class represented a respected analytical framework once I arrived in graduate school. Yet I also experienced a certain kind of alienation during my studies. For someone with a profound need to fi nd a mirror that could refl ect back upon and help make sense of my own experi- ences and those of others in Southeast Chicago, I often found it diffi cult to recognize myself, my family, or my neighbors in the more abstract academic accounts of class that I read. Although I felt most at home in the anthropo- logical literature that focused on the particulars of people’s daily lives and their understandings of the world, it was the more theoretical literature that portrayed capitalism as a structural system or abstract logic in ways divorced from fl esh- and- blood people that seemed to receive the most respect.20 For a while, I worried that I somehow lacked the authority to offer my own in- terpretations of class, since in order to really understand “class,” it seemed one fi rst had to master seemingly esoteric theoretical accounts. This feeling of alienation alternated with one of resentment at the privilege implicit in creating such high barriers for the less educated and the more plainspoken to participate in academic conversations. Although as the years progressed, I found the ideas of these more abstracted academic works intensely stimu- lating and learned a great deal from them, I remained troubled by the irony that the more theoretically sophisticated a text seemed to be about class, the more inaccessible and distant it sometimes felt from the working- class lives it was intended to describe.

At the same time, I longed for more recognition of the meanings and analyses that individuals from working- class backgrounds could offer of their own class experiences.21 Might there be, I wondered, a more inclu- sive meeting ground for thinking about class, where theory and experience could be revealed as false dichotomies and where conversation could hap- pen on a more level playing fi eld? Of course, many people have managed to forge such meeting grounds in union halls, church basements, community meetings, or even the give- and- take of ethnographers’ fi eldwork encounters. Here, I try to create a meeting ground of sorts through this book of stories. When I was a teenager and talked about “big issues” with my dad, some- thing we both loved to do, my father would always respond to my questions with a story. When I asked him about the mills or politics, he would poke

Introduction / 13

me with his forefi nger on the leg and begin, “Let me tell you, Peanut . . .” and launch into some story that illustrated how he viewed the world. I didn’t always agree with his stories; some I even found troubling. But it was clear that his stories were not mere anecdotes but a form of analysis of the world.

I have made this book a book of stories for a variety of reasons. Psy- chologically, I’ve had a deep- seated need to do so. Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff in Number Our Days has described how people often feel a need to create a coherent narrative of their lives, whether through storytelling or writing, a process that allows them to piece together potentially disparate and confl icting experiences in ways that create a more unifi ed sense of self.22 In my own case, I have felt a similar need to tell my story and my family’s stories as a way to heal the ruptures in my own life. Yet there are also other reasons. I see stories as forming a potential meeting ground, a space where both the personal experiences that go into creating theory and the analysis that is part of making sense of one’s experiences can be equally recognized. Although stories may be an imperfect medium through which those from a variety of backgrounds can communicate, it is a better one than most.23

Stories are helpful because they are always told by someone and from somewhere. Storytelling about our lives forces us to acknowledge the par- ticularities of how we are each, as anthropologists might say, “socially po- sitioned” in the world.24 We all live in space and in time, within particular social contexts and historical moments that shape who we are and how we think about the world. Recognizing the fact that we are all coming from somewhere in social and class terms can challenge the tendency of elites to make abstract and authoritative generalizations in ways that seek to defi ne the world from their vantage point without appearing to do so. Personal narratives are also good at showing people and class in motion. After all, our life stories are bound up with the class trajectories our lives have taken (or failed to take), our hopes and fears for the future, and how we relate to our own pasts. Personal stories register the class- based frictions that appear as individuals within families, neighborhoods, regions, and even nations move “up” or “down,” in unison with, or opposition to, others, altering the economic relationships that bind us together. And, fi nally, telling stories forces us to acknowledge how class is bound up with other dimensions of our experience. After all, in our personal stories, we also speak as women and men, African- Americans, whites, Mexicans, immigrants, natives, gays, and straights in addition to our class backgrounds.

Valuing storytelling does not necessitate romanticizing it. As scholars who focus on narratives note, the stories we tell are not a privileged form of understanding, nor do they offer any intrinsic insight into the world:

14 / Introduction

stories can be perceptive or lead us astray and can either contest or but- tress the viewpoints of the most powerful. And while stories are often a way that people attempt to convey their experiences, stories are not direct windows onto these experiences. Conveying stories always happens through the medium of language, through our choices about how to represent our experiences, and through the social conventions that guide our storytelling. What we share with each other are our interpretations of our experiences, not the experiences themselves. In short, it is as necessary to guard against the tendency to romanticize stories from “below” as it is to guard against romanticizing theory from “above.”

The point of conveying personal narratives is not, of course, just to tell stories. When we tell stories, it’s not simply the content that is important, but the context in which we speak them. To whom do we tell our stories? Why? Toward what ends? And, most crucially, to what effect? Our stories are meant to intervene in the world, to persuade others, to give voice to feelings and events, to make our lives meaningful. In this way, stories are not a mere refl ection of the material world; they are a dynamic part of it. The kinds of stories that we tell about social class or deindustrialization, for example, help to actively create and transform the world in which we live. Because our stories are inextricably linked to the ways we act in the world, they are part and parcel of what scholars would see as broader “structural” concerns. We might well ask what kinds of storytelling aided the process by which certain categories of people in the United States came to benefi t in economically disproportionate ways in recent decades, while other groups were repeat- edly hurt. And, what other kinds of stories made the loss of industrial jobs that offered decent wages, benefi ts, and employment stability seem inevi- table and even a form of progress? Thinking through these kinds of stories and the challenges to them, from an era in which deindustrialization still seemed unfathomable to an era in which it may seem inevitable, can help us make sense of a past that we need to understand both to comprehend the roots of our country’s expanded inequality and to create alternative paths for the future.

“The Struggle for Existence from the Cradle to the Grave”

When writing this book, I struggled with how to describe it. Was it a mem- oir, a social scientifi c analysis, or simply a book of stories? Anthropologists, who write ethnographies or in- depth descriptive analysis of the daily lives of the people with whom they work, might defi ne it through the unwieldy term “autoethnography” or as a form of “intimate ethnography.”25 Accord-

Introduction / 15

ing to Deborah Reed- Danahay, an autoethnography is “a form of self- narrative that places the self within a social context.” Others might clarify that the goal is not simply to place but to analyze the self in such a way.26 An “intimate ethnography,” in turn, explores the lives of family members, link- ing such lives to larger social processes, while also considering the method- ological, emotional, and ethical issues that come into play.27

Regardless of the term used, this book has consciously mined a self en- twined in family relationships for ethnographic material. Although all an- thropologists rely upon the self as an instrument of research, I have done so in this book perhaps more overtly than usual. During the initial period, when I wrote the most personal stories found in this book, I would sit in my computer chair with eyes closed and attempt to turn inward, trying to channel my own feelings regarding the past. When it began to get painful, I knew I was getting close. Then, like the surrealists who used the tool of stream- of- consciousness writing as a window onto the unconsciousness, I would force myself to write without thinking. My training as an anthropolo- gist was useful. Like a good fi eldworker, I tried not to judge my own feel- ings and memories—instead they were ethnographic “data” to be respected. Once the stories were out, I combined them with the personal narratives of other family members captured, in most cases, on video or audiotape. I then created the shape of this book around these stories. In working with them, I tried to walk the precarious line between feeling emotions and analyzing them, in the process probing and challenging these ideas and feelings, trying to discover what lay underneath. I then cross- checked and contextualized these stories through references to a range of other material collected over many years, including additional audiotaped and videotaped interviews, ar- chival research on Southeast Chicago, government reports, newspaper clip- pings, academic writings, and literary memoirs on related topics, and, most important, conversations with others. I used this material to work on these stories from different angles, turning them over in my mind’s eye, viewing them from a variety of perspectives, trying to discover what could be taken away from them.

The book itself emerges from a kind of double consciousness, one that combines the viewpoints of a daughter of a steelworking family with the societal outlook of an anthropologist. The personal narratives offered here are part of an attempt to think and talk about social class in a way that feels like “home”: a way that allows the “me” that I was Before the Mill Shut Down to still have a conversation with the “me” that I have become so many years later. No longer solely the daughter of a steelworking family but also a middle- class professional, I have felt that it is important for me to

16 / Introduction

have such a conversation. These stories have offered a way to tack back and forth between these different parts of myself. They have provided a space to write and think in ways that refuse to artifi cially keep emotion at bay and that draw upon the ideas and experiences of both halves of my life. In short, the narratives in this book have been part of a personal quest to fi nd a way to understand social class that “fi ts” in a context in which many avail- able accounts have proven unhelpful. Of course, in our daily lives, all of us speak in different “registers,” what linguistic anthropologists call those ways of speaking and acting that are appropriate for particular settings. The dis- sonance comes when these registers are perceived to be in opposition and rarely come into contact. My own experience of how distinct these two parts of my life have felt says something revealing about class—and about the United States.

Finding a way to speak that bridges these “worlds” is bound up with a desire to challenge such divides within the United States more broadly. In the end, I ponder these questions not only as a daughter of a steelworker, but also as a parent with a child whose generation will inherit a country deeply divided in both economic and political terms. Reconsidering the transformations at the heart of deindustrialization and their implications for the United States at large must be central to any discussion that seeks to challenge the growing divisions within our nation as a whole.

Although I have wanted to tell the stories found in this book almost to the point of obsession since I was a teenager, I found it diffi cult to do so at earlier stages of my life. I had watched other members of my family, including my father, struggle with doubts similar to my own: How does one fi nd the confi dence to believe that one’s story is worth telling and that others should listen? How does one fi nd the language to express such expe- riences or make the words stick to intended meanings? How does one keep one’s meaning from being derailed or appropriated by the accounts of more powerful others?

Such quandaries were also apparent in another, much older, piece of writing by a family member. My great- grandfather Johan Martinsson wrote a memoir in 1967 that also had a hard time saying what it wanted to say and that didn’t quite “fi t.” After his death, my grandmother found a paper bag hidden in their attic. It was stuffed with poorly typed pages that my great- grandfather had written at the age of seventy- fi ve. In order to understand the English of this Scandinavian immigrant, it is helpful to read the text out loud with a Swedish accent. Then it becomes clear that “vont,” for example, signifi es “want” or “fju” means “few.” On the front of the paper sack, my great- grandfather had scrawled in pencil the dramatic title “The Strugle for

Introduction / 17

Existence from the Cradle to the Grave” (plate 1). Clearly, he wanted to tell his story, but the fact that he hid his writings in the attic to be found only after his death suggested a deep ambivalence both about describing pain- ful family events and about telling a life story that so bitterly contradicted mythic portrayals of immigrants eager to land on American shores. Presum- ably, he hid his writings in order to both tell and not tell things that were diffi cult to say. Although the points where our own personal narratives come into confl ict with more dominant ones can make it diffi cult to speak, I want to suggest that these uncomfortable spaces are the most important ones from which to try to do so. Sometimes one has to point to one’s own life and announce, “See! This is why my view of the world doesn’t fi t.” In such a context, to tell one’s story is to call attention to a reality ignored—in this case, to the class realities central to our lives that often remain unspoken.

On the morning that Wisconsin Steel abruptly closed, my mother hesi- tated to tell me outright what had happened presumably because she sus- pected the momentous impact it would have on our family. And, as this book suggests, it did so, in ways that it has taken decades of my life to under- stand and learn to say. However, this account holds out hope that the act of telling stories that don’t “fi t” can contribute, in however small a way, to redefi ning how we think about our changing class relationships with each other and the kinds of collective futures to which we might aspire.

My father spent much of his life contending with the economic, emotional, and psychological fallout of deindustrialization, a trauma in which my entire family shared. This trauma was more than just personal or familial; in retrospect, it took place in the eye of the storm of the changing class landscape of the United States. In my own life, I have contended with an- other set of class issues emerging from a wholly different quarter: the path of upward mobility. On the surface, these issues are positive ones and are, certainly, very distant from the kind of hardship unemployed steelworkers like my father experienced. Nevertheless, this alternative trajectory also re- veals something of the tensions surrounding class in the United States and how such tensions can play out in ways unrecognized within commonly accepted or “hegemonic” accounts of upward mobility.

The possibility, even the probability, of upward mobility lies at the heart of what the United States has symbolized as a nation both for its citizens and for others. In the “rags to riches” Horatio Alger stories of the late nine- teenth century that were so beloved in American history, it was hard work, a sense of fair play, and enough pluck to seize opportunities that could set even the lowliest street urchins on an upward path. Later conceptions of the “American dream” emphasized the ability of hardworking individuals and families to be become part of an expansive American middle class in which children could expect their lives to be more prosperous than their parents’. In such formulations, the act of upward mobility itself appears relatively straightforward. After all, we all want things to be better for ourselves and for our children. Consequently, once opportunity presents itself, the path should be clear.

Of course, the ideal of the American dream does not always accord with reality, as critics have long noted. Despite the very real experiences of up-

C H A P T E R T H R E E

Places Beyond

Walley, Christine J.. Exit Zero : Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1095058. Created from newschool on 2022-08-31 00:59:35.

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ward mobility for many groups in the United States during, for example, parts of the nineteenth century or after World War II, other groups found themselves excluded from such trends. In more recent decades, many have noted that, regardless of widespread opportunities for class mobility in the past, upward mobility in the United States has also stagnated as class in- equalities have expanded.1 Both critiques are ones that this book shares. However, there is yet another critique to be made. Upward mobility, when it does occurs, may not be the straightforward phenomenon our national mythology suggests (at least, not if the stories of many middle- class profes- sionals from working- class backgrounds, those whom Alfred Lubrano refers to as class “straddlers,” are any indication).2 Instead, the path of individual upward mobility may be strewn with confl icting emotions, painful shifts in relationships with family and friends, and disorienting confl icts of identity.

It is only when we reduce class solely to material factors or to the rela- tively straightforward matter of unequal opportunities that one can assume the experience of upward mobility to be unproblematic. Such assumptions, however, leave out myriad other aspects of how social class works.3 Although class is most often understood as our positioning within a broader economic fi eld, it is not reducible only to this. Class is also about our sense of iden- tity—who we understand ourselves to be and the unequal ways in which we perceive ourselves and are, in turn, perceived by others in relation to those from different class backgrounds—and what these experiences mean to us. Class is about the links that exist between our economic positioning and the ways that our beliefs, tastes, and lifestyles come to be judged in the world. It is embodied in how we walk, talk, speak, and dress. It is something that we “perform” and that we may try to mold in our daily lives. Class is also bound up with the places where we live and how we live in them, and it helps determine who our friends are, how we argue or choose to raise a family, and what we decide to read or watch on TV. In the end, changing how one lives in the world, despite the seemingly straightforward narrative of upward mobility, is not such an easy thing.

For many kids, rich or poor, discovering their class position is often a mo- ment of revelation. For me, this moment happened when I was in grammar school. I was in fourth or fi fth grade, and my class was studying the history of Chicago. I remember opening a thin, brown book with a hard cover that we were told to read at our desks and coming across a section about tenements and the urban immigrant poor in Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century. Reading about the hardships of these people, I felt sorry for them and tried to fi gure out where in Chicago these poor areas might be. It was the same kind of pity that I remember feeling in church when they took

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collections in special boxes for starving children in Africa. Then, I fl ushed hot all over as it suddenly dawned on me that the book was describing old industrial areas like Southeast Chicago, where we lived. Initially, I was bewil- dered. “But we’re just average here,” I thought. Then again, I conceded, they were talking about the past and, certainly, things had been different back then. But my great- grandparents and grandparents (as well as the relatives of my friends) had lived in the area in the past. Were they the poor people the authors were talking about? When reminiscing about the old days, my relatives had talked about hard times, but they had not presented them- selves as helpless objects of pity in the way this well- meaning account did. My mind continued to race. If this was “our” history and most of our dads were still laborers, what did that make us? Weren’t we middle class now? The book offered no answer. Thinking back on this moment, I recognize a deep confusion about class that at the time I didn’t know enough to articu- late. I also could not have foreseen that life circumstances would lead these once inchoate questions to remain at the forefront of my consciousness in the years ahead.

In hindsight, I now recognize that my family and I experienced two very different kinds of upward mobility over the course of our lives, two very different versions of the American dream. My grandparents’ and parents’ generations experienced a form of economic upward mobility as a commu- nity in a post–World War II era of strong unions and high wages. In this shift, most (if not all) boats were raised together (even as other aspects of people’s social lives remained relatively unchanged). It was this form of upward mobility that the collapse of the steel mills later destroyed. My own experience of upward mobility began when I was a teenager and was a de- cidedly more individual and lonely one. It is the kind of mobility almost exclusively emphasized in the more contemporary versions of the American dream. This experience of upward mobility was based on a form of educa- tion that brought me out of the community in which I was raised and into a very different world. It allowed me to peer into the lives of elites that I had only known as caricatures on TV. And it transformed my habits and outlook on life and put me in a position to write books rather than to simply be the subject of one.

Yet this process of upward mobility was the opposite of straightforward. I was entirely unprepared for the new world I entered as a teenager, and the abrupt transition left me unsure how to relate to my own past, to family members who remained in Southeast Chicago, and to a childhood world increasingly littered with brownfi elds and industrial ruins. Who, exactly, was I and where did I belong? In the years immediately after leaving Southeast

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Chicago, I would often feel overwhelmed by this clash between disparate worlds. In later years, after I had largely assimilated into middle- class cul- ture, I would continue to be surprised by moments of awkwardness and a sense of being ill at ease that I found diffi cult to articulate (and that often made little sense to others).4 Eventually, I was forced to acknowledge that being raised working class wasn’t simply something one left behind. The need to articulate this persistent sense of unease led me to search for a way to talk about the experience (and not just what academics might refer to as the structural realities) of class. Just as my great- grandparents’, grandparents’, and parents’ stories challenged dominant narratives of immigration, labor, and, later, deindustrialization, my own story contradicts widespread as- sumptions about upward mobility. For me, telling this story offers a chance to rebel against the meanings that others would attribute to my life. It also represents my own struggle to fi nd a language and concept of class that “fi ts,” one that begins from the inside and works its way out (rather than being an analytical category imposed from above), one that acknowledges the workings of social class, not only in how we are economically positioned in a highly unequal world, but also in our identities, the existential crises of our souls, and, as discussed in the next chapter, the physical composition of our bodies. In the end, it also forces me to ask what we in the United States have lost by thinking of upward mobility solely as an individual rather than a collective project.

A New World

After the demise of Wisconsin Steel in 1980 turned my family’s world up- side down, my overwhelming desire as a fourteen- year- old was to escape. I wanted to run away from the clouds of depression hanging over my father, my parent’s home, and Southeast Chicago in general. My long- standing habit of reading and daydreaming turned out to be helpful in searching out escape routes. On a whim, I sent for a brochure about a girl’s boarding school on the East Coast. I can’t remember how I even thought to do this, since boarding schools were unheard of in Southeast Chicago—perhaps I saw a fl yer on a ne- glected bulletin board in my public high school or the local library. I remem- ber staring longingly at the brochure’s photos of rich and athletic- looking girls who sat around reading books on neatly manicured lawns. It was merely fantasy literature, however, like the catalogs we received and never bought things from. Yet, a little later, a chance encounter offered an unlikely means for turning it into something more. A friend, the daughter of a neighborhood fi refi ghter, had a brother who was attending the University of Chicago after

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graduating as a star student at the local Catholic high school. His college roommate told her about the New England prep school he had attended, called Phillips Exeter Academy. He encouraged my friend to apply, and she encouraged me, more for company in such an unlikely activity, I think, than anything else. During the application process, my mom humored me by tak- ing me for a required standardized test in downtown Chicago. The test was given in a wealthy private school, where I sat intimidated and frightened by the alien environment and well- off students. Nevertheless, months later, a heavy piece of stationery with offi cial Exeter letterhead arrived, informing me that I had been awarded a full fi nancial scholarship. In retrospect, I am uncomfortably aware that it was my father’s fall that unexpectedly made me a candidate for elite schools concerned with increasing the diversity of their student bodies.

Although my friend did not go to Exeter, I was determined to seize my chance. My parents, however, refused to let me go. The idea of sending a child away to school, and halfway across the country at that, seemed like an act of cruelty to them and to many in Southeast Chicago. But there were deeper reasons as well. When I yelled at my father, who was then working as a janitor, and demanded that he tell me why I couldn’t go, he responded, almost in tears, “Because when you come back, you’ll look down on me for being a janitor!” His words and the pained look on his face remain imprinted in my memory. Yet I was fi xated on making an escape and re- fused to back down. My mom, convinced that I was simply causing trouble, complained about me to our sympathetic family doctor. He knew of Exeter and insisted she should let me go. At the time, I attributed the fact that my parents fi nally relented to his intervention. Yet, once again in retrospect, I suspect that the real reason was both more mundane and more troubling. At a point when my parents were fearful of losing their house and openly worried about the possibility of having to send me and my sisters to live with relatives, the brute economic fact that my expenses would be paid for and there would be one less mouth to feed at home was critical. In the days that followed, two kindhearted former teachers of mine took me shopping and generously bought me some new clothes, a winter jacket, and a portable typewriter. My uncle Bill, whose job was still safe at a local GM factory that built railroad cars, lent my father his blue pickup truck, and the entire family drove me across the country to New Hampshire.

I made my escape almost exactly on my sixteenth birthday, although it was a far rockier and more painful trek than I could have imagined or than is commonly found in the American mythology of upward mobility. It left me saddled with lifelong feelings of guilt. At a time when my little sister at

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home was making extra visits to my grandparents’ house in the hopes of getting something to eat besides the hot dogs that had become my family’s daily fare, I was catapulted to the other end of the American class spectrum. I found myself sitting in classes in imposing buildings of brick and marble alongside students with names like Getty, Firestone, Packard, and Coors. My euphoria at escaping soon disintegrated into a profound dislocation. In a country where the language of race and ethnicity are highly elaborated categories but class is not, there was no recognition that the transition might be diffi cult for a white working- class girl. While the outward appearance of the few African- American students then attending Exeter marked them as “different” regardless of their class origins, we few white working- class students simply faded into the background.5 I often wondered whether my African- American classmates from middle- class backgrounds resented their inability to escape assumptions that they were different as much as I resented the inability to have my differences recognized. If, according to American mythology, all I had previously lacked was opportunity, now that opportu- nity had presented itself, I should have been fi ne. Yet the radical disjunctures in this transition—the profound social differences that I had no way to ar- ticulate—created an almost unbearable sense of rupture.

The sense of dislocation, and at times humiliation, that I felt at Exeter emerged in countless small incidents. In classes, I was startled by the self- confi dence of my classmates, their belief that their words mattered, their relish in articulating abstract ideas in a mode I found foreign. I tried to contribute to class conversations, taking an entire class period to work up the necessary bravery. Red in the face, heart hammering by the time I man- aged to get something out, I was constantly afraid that I would speak in the grammatically “incorrect” English that was my fi rst language or be judged insuffi ciently smart. I remember sitting one afternoon on the well- tended lawns outside my dorm with my housemates, including a classmate from Greenwich, Connecticut, who was dressed in expensive, preppy clothing. She stared in perplexity at an unfashionable, polyester- clad “townie” from the working- class town of Exeter who happened to be walking past (a woman who to me bore a comforting resemblance to my own mother) and won- dered aloud, “What is wrong with people in this town?” Trapped in my own insecurities, I cringed inside and said nothing.

I remember dormmates good- naturedly telling anecdotes of their fami- lies, and when I would try to reciprocate, revealing a bit of what was hap- pening with my family, there would instead be an awkward silence. My story was a “downer” that simply made people feel uncomfortable (and perhaps secretly guilty); I quickly learned to remain silent. At the end of such days,

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I would go to the music practice rooms on campus where I was learning to play the harpsichord and would cry in the only truly private space I could fi nd. My sense of dislocation eventually turned to anger. How could there be places where privilege was so utterly taken for granted? By what right did some people enjoy such ease when others’ lives were being torn apart in places like Southeast Chicago? For a while, I even tried to hate my class- mates and their parents. After all, weren’t their parents among the business elite who made decisions such as closing my father’s mill? Weren’t they the ones who stood to profi t as the value of their investment shares in the conglomerates that owned the mills rose? But, it didn’t work; I was forced to admit that I liked many of my classmates. When the father of one classmate, a descendent of the wealthy DuPont family, visited and took us out to din- ner, I hoped I could despise him. But he was kind and attentive, and I was ashamed of myself.

I tried to protest, to fi nd a voice to tell my own story in other ways. In my creative writing class, I wrote a tale about a man who could barely read, a character who I can now admit was a melodramatic exaggeration of my father. (Although I never saw my father read a book or write a letter and al- though my mother euphemistically described his literacy skills as “limited,” my dad obsessively read the tabloid newspapers his entire life.) Painfully aware of the presence of one of the Getty boys in my class, I had written this story in a spirit of defi ance, hoping to comfort myself by drawing attention to and surreptitiously pricking at his privilege. (He appeared unperturbed.) As a scholarship student, I was asked to speak to alumni and wrote out on 3 × 5 cards a speech that I considered a manifesto. I wrote about Southeast Chicago and stated that the people I grew up with were no less intelligent or worthy than those who went to schools like Exeter. In my mind, it seemed a bold attack, although reading it back years later it now seems overly timid and polite. On the day I gave the speech, I cried and couldn’t get through it. Afterward, instead of responding to it as the attack I intended, several alumni came up and told me what a good speech I had written and that they were proud of me. Ashamed that I was grateful for their praise even when I had been actively courting their anger, I smiled back in confusion. Later, I came to realize that they could not hear the story of class I wanted to tell—a story of injustice and anger at class inequalities in the United States couched in the self- righteousness of a sixteen- year- old—because it was too readily subsumed by the broader narrative of America as a land of opportunity. For the assembled alumni, my own presence at Exeter merely confi rmed this; even more for the liberal minded, since my speech acknowledged those left behind. I felt trapped by my inability to fi nd an object upon which to

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vent my rage, trapped by my inability to fi nd my own voice, trapped by an inability to be heard.

As diffi cult as it was during those two years at Exeter, it was even more diffi cult to come home. I recall a day in the early 1980s when I was on sum- mer vacation in Southeast Chicago. During the summers, I worked multiple jobs, once again including a stint on the government- sponsored CETA jobs program for poor youth. Along with many other teenagers, I was assigned to work as a tutor for elementary school children. The tutoring program was located in the local grammar school on the East Side that I had attended, yet most of the other tutors were African- Americans bused in from the poorer parts of the South Side that lay beyond the steel mill neighborhoods. Al- though the school’s Italian- American vice- principal was friendly to me (he himself was from a poor immigrant background and, as a child, had slept with four siblings to a bed), he was clearly afraid of my black teenaged co- workers. In the long downtime in the periods before and after our students arrived, he would force us to sit in silence with our heads on the desk so we wouldn’t cause trouble. I didn’t know how the African- American teenag- ers—who were regularly accorded such treatment—could stand it. I remem- ber sitting there, my head lying on the same wooden desks with holes for inkwells that my parents, grandparents, and great- grandparents had used. I thought about how, only a few weeks earlier, I had been in the marbled and red- carpeted assembly hall at Exeter being told that I was one of the future leaders of America. Now I was sitting with my head on a desk, an object of distrust, someone to be controlled.

Here were all the paradoxes. I now realized that the white working class, including my own family, as well as the vice- principal, were victims of class in a way I had never imagined before I left Southeast Chicago. Yet, as one of them, I couldn’t comfort myself with romanticized ideas of the moral righteousness of the working class. The respectability, as it were, of the steel mill neighborhoods was built upon a hatred of those on the rung below: those living in deeper poverty in other parts of the South Side, many of whom were African- Americans. I was forced to admit that all victims could, in other contexts, be abusers. It reminded me of going out to dinner with my Exeter housemate’s father and being fl ummoxed because I couldn’t bring myself to hate him. What does one do with the recognition that there are rarely simple villains or heroes in the world and no single vantage point from which to make sense of its all too real cruelty and oppression? The only way I could fi nd to withstand this tension was by an act of dissociation. I came to believe that one had to hate the thing—class injustice or racism— without hating the people who embodied it. Otherwise, one could fi nd rea-

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sons to hate all of humanity. While some people address such conundrums through religion, I chose the kind of social scientifi c thinking fostered by anthropology as my chosen route to try to achieve this sort of dissociation. It provided a way to challenge such hateful social realities while also leaving space to understand how such realities had come about. And it did so, while implicitly recognizing the common humanity of both victims and abusers in a highly unequal world.

Between Two Worlds

For two years, I shuttled between Exeter and Southeast Chicago, two seem- ingly separate worlds that refused to recognize each other. On vacations, my parents never asked me about life at school and pretended as if it didn’t exist. Like a chameleon, I tried to assimilate into the neighborhood again. When my father angrily told me to stop using such big words, I let my sentences drift back into ungrammatical form, afraid that speaking differently would con- fi rm his fears that I now looked down on him. I worked multiple jobs, both because I needed the money and in order to keep myself out of the house. My mom needed emotional support in dealing with the traumas that had befallen our family, but the weight—like my father’s depression—seemed too heavy to bear. In the rare hours when I wasn’t working, I hung out with my old friends. We spent a lot of time drinking, driving around the neigh- borhood, and hanging out in parking lots. At such moments, I enjoyed being back in the neighborhood and told myself (borrowing from middle- class literature that romanticized the working class) that it was somehow more “real” than Exeter. But the fact that I was becoming increasingly different was impossible to escape. Despite my efforts to reshape myself as I moved back and forth between Exeter and home, who I was and even the way I spoke and handled myself were changing. Once at a neighborhood yard party, the cousin of a friend brought his Catholic high school buddies over to listen to me “talk.” “See, what did I tell you?” he told them in a voice laced with both mockery and admiration. I wasn’t like the other girls they knew; I was an “intellectual” oddity you could be friends with but couldn’t quite date.

In later years, my need to make sense of the two worlds into which my life had been split led me to be fascinated by the stories of others who had experienced unusual class journeys. I devoured academic and journal- istic accounts as well as novels—at least on the rare occasions I could fi nd them—that spoke from places I could recognize. During college, it was the story of the educated son of the British coal miner in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. As an adult, it was books like Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a

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Good Woman, Richard Rodriquez’s controversial Hunger of Memory, or a series of edited volumes that contained the life histories of middle- class profes- sionals from working- class backgrounds that Lubrano called “straddlers.”6 Of course, not all upwardly mobile individuals are traumatized by the social transitions they have made in life. I recall visiting a childhood friend of my mother’s during a vacation from Exeter. She and her husband, a man who had become a high- ranking military offi cer, now lived an upper- middle- class lifestyle on the East Coast. She was excited that I was going to Exeter and generously invited me to visit their vacation beach house since I didn’t have the money to go home. I was taken aback, however, by her lack of sympathy for the working- class Southeast Chicago of her youth. For her, it was simply a place from which to mark distance. Clearly, for some, American ideals of meritocracy reinforced the idea that they deserved to get ahead while others were left behind. Yet the written accounts of many straddlers suggest more complex reactions. Many describe a sense of living between two worlds and a range of emotions similar to my own: a desire for a different way of life, a profound ambivalence about upward mobility, and a fear of competing loyalties and of betraying one’s family and friends.

The stories recounted by straddlers in Lubrano’s book Limbo: Blue- Collar Roots, White- Collar Dreams suggest that upward mobility may be diffi cult not only for the young people on such journeys, but for their parents and loved ones as well. In the United States, there is a widespread assumption that upward social mobility is what all parents desire for their kids—again, it is part of our national story of how the American dream works. Yet real- life dynamics are more complicated. These accounts confi rmed what I had experienced in my own life: that while many parents do want their children to do well, many also hope their children will stay close to home, remain part of their family’s social world, and continue to value what they value. Modest success within known social worlds may seem more attractive to some parents than outside success as defi ned by elite educational institu- tions. (When educated elites shake their heads at the “ignorance” of such parents, they fail to recognize that there may be love and the fear of losing one’s children embedded in such sentiments.) Finally, the life stories col- lected by Lubrano led me to acknowledge that darker emotions are also commonplace. In many accounts, family members felt jealous or resented an upwardly mobile member for “putting on airs” and actively tried to bring him or her down a peg. And straddlers could feel less than generous feelings towards their families and old friends. Many resented or were embarrassed by working- class habits, values, or tastes, from which they sought to distance

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themselves. These accounts, in short, confi rmed for me that class mobility is as much a subject of strain, friction, and bitterness as one of celebration.

It is education, the standard gatekeeper between these two worlds, that is often symbolically positioned at the core of such tensions. While educa- tion promises and offers much, it also requires painful choices while forging constraints of its own. In his autobiographical account of growing up as the son of working- class Mexican immigrants, Richard Rodriguez describes the ruptures created for working- class and non- Anglo children by formal (and particularly elite) education.7 Education, he argues, teaches working- class children to aspire to be more than their parents. In doing so, it directly or indirectly insults the parents by depicting them not as models for behav- ior, but as models of the kind of life one shouldn’t want to lead. While middle- class and upper- class kids fi nd continuities of expectations, norms, and values between school and their home lives, working- class kids experi- ence competing viewpoints and values that starkly separate the world of school and family life. In the end, Rodriguez depicts this diffi cult experience as having been worth it, since it allowed him to change classes and gain access to a public world in which he hadn’t been fully able to participate before. However, he fails to address the larger question of why such radical class differences existed in the fi rst place, in part by naturalizing such differ- ences as being primarily ethnic ones.

Given the American propensity to emphasize race and ethnicity but downplay class, my own journey offers a twist upon such experiences. Rather than differences in skin color (and, in Rodriguez’s case, language) being used to symbolize the division between the world of home and school, the fact that I was white like most of my Exeter classmates was often assumed to erase the depth of the divide. Although being white or “unmarked” in racial terms is a privilege that minority individuals can never experience, there can be, nonetheless, for upwardly mobile whites, a kind of unacknowledged discomfort associated with being unmarked. For those of us who “pass,” there may be a failure to recognize other forms of difference integral to one’s identity. In my own experience of attending Exeter, it often seemed as if I were the only one who wanted to acknowledge that I was living in two radically different worlds. To call attention to it was either perceived to be insulting (at home) or bad manners (at Exeter).

My own experience of education has left me feeling profoundly ambiva- lent. On the one hand, the act of becoming educated—a process that kicked into high gear at Exeter—was an extraordinarily rich and exciting one of gaining knowledge about the world and of exploring diverse ideas. Yet, at

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the same time, it was impossible to escape the less high- minded ways in which education was bound up with the transmission of social class. The middle- class parents of many prep school and college friends often uncriti- cally presented education as an unalloyed good or as simply a source of credentials that held the key to maintaining or, better yet, improving upon one’s position in the world. Sociologists might add that education provides the institutional space where individuals learn to remake themselves in class terms and where they acquire the social markers by which other people come to “read” their class position. Schools are, after all, places where one learns how to speak, think, and act in the world as one of the “educated” (read: middle class or above). I have been struck by the argument of the infl uential French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu (not coincidentally, him- self the son of a rural French postman) that the impact of formal education primarily consists not of the content offi cially taught at universities, but of what is informally assimilated as tastes, values, and a particular orientation to the world that marks one as being of a certain class. Through informal channels, students learn from peers and professors what books or fi lms to admire, what ideas to value, what jokes to laugh at, what food to eat, how to dress, and even (I would add) how to rebel in class- appropriate ways.8

In my own journeys through elite educational institutions, I have experi- enced the need to perform both class and intelligence as a constant weight. I have been discomforted by pressures to act “smart” in ways that accord with the middle- and upper- middle- class norms embedded in academia. After all, it doesn’t take long to discover that the use of long words, the referencing of authors, books, or periodicals well known to intellectual elites, and the reliance upon abstracted styles of argumentation are considered to be not only a class- based performance of being “smart,” but actually being smart. In this sense, formal education can be destructive. This is not only because education channels some people into particular life courses while sharply curtailing the options of others, but also because education promotes the widespread idea that those who pass through its institutions or adopt its values are actually brighter. This is one reason why people I knew growing up in Southeast Chicago referred to themselves as “middle class” rather than “working class” (and why my father and other steelworkers so thoroughly resented the college- educated young engineers who periodically showed up in the mills to tell them what to do). Being labeled or thought of as work- ing class smacked of being called stupid. I was reminded of this after my mother read an early version of the family history found in chapter 1 and surprised me by pointedly remarking, “Not all the Walleys were stupid.” Her comments stemmed from the idea that my drawing attention to my father’s

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family background as being long- term poor white stock might inadvertently imply the insult that they were dumb or lazy. In a country taken to be a meri- tocracy, such feelings are part of what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb refer to as the “hidden injuries” of class in the United States. It is for such reasons that many working- class people may feel that class is better left un- discussed. Claiming middle- class- ness, instead, becomes a way to reference a shared humanity with those from other class backgrounds.

From the time I was a child, my own ideas about education, knowledge, and smartness were hopelessly confl icted and tangled. First of all, I wasn’t so sure I was smart. Later, I would realize that this was in part due to the cultural tendencies of both Scandinavian immigrants like my mother’s family and poor native whites like my father’s. For both groups, it wasn’t considered good parenting to make too much of your kids, causing them to “get a big head” or think they were better than others. This contrasted strongly with the cultural tendencies of some of my Italian- American friends’ parents and, later in life, my Jewish friends’ families which were expected to brag about their kids. There is a phrase used to describe this phenomenon in Appala- chia, I later learned, called not “getting above one’s raisin.’”9 In retrospect, there is something inherently democratizing in this attitude that I fi nd ap- pealing; nevertheless, there is also something about it that can be destructive.

When I was in the third grade, I experienced this destructive edge in a visceral way. I scored unusually well on the fi rst standardized national test I had taken. My teacher made a great fuss over my score, which both pleased and embarrassed me. My mother, however, came to school and insisted that I retake the test because I couldn’t possibly have scored that high.10 The Italian- American vice- principal was incredulous that she thought the school had overestimated her daughter’s abilities. I retook the test in a lonely room by myself, puzzled by a sense that I had somehow done something wrong. Once again, I received the same score. Only later as an adult would I under- stand what was at the heart of my mother’s reaction: if you are not raised to have confi dence in your own intellectual abilities, why have confi dence in your children, with whom you closely identify? My mother would also ponder this moment in future years. When I was in my early twenties, I was moved when she wrote a note apologizing for this incident even through we had never spoken of it in the intervening years. My ability to analyze such “class” moments as an adult, however, cannot assuage my own deep- seated suspicion that I am not so smart, a feeling that has plagued me my entire life, even as a tenured professor at an elite university. Throughout my life, such doubts led me—and presumably many other working- class kids—to constantly underestimate my abilities in relation to others from more privi-

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leged backgrounds. If I have had relative success in my life, ironically, it has stemmed from the profound need to overcompensate in “proving myself” in order to dispel such insecurities.

My ambivalence about education reached a peak during my senior year at Exeter. For the second time in my life, I felt an overwhelming desire to run away. Committing what was considered to be heresy in a striving prep school environment, I decided to go to a small liberal arts school that I picked with indifference out of my roommate’s guide to colleges. Despite its good reputation, my fellow classmates dismissed it as a “backup” school, and I didn’t bother to explain that at my old high school in Southeast Chicago, the vast majority of students never even went to college. My major criterion was that my future college be as far away as possible from both New En- gland and Chicago, or, more accurately, from the class confl icts both places represented. I preferred to think of my choice not as a form of escape, but, more bravely, as a conscious choice. This would be my own (in retrospect, ludicrously minor) rebellion against a system of elite status whose existence had been painfully thrust into my consciousness. My dormmates, however, prodded me to apply to at least one of the top Ivies. Everyone at Exeter did, they argued; what could it hurt? While home on vacation in Southeast Chi- cago, I composed an application to Harvard on the typewriter in the church basement where my mom, as church secretary, prepared the Sunday bul- letins. I recall my admissions essay as being a class diatribe, a more pointed version of my speech to the Exeter alumni. In my mind, I characterized the essay as politely fl ipping off Harvard. (Since I kept no copy of the applica- tion, it is hard to judge it in hindsight.) On what was called “Black Friday” at Exeter, the day when students received their college acceptance notices, I was warned to be wary of a skinny rather than a fat envelope. When I discovered a fat one from Harvard offering full fi nancial aid in my post offi ce box, I felt a rush of confl icting emotions. A part of me longed for the validation the acceptance implied, yet a larger part was skeptical. I found it hard to believe that my grades and scores were better than many of my Exeter classmates. I cynically imagined that for a university where everyone was dying to get in, it was too intriguing a novelty to pass up someone who was openly disdainful. Or, perhaps, more likely, I was simply a diversity token once again?11

I told my housemates about my acceptance to Harvard. They were per- plexed when I informed them that I still wasn’t going. At least you have to tell your parents, they insisted. I called home from the tiny phone booth in the dorm common room. Although a small piece of me hoped for praise, the reaction was what I had anticipated. My father expressed the fact that he missed and loved me by asking shyly whether I didn’t want to come

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home instead and go to secretarial school downtown like my high school girlfriends from Southeast Chicago. My mother complained that she had already informed her friends that I was going to Pomona College, the liberal arts school in California that I had said was my fi rst choice. My grandmother simply wondered what Harvard was. It was not a reaction I could explain to my friends at Exeter and reinforced the impenetrable rift between my two worlds. Instead, I made a show of rejecting Harvard and ritually burned my acceptance letter with my dormmates sitting around offering support, or perhaps simply being intrigued by the transgressive nature of it all.

A few days later, I was called into the Exeter college placement offi ce to explain my decision. The top Ivies had an unoffi cial quota of students they took from prep schools like Exeter. Why, they asked, did I take one of the coveted spots for an Exeter student when I had no intention of going? I was taken aback, since this thought had never occurred to me. I had assumed this was simply a personal decision, my own minor rebellion. Did they really care that much? At Exeter, school offi cials had always been careful to insist that it was possible to get an excellent education at a wide variety of colleges. Their annoyance, however, made clear that this was a calculated at- tempt to soothe young psyches frayed by prep school competitiveness and underscored my own naïveté about the stakes of reproducing class through such elite institutions. In private, I spelled out my reasons for not going to myself. First, I didn’t want people to treat me differently based on what uni- versity I had gone to and not because of who I was. Second, I feared a sense of rupture with people who were not in this elite world. To carry the label “Harvard,” I decided, is to ask for a lifetime of people either treating you better than you deserve or resenting your presumed smartness and trying to take you down a peg. I didn’t want either. But what I didn’t tell myself was that I was also scared: I did not have the confi dence to see if I could try. And I didn’t know if I had the internal resources to keep living with the striking dissonance between my worlds.

Upon leaving Exeter, I dealt with this dissonance by deciding that formal education was, as my father might have said, bullshit. I spent my years at Pomona College drinking at parties and having intellectual conversations outside of, rather than inside, the classes that I irregularly attended. I did only enough work to keep up appearances. After all, if I lost my fi nancial aid package, what would I have done? I had exaggerated fears of ending up cut- ting ham at the deli counter at the local grocery store on the East Side, and despite all my ambivalence, such prospects sent me into a cold sweat. While rich kids, like those who dominated at Exeter, might playact at dropping out, they had the means to get back in if they chose. Rebellion for someone

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with such a precarious life course as myself carried far more serious penal- ties. Indeed, for years I lived with exaggerated feelings of living at the edge of a precipice; I worried that at anytime that the life I was building outside Southeast Chicago might be ripped out from under me and that I would end up in a devastated world of nothingness, as my father had. The experience of having watched my father’s fall gave me almost literal vertigo. If anything, I had even farther to fall. One day, I wandered into the counselor’s offi ce at my college and said that I had “issues” that I needed to talk about. I sat down and explained about my dad and the mills going down. After half an hour, the counselor told me that it seemed like I had it all thought out and he didn’t think he could help me. While I didn’t have much of a language to talk about social class, he clearly didn’t either. How does one offi cially ask for help for a “problem” that counters all our national narratives of what upward mobility is supposed to feel like?

Becoming a Sociocultural Anthropologist

My need to make sense of the ruptures in my world led me to graduate school in sociocultural anthropology, a discipline whose practitioners have long made a habit of crossing social boundaries. This life path, however, was not an immediately obvious one. I also conjured up other vague dreams. In one, I would become a nursery school teacher in New Mexico, wear a lot of denim, and learn to ride horses. In another fantasy scenario, I would spend my life back- packing around the world, working odd jobs, sleeping on beaches, and living in the moment. Such paths seemed to pleasantly skirt many of the class issues in my life. In the meantime, I spent time waiting tables with a friend in New Orleans before deciding to apply to a program that sent college graduates to teach high school in rural Kenya. While my ex- perience in East Africa would be profoundly different from others in my life, it was a relief to discover that this kind of “culture shock” was explainable to others, since cultural and ethnic differences were recognized to exist and were accorded a legitimacy and weight not always afforded to class differ- ences. As a result, it was a far easier journey than the one from Southeast Chicago to Exeter that had proven to be the most deeply dislocating of my life and the one most diffi cult to articulate to others.

Upon returning from Kenya, I began anthropology graduate school in New York City. I am now aware that this was an unusual and esoteric choice for an upwardly mobile working- class kid from the Midwest. Many young people who leave behind working- class backgrounds choose “practical” professions like business or engineering that offer the material rewards that

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Intro - Walley
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