Of Bankers, Pundits, and Hillbillies

Up on Banker’s Hill the party’s going strong

Down here below we’re shackled and drawn.

                     –Bruce Springsteen

What does Rolling Stone’s bad-boy investigative reporter Matt Taibbi have in common with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly?

That might sound like the lead-in to an off-color joke, but I’m serious. Despite their different forums and ostensibly different political orientations, both men reflexively invoke images of poor people—desperately poor people from Appalachia in particular—as cautionary tales, supposedly vivid representatives of what is wrong with our country. For good measure, both toss in “war on drugs” rhetoric to seal the scary deal that “hillbillies”—Taibbi’s word, not mine—are not only economically bankrupt but morally bankrupt as well.

Poverty in Appalachia has been harrowing for well over a century. Moreover, that poverty was planned. At the end of the Civil War, both black and white Appalachians were trapped in the subsistence practice of sharecropping, a struggle to wrest the barest of livings from someone else’s land that shared much with the economic system of slavery. The speedy industrialization and subsequent regional over-production that followed—most famously coal mining, but also timber, textiles, and chemical production—not only bequeathed the exploitation and unsafe working conditions depicted in John Sayles’s movie Matewan, but also had a lasting and deeply detrimental effect on the region’s economic health. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Appalachia hard by the 1920s, when Southern politicians managed to prevent domestic and agricultural workers from qualifying for Social Security benefits so as to keep them from moving even incrementally closer to economic independence. In the 1960s, when the Johnson administration pushed Appalachian poverty into the national line of vision, one in three Appalachians lived in poverty. More recently, mountaintop removal mining has had a devastating effect on the region. 2008 census figures showed that Appalachia was home to 13.3 million people living in poverty. In some areas, as many as 16.8% of homes are classified as substandard, which means that the house has more people than it has rooms and lacks indoor plumbing. Rates of poverty among children in Appalachia range from 17% in some counties to 56.4% in others. 13.6 million Appalachians have no health insurance (which renders the “hillbilly teeth” sold on Halloween considerably less funny). Last month hundreds of miners gathered in St. Louis to protest both the economic and mining practices that contribute to poverty in Appalachia (stealing retirees’ pensions and stripmining) on the part of Arch Coal, the second largest coal company in the U.S.

When O’Reilly, in a 2009 interview with Diane Sawyer, discussed these economic realities, he disparaged Appalachians as ignorant drunks willfully keeping themselves stuck in a “culture of poverty,” calling the region’s children “hopeless” because of their parents’ innate lack of ambition. As might be expected, the interview generated a great deal of furious response, both from people within the region personally hurt by this application of stereotype and from others outside who were repulsed by this latest articulation of Fox News’s contempt for the poor. With all this in mind, it’s both galling and bewildering that Matt Taibbi, groping in an otherwise instructive piece about the chicanery involved in the bailout of Wall Streets moneyed interests for an analogy to communicate how seemingly ad hoc crisis measures have been institutionalized, writes, “We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.”

At best, Taibbi is being lazy here, reaching for a slur that is near to hand to squeeze shock value out of a hateful stereotype: Appalachians are poor because they deserve to be. At worst, he is rearticulating the Reagan’s disgusting image of the “welfare queen” who takes and takes but is unwilling to contribute to society. In doing so, Taibbi knocks at the door of a ringing defense of 21^st century capitalism, wherein the poorest people endanger a healthy economy, and the better-off are at risk of contagion from them. It’s particularly frightening in the context of American history to put forth, as Taibbi does, an image hinging on how dangerous it is when the wrong people get into your neighborhood.

Taibbi’s starkly punishing “war on drugs” language deploys this vocabulary of invasion to identify a group of people who supposedly cook meth because they’re rotten at their core (and sleep nine to a bed because they’re tacky). This demonization of addicts is all too familiar to me. Having watched heroin ravage the neighborhood I grew up in—at least four dead, including my brother, on my old block alone—I am accustomed to encountering language that blames people who just don’t want to better themselves and get off drugs, darn it. Sometimes the language is coded, but sometimes it’s not: the meth Taibbi invokes is frequently referred to as “hillbilly crack.”

The concrete relationship between meth and the rural economic wastelands of the United States is depicted in a moving way in the 2010 movie Winter’s Bone, in which even the landscape is empty and bleak. There’s no work to be had, so people cook meth. They are resigned to the fact that sometimes they will die doing it. “When it’s either the mine or the Kentucky National Guard,” sing Old Crow Medicine Show in their 2008 song “Methamphetamine,” “I’d rather sell him a line than be dying in the coal yard.”

But the most important word in Taibbi’s cruel put-down might be one of the shortest and most common: “we.” In my teaching life, I often wish for a rubber stamp to print certain comments I find myself writing over and over. “Who is this ‘we’ you’re writing about?” is one stamp I’d order up to simplify my job. Obviously, Taibbi’s “we” is not simply “Americans,” because some people are being pointedly excluded. “Decent” Americans? Suburban Americans? Educated Americans? The mental exercise of filling in that blank—who is “we” to Taibbi and O’Reilly, and who are the outside invaders trashing up their well-manicured front yards—is painful.

It’s a shame, really, because Taibbi has shown the potential to make Rolling Stone halfway relevant again. If he could learn to set aside his class bias, a lot of what he writes is insightful and deep. “Taibbi’s too smart and wickedly funny to opt for the hillbilly default button,” historian Jeff Biggers, author of The United States of Appalachia, among other books, told me. “When it comes to banking machinations, he should turn off ‘Buckwild’ and take a cue from Anne Royall, the hillbilly muckraker–the original American muckraker that carved out Taibbi’s literary niche nearly two centuries ago–who single-handedly took on the corruption of the Bank of the United States.”

Ultimately, I mourn the way Taibbi has surrendered the rhetorical battle. The wonderful radical Appalachian poet Don West pointed out more than half a century ago the great American sleight-of-hand to which Taibbi contributes: somehow convincing a broad swath of Americans that it is the poor who are to blame, not those who have made millions after bloody millions from institutionalized racism, from environmentally reckless industrial policies, from mass incarceration and the drug laws that facilitate it. Taibbi owes Appalachians an apology, to be sure. And his readers need to refuse to be part of Taibbi’s “we,” and instead join the community on the lawn—they’re not cooking meth, they’re Occupying.

Rachel Rubin

Rachel Rubin is a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Immigration and American Popular Culture (with Jeffrey Melnick).

Union Density: What’s Literature Got to Do with It?

So union density in United States has declined yet again. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 11.3% of American workers now belong to unions.   This compares to 11.8% in 2011, and it’s a long way from the all-time high of 35% in the early 1940s.   The “right to work” campaign is expanding – even to Michigan, of all states – along with “austerity” policies that target working people.   Since Ronald Reagan launched his attack on labor in 1980, when union density was at 20%, real wages have declined along with union membership to a point where we now have a “gilded age” level of income inequality.

In times like these, it is useful to be reminded of what unions can be good for.  A labor history like From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend (2001) explains in readable style what it took to establish unions in the first place, while New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse makes clear in The Big Squeeze: Hard Times for the American Worker (2008) why we need them now more than ever.  Novels, too, can make the case for working people’s rights, through compelling fictional narratives that engage us with characters we care about.  Two Depression-era novels from the Pittsburgh steel district, Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace and William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge, both in published in 1941, do this particularly well, though in very different ways.

Bell’s book – subtitled “a novel of immigrant labor in America” when it was republished by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1976 – follows three generations of a Slovak-American family from arrival in the 1880s up to the unionization of the steel mills in the New Deal era.  Along the way it addresses the Homestead battle of 1892, as well as the great strike of 1919 and the struggles of 1934-37.  Attaway’s is a novel of the Great Migration, tracing the experience of three African-American brothers who are lured north from Kentucky to work the mills during the 1919 conflict.  By this time, eastern European laborers have been admitted into some union lodges, while blacks are excluded and demonized as strikebreakers.

Although Bell’s novel is a family saga spanning fifty years of steel-town history, while Attaway’s focuses on one pivotal year, they have several points of contact.  Both address the dislocations of [im]migration, the hazards of steelmaking, racial/ethnic subjugation, labor strife – and the strength of the human spirit in response to these conditions.  And there are telling coincidences of detail between the two: fourteen men die in the blast furnace “accident” that kills Joe Dubik in 1895 in Furnace and fourteen in the explosion that blinds Chinatown Moss in 1919 in Blood.

But there are equally telling points of divergence.  Bell takes the family as a social ideal and traces its process of Americanization within a known community.  The health of family and community depend on strong representation in the workplaces that dominate life in the steel towns.   Although they are discriminated against as “Hunkies,” assigned the worst housing and the worst tasks in the mill, Bell’s characters grow into a sense of citizenship and belonging.  And they are recognizably white in relation the lowest stratum of immigrants to the steel towns.  Looking back on how Braddock has changed in fifty years, Bell’s aging Slovaks lament the arrival of the “shines” in the First Ward, “brought here to break the strike” in 1919.

Attaway’s characters are rootless single men, focused on survival and what pleasure they can find in the present moment, with the aid of corn whisky, dog fights, and the prostitutes in Mex town.   Only the eldest brother, Big Mat, who has left his wife behind in Kentucky, sees any future for himself in the mill town.  Working steel, “His body was happy.  This was a good place for a big black man to be.”  When the strike starts, however, he lends his strength to the company’s campaign to crush it; as a sheriff’s deputy, he becomes a “black riding boss,” trampling those who have mocked him, including the Hunkies.

From contrasting standpoints, both novels demonstrate how racial division was as much a product of industrial management as steel from the mills, and how this division, reinforced by craft union prejudices and racial exclusion, bedeviled any attempt at industry-wide organization – that is, until the CIO swung into town in 1935.   Dobie, Bell’s third-generation protagonist, understands the racial system: “Once it was the Irish looking down on the Hunkies and now it’s the Hunkies looking down on the niggers.  The very things the Irish used to say about the Hunkies the Hunkies now say about the niggers.  And for no better reason.”  Whereas Bell does not criticize the steel unions for their part in maintaining this cycle of racism, its destructive power is central to Attaway’s story.

Differences in narrative style make it a pleasure to read the two novels alongside each other.  Bell writes with a naturalistic matter-of-factness, leavened with gentle irony, and sometimes with finely pointed commentary.  Of the death of Joe Dubik and his workmates, Bell writes:  “Officially it was put down as an accident, impossible to foresee or prevent . . ..  In a larger sense it was the result of greed, and part of the education of the American steel industry.”  His style is also capable of great tenderness, especially in his scenes of courtship, married love, and family losses.  Attaway’s writing, by contrast, crackles and hums with a dark music.  The novel’s first sentence reads: “He never had a craving in him that he couldn’t slick away on his guitar.”  But Melody’s healing blues cannot survive the move to the steel towns, nor can it save his brothers Chinatown and Big Mat, who used to love to hear him play in the red-clay hills of Kentucky.

The two novels’ titles suggest not only this contrast in style but also in narrative outcomes.  “Out of this furnace” comes a vindication of the steelworkers’ aspirations and the possibility of a better life for their families.  At the end of Bell’s novel, Dobie, having helped to build what became the United Steel Workers, engages in a nighttime reverie about issues the union could address in the future:  technological unemployment, environmental destruction, anti-worker politics, bosses and “bossism,” and the degradation of work itself.  As he spins this web at the bedroom window, his sleeping wife is pregnant with their first child – completing the picture of productive and reproductive futurity.

The “blood [spilled] on the forge” in Attaway’s novel is not redeemed by any such optimistic conclusion.  The book itself becomes a kind of blues, and any uplift it provides comes from Attaway’s ability to sing it.   Big Mat, Melody, and Chinatown do not recover from the combined violence of cultural dislocation, deadly working conditions, and racist labor politics – and they do not understand what has happened to them.  But we, as readers, are invited to develop the consciousness they can’t.  The novel offers us the insight and empathy out of which to draw our own conclusions about the industrial system and the need for racial solidarity in labor.

For me, novels like these suggests that unions can be good for much more than better hours, wages, and working conditions. What they achieved, on the evidence of Bell’s novel at any rate, included a sense of personal dignity and collective strength in the present, and a hopeful vision pulling one forward.   When Bell wrote that in 1937 “the fifty-year struggle to free the steel town was nearly over,” he was claiming that the fight to organize, to be recognized, to bargain implied more than “labor rights” alone; it was a struggle for what came to be called civil and human rights. Conversely, Attaway shows us, in visceral scenes, the damage done, no only when companies and their henchmen engage in violent suppression of those rights but also when unions play into a company’s hands by excluding the unorganized and the “other.”

Most unions today seem to get this – though, for now, they are still on the losing end of the most concerted legal and political assault since the robber barons ruled the roost.  But we would be much worse off without them, and they may be due for a revival.  Read any good labor novels lately?

Nick Coles

“By My Lights” and “Studies Have Shown”

Recently while writing an article, I found myself using an old-time expression I don’t think I have ever used in writing before: “by my lights,” which means something like “in my view.”  It’s an expression I heard a lot growing up in a working-class family decades ago and still hear among the old-timers of my generation.  Though I sometimes use it in conversation, I thought it might be obscure and/or too colloquial for readers, but the meticulous editor of the piece let it pass without comment.

Then as I read Barbara Jensen’s new book Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America, I thought about notions I’ve had for some time about a distinct working-class epistemology that is often more complex and sophisticated than the standard educated middle-class one.   Reading Classes lays out in detail what Jensen sees as competing class cultures, with special emphasis on how middle-class cultural imperialism in schools (from kindergarten to graduate school) makes life and learning more difficult for working-class students.

Though the book is rich in showing oppositions between categorically distinct working-class and middle-class cultures, Jensen’s effort is to put the cultures into dialogue with each other so that they can benefit from each other’s strengths and compensate for their contrary weaknesses.  Firmly based in a memoir of her own experience as a working-class girl who became (somewhat accidentally) middle class, Jensen draws on a wide range of social science studies to supplement her own direct observation as a counseling psychologist, especially of mixed-class couples and high school students.  In doing that, she brings together what I take to be contrary but potentially complementary epistemologies, captured perhaps by the expressions “by my lights” and “studies have shown.”

In my undergraduate classes, I have long warred against the usage “studies have shown” because of its passive-voice exaggeration of the certainty of conclusions drawn from social science studies.  I read a fair number of such studies, and I have yet to come upon one whose data would not support more than one interpretation, no matter how rigorous the research methodology.   I encourage students to use somewhat more awkward phrasing that acknowledges that fallible human beings are actively drawing conclusions from their study – e.g., “researchers [or even “experts”] who have made systematic studies of X have concluded that . . .” Studies do not “find” things or “show” things.  People do.

Systematic studies by people who are knowledgeable about what has been thought and said in their discipline or field of study should be given greater weight than my or my students’ off-hand impressions based on our direct observation and experience.  But, like our off-hand impressions, studies are products of creative human thought.  And one of my off-hand impressions is that one out of three times when the expression “studies have shown” is used it actually means “shut the fuck up.”  That is, it is an educated middle-class bullying tactic to close off discussion by an appeal to authority.

At least as it is reported in both mainstream and, especially, progressive media, this often seems to be the case with disputes about teaching climate change and evolution in public schools.  Without discounting the ideological power politics of local school boards, I don’t see why popular skepticism about scientific findings (even in the natural sciences) does not present opportunities for educating students about the values and procedures of scientific methods, let alone for the exercise and development of critical thinking.   In any case, dismissing and thereby disrespecting popular skepticism strengthens that skepticism – or, rather, has a tendency to turn skepticism into ideologically rigid resistance.   Thus, my war on “studies have shown” in undergraduate general education courses is part of gaining students’ respect for such studies by requiring them to think about the conclusions experts have derived from them – and not simply learn to repeat “what studies have shown.”

On the other hand, in my experience working-class adults have a strong tendency to give too much weight to their own direct observation and experience.  There is a clear strength to this, as they are often very complex interpreters of what they have seen and lived.  But it can often cause them to discount the value of “book-learning” and “abstractions,” and it can be difficult for them to articulate their interpretations of their direct observation and experience in a mixed-class, mixed-race, mixed-everything public setting.  On the plus side, though, “by my lights” is one of several expressions whereby people acknowledge that not only is their own observation and experience necessarily limited – that is, they know they’re only seeing or feeling one small part of a massive elephant – but that they also are bringing their own unique framework, their way of seeing and thinking, to their report/interpretation of that experience.  And, in most cases, the expression invites others to share how they see things by their lights while firmly asserting the value of one’s own lights.  That is, I fancy that there is a grassroots working-class relativism that thinks and lives within an experientially based subjectivity that claims a large space (often too large, in my view) for belief and faith, but that also sees a path to truth in inter-subjective dialogue – usually looking for confirmation, but existentially open to correction and refinement by how others read their different experiences.

The educated middle-class, on the other hand, while officially recognizing a thorough-going epistemological relativism (“observation interferes” even in physics), has a strong tendency to overestimate the number and certainty of “known facts,” to confuse “evidence” with “proof,” and to try to “escape” from belief through the use of rigorous methodologies that can overcome or get beyond “subjective biases.”  The whole project of the sciences (social as well as natural) is to design and implement methods that get researchers free not only of their own subjectivity, but of all subjectivity so that they can “find” objective truth.  These efforts can sometimes be quixotic and are often highly disingenuous, but over the past several centuries they have compiled an impressive array of “known facts” that could not have been derived from undisciplined sharing of beliefs and experiences.  Though the arts and humanities operate very differently, placing much more emphasis on the interpretation of direct experience, interior as well as exterior, we generally respect and pay deference to “scientific truth” without thinking that it is all there is.   But we too tend to overestimate how large what is known is and the degree of certainty with which it is known.

If I had my way, there would be more experimentation with putting these two contrary, but potentially complementary epistemologies together.  Barbara Jensen’s Reading Classes is not the first to do that within Working-Class Studies, but it is the most thorough and comprehensive (and admirably risky) attempt so far.   There are more such efforts in progress.  Christine Walley, for example, who spoke at last year’s How Class Works conference, will soon publish Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago.  Walley calls it an “autoethnography.” The book begins with her childhood recollections of the day her father lost his job when Wisconsin Steel shut down forever, and Walley uses anthropological methods to understand the long arm of consequences deindustrialization continues to visit not only on her family and its neighborhood but on a whole world of meanings and relationships that extend well beyond.

By my lights, these and other working-class studies have shown that there is a lot more to life and learning than is dreamt of in an exclusively middle-class philosophy.  But that’s true of a working-class one as well.  Cross-class coalitions, besides being crucial to our politics going forward, have a vast, nearly untapped potential for cultural sharing — not just of information and ideas, but of different ways of knowing.   With Reading Classes and Exit Zero we are better able to tap some of that potential.

Jack Metzgar

Chicago Working-Class Studies

Is Marriage Becoming a Marker of Class?

A lot of people have been talking about marriage recently, from across the political spectrum.  In the ongoing struggle over same-sex marriage, North Carolina passed an amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions in early May, and President Obama voiced his support of marriage equality the very next day.  We’re also hearing about the “end of men” or, especially since the beginning of the Great Recession, the “mancession,” which paints pictures of female ascendancy and male decline, and how that role reversal will affect marriages.  And then there’s the firestorm sparked by Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, in which Murray uses falling marriage rates and rising divorce rates (along with honesty, industriousness, and religiosity) to support his claim that the white working class is in moral decline.

Suffice to say that we are in the midst of a period when journalists and academics are heavily scrutinizing the institution of marriage, offering interpretations of the demographic shifts documented by the 2010 Census and recent think-tank reports, but more importantly, predicting what will become of it in the future, why and how it will continue to change, and how society will be affected by those changes.

What intrigues me most in all of these ongoing threads about marriage is the way marriage is increasingly being discussed as a marker of class. While he wasn’t the first to make the link, Murray grabbed the spotlight by highlighting the connection between class and marriage, and critics’ efforts to rebut his claims kept the issue alive.

Both Murray and his critics agree that marriage patterns differ markedly by class.  Because marriage rates among the middle and upper classes have not declined over the past two decades, and their divorce rates are low, and because marriage rates have plummeted for white working-class and working-poor people, and their divorce rates have stayed high, marital status is, increasingly, a pretty good sign of what class someone belongs to.  Murray finds a 35 percentage point difference in the rates of married couples in the middle/upper class and working-class communities on which he based his study (83% v. 48%).  He ties the difference to the radically lower rate of divorce in the middle/upper class community and the significantly higher number of never-married people in the working-class community he studies.  He says that the increase in this number since 1960 is “driven mostly by the retreat of men from the marriage market.”

Critics of Murray accept his basic claim but disagree about the cause of these shifts.    Where Murray sees moral decline, his critics point to declining incomes and employment instability among working-class people.  Adding fuel to the economic argument is compelling research showing that while the rates of marriage and divorce differ, the stated values around marriage are remarkably consistent across classes. Working-class and working-poor people marry at lower rates, but not because they don’t believe in marriage.  Across the class spectrum, people consistently report that marriage should be delayed until they are in a stable, supportive, and loving relationship, of course, but also until they have economic stability. Perhaps the best explanation for the difference in marriage rates lies in the relative ease with which one group achieves economic stability while the other struggles to do so.

We can’t fully understand how economic factors contribute to marriage becoming a marker of class unless we throw gender into the mix.  As someone involved in both Working-Class Studies and Women’s Studies, I am deeply interested in the gendered dimensions of economic change, including how the ongoing economic crisis is shaping the institution of marriage within working class and working poor communities.   Working-class men, as individuals, have been hit harder by the economic shifts of the last 30 years than working-class women.  Working-class men’s employment and wages have been undermined in ways that make being a breadwinner increasingly difficult.  And the breadwinner role is still important to large numbers of working-class men, even as women now make up half the workforce, and single-earner families are increasingly rare.  Economic crises cause identity crises that undeniably shape working-class men’s self-image, but they also influence working-class women’s choices about whether and when to marry them.

And what of working-class women?  Here’s where things get interesting and complicated.  As individuals, working-class women have made some gains.  While working-class families used to be more likely to use their limited resources to send their sons rather than their daughters to college, this trend has reversed.  Today, working-class women of all races attend and graduate from college in substantially higher numbers than working-class men.  The employment picture looks better as well.  Working-class women have greater employment stability than men, and they are more likely to work in fields that are predicted to experience the greatest growth over the next decade.

But are these real gains, or do they just look like gains relative to working-class men’s losses? Do we really want to measure working-class women’s gains separately from the losses of working-class men, especially when those losses seem to be so dramatically affecting marriage rates?

Murray uses marriage and divorce statistics to make a bold claim about the decline of morality among the white working class, and plenty of people have rebutted him, but no one has really stepped forward with an insider’s view.  In all of this talk about marriage in the wake of Murray’s book, I find myself wishing for the voices of working-class people.  Hearing directly from working-class couples, whether married or cohabiting, might shed some light on whether and how improved economic circumstances would result in a rebounding of marriage rates among the working class.

It is not a foregone conclusion that marriage will henceforth be a marker of class.  After all, this certainly wouldn’t be the first time that academics and journalists have interpreted marriage statistics in ways that turned out to be dead wrong.  But while I think that predictions of the demise of marriage in the working classes are premature, I am willing to step out on a limb and predict that gender roles among working-class couples are in the midst of a transformation that will have lasting effects for decades to come.

Christie Launius

Christie Launius directs the Women’s Studies program at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and is helping plan the 2013 Working-Class Studies Association conference, to be held in Madison, WI.

“Which Side Are You On?”: The Life and Travels of a Working-Class Song

Why do certain songs get under our skin?  How is it that they seem to express the way we are feeling or speak to the times we are living in?   The old labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” has been such a song for me.  I’ve been playing it, singing it, and listening for new versions, ever since I first heard Florence Reese perform it in Barbara Kopples’ documentary film Harlan County USA (1976).

According to John Steinbeck, in his introduction to Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People, “The songs of the working people have always been their sharpest statement and the one statement which cannot be destroyed. . . .  You can learn more about people by listening to their songs than in any other way, for into the songs go all the hopes and hurts, the angers, fears, the wants and aspirations.”

Florence Reese, a thirty-year-old miner’s wife in Eastern Kentucky, wrote “Which Side Are You On?” in the midst of the coal wars of the early 1930s.   Sung to the traditional tune of “Lay the Lily Low,” it spoke of the “good news” of the union, the violence of the gun thugs, the hardships for workers and families, and the necessity of deciding “which side are you on.”  Since then the song has traveled, as good struggle songs will, from one place and time to another, picking up new verses as well as different vocal accents and musical styles, while the moral challenge posed in the chorus has remained unchanged.

According to George Ella Lyon’s beautiful picture book Which Side Are You On?  The Story of a Song (2011) Reese’s original verses included:

Come all of you poor workers
Good news to you I’ll tell
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell
Which side are you on?

If you go to Harlan County
There is no neutral there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair

They say they have to guard us
To educate their child
Their children live in luxury
Our children almost wild

Gentlemen, can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?

My daddy was a miner
He’s now in the air and sun
He’ll be with you fellow workers
Till every battle’s won

The verse which evokes extreme class division in the image of the children suggests that Reese wrote as a mother as well as a union supporter, while the verse about her father indicates she wrote also as a daughter, within a proud family tradition.  (To be “in the air and sun” implied to be blacklisted and therefore unable to work underground in the mines.)

The story goes that Reese wrote her song on the back of a wall calendar while her husband Sam, an organizer for the National Miners Union (NMU) was on the run from Sheriff Blair’s deputies.  Of her motivation for it, she has said: “Some people say, ‘I don’t take sides—I’m neutral.’ There’s no such thing as neutral.   You have to be on one side or the other.  In Harlan Country there wasn’t no neutral.  If you wasn’t a gun thug, you was a union man.  You had to be.”

With its message of resistance and hope, the song quickly became a picket-line standard.  As Jim Garland, another songwriter-organizer from that 1931-32 strike and lockout in “Bloody Harlan,” explains: “In the course of such fights, songs expressed people’s feelings in a manner that allowed them to stand together. . . .  Rather than walking up to a gun thug and saying, ‘You’re a bastard,’ which might have resulted in a shooting, we could express our anger much more easily in unison with song lyrics.”

“Which Side Are You On?” began its travels out of Kentucky when Garland and his cousin Aunt Molly Jackson took the song to New York City where they held concerts to raise funds for the striking miners and their starving families.   Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie learned it and included it in performances of the Almanac Singers in the early 1940s, singing Reese’s original lyrics.

The first rewriting of the song I have discovered occurred when Pete Seeger adapted it as a recruiting tool for another “NMU,” the National Maritime Union, which was supported in 1947 by the Peoples’ Music collective.   Seeger’s version adds some critical humor to the call for solidarity:

The men who hate our union’
They say we dodged the draft
Not one of those damn liars
Knows his forward from his aft.

Chorus

So all nonunion seamen
Who listen to my song
Unite with us, fight side by side
And make our union strong.

Chorus

Like Reese, Seeger includes verses that point to a family legacy of work and struggle:

My daddy was a seaman
And I’m a seaman too
But poor old daddy sailed the seas
Without the NMU

Chorus

In days before the union
I heard my daddy say
‘Twas hardtack for your breakfast
And peanuts for your pay.

Chorus

In the 1960s, the song was picked up again and repurposed for the Civil Rights movement.   The Freedom Singers, formed in 1962 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, rewrote everything but the chorus to address the local struggle in Fulton County, Georgia.   In gospel style, with preacher-like lead vocals and choral responses, they sang:

Oh tell me Mayor Allen
Where is your heart?
We are children of
The same almighty God.

Chorus

Come all you negro people
Lift up your voices and sing
Will you join the Ku Klux Klan
Or Martin Luther King?

Reese herself, now in her 70s, took the song to the Brookside (KY) strike of 1972 – 73, where she was filmed for the first time singing it in Kopples’ award-winning film.  After listening to the multi-voiced versions of the Almanac Singers and Freedom Singers, Reese’s quavering a capella rendering at a hushed union rally is powerful [You Tube link].  Whereas in 1932 — before New Deal legislation secured the right to organize — the miners lost their fight and the union was driven from the coalfields, the Brookside strike ended in a UMWA victory in which local women played a leading role.

Meanwhile, across the pond, Londoner Billy Bragg rewrote the song to address the bitter British Miners’ Strike of the mid-1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s relentless attack on labor rights.   Bragg performed his song at rallies and on picket lines, in punk-folk style with jagged electric guitar accompanying his broad cockney vocals [YouTube link]:

It’s hard to explain to a crying child
Why her Daddy can’t go back
So the family suffer, but it hurts me more
To hear a scab say “Sod you, Jack”

Chorus

I’m bound to follow my conscience
And do whatever I can
But it’ll take much more than the union law
To knock the fight out of a working man

Many other musicians have performed Reese’s original lyrics, reinterpreting them by shifting tonalities and tempos: Jamestown (NY)-raised Natalie Merchant has produced an elegiac soft-folk rendering and Boston’s the Dropkick Murphys an angry post-punk performance, while Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine sings a version with elements of Merchant’s pacing and the Murphys’ intensity.  There’s even a karaoke version by the PPK Band!

The most recent and, to my ears, compelling rewriting of “Which Side Are You On?” comes from Ani DiFranco on her 2012 CD of the same name.  She records a version first performed in 2009 at Pete Seeger’s 90^th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden.   The six-minute track opens with a Seeger banjo solo, but after that homage to the song’s origins, it quickly gathers momentum and instruments, including Occupy-style drumming, as it addresses the current fight-back against corporate greed, political corruption, environmental destruction, and endless war.   If the song lacks the sharp class-consciousness of Reese’s original verses, it certainly gains in breadth of political critique and rousing energy.  And in some verses it re-genders the song, citing a different family legacy:

my mother was a feminist
she taught me to see
that the road to ruin is paved
with patriarchy

so, let the way of the women
guide democracy
from plunder and pollution
let mother earth be free

There is no space here to trace more of the song’s musical and political border-crossings — a friend heard it recently during an NPR report on rallies against the Greek government’s austerity measures.   Most of the versions mentioned above can be heard on iTunes and/or YouTube.  So what is it about the words and tune of “Which Side Are You On?”— written in a Kentucky coal camp at a time of mass poverty and class violence—that allows it to speak in so many different accents and contexts about the key contradictions of our time?

Nick Coles

Nick Coles teaches working-class literature at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is the president of the Working-Class Studies Association.

Fighting the Culture Wars — Again!

If you’ve been following the mainstream news cycle over the last month you know that the culture wars are back. With a vengeance. We’ve seen the supporters of women’s health care and Planned Parenthood respond so vehemently when Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced funding cuts that the popular breast cancer foundation reversed its decision. We’ve seen the return of Catholic Bishops and Rick Santorum arguing to limiting access to birth control.  We’ve seen hundreds of laws restricting abortion and access to birth control passed in state capitols across the country.

The cultural wars may not, at first glance, have much to do with class, though a look at history provides a context that can help us see the connection. In the 1980s, the culture wars were defined by questions like “what literature should we be teaching?” Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy had one answer: core curricula in “great books” and “Western Civ.” Many of us offered different answers: Ethnic Studies, Third World Studies, American Studies, Post Colonial Studies, and Transatlantic Studies—curricula that would be diverse, inclusive, and a featuring a non-Western-centric narrative.

Race and ethnicity were at the heart of this debate, but class wasn’t far behind. Ironically, perhaps, Hirsch argued that when we lost our common literacy we fractured along class lines as well as racial and ethnic lines. His argument had little basis in sociology, but he was, in some ways, democratic in his goals. At the same time, many of us rejected his thesis because his “cultural literacy” left out the accomplishments of the subaltern, those “under others” not only because of race but also because of class, whose cultures had been left out of the classroom.

The culture wars were re-ignited in the 1990s, but this time with a more sociological bent. In his book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, James Davidson Hunter, a sociologist at the University of Virginia argued that America could be divided—not by class, race or gender—but by “culture,” and especially the culture defined by religion. Some Americans, he argued, were anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-church, anti-drug, anti-gay, and pro-censorship. The rest were not.

Pat Buchanan became associated with this kind of culture war when he declared in 1992 that Bill and Hilary Clinton would usher in a culture of “abortion on demand, a [left wing] litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, [and] women in combat.” This definition of the culture wars has mostly held sway for 20 years, as we have seen social values conservatives (often represented as white, working-class voters) pitted against “limousine liberals.”

In 2010, the Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels told the Weekly Standard that the next president “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while, until the economic issues are resolved.”  The truce was short lived. Many have speculated that as the economy improves, the Republicans fall back on the culture wars to engage and inspire their base. But many of these same pundits believe that the Republicans are now too far to the right and are out of touch with their own voters. The statistic that 98% of sexually-active Catholic women use birth control, for example, suggests that many Catholic voters would probably support the idea that birth control (which can cost up to $720.00 a year) should be covered by insurance plans.

But if the latest salvos in the culture wars become policy, the effects might hurt poor and working class Americans—and especially poor and working class women—more than anyone else.

In Texas a new law aimed at restricting Planned Parenthood might end the state’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program, leaving 130,000 poor and working-class women without health care. As for the question of birth control, a 2009 poll showed that the recession has increased the concern among poor and working class women about family planning. Women lower down on the economic scale are more likely to agree with this statement:  “With the economy the way it is, I am more careful than I used to be about using contraception every time I have sex.”  Proposed restrictions on access to birth control will deprive these same women of the ability to practice family planning the way everyone should be able to: easily and affordably.

Restrictions on abortion also affect poor and working-class women disproportionately. When access to abortion is further restricted, or when women are made to undergo painful and shame inducing interviews and/or ultrasounds before having an abortion (as many states have already legislated or are considering doing so now), we are more likely to see an increase in illegal abortions and women attempting to end pregnancies on their own.

Over the last month, as we have seen all-male panels of experts testifying in Congress about birth control and Sunday talk shows made up, again, of male commentators talking about these issues, I have felt angry. And tired. It is so frustrating to feel like we have to re-wage “culture wars” that we won decades ago.

But I guess I have two messages for myself and everyone else who feels the same way. Get over it. Keep fighting. As the artist Barbara Kruger warned us in 1985, “When I hear the word culture I reach for my checkbook.” This year I am going to be reaching for my checkbook, my telephone, my social networks, my neighbor’s doorbell—everything I can think of to make sure that this war on women, and especially the most vulnerable women in our society, in the name of culture, is not won by the wrong people.

Kathy M. Newman

Beyond Stereotypes: What Makes a Good Representation of the Working Class?

The working class is everywhere these days – in the dozens of reality TV shows about work, in media analysis of the Republican race for the presidential nomination, and in recent reports on economic inequality.  While the Occupy movement isn’t necessarily about the working class, and there are real divides within the 99%, the movement has helped change the meaning of the term “class warfare,” making it harder for conservatives to use it to denigrate any effort to talk about economic justice.  Given recent history, the presence of the working class in public discourse shouldn’t surprise us.

The increase in attention is real and significant.  A check of three news databases – Lexis/Nexis, Newspaper Source, and Newsbank – suggests that the number of stories that include the phrase “working class” has more than tripled over the last two decades.  A Newsbank search of articles in news magazines, for example, found 212 articles mentioning the working class in 1991 and 1992, but a search for 2010 and 2011 listed 778.  Newspaper Source, which searches newspapers, news wires, transcripts, and magazines, tracked an increase from 117 items in 1991-92 to 5774 in 2010-2011.  These numbers may not provide an exact count of what’s happened. Earlier articles may not have been entered into these online databases, which were just getting started in 1991, and the number of news outlets has grown with digital media.  But even given those issues, it seems as if the American media are talking about the working class much more now than they were 20 years ago.

Is it merely coincidence that the first working-class studies conference was held here at Youngstown State 20 years ago?  Several colleagues have suggested that new working-class studies has helped draw attention to the working class. Within this field, scholars, artists, and activists who share a concern about the working class have often noted that American media tend to either ignore or stereotype the working class.  Well, they’re certainly not ignoring the working class these days, so we seem to have made progress.  But have we gotten beyond the stereotypes?

Of course not.  If nothing else, reality TV shows like Hillbilly Handfishin’ and Moonshiners suggest that at least one old-style working-class stereotype – the redneck, white country boy – is alive and well.  So, too, is the idea of the white blue-collar factory worker, a down-to-earth guy who’s proud of the work he does and enjoys a cold one at the end of the day. And then there are all the reporters and commentators analyzing whether Mitt Romney can attract enough white working-class voters to win the Republican nomination over the supposedly more working-class Rick Santorum, a discussion that explains Santorum’s appeal by noting his coal miner grandfather, his traditional values, and his ordinary guy persona.

On the other hand, some recent public discourse about the working class suggests that some of the ideas that we’ve been discussing at working-class studies conferences for the past two decades are being heard beyond academic walls.  Consider, for example, Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  No doubt, Murray’s argument that the white working class is in decline because it lacks morality and self-discipline is troubling, and a number of critics have already pointed out the problems with this analysis, especially his habit of assigning to culture social changes that are rooted in economics.  Yet we can’t accuse him of mere stereotyping.  Two recent reports by one of the best reporters on working-class issues, Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times, corroborate two of Murray’s main claims:  that the working-class lags far behind the middle and upper class on educational attainment and that single motherhood is increasingly common for women without college degrees.  Part of what makes Tavernise’s reports so good is that, unlike Murray, she identifies economic reasons for these cultural patterns, rather than suggesting that they reflect moral or intellectual weaknesses.

And yet, Murray’s approach suggests that he understands a key idea of working-class studies: like Barbara Jensen, Jack Metzgar, and others, he views class not solely in terms of economic position but also as a matter of culture.  I wish he’d paid more attention to the idea that working-class culture has some real strengths, such as the strong family and community ties that Jensen identifies, but I’m still pleased that his book has gotten people thinking about class in more cultural terms.  Murray also defines the working class not by income but by a combination of education and occupation, an approach that at least in part reflects the complex understanding of class in new working-class studies.

The working-class value of fostering communal ties rather than focusing on individual achievement was a core theme of Chrysler’s much-discussed “Halftime in America” ad.  Clint Eastwood’s gravelly voice speaks in terms of “we” and “us,” and he reminds us that because the people of Detroit “all pulled together,” the auto industry there has recovered.

Both that ad and another GE ad also challenge the whiteness of so much of public discourse about the working class.  Chrysler shows images of white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and other American people, some looking gravely at the camera, others working, dropping kids off at school, driving a car.  GE shows workers at a Kentucky appliance factory, men and women, white and black, talking about why their jobs matter.

Of course, these ads still draw on a fairly narrow, traditional definition of the working class — the industrial worker.  I’d like to see the media develop better strategies to show us the majority of today’s working class – the janitors, retail clerks, home health care workers, and so on.  For too many people, “working class” still brings to mind a factory worker, not a cashier, and that contributes to continued misunderstanding not only of who the working class is but of what issues matter to the working class.  But then I’m reminded of the question someone once asked after I introduced myself as the co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies:  do we still have a working class in America?  What she meant, I think, is that all the blue-collar jobs had disappeared.  But while most working-class jobs these days are in the service sector, there’s some value to remembering that factory jobs still exist and still matter.

We’ve spent so much time talking about how the media gets it wrong.  Maybe we also need to talk about what it means to get it right. Clearly, we’ve made gains in the quantity of media attention to the working class. But how are we doing on quality? What do you think makes a good representation of the working class?

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

Industrial Heritage and the Value of Working-Class Memory

A year or so ago, I was helping one of my sociology students get started on an essay.  She wanted to write, she said, “something on coalmining communities.” I suggested she narrow the topic, since coal mining was, until relatively recently, a widespread industry in the UK. She responded by suggesting that she could look at “Somewhere up north, where all the coalmines were.” Though she was Kent born and bred, she was taken aback when I told her that until the 1980s, there had been a thriving coal industry in Kent that had once employed thousands of men.

I thought about that conversation recently at a meeting at the pithead of the long defunct Snowdown Colliery, between Canterbury and Dover in East Kent. I met with a varied set of people interested in saving what remains of the pithead buildings – including the local MP and councillor, a representative of the historic buildings trust, and three former miners. The site offers the last remaining above ground evidence that there was ever a Kent coalfield. When coal extraction was ended in the mid-1980s, the winding gear was destroyed but many of the ancillary buildings were left intact. The passage of time has not been kind to them; saplings have sprung up across the site, birds nest in exposed rafters and brambles, and ivy cling to the walls. However, the plan is to purchase them from the coal authority and create a mixed use development, which would, in part at least, memorialisethe local coal industry.

Industrial heritage projects like this can be controversial; for some they represent ‘smokestack nostalgia’ or even ‘ruin porn’ – the uncritical celebration of traditional industries while ignoring their numerous negative legacies.  During the 1980s, some on the left in the UK lined up to attack the growth of the heritage industry, a Disneyfied version of the nation’s material past.  They argued that  the sentimental, conservative, and largely uncritical preservation of the built environment glossed over more critical aspects of history, including evidence of working-class life.

Lately, this concern has lighted on the contemporary publishing trend of coffee table books that offer beautiful images of on industrial ruins. Shelves in the fine art sections of certain bookshops groan beneath the weight of this deindustrial aesthetic.  While critics don’t always say so, I think the objection is, at least in part, to the absence of labor both substantively and rhetorically in the text. These books celebrate beauty in decay and the grandeur of decline, but most mention little or nothing of the people who once toiled in the buildings or their fate since closure.

When the group was assembled at Snowdown colliery, we set off for a quick tour of the site. The various buildings were pointed out, their original purpose explained, and their projected use outlined. After a time the discussion turned to a rather involved debate about the legal issues which beset the ownership of the site and might still scupper plans for its restoration. As the discussion extended and became more specialised, I felt a tug at my sleeve as George, one of the former miners present, invited me for his own tour of the site.  We walked around the pithead and talked about the mine in its heyday, and about the village and community it had supported. This mine, along with much of the Kent coalfield, had been populated by miners looking for work who travelled down from the north of England after the Great War in 1918. He talked about the way these incomers had been distrusted by the local population and the way that legacy still persists at times, including in the way  the Kent coalfield dialect still carries traces of northern influences, reflecting the relative isolation of coalminers in this area.

As we walked among the decaying buildings, we reflected not so much upon the architecture, impressive though that was, but on the skill of the craftsmen who had rendered material the architect’s plans — a pediment here, a perfectly executed circle of brick there. Towards the end of our informal tour, I asked George why he wanted to see the buildings saved.  It was, he said, because so many of his friends and family members had worked there, been injured or killed in the pit, “good men” he said. He wanted something physical left to invite people to pause and think about one aspect of Kent’s industrial past and the part played by working-class people.  When I told George about my former student, he laughed and agreed this generational amnesia was common even in his own village where children and young adults, who in former times would have themselves made their way into colliery employment, were now almost entirely ignorant of the purpose of the site’s buildings.

This, then, is the real the value of our industrial past. Former factories and other buildings cannot all be saved of course, but some should, and historical sites should include the stories of labor – both in the sense of the work itself and the trade union movement — and of working-class people. Without physical reminders of previous ways of living and being in the world, our ability to read the past is impoverished. Their mere existence elicits memory and debate. Importantly, such remembrance is not simply nostalgic. Rather, I believe, it reflects a more complex desire for recognition for working-class life, the acknowledgement that something important went on here that others should know about now and in the future. The desire to preserve industrial heritage sites does not idealise the past — the deaths and injuries George spoke of surely negate that. Rather,  it speaks to a simple desire for dignity. George and his former workmates became involved in the preservation project due to a sense of debt they feel towards their work and comrades. They seem to feel  a moral responsibility, a custodianship for their industry, even though it is long deceased.

Kent is a county that has seen more than its share of industrial loss. However, traces of this legacy are often difficult to find. The County is known as the ‘Garden of England’ a phrase that highlights the agricultural landscape but masks the once extensive industrial and manufacturing aspect of the region including chemicals, gunpowder production, paper-making, ship and submarine construction, and electrical engineering. This history is sometimes marked, a plaque here or possibly a heritage trail there, but it is all too easy to lose the bigger picture of the rich and vibrant working-class cultures and communities that were created as a by-product of industrialisation. That is why projects like Snowdown should matter to us.

Tim Strangleman

Strangleman is a Sociologist at the University of Kent and co-author of the  textbook, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods

What Work Is, and Isn’t: Poet Laureate Philip Levine

In between grading student papers, revising my department’s mission statement, taking my son to soccer games, and following the Occupy Wall Street protests, I’ve been thinking about Phil Levine being named Poet Laureate for 2011- 2012.  It’s about time: at 83, he has been writing powerful poetry for five decades.  Nevertheless, in “Voice of the Workingman to be Poet Laureate,” the New York Times quotes the librarian of Congress who made the appointment as saying, “I find him an extraordinary discovery because he introduced me to a whole new world I hadn’t connected to in poetry before.” Clearly, those of us interested in bringing working-class literature into classrooms and to the forefront of the culture still have work to do.  I’ve included Levine’s poems in three anthologies of working-class writing I have co-edited—two with Peter Oresick and one with Janet Zandy—and I teach them every chance I get.

So when I was asked recently to speak as part of a panel on working-class literature sponsored by the International Socialist Organization, I used Levine as one of my examples.  I chose one of his best-known poems, “What Work Is.”  Published in 1991 in the book of the same name, “What Work Is,” like many of Levine’s poems, evokes industrial Detroit where he grew up and worked in the auto plants, in the late 1940s and 1950s.   It begins:

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is–if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Queuing for work, the poem’s narrator thinks he sees his brother ahead of him in line.  But it is another man, a worker whose grin shows the same “stubbornness,”

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, “No,

we’re not hiring today,” for any

reason he wants.

In the second half of the poem the narrator is flooded with love for his brother, who is not in line because he is home sleeping off “a miserable night shift / at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German”: “Works eight hours a night so he can sing / Wagner, the opera you hate most.”

Looking back across the decades since that day, the poet asks:

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don’t know what work is.

I admire the way the poem addresses its own question backwards.  What work is gets revealed through what work is not: grinning, singing opera, loving your brother.  Typically for a Levine poem, there’s a resistant dignity in the small acts that keep us human, even when there’s little of that in labor itself, and none at all in being denied work.  You see this dignity in famous Levine poems like “They Feed They Lion,” written in response to the Detroit riots of 1967, or “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” with its classic conclusion: “Not this pig.”

As it happened, my colleague Robin Clarke was on the same ISO panel and had chosen the same poem to illustrate her talk.  Robin also teaches composition and literature at Pitt, but unlike me, she is a poet and so has a different investment in the politics of poetic practice demonstrated by Levine.   This became the subject of lively debate on the panel and with the audience.

Robin finds “What Work Is” beautiful in its evocation of the feeling of standing in that line, but she does not see the poem as an example of working-class literature because it is not part of “a literature of revolution.”  For her this is as much a matter of language as of political content or class position.  That is, the poem speaks through lucid language and carefully wrought lines, from the position of a fully realized humanity that is in fact not possible for most people under capitalism.  In doing so, it betrays the reality of “what it means to be a member of the working class”:

In a poem like Levine’s—which is the dominant mode of contemporary American poetry—the poet becomes the source of redemption, restoring dignity in ways the society itself cannot.  A poetry of the working class—a revolutionary poetry—must demand that its reader demand system change, must show us the wound rather than seem to heal it.

Robin went on to share excerpts from poems by Claudia Rankine and Julianna Spahr that enact this principle.  They do this by staging a formal conflict in the poem itself, demonstrating that the poet is not more in control of language and images “than they or we are in control as citizen subjects.”  This way the reader is not “lulled into submission” by the poem, but, in a sense, agitated by it.

I think a poetry that wants to attend to the reality of working class exploitation can only do so by challenging notions about language, for it is language that transmits the ideology of the 1% day after day on television, from the mouths of our elected officials and all their corporate sponsors . . ..  Our attitude toward language embodies a whole attitude toward reality, and it is this we need to differently imagine.

While we disagree about Levine, I agree with Robin that this is an important political discussion to stage with students in any classroom.   Which is why I see the debate as more than a minor storm in a literary teacup.   The market for poetry may be small—though writers like Levine have helped expand it.   But even in today’s economy, roughly 50% of young people in the US attend college, and most of them will take required Humanities courses.  In these writing or literature classrooms they may encounter poems through which they can critique everyday language and address fundamental social questions.

Asking “what work is,” even in a time of mass unemployment, can lead to asking about how work is allocated, organized, and controlled.  For example, with a shorter workweek, everyone who needs or wants a job might have one—and still have time to learn German, play soccer, or write poetry.  Or, in Marx’s vision of communist society: “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind.”

Perhaps Robin and I could agree that a good poem provokes a revolution in consciousness.  Whether such movement in thinking and feeling contributes to larger social transformations will depend on the particular negotiation between reader and text, in the context of a particular historical moment.  Today when I read  “What Work Is,” my responses include gratitude for my relatively secure professional job, a resolution to head downtown for the next OWS event in solidarity with those whose security is being shredded, and a desire to hug my brother when I next see him.

The Poet Laureate has few official duties.  Some have created projects to promote the cultural work poetry can do.  Levine has jokingly proposed “a project in which people would be asked to name the ugliest poem they could think of.”  Whatever he decides to do with his year as the nation’s top poet, I hope he enjoys himself.  He’s earned it.  He knows what work is.

Nick Coles

Nick Coles teaches working-class literature at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is the president of the Working-Class Studies Association.