Class Warfare....

Americans operate on the illusion of a classless society. It is generally an implicit understanding that I did not have much of a handle on until I worked with teachers from the United Kingdom in my early to mid-20s.  Those teachers were always talking about the “working class” and those struggles and how it translated to national politics. They had well developed positions on international politics on the same basis. 

For the record, my family of origin was solid working class or the American equivalent “blue collar”.  During my father’s short lifetime, he was a railroad fireman and then engineer.  I can recall watching him shovel coal into a steam engine when I was about 5 years old.  One grandfather was an ore puncher or a guy who attends to an emptying iron ore rail cars - until he died from an apparent head injury.  My other grandfather ran a dray business hauling goods for other people and moving families from house to house. In late high school I assisted my grandfather moving and hauling things around ranging from flower boxes to grave sites to carrying very large pianos up several flights of stairs.

When you are raised in that environment it is easy to develop a distrust of authority – because let’s face it – in a capitalistic society altruism is at a minimum. People at all levels are trying to exploit you for their own gain. In the case of my father, he was in a system that could potentially pay you well when you were in your mid-50s or 60s.  If you were younger than that a seniority system kept you from working full time or enjoying the more premium jobs that did not require extensive travel or hardship. You could get “bumped” from a job at any time by an engineer with more seniority.  You could also be called up out of the blue to take a job that nobody else wanted.  On the days that my father did not want to work the call up jobs we were all given the code words: “Your father is not here today.”  That meant if I picked up our wall phone and my father was sitting at the kitchen table a few feet away and I heard a dispatcher say: “Is George there?” I knew it was my family duty to say: “No he’s not here.”

And who could blame him? I knew one of those jobs was an all-day run for about 220 miles (switching cars along the way). During the one-night layover – he slept on a wooden bench in the locker room at a train station and then came back the next day. I was a visitor to many of those locker rooms as a kid and knew what they all looked like - stark, dingy, sweaty furniture, and smelling like diesel fuel and Lucky Strikes. I also knew he did this to save money because we were usually strapped for cash.

But my father’s role was to educate me about the basics of growing up in a blue-collar family as well as live the practical aspects. I remember him showing me his union paper.   There on the cover was a picture of the home of the President of the Union. I guess they were unconcerned about optics in those days. It was a large home sitting on the high bank of a river.  I probably inherited my dead pan affect from my father but on this day, he was particularly animated.  I usually only noticed that if he was watching opera or comedy on TV.

“Do you see this house, George?! Do you think the guy who lives in this house cares about what happens to us?!”  It didn’t matter if that guy was once an engineer. He had migrated to the managerial class and that defined the relationship.

Even back then I knew it was a rhetorical question. I had been schooled in the fact that there was a mandatory withdrawal from his paycheck for union dues and that he could not work unless he was a member of the union. There was even an occasion where his union went on strike against the railroad he worked for and after getting appropriate clearances – he went to work for a competing railroad until the strike was over.  It wasn’t like he had a choice anyway. We lived on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis.

The blue-collar ethos was about more than suspicion of the managing class. There was an identification with coworkers and at times joint projects rather than socialization for socialization’s sake. My father decided to replace a rotted footer in the porch just off our kitchen one day.  By noon there were a dozen railroad coworkers there figuring out how to do it for the least amount of money. They finally located a significantly distorted 4” x 12” x 16' plank and used a car jack to bend it into place until it was nailed securely.  That was the first and last time I saw many of those men.  A fellow engineer who was a good friend of my father came over one day and they built an entire set of kitchen cabinets from scratch.  I never saw my father do any carpentry after that. The focus was on doing what needed to be done for the least amount of money.  

During that team effort on our porch on of the common topics of conversation was the work values of some of their colleagues. There was unanimous agreement about a car knocker who everyone seemed to know.  Car knockers on the railroad maintained all of the cars. That job breaks down to many skills and a fairly broad knowledge base. Everyone there commented about how this particular car knocker would always complete everything he knew how to do before passing the job along to someone else. That work practice was very highly regarded.

The social life of my parents consisted of brief daytime visits with two coworker friends from the railroad and a friend who my father used to play baseball with in his early 20s. My parents went out on New Year’s Eve to a local dinner club and that was it. No weekly weekend celebrations that are common today. But even more significantly – no rubbing elbows with the managerial class in hope of advancement. One of the significant blue-collar features is that people only socialize with whom they want to.  Socialization is not seen as a way to advance your career or develop relationships in the workplace apart from your overall competence. Another illusion of the blue-collar existence is the idea that you will be judged on your work quality and nothing else.  At least until you notice people with fewer work skills being advanced due to nepotism and fraternizing with the boss after work.  

 Another feature of the blue-collar existence was adherence to certain rules about money and specific social relationships.  Illegal activity was to be avoided at all cost. If you don’t have the money, you don’t do the activity. I can recall being lectured by my father for watching a baseball game from outside a ballpark after the fences had been torn down. His emphasis – if you can’t buy the ticket don’t go. Teachers were highly respected but the role of education was uncertain. Good grades were expected but there was minimal help at home and no clear career advice.  Some of the educated were after all members of the white collar and managerial classes. There was an explicit message that if you had a problem with a teacher you would run into an even bigger problem at home.  Teachers were unequivocally understood to be right and you were wrong.

A contrasting feature compared with the current pandemic is that I was born during a polio pandemic. Some kids in the neighborhood were acutely ill and one of them who lived a few blocks away was permanently paralyzed.  We all got the required vaccinations to attend public school and both the Salk and Sabin vaccines for polio. We also got smallpox vaccinations. There were no antivaccination protestors in those days.  Even though medicine was clearly more primitive 50 years ago - blue collar families were all for it. 

The politics was more clearcut even though most politicians on both sides of the aisle were moderates. Both of my parents were Democrats.  My maternal grandmother was a Democrat because “they are for the little guy.”  My maternal grandfather was a Republican because they always talked about cutting taxes but he also would get a faraway look in his eye and say: “George – someday there is going to be a revolution. All politicians are crooked!”  My grandmother encouraged a sensible and moderate life style. She lectured me on “roadhouses” when she learned I had gone to a local college bar.  The Eisenhower administration was ending to be followed in fairly quick succession by JFK and LBJ. America’s streets were not flooded with guns like they are now. Gun violence was not like it is now.  The NRA taught hunter safety courses and most blue-collar kids took the course in order to go hunting or target shooting. There were no school shootings but kids died in hunting accidents and by suicide. There was some building concern about the domino theory of communism in southeast Asia and the threat of nuclear war with the USSR.  The idea that nuclear was survivable was alive and well and there were several bomb shelters designated across the town.  I was charged with dismantling one of them as part of my work-study job in college about a decade later.

The transition to white collar work from a blue-collar family is interesting and complicated by the generations of white-collar people who you encounter. That transition was noticeable at the level of medical school. There it became apparent that there were a number of second and third generation physicians and many did not relate to people the same way that the blue-collar class did.  But the most striking transition occurred in the workplace when you are face-to-face with the same kinds of administrators that my father encountered in his railroad job.  People who have the power to fire you or severely reduce your income or professional prestige and don’t hesitate to do it on a whim. People who can actually do whatever they need to do to discredit you. In the last 40 or 50 years there has been a proliferation of this managerial class and the benefits have been uncertain at best. I have advanced the argument many times that the new managerial class has added no value at all. But then again based on what I have written so far – you knew that I would.

Today we are faced with a severely fractured society. Vast areas of rural American support policies that seem like a return to the 1960s blue collar world in terms of turning back women’s rights, pretending that there has been significant progress on racial equity, maintaining law and order by not questioning the police, and making sure that tax dollars are not given away to people seen as working less hard than they do. In what is the ultimate irony these same people have come to believe that a probusiness party lax on regulation is the best way to preserve their way of life.  They are turning to the same people who they have been skeptical of for decades to make these changes. This pivot has not been without cost.  Many blue-collar families have fragmented over these obvious contradictions as well as problems with the frontman of the party.  If you have blue collar values – the only way you can ignore thousands of lies is to ignore that they are lies in the first place. The only way you can ignore the gun violence in schools and on the streets is to blindly restate that this has something to do with the Second Amendment and all of the political biases that goes along with that, while ignoring the fact that it is a desperate political attempt to stay relevant.

But there is a deep inconsistency in that decision making – not just because of the sudden blind trust of the epitome of the white-collar world. It is a white-collar world that is clearly affiliated with interests inimical to most of the American people both culturally and in terms of foreign security. 

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

Graphics Credit:

Benjamin Morawek, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons