CHAPTER 1
Why Talk About Class?
MY FATHER-IN-LAW GREW up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of
the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the
family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from
apartment after apartment.
He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a
good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines
that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side,
but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class
life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part time.
He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing
yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican.
He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a
bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in
the 1970s, many blue-collar whites followed his example.
Over the past 40-odd years, elites stopped connecting with the working class, whom prior
generations had given a place of honor. Think of the idealized portrayals of noble blue-
collar workers in post offices across the country, painted by artists of the Federal Art
Project of the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. (My favorite WPA mural
is in Coit Tower in San Francisco.) Or of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath
(1939), or Terry Malloy in the film On the Waterfront (1954). Elites worked hard to
understand working-class men’s striving and their pain.
Class consciousness has been replaced by class cluelessness—and in some cases, even
class callousness. Emblematic of this reversal is “All in the Family,” one of the most
popular shows on television between 1971 and 1979. The central blue-collar character,
Archie Bunker, represented a new and unflattering contrast to his long-haired, liberal,
and enlightened college-going son-in-law. Archie was narrow-minded, coarse, ignorant,
sexist, and racist. This image came from the core of the progressive elite: Norman Lear,
the series producer, who later founded People for the American Way. The 1990s brought
Al Bundy, the dimwitted women’s shoe salesman on “Married... With Children,” and
Homer Simpson, who epitomized stereotypes of the working-class man as “crude,
- Why Talk About Class?