An All-Consuming Century, by Gary Cross

This thought came to me when I was remembering the consumer history course I took at Northeastern. Gary Cross’ “An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America” was my first introduction to the saying “keeping up with the Trumps.” What we want and need to buy has changed significantly in the past fifty years. On television various personalities  whiz by showing off new purses, shoes, video games, clothing, cars, &c. Magazines tell us that $500 high-heeled shoes are must-haves, not to mention inexpensive (WHAT?). Our attempts to keep up with the Joneses, has, in effect, turned into keeping up with the Trumps.

The simple fact of the matter is that we’re not millionaires…yet. There’s no telling what will happen, but quite honestly there was never a time when a person graduated from school to earn all the money they wanted. As I panicked the other day at the lack of jobs, I remembered the story my mother used to tell me – when she graduated in 1972, there was not a teaching job to be found, so she and my father moved up to Burlington, Vermont and lived in a trailer, made their own clothes, and grew their own vegetables and baked their own bread. Yes, this was in the 1970s, but I think the point is that we all start out somewhere. I simply have to accept the fact that I will not be able to afford the 1925 Rolls Royce Phantom I’ve always wanted until a long while from now. And that’s okay.

Children reading at a Head Start center in St. Louis, MO.

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about Maddy, a young single mother in Portland, Maine, who used her boyfriend’s sister as a babysitter. She paid this babysitter fifty dollars a week, instead of paying ninety dollars for a “real day care center.” [1] Affordable child care is a problem, especially for single-parent families living on a meager salary.

Parents bracketed in the lower class (even those in two-parent households) must have jobs to pay the bills. This means that their children must attend some sort of child care while their parents are away. Most national organizations suggest that children not be left home alone until they are at least twelve. Yet there is a catch-twenty-two here: to make enough money to pay for childcare, parents need jobs. To get a job, your children need childcare services. What comes first? Ehrenreich found herself in a similar (yet slightly less dire) situation when she described her need for both work and a place to live: “I need a job and an apartment, but to get a job I need an address and a phone number and to get an apartment it help to have evidence of stable employment.” [2]

If parents are lucky enough to find childcare, how much will it cost them? The Head Start program is an option for those who meet the federal poverty level eligibility requirements. As of 2008, a family of four must earn less than $21,000 per year to qualify. [3] However, for those not under the federal poverty level, the average day care cost in the United States is $8,150 per year for infants and toddlers. [4] The price is slightly lower for pre-schoolers. By visiting the Child Care Aware site, I used their nifty budgeting option to find out that if I lived in Massachusetts, had one child, and worked in a job that paid $30,000 a year, I would be deep in the red by now.

What happens to single mothers (or fathers, or even two-parent families) who are forced to get a job, but are unable to pay for childcare during the eight (or more) hours they are gone? It is illegal and dangerous to leave children alone for extended periods of time. Shifting children from place to place (grandmother, friend, babysitter, etc) results in under-developed emotional capabilities in children; if they cannot be at home with at least one parent, it is best for their development to attend an accredited childcare facility. Yet these places are rarely affordable to people living near the poverty line (and even many in the middle class), and both children and parents suffer for it. As Ehrenreich’s experience documented, a single person has a hard time “getting by” in America. But what happens when you have children counting on you, too?

[1] Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2001), 80.

[2] Ehrenreich, 54.

[3] Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center, “Head Start Family Income Guidelines, 2008,” <http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/Program%20Design%20and%20Management/Head%20Start%20Requirements/IMs/2008/resour_ime_005a1_020508.html&gt;.

[4] National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, “2008 Price of Childcare,” <http://www.naccrra.org/randd/docs/2008_Price_of_Child_Care.pdf >.

Hollywood Slots Casino, Bangor, Maine

When we talked about Foxwoods Resort in class, the first thing that popped into my mind was the new Hollywood Slots Casino that recently opened in Bangor, Maine – the state’s only casino. Penn National Gaming owns this casino, which makes it slightly different from Foxwoods, as its owner is a gaming company and not a Native American tribe.

That is not for lack of trying, however. In both 2003 and 2007, the Passamaquoddy Tribe living in Indian Township, Maine, sought approval for a tribal casino. Maine voters rejected it. Now, on May 5, 2010, the Passamaquoddy Tribe stated that a new proposal from Black Bear Entertainment  for a casino resort in Oxford County (Western Maine) is restrictive and “allows for the monopolization of future gaming in Maine.” [1] If this proposal goes through, this means that neither of the two casinos in Maine will be owned by an Indian Tribe. Is that fair?

The state of Maine is attempting to rejuvenate itself by bringing in new business and younger people. Voters allowed the Hollywood Slots Casino because it promised to bring new jobs and revive a dying industry in Maine, harness racing. However, new reports say that it has done neither. In fact, as the Hollywood Slots complex bought up motels and restaurants, they put more people out of work. CasinosNo!, an organization working against casinos in Maine, reports that the unemployment rate has remained the same (8%) and crime is up. [2] The only thing that has gone down is retail sales, as most people just go to Bangor for the casino. As we will be talking about getting by in America in our next class, I thought this was an appropriate segue.

The twist in this case is that although Mainers are essentially against any casinos in their state, there are several bus lines that run two or three times daily down to Foxwoods, from Bangor, Portland, and Portsmouth, NH. We love casinos, but not when they’re in Maine? The one casino is okay, but only because we want to help the economy? But not support a tribal casino? What is the message we’re trying to send?

[1] Bangor Daily News, 5 May 2010. <http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/142710.html&gt;.

[2] CasinosNo! “One Year Later, Hollywood Slots Fails to Deliver on Its Many Promises.” <http://www.casinosno.org/info.php?info_id=53&gt;.

This is What a Feminist Looks Like T-Shirt

March for Women's Lives, 2004

When I went to the March for Women’s Lives on the Mall in Washington, DC, in 2004 (a march for reproductive and women’s rights), over a million marchers went as well. I’m pretty sure about a quarter of them wore the above t-shirt. I did too (although now it has found it’s place pinned to the rear seat in my car, with the hot pink words blazing off the black background). In our discussion of what it meant to be a feminist, a lot of questions were raised about a feminist’s appearance, likes, and dislikes.

Can you be a feminist and still want to look like Betty Page or a Playboy model? Should you be wearing mascara and curling your eyelashes? Wearing only jeans and baggy t-shirts? Cropping your hair short, or wearing it long and uncut? Be a stay-at-home/soccer mom? Watching “chick flicks”? Dying your hair blonde? Changing your name to your husband’s name once you’re married? Does it even matter?

For feminists, it’s the ideals that make you a feminist or not. But some do not see it that way. Like many of us, I had friends in high school who would not say they were feminists because they assumed being a feminist meant looking masculine (or at least not feminine). I once had a co-worker tell me I was “brave” for displaying my feminist shirt in my car, and that she would never have done that. Why? For fear of being made fun of? Being called “butch,” perhaps? That’s exactly why the t-shirt is there.

I think the whole point of the “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt is not just another way to force feminism down the throats of society, but a way to show that feminists do not have a specific look. In my book, if you want to be treated equally in all forms of society (or for men, if you want women to be treated equally), then you’re a feminist. I think it’s a sad review of our society that there even have to be feminists anymore. But the beat goes on.

Leadbelly (l) and Louis C. Jones (r)

In class yesterday, we talked about John and Alan Lomax recording Leadbelly in prison. The Lomaxes were folklorists and field collectors, recording songs sung by sharecroppers and prisoners in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

For my work on the CGP Community Stories website, an oral history archive, I am transcribing an interview of Louis C. Jones by CGP student Ellen Fladger, performed in 1975. Louis C. Jones was the pioneering director of the New York  State Historical Association and the Cooperstown Graduate Program. In this interview, Louis C. Jones talks about meeting Leadbelly and the Lomaxes. If you have the time, I encourage you to take a trip over to the site and listen to the interview in its entirety. Louis C. Jones had some really interesting stories to share. For our purposes, I am going to post the part of the transcription that contains his story about Leadbelly and the Lomaxes.

(Since we’re coming in during the middle of the interview, I wanted to give some context: Jones has been talking about teaching in Albany with his friend and fellow folklorist Harold Thompson.)

LJ = Louis C. Jones

EF = Ellen Fladger

LJ:

Harold Thompson had been in Cornell, um, sorry, at Harvard with John Lomax. And so through Harold I met John Lomax and very shortly after he came back to Albany with Leadbelly. And Leadbelly had been out of jail about a week or ten days, and John had had him up at Harvard to meet Dr. Kittredge, the great Kittredge. And I must say, when I think about Leadbelly and Kittredge, it’s a beautiful thought.

EF:

[laughter] It sort of is. What a great pairing.

LJ:

Lomax brought him to Albany to visit with Thompson, and I think he may have sung in Thompson’s class, but there was a really great evening when John Lomax, who really was scared of Leadbelly – Leadbelly had only, he’d only killed four or five people and there had always been a good reason, and since they were black men in Texas it didn’t matter a great deal so that he’d always gotten out. And Leadbelly, or Lomax, had been recording Lead…oh, damn it. Lomax and his son, Alan, had been recording in prisons in Louisiana, or Texas…Texas or Louisiana.  Governor O.K. Allen, I can’t remember which state it was.

EF:

I think Texas.

LJ:

I think Texas, that’s their state. At any rate, they had recorded a sound of Leadbelly’s which was an appeal to governor O.K. Allen to release him. And the Lomaxes had played this to the governor and the governor had turned him loose. I remind you, who come in here with a two-pound recorder, that in those days you carried with you a recorder that weighed never less than fifty pounds and sometimes seventy-five, and some of them had batteries which invariably went bad, and some of them you had to plug in and you were invariably in a place where there wasn’t any plug. I have lugged those damn things up mountain sides and then gotten there to find there wasn’t any electricity. So that when we say that the Lomaxes collected in a prison, it was a tour de force in itself to get that much done.

[Here the interview digresses from the topic, so I have edited it out in this copy. The interview about Leadbelly continues below.]

LJ:

There was this great party at the Thompson’s house. And we all sat around and at about ten o’clock, Leadbelly got up on the dining room table, and sat in a chair with a bottle of gin by his side, and he starts singing and playing his twelve finger top and we sat there till four, five in the morning. Singing, quietly drinking. Absolutely marvelous, one of the great nights of my life. And then, when there was just one more swig in the bottle, he sang “Goodnight, Irene.” And he sang “Goodnight Irene” not the way that fellows hopped it up later on. But in the original version. The Library of Congress record is a good recording of that. And I remember taking him down to the place he was staying that night, a gently kindly man, but I imagine him a very difficult man when he was angry. But I want to put into the record a defense of Alan Lomax. Alan understood Leadbelly, he treated him like a man. John Lomax treated him like a n—–. And I use the word carefully. To John, he was a bad n—– that he was responsible for. To Alan, he was a friend. And when, after Leadbelly died, and that revised version, popularized version of “Goodnight Irene” became a brief bestseller, Alan Lomax was in a position to have walked off with all of that money, and he didn’t. He saw to it that Leadbelly’s widow got it. And it was an act of the highest kind of integrity and the kind of model for what the collector and the original source – what their relation should be. Alan and I haven’t always agreed, and I thought sometimes he did silly things, but as long as he lives I will admire his respect for his informants as people. And God knows Alan has done some awfully silly things. He got tied up in the Marxist business, and then in the Freudian business, and then some later things. None of this did I sympathize with, on the other hand, what the hell does that matter compared with the kind of integrity that he’d shown. I knew all of those men, or most of them. [1]

[1] Ellen Fladger, interview with Louis C. Jones, 26 May 1975. CGP Community Stories. <http://cgpcommunitystories.org/items/show/21>.

Feminism tends to touch on very personal topics, such as marriage, family life, sexuality, and abuse. Women coming from varied backgrounds no doubt have varied responses to each issue. One goal all women’s organizations hope for is betterment of their current situation through the ending of all kinds of oppression. [1] How they get to that point and how far they take it are the points of contention. In this week’s reading, Davis asserts that women in the African American bourgeoisie and the women’s blues community both challenged the dominant racial and patriarchal ideologies but were unable to unite in the end.

The black women’s club movement was concerned about the perception of African American women as immoral and sexually promiscuous. [2] The African American working class community, especially women, saw practicing sexual love as freedom. These competing opinions of women’s advancement and freedom are proof of the opposing ideals under the flag of feminism. The blues songs of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith emphasized the sentiments of working class women, and talked openly about situations in which many women found themselves. While the women’s club movement worked to appear as a united front for the betterment of all of their peers, they did not approach women’s personal issues like blues songs did. For instance, as Davis wrote about Bessie Smith’s “’Taint Nobody’s Bisness If I Do” (a song loving the man who is the abuser), songs like this could be the “catalyst for introspective criticism on the part of many women in Bessie Smith’s listening audience who found themselves entrapped in similar situations.” [3]

Women’s blues songs held nothing back. Although they did not speak to family issues, they discussed abuse, love, sex, friendship, and emotion. They represented the people who listened and empowered them. My one issue with Davis’ argument, and perhaps this speaks to my own brand of feminism, is that she did not approach the fact that these women’s blues songs were basically about women’s reactions to men. Although singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday appeared to be very strong women in their own right – and their songs encouraged common understanding among many women of the working class – I wish she would have explored why women continued to feel they had to define themselves against men, even in their resistance.

Female acquiescence to male superiority occurred no matter the race or class. Davis evidenced her own feminist perspective when she took issue with wealthy white women who, as she wrote, “were in a position to write about their experiences in abusive relationships” but did nothing until recently, when the topic was considered suitable for “public discourse.” [4] As we now know, women’s blues songs had conveyed issues of abuse far before the middle or upper class did. Where some women saw embarrassment and vulgarity, others saw a stance for freedom.  The blues “made oppositional stances to male violence culturally plausible.” [5]

[1] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Feminism,” Stanford University. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/#FemDivWom&gt;. Accessed 27 March 2010.

[2] Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 43.

[3] Davis, 31.

[4] Davis, 25.

[5] Davis, 29.

Communist Party poster from the early 20th century. Looks promising.

Many African Americans looked to Communism in the early twentieth century because it claimed to be a system of government that recognized no class or race as superior; the very definition of Communism is founded in the ideal that all people have the same national goal of equality in life and work. Black southerners such as Lovett Fort-Whiteman traveled to Moscow and were amazed at the equal treatment they received from their comrades.

The evil done in the name of Communism by party leaders has tainted (and perhaps even destroyed) the original goal of this system of government. I can understand why this system appealed to those African Americans (and whites as well) living in the 1920s and 1930s American South. In a world that abused their rights, forced them to work overtime for little pay, and showed them no respect, as in the case of Lovett Fort-Whiteman’s friend Oliver Golden, Communism was an answer. It promised to bring change to the lives of African Americans, many of whom were educated but found jobs “incommensurate with their educations.” [1]

Richard Wright’s short story “Fire and Cloud” also explains the draw of turning “red.” Dan Taylor, the main character, is a reverend trying to help his congregation find food to feed their families, and conditions get continually worse. When the whites of the town refuse to provide any help and deny any undue suffering, the black community turned to the Communists in order to arrange a demonstration in the town center to strike for food.

In both the short story and in Gilmore’s exploration of Lovett Fort-Whiteman and the growth of African American Communists, the white people in each community try to quell the movement toward Communism and claim that joining was anti-American. African Americans had no room to move. They could not move up in the democratic system of the United States, although it claimed everyone was equal; and when they found a new form of government that treated them as human beings, they were called anti-American. In “Fire and Cloud” the black community joined the Communists in a demonstration for food because they wanted change (and food); it did not necessarily mean that they agreed wholeheartedly with the Communists. As Dan Taylor explained to the mayor, “they jus hungry. Theys marchin cause they don know whut else t do.” [2] As Gilmore wrote in her chapter titled “Jim Crow Meets Karl Marx” in Defying Dixie, the magazine Afro-American said: “If the American Federation of Labor has something better to offer the American Negro than the Communists of Moscow, then they need not fear any widespread development of this radicalism.” [3] The problem was that America had nothing better to offer. At once a freeing notion, Communism attracted its own prejudices in due time.

I wanted to make a note here to say that this dilemma of government reminded me of a more recent political topic. When the people of Palestine elected Hamas leaders into power, much of the world considered it a sign that all of Palestine was a threat, because the Hamas organization was previously only recognized for its violence against Israel. While the group’s hostile past is true, the nation did not elect its leaders because of it. The country had experienced an extreme downfall and was forced to bring change to their government. The only choice they had was to choose Hamas over the stalling Fatah government. We can also see this in our own country, with the election of Republican Scott Brown into a historically Democratic seat because change is not coming swiftly. If the country (or group) is in distress, its people align themselves with what will bring change.

In “Fire and Cloud,” Dan Taylor discovers hatred as an emotion within himself after he is savagely beaten and whipped by white men whom he had earlier tried to acquiesce by playing the stereotypical black man to their white. At different points in the story, both he and his son, Jimmy, believed that they could not just sit around and do nothing. Just before he was beaten, Wright wrote of Taylor, “[he] saw it coming, but could do nothing.” [4] In a world where black men (and women) knew what was coming for them if they dared to challenge Jim Crow and were forced to live behind the bars of race and class, the Communist promise of equality seemed to be the change they hoped for.

[1] Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 48.

[2] Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 183.

[3] Gilmore, 52.

[4] Wright, 197.

“]

Much like what I looked like upon discovering racist websites in my search for answers. [1

I’m going to open this post with the fact that I was not planning on writing about the topic I am about to share. Our discussion on whether fictional stories about historic events really interested me, and I wanted to explore that further. However, when we walked out of class on Wednesday, I still had one burning question – and maybe it is not answerable at all: where did the oversized myth of African American men’s attacks on white women (specifically rape) come from? When did it start? If you have an answer, please let me know. We know who perpetuated the myth. It was the white American men who participated in lynch mobs and all of the white citizens that lived in fear of this fake fact. But when and how did it start?

I know that black-on-white rape threatened the American patriarchy because it was thought that abusing “our women” would degrade white men’s masculinity and power. But how did this thought start? I simply think it is strange that the first thing to pop into white men’s heads after black men were freed was: women! Why wasn’t it: jobs! Money! Who will work for me?! Space! All of these were actual issues during this time period and up until the Civil Rights Era, but women became a leading reason (fake or not) to lynch African American men. I still ask how this all started.

I decided to do a quick search on the internet to find any scholarly opinions on the fact, and was stunned at what I found. Not only was the internet completely unhelpful (no big surprise there), but the top ten websites that appeared after a Google search were white supremacist. I certainly do not want to advocate that you give any of these sites any of your time, but try a quick search and see what comes up.

Instead of discussing fiction and American history, which I really like to do (I wrote my undergraduate thesis on fiction and American masculinity during war time) I felt a need to call attention to this issue on the internet. Perhaps the lynch mobs have disappeared, but the perpetuation of this myth of African American men’s rape of white women continues today. For instance, the first website to come up was for “Stormfront,” which I had never heard of before now. Stormfront is a white supremacist group that has an online community and even a forum. I wanted to spend the time this week to recognize the fact that although most of the gruesome violence has gone away, the hatred and ignorance still survives today. In fact, they are using the internet to share their ideas just as we are using it to share ours.

Is it possible to educate people differently? What can we say to make racist citizens understand issues differently? Do you think there is any harm in having websites like this, those that write and project obvious lies or fractions of the truth? Is it better, worse, or equal to have white supremacists in hiding rather than out in the open as mobs? Society in America today has changed how racists voice their opinions and how they act in public. But how can society change their minds?

[1] Image from: “Fibre Intermediates Achives,” ICIS, <http://www.icis.com/blogs/asian-chemical-connections/fibre-intermediates/&gt;, Accessed 20 March 2010.

"Kiss Me, I'm Irish" T-Shirt.

The only time I saw any person call herself something she was not occurred on St. Patrick’s Day. A Japanese student walked past my dorm room wearing a “Kiss Me, I’m Irish,” T-shirt. Six years before our reading of Roots Too by Matthew Frye Jacobson for graduate school, I sat in my freshman year dorm room in Washington, DC wondering whether or not it was important to define yourself by race. And here we are again.

“White” does not come from a country or a continent, it comes from your point of view. On the first page of his book, Matthew Frye Jacobson discussed white citizens’ inclination to “dissociate themselves from the history and persistent reality of white privilege by emphasizing some purportedly not-quite-white background.” [1] People do not want to be categorized into an entity that they are not. So they search for what they are (or what they can claim to be). In this way, as Jacobson put it, “Italianess, Jewishness, Greekness, and Irishness had become badges of pride, not shame.” [2] After the Civil Rights movement, white ethnics tried to distance themselves from so-called “white privilege,” basically trying to say that “the nation’s crimes are not our own.” [3] It seems that white Americans tried to individually define themselves by connecting to different nationalities, making sure they were not defined by the stigma of white men past. The largest group in America separated into much smaller groups so they would not be defined as “the bad guy.” Do you think the effort was worthwhile?

Joseph P. Kennedy. Perhaps the quintessential American dreamer.

“What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?” Good question, Joseph Kennedy. [4] This is definitely the “hyphen nation.” [5] Long lists of complicated family histories and homelands? Let’s do it. I, for one, can say that I am Finnish-Italian-French-English-Dutch. If you looked at me, would you know that? Probably not. Do I call myself simply “American” most days? Sure. Do I check the “Caucasian” box on applications? Yup. Let me ask you this: if you stood in a room full of white people, would you say it was a diverse crowd? I would.

Group power is important when talking about race. When reading this passage, I was reminded of the saying “there is safety in numbers.” Inspired by Alex Haley’s Roots to find their own histories and genealogies, white Americans defined themselves by the homelands of their ancestors; Jacobson recognized each ethnic group’s need to prove that they were somehow oppressed, too. Where does this “underdog” mentality come from? Why is there a need to prove this status?

Alex Haley’s Roots, although written about Haley’s ancestors forced into slavery by white men, was a hit with white audiences. Could this genealogy phenomenon have anything to do with people wanting to prove that they had nothing to do with the evils committed in America? Or perhaps (rather, hopefully) it is because we all wonder, how did I get here? Why am I the way that I am? Why do I look the way I do? Would my ancestors be glad to see what this generation’s product is (me)? Perhaps we are all just double-checking on the American dream, making sure it’s still there and that you’re doing your part to reach it.

That could also just be pure American (which means Finnish-Italian-French-English-Dutch-landed-here-in-the-past-200-years) patriotism.

[1] Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Ibid, 21.

[4] Ibid, 9.

[5] Ibid, 9.