Dreams and Defenses...Families Caught Between

JOE HOWELL and his wife and their small son lived for a year in an unstable blue collar neighborhood just outside Washington. Many of their neighbors were out of work, or could find work only occasionally and on a short-term basis. The families of the men who worked the least generally were also the families who had the most anxieties and crises in their family relationships, the families who drank the most, who lived the hardest and least stereotypical lives in the community. The more settled families on surrounding streets looked down at Howell's neighbors. In their eyes, the Mosebys next door and the Shackelfords in the run-down, soon-to-be-condemned house three doors away were little more than irresponsible drunks. The more settled families called the others "lower class," and occasionally even called them "white trash."

But the differences Howell found between the stable and the unstable families in his all-white community were not differences of class but differences caused by no one's having enough money to live both for now and for the future. The Shackelfords and the Mosebys often spent more money, at least on immediately consumable items, than the nearby families who called them lower class. This was true even through they had less money to spend. The people--Howell calls them the "hard living" families--had given up on hopes of someday finding a better job, moving to a higher income neighborhood, and saving money for their children's future. They still mentioned these dreams as their dreams and spoke of them in the same terms as the families who saved their money and did live for the future. But their actions implied that they no longer believed in their dreams. They drank hard, they lived for the present, and so they posed a threat to their conservative, sober, church-going neighbors who believed that people could rise in the system by saving, by living stable lives, by waiting for the big break that would inevitably come.

After chronicling a year in the life of the Shackelfords and the Mosebys, Howell's book moves to a quicker discussion of people he knew less well, and finally to a general description of the style of life he calls hard living. Even in the conclusion, however, Howell respects the individuality of each of the people he knew. He uses a novelist's style to describe the people he knew on Clay Street, and he draws few conclusions, because he wants to broaden the reader's thinking, not to fit it to a set of his ideas.

But the book has a fundamental thrust in dramatizing, through its narrative, how significant a mistake people make when they equate with satisfaction the general conservatism of an area like this Washington suburb. People trapped by a class system--or, rather, people trapped above subsistence level--find some way to cope. And if most people in the lower middle-class--the stable families--sit relatively complacent until directly threatened by change, there is a minority whose hard living demonstrates how much of the present the majority must mortgage in order to live for its dreams.

RICHARD SENNETT and Jonathan Cobb probe more directly into the disguised mechanisms by which workers reconcile themselves to their status. They delve into societal dictates on people's modes of thought, which are often far more effective and less brutally obvious ways of keeping people in their place than sheer economic power. The long-term interviews Sennett and Cobb conducted in ethnic neighborhoods in Boston and with Bostonians who had moved to the suburbs showed most people had both a complacent and a wounded side that in some ways are comparable to the two styles of life which Howell describes on the family level. On the one hand is satisfaction and resignation and a hope for the children, but on the other is at least the germ of the idea that something is wrong in this good life that is so much more prosperous than that of a generation ago.

Sometimes the injuries of class appear in terms of blatant social paradoxes, (Why should a master pipefitter call the mediocre school teacher next door "Mr." while the teacher calls him by his first name?), but more often the wounds are expressed by workers in ways so fundamental to their thinking that they themselves do not notice. Sennett and Cobb relate the example of a plumber working on a construction job who would not describe his accomplishment in the first person. When he found that the plans for a major plumbing installation were clearly faulty (though they had been made by a man with far greater income and status than he had) he redesigned the system and installed it so that it worked correctly. But when it came time to tell what he had done, he did not say, "I did this," but only, "The south wall mess was straightened out."

The loss of "I"--something Sennett and Cobb found again and again--occurs in a world where things happen to people instead of the other way around, where all the important choices and opportunities are predetermined. Even when people began to talk about how little they felt "on top of things" their feelings would immediately be counter-balanced by the sources of their conservatism--by the modicum of security and the dreams that held together Howell's "settled" families and from which the "hard living" families had found the only immediately realizeable escape.

The psychological, internalized injuries Sennett and Cobb describe are forces which maintain the usually silent middle America that politicians extoll: forces which somehow fail to take hold fully in the hard living families. But though the hard living families in Howell's book have escaped from the conventional worker's world, they are no better off. They have traded a slow-paced life of hidden injury for a more exuberent life in which the injuries are more direct and economic. Neither Howell nor Sennett and Cobb begin to analyze what causes the against-the-mainstream behavior of the hard living families and how the internalized feelings of class break down. Howell says only that specific family problems can explain hard living on a case-by-case basis, and that societal explanations are beyond the scope of his book.

SENNETT AND COBB are far more ambitious. They recognize that the mechanisms of class may sometimes, fail to hold workers in--they treat the question of revolt and the "intensity of pent-up feeling" which revolt releases--but they do not consider the hard living families who give up on middle-class dreams and retreat from society rather than attack it. Yet their book goes far beyond other books based on interviews in that they attempt to create a comprehensive modern theory of class structure as it holds for the majority of people. Drawing together thoughts from philosophers and modern social scientists, even from literary sources such as Flaubert and Tolstoy, they grope and question and gradually develop a very deeply felt portrait of society and its hierarchies. In the end, Sennett and Cobb present a utopian picture of a world with diverse standards of achievement where every man can feel his worth, but unfortunately this is also a picture which includes a surprisingly superficial and rather distressingly nostalgic presentation about the guild system of the early Italian Renaissance. The book is an important contribution to thinking about class in terms of feelings, but the conclusion's simplicity only emphasizes the need for a new economic approach to class synthesized with the subtle, but narrow, approach which Sennett and Cobb present.

Both books emphasize the very human considerations which are so easily lost in the studies of patterns of consumption, distribution of housing and other matters which now make up the bulk of urban studies, and that is their greatest importance. The two discussions, if widely read, might make urban thinking at least a bit more humane. And they reveal once again that the problems facing a class society lie much deeper than the question of subsistence--that even if the liberal dream of integrating all poor people into the manageable middle class could somehow be realized, that man's self-image would still be defeated, and that a substantial group of the middle class would move back to the semi-poverty of Howell's hard living families and the old structure would begin to be recreated.