1. Merriam-Webster, “mediocre,” https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/mediocre#synonyms.

2. Benjamin Franklin, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America: 1782, Excerpts,” America in Class, https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/independence/text8/franklininfoamerica.pdf; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004, originally published in French, 1835–1840), 3.

3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 161.

4. Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 278–79.

5. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961).

6. Geoff Eley, “Corporatism and the Social Democratic Moment: The Postwar Settlement, 1945–1973,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 37–59; Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo, “ ‘Les trente glorieuses’: From the Marshall Plan to the Oil Crisis,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, 356–411; Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance & Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

7. Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 54.

8. Willis, Learning to Labor, 1–3.

9. For accounts of female “lads” in (roughly) my generation, see Barbara Jensen, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), chap. 5; Marge Piercy, Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), chap. 3. Jensen, who grew up in a working-class Minneapolis suburb, recounts how “the cool kids … were powerfully bound together—in part against school,” 117. Piercy grew up in a working-class Detroit neighborhood where she belonged to a gang that “forgave” her for “doing well in school” because she could pick locks and was gifted at shoplifting, 40. A more contemporary study of Latinx and Anglo girl “lads” in California is Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2003). Bettie explores a wide variety of antischool tactics that working-class girls employ, commenting that “girls may resist school without violently confronting it, and their strategies, often less sensational than those of boys, are easily overlooked” (47). What is fundamental for both genders of ladness is, as Bettie puts it, the rejection of “official school activities and, by association middle-class cultural norms.”

10. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 20–21. See especially: “In the language they [Americans] use, their lives sound more isolated and arbitrary than … they actually are.”

11. For a brief but insightful discussion of various current conceptions of “culture,” see Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michele Lamont, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (May 2010): 6–27, esp. 13–19. Within that taxonomy, my view would be closest to the notion of culture as “frames”—certain “shared taken-for-granted understandings” that “highlight certain aspects of social life and hide or block others” (14, 19, and 23). But I am more insistent that culture is first outside and beyond the individual, with each of us interacting with our culture, some viewing it as guide and comfort while others view it as unwanted pressure and constraint but mostly just taking it for granted without another thought.

12. For an excellent brief historical overview of free wage labor up to the present day, see Jurgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 124–45. However, even Kocka fails to recognize the significance of managerial and professional occupations that are wage-dependent as an important part of free wage labor in today’s advanced capitalist countries.

13. Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 90. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Jack Metzgar, “Are ‘the Poor’ Part of the Working Class or in a Class by Themselves?,” Labor Studies Journal 35, no. 3 (2010): 398–416.

14. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Median Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers by Occupation and Sex, Quarterly Averages, Not Seasonally Adjusted,” Table 4, regularly updated at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.nr0.htm, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Situation Summary Table A: Household Data, Seasonally Adjusted,” regularly updated at bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm.

15. According to the BLS, the median salary for “food service managers” was about $45,000 in 2019, meaning half of such managers made less than that. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Median Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers by Detailed Occupation and Sex,” regularly updated at bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t104.htm. See also Stewart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), whose central character is a manager of a Red Lobster that is closing.

16. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Median Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers,” Table 4.

17. Though I could not calculate a racial/ethnic breakdown from BLS statistics, which double-counts Hispanics, Colby King used the 2017 American Community Survey to determine that nonwhites were about 42 percent of the working class, using three different occupation-based definitions including mine. Colby King, “Counting the Working Class for Working-Class Studies: Comparing Three Occupation-Based Definitions,” Journal of Working-Class Studies 4, no. 1 (June 2019): Table 4, https://workingclassstudiesjournal.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/jwcs-vol-4-issue-1-june-2019-king.pdf. Likewise, by the commonly used education binary—working-class equals adults without bachelor’s degrees—people of color are 40 percent of working-class adults, as calculated from US Census Bureau, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2018,” February 21, 2019, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/education-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html.

18. Though the 2016 presidential election showed an eight-point advantage for Donald Trump among the working class versus the educated middle class (all colors), that margin was completely the result of a huge shift in the white part of the working class. In 2008 and 2012, the education-defined middle and working classes (all colors) voted virtually the same. See the presidential exit polls for 2008, 2012, and 2016.

19. The most important of these are Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), which found some relatively minor differences by race among black and white working-class men who, however, shared the same broad “cultural repertoire,” and Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), which found that shared patterns in child-rearing approaches by class were much more significant than by race or levels of poverty. Likewise, Bettie, Women without Class, found that Latina and white working-class girls shared similar antischool cultures, even though the unavailability of class terms in their experience caused them to interpret that experience strictly through an ethnic lens. Jessica Calarco, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), likewise tends to confirm the strength of class cultures among Latinx and Asian elementary school students and their parents.

20. I have asked this open-ended question a lot—very unsystematically, or randomly but not in a good way—sometimes with groups of students in my classes, sometimes one-on-one with people I know or those who engage in conversation in public settings. Amazingly, few give answers outside the rich/poor/middle-class framework. For a full discussion see Jack Metzgar, “Politics and the American Class Vernacular,” in New Working-Class Studies, ed. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, 189–208 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

21. General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 1972–2018, https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/568/vshow. For a discussion of these survey results, see Michael Hout, “How Class Works: Objective and Subjective Aspects of Class since the 1970s,” in Social Class: How Does It Work?, ed. Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), 28–32.

22. Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), 137.

23. All issues of Labor Research Review, from 1982 through 1996, have been archived at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/lrr/.

24. Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” Science 356, no. 6336 (2017): 398–406.

25. Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (New York: Penguin, 2019), captures the basic dynamics of this class relationship: “Elite children strain themselves in meritocratic schools and elite adults accept the relentless rigors of the meritocratic workplace because the returns to gloomy jobs are so low, the returns to glossy jobs are so high, and so few jobs are glossy” (34).

1. A potential exception to this dismissive usage might seem to be Yuval Levin’s chapter “Blinded by Nostalgia,” in The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016). But though that chapter very insightfully charts the reliance on nostalgia by both the Left and the Right, it does not actually show or even address how this nostalgia “blinds” rather than guides both progressive and conservative thinking. Though much conservative nostalgia is now superficially for the Ronald Reagan era, not the Glorious Thirty, as Levin insightfully points out, “Key to what Reagan achieved, in the eyes of conservatives, was that he recaptured something of the magic of the midcentury decades. So in a sense the Right is awaiting a second renaissance while the Left awaits a first one, but both have in mind the postwar decades as the original model to be recovered—the model of America in its prime” (22).

2. The quote is from the call for papers for the German Historical Institute London’s October 2015 conference “Nostalgia: Historicizing the Longing for the Past.” This conference points to a scholarly literature that does not simply dismiss nostalgia but also investigates it from many different angles. I have not drawn on this literature much because it is not reflective of general public and intellectual discourse in the United States, but I have been kept apprised of it through many hours of conversation with my friend Tim Strangleman, whose thinking on the potential value of nostalgia has very much informed my own. See Strangleman, “The Nostalgia of Organization and the Organization of Nostalgia: Past and Present in the Contemporary Railway Industry,” Sociology 33, no. 43(1999): 725–46. See also “Nostalgia for Nationalisation?,” in Strangleman, Work Identity at the End of the Line? Privatisation and Culture Change in the UK Rail Industry, 164–77 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

3. N. Geoffrey Bright, “ ‘The Lady Is Not Returning!’: Educational Precarity and a Social Haunting in the UK Coalfields,” Ethnography and Education 11, no. 2 (2016): 142–57.

4. I am using the term “restorative nostalgia” in a very different sense than Svetlana Bohm’s The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41–48. For Bohm, the term refers to right-wing nationalism’s use of monuments to evoke a mythical origin narrative of a nation; though her essays are primarily on Europe and Russia, the closest American analogue would be the way southern segregationists used Confederate monuments and symbols to create and enforce Jim Crow laws. For me, nostalgia is an emotion or an emotional state that can be brought into thought in many different ways, some of them distasteful and dangerous, as Bohm explores, and this is one of the reasons nostalgia should not be simply dismissed. But my sense is that restorative nostalgia just as often leads to golden age thinking, which first identifies an exemplary period and then engages in an intellectual process to determine what made it exemplary.

5. This personal anecdote is an extreme example of a larger trend. During the 1980s the premium for a college education versus a high school education across the US economy went from 36 percent to 60 percent. Reynolds Farley, The New American Reality: Who We Are, How We Got Here, Where We Are Going (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), 97–99. In 2017 the premium was 165 percent. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rates and Earnings by Educational Attainment, 2017,” September 4, 2019, https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm.

6. See Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 126–27.

7. Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), esp. chap. 4.

8. Golden age thinking far predates the European Renaissance, of course. Mary Beard explains that “a typical style of Roman reform” justified “radical action as a return to past practice,” citing Tiberius Gracchus’s attempt in 133 BCE to “restore land to the poor” by enforcing an “old legal limit” to owning 120 hectares of land. Mary Beard, SPOR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2015), 222–23. Golden age thinking such as this has sometimes been productively creative, as when seventeenth-century English politicians transformed a thirteenth-century “treaty among feudal antagonists” into a Magna Carta that made Parliament dominant over the king and then American Revolutionists claimed it as the basis for a series of rights for “free-born subjects of England.” See “The Uses of History: How Did a Failed Treaty between Medieval Combatants Come to Be Seen as the Foundation of Liberty in the Anglo-Saxon world,” The Economist, December 20, 2014.

9. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement, and How We Can Fight Back (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

10. Hacker and Pierson, American Amnesia, 119; Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 229.

11. Sam Pizzigati, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class, 1900–1970 (New York: Seven Stories, 2012).

12. David Weil, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

13. Steven Pearlstein, “When Shareholder Capitalism Came to Town,” The American Prospect, April 19, 2014, https://prospect.org/economy/shareholder-capitalism-came-town/, and more recently, in Moral Capitalism: Why Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2020).

14. Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (New York: Norton, 2018), 26, 37.

1. Jean Fourastie, Les Trentes Glorieuses, ou la revolution invisible de 1946 a 1975 (Paris: Fayard Press, 1979).

2. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

3. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976), 14; US Census Bureau, The Statistical History of the United States: From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), Series F 10–16, 225.

4. “U.S. GDP Growth Rate 1961–2020,” Macrotrends, https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-growth-rate.

5. For unemployment, see US Census Bureau, The Statistical History of the United States, Series D 85–86, 135, which shows the seven years from 1923 through 1929 at or below 5 percent followed, of course, by a decade of double-digit unemployment. Inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index is a somewhat more complicated story, since the beginning and end of the Glorious Thirty saw substantial spikes in inflation, whereas the 1920s and 1930s was an overall period of deflation. See Statistical History, Series E 136–166, 210–11.

6. Statistical History, Series D 722–727, 164. In 1940 dollars, the average annual wage in 1940 was $1,299. The 2020 average annual wage is calculated from “Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, First Quarter 2020,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 16, 2020, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf.

7. For manufacturing and other sectors, see Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Work and Welfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 275–77. This source reports wages in current dollars, and I adjusted them to 2020 constant dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

8. Frank Levy, The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998), 27.

9. At the end of the Glorious Thirty, however, the poverty rate for African Americans was double that of whites for prime-age adults and even worse for black seniors (36 percent) and children (42 percent). At that point it got worse for both blacks and whites for the next twenty years. “Historical Poverty Tables: People and Families—1959 to 2018,” US Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-people.html.

10. By one highly sophisticated analysis, poverty in the United States would have disappeared by 1985. See Economic Policy Institute, “Poverty Rate, Actual and Simulated, 1959–2013,” in The State of Working America, http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-poverty-figure-7m-poverty-rate-actual/.

11. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster 2016), 337. Most relevant for the decades prior to 1945 is Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Gordon argues that 1870–1970 was the best period for the most people, despite economic depressions and wars, and emphasizes especially the introduction and dispersion of indoor plumbing, household electricity, and telecommunications as bringing our daily lives “from dark and isolated to bright and networked” (94).

12. Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 123.

13. Hyman, Debtor Nation, chap. 5.

14. Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Viking, 1991), 144.

15. Robert Whaples, “Hours of Work in U.S. History,” Economic History Association, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/.

16. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 12.

17. “Life Expectancy for Social Security,” Social Security, https://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html.

18. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 516. The percentages of workers with employer-based pensions is now and always has been higher among those employed by large firms, but large-firm coverage shows the same pattern of postwar rise and post-1970s decline, reaching a high of 85 percent in 1981 but falling to about 50 percent by the turn of the century. See William J. Wiatrowski, “The Last Private Industry Pension Plans: A Visual Essay,” Monthly Labor Review, December 2012, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/12/art1full.pdf.

19. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, 550–51.

20. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 207.

21. These complaints are usually posed as questions that are legitimately concerned with the possibility that I, as a straight white man, might be purposely or accidentally whitewashing history. I have learned to respect this concern when it is expressed by nonscholars or even by scholars from social science traditions that are aggressively ignorant of history. I am less tolerant of historians who should know better. Jonathan Levy, for example, has declared that “the postwar decades were a good time to be a worker, but only if you were white, male, and straight.…. what has come to an end is a golden age for white men with nothing more than a high school education” (“Stuck in a Gilded Age,” Dissent, Summer 2016), 157. Evidently, Levy thinks white women and people of color with nothing but high school educations and less—a group that constitutes nearly half of the adult population—are making more progress today than they were from 1945 to 1975. They’re not. See US Census Bureau, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2019,” https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2019/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Earnings and Unemployment Rates by Educational Attainment, 2019,” https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/unemployment-earnings-education.htm.

22. Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2010), chaps. 7 and 8.

23. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, trans. and ed. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Books, 2008, first published in 1856), 174–75.

24. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Table Ba4954-4964, “Work Stoppages, Workers Involved, Average Duration, and Person-Days Idle: 1881–1998,” 354–55. For the postwar strike wave, see Jack Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave,” in The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, 216–25 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009). For the broader context of the 1967–1971 strike wave, see Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), esp. chap. 1.

25. Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 141–48.

26. See, however, Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Growing Prosperity: The Battle for Growth with Equity in the 21st^t Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). In chapter 2, “A History of American Growth,” they conclude that “on its own, however, postwar growth would likely have petered out in a decade [i.e., by 1955] or so if it were not for three critically important factors,” of which “organized labor and collective bargaining” was the most important. The other two are “the role of the federal government in stimulating aggregate demand” and “the unexpectedly strong expansion in labor supply as women entered the labor force in record numbers” (35–36).

27. Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). Pages 11, 98–102, and 279–287 recount the fight from 1952 to 1974 to get “homosexuality” removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a sickness that needed curing. The Mattachine Society, which most historians see as the origin of the gay liberation movement, was formed in 1950, and many gay activists saw the American Psychiatric Association’s 1952 declaration as a reaction to the beginnings of that movement. See Eric Marcus’s oral history Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights (New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2002). For the containment strategy against women, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

28. Patterson, Grand Expectations, 642.

29. The direct quotes are from Patterson, Grand Expectations, 205 and 342, though the penultimate passage is on 374: “By the late 1950s millions of Americans were enjoying the bounties of affluence and the consumer culture, the likes of which they had scarcely imagined before. In the process they were developing larger expectations about life and beginning to challenge things that seemed set in stone only a few years earlier. Older cultural norms, however, still remained strong until the 1960s, when expectations ascended to new heights and helped facilitate social unrest on a new and different scale.”

30. Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, 174–75.

31. Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). For a basic explanation of the origin and trajectory of the campaign, see “Double V Campaign,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_V_campaign.

32. Levy, The New Dollars and Dreams, 27, 34, and 50.

33. Economic Policy Institute, “Median Family Income, by Race and Ethnicity, 1947–2010,” The State of Working America, http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-income-table-2-5-median-family-income/.

34. Economic Policy Institute, “Black Median Family Income, as a Share of White Median Family Income, 1947–2013,” The State of Working America, http://stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/ratio-of-black-and-hispanic-to-white-median-family-income-1947–2010/.

35. Andrew J. Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 94.

36. Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost, 9.

37. Randall Kennedy, “Black America’s Promised Land: Why I Am Still a Racial Optimist,” The American Prospect, no. 5 (Fall 2014), https://prospect.org/civil-rights/black-america-s-promised-land-still-racial-optimist/.

38. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 189.

39. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 353.

40. Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles, “Divergent Paths: Structural Change, Economic Rank, and the Evolution of Black-White Earnings Differences, 1940–2014,” Working Paper No. 2279, National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2017, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22797/w22797.pdf.

41. “Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity,” Kaiser Family Foundation, 2018, at https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D.

42. See Marianne Cooper, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Victor Tan Chen, Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Allison J. Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Arne L. Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); David Weil, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

43. Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 4.

44. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 50–51.

45. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, 14. See, in general, Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 47 and 32–59. Writing in 1968, Huntington was more focused on what were called third world countries at the time, and his book is in part a warning to the American foreign policy establishment not to be in such a hurry to encourage literacy, democracy, economic development, and prosperity in those countries; he compiles an impressive list of well-known instances where improved conditions of various sorts led to more “social unrest”—more activism and agency among people—rather than less, as still is conventionally expected.

46. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), was originally published in 1959, when real median household income was about three-fourths of what it would become by 1975, by which time it had reached nearly the level it is now. In 2019 dollars, median household income was $31,000 in 1947 (when this series begins), $42,000 in 1959, and $57,000 in 1975. See Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Table Be1-18, “Distribution of Money Income among Households, 1947–1998,” 652.

47. In 1956, for example, fewer than one in four whites thought blacks and whites should be treated equally in hiring. See Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 54. Likewise, Tamara Draut cites the opposition of the New York Times and the New Republic to the “sex equality” provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to show how the “very idea that women should be able to have the same jobs as men was seen as both ridiculous and contrary to nature.” Tamara Draut, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 123–24.

48. On productivity, see “Labor Productivity and Costs: Productivity Change in the Nonfarm Business Sector, 1947–2015,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm. On innovation, see “The 85 Most Disruptive Ideas in Our History,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 2014, special issue celebrating the magazine’s eighty-fifth anniversary, http://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek/85ideas/. Nearly half of the ideas named came during the Glorious Thirty, including exactly five of the top ten and ten of the top twenty. Also noteworthy is that “between the late 1950s and early 1970s, the legal underpinnings of the right to vote were transformed more dramatically than they had been at any earlier point in the nation’s history.” Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 256. Chapter 8, “Breaking Barriers,” lays out the case for this claim, reading like an ode to the Glorious Thirty in a realm I have not covered in this chapter.

49. Based strictly on income quintiles, there was not a significant increase in the chances of a person born in the lowest quintile reaching the highest (they were slim before and still are), but this does not take into account the enormous shift in the occupational structure during the Glorious Thirty and the working conditions and life circumstances that went with that change. Political theorist Adam Swift calls “the ‘Golden Age’ of social mobility” an “expansion of ‘room at the top,’ ” explaining that “the postwar increase in the proportion of better jobs … constitutes an upgrading of the class structure.” Adam Swift, “What’s Fair about That?,” London Review of Books 42, no. 2 (January 23, 2020), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n02/adam-swift/what-s-fair-about-that. Still, the continuity in “rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility” (often called “relative mobility”) merely emphasizes the greater importance of across-the-board increases in real wages and family incomes (often called “absolute mobility” and metaphorically “a rising tide that lifts all boats”). For evidence of the continuity in “rank-based measures” of income across the second half of the twentieth century, see Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, and Nicholas Turner, “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” American Economic Review 104, no. 5 (2014): 141–47.

1. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Work and Welfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Table Ba1033–1046, “Major Occupational Groups—All Persons: 1860–1990,” 133. From the table’s occupational categories, I defined “blue collar” as including “craft workers,” “operatives,” and “laborers,” who grew from 18.5 million workers in 1940 to more than 30 million in both 1980 and 1990 but declined as a percentage of the total workforce from just under 40 percent to about 25 percent by 1990.

2. Camille Ryan and Julie Siebens, Educational Attainment in the United States: 2009, US Census Bureau, 2012, http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf. Despite fierce racial discrimination during the entirety of the period, blacks increased their college graduation rates from nearly zero in 1940 to 10 percent by 1975. National Center for Education Statistics, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 1993), https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf.

3. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Table Ba1033–1046, “Major Occupational Groups—All Persons: 1860–1990.”

4. John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998, originally published in 1958), first identified a “new class” of workers who expected to enjoy their work, and his examples were all professionals and managers (chap. 23, “Labor, Leisure and the New Class”). He would later develop this notion into what he called “the technostructure” in The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s justly famous article “The Professional Managerial Class” was reprinted in 1979 and matched with a book’s worth of critique, debate, and commentary in Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

5. See Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968); Martin Trow, Twentieth-Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010).

6. The literature on middle-class professionalism is outrageously slim given its importance in our society today and for at least the last one hundred years. Burton J. Bledstein’s The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976) is focused strictly on the nineteenth century but is valuable in establishing the university as the agent for developing “the culture of professionalism,” which he presents as a contradictory jumbo of high-minded social idealism and a relentless pursuit of status and affluence. Paul Starr’s masterful The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982) is revelatory about the rise of doctors mostly in the twentieth century and mostly absent any “high-minded social idealism;” but as important as the health care industry is, physicians have played a minor, nearly nonexistent role in shaping the broader professional middle-class culture of the Glorious Thirty and after. Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) was especially helpful to me; see note 7 in this chapter. Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) is not without insight but is so single-minded in its moralistic ax grinding that I couldn’t finish reading it.

7. See Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands. Khurana, a Harvard Business School professor, presents the Glorious Thirty (for him 1941–1970) as merely a way station in the long-term erosion of what he calls management’s “professionalization project,” but his treatment of the period after 1970 is nonetheless cast within a certain angry nostalgia for the era of managerial capitalism.

8. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. chaps. 6–8.

9. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Table Bc713–718, “Professional and Instructional Staff at Institutions of Higher Education, by Sex and Public-Private Control: 1869–1993,” 462.

10. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Table Ba1159-1395, “Detailed Occupations—All Persons: 1859–1990,” 142–49.

11. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Table Bc97–106, “Public Elementary and Secondary Day School Teachers and Instructional Staff—Average Annual Salary and Number, by Sex: 1869–1996,” 412–13.

12. For the massification of higher education, see Trow, Twentieth-Century Higher Education, esp. chap. 16.

13. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 283–85. Bakewell is one of several younger historians, born in the mid-1960s, who have joyfully documented the dynamism of the 1950s as prelude and prologue to the 1960s. Referring to “the great liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s,” Bakewell claims that “existentialist ideas flowed into the widening stream of 1950s anti-conformism, and then into the full-blown idealism of the late 1960s” (29, 31). Painting on a wider canvas, Alan Petigny’s The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), covers everything from blue jeans and Abstract Expressionism to child-rearing manuals and the “ascendancy of science,” along with sexual norms and values, psychology, and religion to argue that “Americans during the 1950s were moving in a more open and democratic direction and away from a conservative, hierarchal vision.… [S]nobbery became a character trait increasingly held in low regard … [and] the valorization of democracy deepened suspicions toward those who fancied themselves, or simply appeared to think of themselves, as superior to the general population” (192–93). Another more narrowly political attempt to redefine the decade is Jennifer A. Delton, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

14. You may think I exaggerate the spread of “intellectual ferment” in the 1950s, but I look back and wonder. What was I—an Appalachian mill town teenager aspiring to be a sportswriter in Connecticut when I wasn’t looking up some girl’s skirt and about as intellectually unfermenting as I could be—doing reading Dharma Bums on my own, writing a research paper on Fauvists and Cubists as a senior, and listening to Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk under the tutelage of one of my steelworker coaches for Franklin Local 2634’s baseball team? How did such a thing happen in 1960, all before the world turned upside down? The moral panic and authenticity dramas must have been really widespread by then for these pieces of it to get all the way to someone like me.

15. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. 2, Table Ba1159-1395, “Detailed Occupations—All Persons: 1859–1990,” 142–49.

16. Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Offer opens the book with what he calls his core argument: “Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.” His argument is not as narrowly focused on impatience as this line suggests, but looking back from the twenty-first century, he fails to see the anxious exhilaration and exploratory nature of those initial decades of living with discretionary income and time, especially among the wildly expanding professions in the United States.

17. Though it initially affected scholarship more than middle-class professionalism as a whole, there were darker notes of class domination and prejudice being sung at the time. The idea that working-class people had authoritarian personalities was developed in the 1950s as a middle-class fear fantasy and has spread more widely in the middle-class imagination up to the present. See Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (n.p.: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020), 103–12. I address this subject more fully in chapter 8.

18. Though higher education is a small and likely more elite part of the emerging professional middle class of this time, by 1975 about one of four college faculty were from working-class backgrounds, about the same percentages as studies in 1995 and 2013 found. Lynn Arner, “Survival Strategies for Working-Class Women as Junior Faculty Members,” in Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Academic Work, ed. Allison L. Hurst and Sandi Kawecka Nenga (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 50.

19. Jason Isbell, Drive-By Truckers, “Outfit,” Decoration Day, released June 17, 2003, by New West Records.

1. David Kynaston, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957–1959 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 26–27. The epigraph for this chapter is also from Kynaston, 56–57.

2. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments, reprint ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

3. Stephen Meyer, Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 4.

4. Meyer, Manhood on the Line, 5.

5. Meyer, Manhood on the Line, 3–6.

6. These distinctions will be explained and explored in more detail in forthcoming chapters. The routine-seeking/action-seeking distinction is from Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962), 28–32. The settled-living/hard-living binary is from Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 30–34.

7. See Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), esp. chap. 2.

8. Sarah Attfield, who grew up in the working class in London, argues that “respectability” is exclusively a middle-class or upper-class (even “bourgeois”) concept imported into the working class from outside. Though that happens too, Attfield’s analysis misses how common it is for working-class people to have a very different idea of what it takes to earn the respect of oneself and others, especially in autonomous or semiautonomous working-class worlds. See Attfield, “Rejecting Respectability: On Being Unapologetically Working Class,” Journal of Working-Class Studies 1, no. 1 (December 2016): 45–57, https://workingclassstudiesjournal.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/jwcs-vol-1-issue-1-december-2016-attfield.pdf.

9. Wlliam Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 128, shows large increases in the proportions of black men in manufacturing from 1940 to 1970—from 5 percent to 15 percent of craft jobs and from 13 percent to 29 percent of “operatives.” For black women workers, see Andrew J. Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 94. In Chicago, African American men and women became majorities in the post office and the transit authority by 1968. Erik Gellman, “In the Driver’s Seat: Chicago’s Bus Drivers and Labor Insurgency in the Era of Black Power,” LABOR Studies in Working-Class History 11, no. 3 (Fall 2014):49–76/

10. Gans, The Urban Villagers, 29.

11. Arthur McIvor, Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 274.

12. Jeff Torlina, Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011). See also Torlina’s “Power at the Point of Production: Explaining Complexity in Social Stratification,” unpublished manuscript, 2016.

13. Sociologist Michele Lamont carefully elaborated this working-class “critique of the moral character of upper middle-class people” in her study of blue-collar men in the United States and France, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); see, for example, 146–48.

14. In their classic history of higher education in the United States, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman initially assumed that the rapid growth in college enrollments in the postwar years was “largely a consequence of increased lower-middle and working-class access to and interest in college,” but their research determined that most of the academic explosion in enrollments was actually “among upper-middle class children.” Working-class high school graduates like me did enter colleges in greater numbers than before, but as I observed, there was a decided lack of interest across the class even as access improved. Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 95. Such negative attitudes toward college educations continue today. Despite the apparent unanimity on the importance of higher education, only about half of Americans think universities are having a positive effect on the country. Kim Parker, “The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education,” Pew Research Center, August 19, 2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education/.

15. See Kathy Newman, “How the Fifties Worked: Mass Culture and the Decade the Unions Made,” book in progress, 2020; John Bodnar, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003); Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

16. The Debs quote is cited in Martin Trow, Twentieth-Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 212.

1. Marc Levinson, An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2016). Though Levinson argues that this “extraordinary time” can never be repeated, he fully agrees that it was glorious:

The very fact that life was so good—that jobs were easy to find; that food was plentiful and decent housing commonplace; that a newly woven safety net protected against unemployment, illness, and old age—encouraged individuals to take risks, from marching in the streets to joining the antimaterialist counterculture. Rising living standards and greater economic security made it possible for many people in many countries to join in the cultural ferment and social upheaval of the 1960s and early 1970s, and arguably engendered the confidence that brought vocal challenges to injustices—gender discrimination, environmental degradation, repression of homosexuals—that had long existed with little public outrage. (4–5)

2. Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal & the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

3. Emmanuel Saez, “Income and Wealth Inequality: Evidence and Policy Implications,” Neubauer Collegium Lecture, University of Chicago, October 2014, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/lecture_saez_chicago14.pdf.

4. This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation: net national income ($17.5 trillion in 2018, from the World Bank) × a 16 percent loss of share for the bottom 90 percent = $2.8 trillion. That $2.8 trillion loss is then divided by the number of workers who constitute 90 percent of the employed labor force (142 million at-work full- and part-time workers in 2019, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), resulting in a per capita gain of $19,700. World Bank, “Adjusted Net National Income (Current US$),” http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.ADJ.NNTY.CD; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey CPS CPS Program Links,” https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm. A more thorough study by the RAND Corporation in 2020 found that my rough approximation is rather conservative. See Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” September 2020, https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html.

5. See Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1983), 54–59 on capital shortage, 95–97 on profit squeeze.

6. Another back-of-the-envelope calculation: Using data from figure 4.1 (from the Economic Policy Institute), real hourly compensation grew about 15 percent from 1973 to 2018, while productivity increased by about 70 percent during the same period. I have been tracking Bureau of Labor Statistics reports of “real weekly wages for production and non-supervisory workers” for decades, so I used those numbers and figured the difference in 2020 dollars between a 70 percent increase from 1973 ($26,608) and a 15 percent increase from that year ($5,701), which amounts to an average loss of $20,907 per worker. Calculated from “Average Weekly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Financial Activities,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Economic Research, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5500000030. Since production and nonsupervisory workers in the private sector number about one hundred million (see “Table B-6. Employment of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees on Private Nonfarm Payrolls by Industry Sector, Seasonally Adjusted,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t22.htm), the total aggregate loss is $20,907 × 100 million = $2 trillion. Steven Greenhouse, in The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (New York: Knopf, 2008), 5, calculated that the annual loss in 2007 was $22,000 for “the average full-time worker” or more than $2 trillion, but he does not explain how he arrived at that figure. While greater precision is to be desired, these rough estimates are enough to confirm that sharing productivity gains again would be as transformative now as it was during the Glorious Thirty.

7. Richard Phillips, “The Facts Missing from the Debate Over Tax Fairness,” Tax Justice Blog, March 3, 2015, http://www.taxjusticeblog.org/archive/2015/03/the_facts_missing_from_the_deb.php#.WMwUGPkrLcs.

8. Sam Pizzagati, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class, 1900–1970 (New York: Seven Stories, 2012), 247, 263.

9. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans, Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 505–8.

10. Pizzagati, The Rich Don’t Always Win, chap. 11.

11. Much of the discussion among international economists has been about determining what would be an “optimal top tax rate” for any advanced economy. Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 512–13) hypothesized that it would be at least 80 percent on incomes above $500,000 or $1 million), and then a more thorough study determined that it would be 83 percent! See Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6, no. 1 (February 2014): 230–71. A more comprehensive analysis by Saez and Gabriel Zucman estimates that a total package of tax reforms focused strictly on the top 1 percent could produce $750 billion a year for government investments in health, education, green infrastructure, and other forms of income redistribution. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York: Norton, 2019), 143.

12. Joshua Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 (New York: Viking, 2012). Freeman frames the second half of the twentieth century as a conflict between empire and “the democratic revolution,” with Henry Luce’s “American century” contesting for resources and attention, hearts and minds, against Henry Wallace’s “century of the common man.” In Freeman’s telling, after 1975 empire wins decisively, as the democratic revolution recedes.

13. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 229.

14. Pizzagati, The Rich Don’t Always Win, 264 and 277.

15. Pizzagati, The Rich Don’t Always Win, 267 and 270.

1. “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1ne (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 116.

2. See E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962), chaps. 9 and 11.

3. See “Wage Labor and Capital,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 1:150–54. See also Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp. chap. 1.

4. Edward Wolff cited in Neal Gabler, “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans,” The Atlantic, May 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/.

1. Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 203.

2. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xliii.

3. Barbara Jensen, “Becoming versus Belonging: Psychology, Speech, and Social Class,” paper presented at the 1997 Youngstown Working-Class Studies Conference, Class Matters, http://www.classmatters.org/2004_04/becoming_vs_belonging.php. Jensen’s more fully developed interpretation of class cultures is in her book Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

4. Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey, Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class (Boston: South End, 1984); C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, eds., This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds., Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). Two books by nonacademics are especially important for tracing the depth and extent of class culture clash: Barbara Jensen, a counseling psychologist, Reading Classes, and Alfred Lubrano, a journalist, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004). Of the numerous class-crossover memoirs, among the best are bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (New York: Routledge, 2000); Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Bantam Books, 1983); Cheri Register, Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000); Renny Christopher, A Carpenter’s Daughter: A Working-Class Woman in Higher Education (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009); Milan Kovacovic, Ma’s Dictionary: Straddling the Social Class Divide (Duluth, MN: Greysolon, 2011).

5. See Allison L. Hurst and Sandi Kawecka Nenga, eds., Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

6. Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1973/1980). Williams defines a residual culture as “experiences, meanings and values which cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture” but “are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation.”

7. Lou Martin, Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), esp. chap. 5; Andrew B. Arnold, Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 224; Jensen, Reading Classes, 60.

8. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 4. See also E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), ix and 294–97.

9. Claude S. Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 12.

10. Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight about Class (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Though I am focused on American social science, American journalism generally follows similarly blind assumptions about the singularity and ubiquity of professional middle-class culture, what DeMott labels “the omni syndrome” (73–93). A particularly prominent example is feature reporters’ unending fascination with tracking generational attitude changes by going to elite college campuses. Only about two-thirds of millennials who graduate high school, for example, go on to a four-year college, and the vast majority of those are not at the top fifty schools, let alone the Princetons and Yales favored by New York–based reporters. See “College Enrollment and Work Activity of Recent High School and College Graduates,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 28,2020, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm.

11. Fischer, Made in America, 12.

12. Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Viking, 2011).

13. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 119.

14. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 119–20.

15. Two more recent studies follow Habits of the Heart’s lead pretty directly. Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) confirms Habits of the Heart’s declension narrative from management as a professional calling to a merely utilitarian career. And Jennifer Silva’s Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) finds working-class young people adopting a hand-me-down version of the middle-class mainstream’s therapeutic culture, mostly without the help of psychological professionals. Claude Fischer, on the other hand, is more positive than Habits of the Heart about “American” individualism, which he says affirms the importance of community while insisting on “the freedom to choose one’s community”: “What is most notable about America is not radical individualism, the principle of going it alone, but voluntarism, the principle that individuals choose with whom they go” (Fischer, Made in America, 98).

16. Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017), 1.

17. Harris Interactive does a large national workplace survey, which it considers proprietary information, but Career Vision’s headline summary of Harris reports that 45 percent of American workers are satisfied with their jobs. “Job Satisfaction Statistics,” Clear Vision, https://careervision.org/job-satisfaction-statistics/

18. For a full set of links to Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational projections for various years, see Jack Metzgar, “Our Overeducated Workforce: Who Benefits?,” Working-Class Perspectives, September 29, 2014, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/our-overeducated-workforce-who-benefits/..

19. Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). I should also mention Jay MacLeod’s Ain’t No Making It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westview, 2009), which contrasts two groups of teenage boys, one of which rejects the middle-class aspirations of the school and one of which embraces them. MacLeod followed up his initial detailed and insightful ethnography from the 1980s with two subsequent revisits with these same groups, and he concludes that these young men were so objectively disadvantaged that their different aspirations made no difference in the long run.

20. For average UPS wages and salaries, see “Average Salary for United Parcel Service (UPS), Inc. Employees,” PayScale, http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=United_Parcel_Service_(UPS)%2C_Inc./Salary.

21. Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), for example, found “having integrity” in “keeping the world in moral order” at the core of “the distinctions that [settled-living working-class male] whites and blacks draw toward other classes.” Most of the men Lamont interviewed shared a “detailed critique of the moral character of upper middle-class people, mostly by pointing to their lack of personal integrity, lack of respect for others, and the poor quality of their interpersonal relationships.” Using alternative definitions of success, these men “locate themselves above, or side by side with, ‘people above’ ” (146–47). Other researchers have found similar working-class assessments of “fakes” and “phonies” among the upper and middle classes. Among the high school girls Julie Bettie interviewed in California’s Central Valley, for example, both white and Latina working-class girls made “claims of authenticity” for themselves in contradistinction to “prep” girls from educated middle-class families (Women without Class, 194–96). There is likely more than a little class prejudice in these views, especially in how sweeping they can often be, but there is also substantial social science evidence that there is a solid core of truth in these working-class accusations. For comparative studies suggesting that middle-class behavior exhibits more independence and individual selfishness while working-class behavior relies more on interdependence and community, see Nicole M. Stephens, Stephanie A. Fryberg, and Hazel Rose Markus, “It’s Your Choice: How the Middle-Class Model of Independence Disadvantages Working-Class Americans,” in Facing Social Class: How Societal Rank Influences Interaction, ed. Susan T. Fiske and Hazel Rose Markus, 87–106 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012); Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Andres G. Martinez, Michael W. Kraus, and Dacher Keltner, “Class, Chaos, and the Construction of Community,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103, no. 6 (2012): 949–62; Nicole M. Stephens, Jessica S. Cameron, and Sarah S. M. Townsend, “Lower Social Class Does Not (Always) Mean Greater Interdependence: Women in Poverty Have Fewer Social Resources Than Working-Class Women,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 45, no. 7 (2014): 1061–73.

22. Bettie, Women without Class, 125–127; Andrew Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 111–13.

23. Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stephane Cote, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 109, no. 11 (March 13, 2012): 4086–91. This study found “a psychological dimension to higher social class that gives rise to unethical action”: “Relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.” Lead author Paul Piff presented a brief on this research in a 2013 Ted Talk titled “Does Money Make You Mean?,” TED, October 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean#t-1729.

24. Metzgar, “Our Overeducated Workforce: Who Benefits?”; Jack Metzgar, “Graduating College Is Highly Overrated,” Working-Class Perspectives, March 17, 2014, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/graduating-college-is-highly-overrated/.

25. David Kusnet, Love the Work, Hate the Job: Why America’s Best Workers Are Unhappier Than Ever (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008).

26. The phrase “fear of falling” and the phenomena it denotes comes, of course, from Barbara Ehrenreich’s influential book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).

27. See Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What We Can Do about It (Washington, DC: Brooking Institution Press, 2017); Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost.

28. See “Occupations with the Most Job Growth, 2018–2028,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-most-job-growth.htm.

29. Alfred Lubrano, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).

30. See David Greene, “Reflections on the Production of a Working Class Academic,” Public Voices 5, no. 3 (2002): 91–96, https://efbd7714-b1f3-4f1a-86a0-22d8babb400d.filesusr.com/ugd/d3a2e5_cafffa298c0c4d43a5f45cad9cfc6fe9.pdf; David Greene, “The Matrix of Identity Revisited,” paper presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University, May 15, 2003.

31. A great example of this is Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2013), translated by George Chauncey from the French 2009 edition. In late midlife after becoming a well-established Parisian intellectual, Eribon returned to visit his working-class mother and Reims neighborhood, having been away for a very long time. Similarly, Raymond Williams’s autobiographical character Matthew in Border Country (Wales: Parthian, 2006, first published in 1960), had a much less troubled childhood than Eribon but was equally alienated in returning to his Welsh village in midlife after a very long absence. I cannot imagine being away from my family of origin for a full year at that stage of life, let alone for decades.

32. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

33. Lareau, Unequal Childhoods, 13.

34. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term “doxa” for those parts of a culture that are “so ingrained that they seldom come to conscious recognition” or “what agents immediately know but do not know that they know.” See Sean McCloud, “Class as a Force of Habit,” in Hurst and Nenga, Working in Class, 16.

35. Betsy Leondar-Wright, Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). The graph referred to is on page 62. Another kind of current class straddling is involved in the educated middle-class young people who return to or move to Rust Belt cities and towns to find what they see as a more authentic way of life as well as cheaper housing. As Sherry Linkon comments, “the hybrid class identity in Rust Belt chic also offers an alternative class location for writers and readers for whom the old suburban, professional version of middle-class life is largely out of reach. For people living in a contingent economy, where the middle class is—together with the working class, of course—on the losing end of the expanding inequality gap, reclaiming the values of belonging and grit may not only offer a way to reconcile the contrast between the promise of the American Dream and the reality of the contemporary economy; it may also serve as a first … move toward solidarity and resistance.” Sherry Lee Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 161.

36. Jessi Streib, The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 202–3.

37. See Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). This class isolation should not be exaggerated, however. People from working-class backgrounds are still entering the professions in some numbers, because despite their considerable advantages, the children of professional middle-class parents experience considerable downward mobility. See Jessi Streib, Privilege Lost: Downward Mobility in a Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 3. Among professors, for example, there has been only a small decline in the percentage of faculty from working-class backgrounds, from a little more than one-quarter in 1975 to a little less than one-quarter in 2013. Lynn Arner, “Survival Strategies for Working-Class Women as Junior Faculty Members,” in Hurst and Nenga, Working in Class, 50–51.

38. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, 69.

39. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, 69.

40. Paul Osterman, The Truth about Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 121–22; see chap. 5 for the analysis.

41. Tim Strangleman and Tracey Warren, Work and Society: Sociological Approaches, Themes and Methods (London: Routledge, 2008), 96–97.

1. Jessi Streib, The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 168. The concept of feeling rules was pioneered by Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), where it was used to describe employer-prescribed practices for customer service workers for whom “emotional labor” is part of their jobs. Other sociologists have applied it more broadly to basic cultural practices or “scripts,” such as Allison J. Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 36–38.

2. Streib, The Power of the Past, 170–71, 179, 186, and 193.

3. The original version was used in Barbara Jensen and Jack Metzgar, “Working Class and Middle Class as Competing Cultures,” presentation at the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University, May 2001. That version is reproduced in Jack Metzgar, “Politics and the American Class Vernacular,” in New Working-Class Studies, ed. John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 207.

4. The key role of “toughness” in working-class culture is more fully developed in chapter 8, “Taking It and Living in the Moments.”

5. Allison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree Penguin Books, 2014), 118.

6. See Victor Tan Chen, Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Marianne Cooper, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Jennifer M. Silva, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

7. William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), 46.

8. Andrew J. Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 46.

9. Jessica Calarco, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

10. Krista M. Soria, “Working-Class, Teaching Class, and Working Class in the Academy,” in Working in Class: Recognizing How Social Class Shapes Our Academic Work, ed. Allison L. Hurst and Sandi Kawecka Nenga (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 132.

11. See Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

12. Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stephane Cote, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences 109, no. 11 (March 13, 2012): 4088, 4086, and 4089.

13. See Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).

14. Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 146–47; Julie Bettie, Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), 194–96.

15. Barbara Jensen, “Becoming versus Belonging: Psychology, Speech, and Social Class,” paper presented at the 1997 Working-Class Studies Conference at Youngstown State University, Class Matters, http://www.classmatters.org/2004_04/becoming_vs_belonging.php. Jensen’s more fully developed interpretation of class cultures is in her book Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

16. If Mary Beard is to be believed, the contrast was visible in first-century BCE Rome when proletarian laundry workers experienced “a sense of belonging that Cicero would never have dreamt of.” Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2015), 454–55.

17. William Foote White, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 107.

18. Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations & Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009).

19. J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (New York: Scribner, 2018).

20. Likewise, using the language of community with very similar findings, see Paul Piff, Andres Martinez, Daniel Stancato, Michael Kraus, and Dacher Keltner, “Class, Chaos, and the Construction of Community,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103, no. 6 (2012): 949–62.

21. “Sarah Townsend,” University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, https://www.marshall.usc.edu/personnel/sarah-townsend-0.

22. Nicole Stephens and Sarah Townsend, “Research: How You Feel about Individualism Is Influenced by Your Social Class,” Harvard Business Review, May 22, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/05/research-how-you-feel-about-individualism-is-influenced-by-your-social-class. See also Nicole Stephens, Sarah Townsend, and Jessica Cameron, “Lower Social Class Does Not (Always) Mean Greater Interdependence: Women in Poverty Have Fewer Social Resources Than Working-Class Women,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 45, no. 7 (2014): 1061–73.

23. Nicole M. Stephens, Hazel Rose Markus, and Sarah S. M. Townsend, “Choice as an Act of Meaning: The Case of Social Class,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93, no. 5 (2007): 814–30.

24. Lynsey Hanley, Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide (London: Penguin Books, 2016), 105.

25. Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2000) is focused on the 1959 steel strike. I also wrote the essay “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave,” in The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, ed. Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, 216–25 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009).

26. Jensen, Reading Classes, 214.

27. Light, Common People, 242.

28. Jensen, Reading Classes, 215.

29. Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, trans. Tam McTurk (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), 123.

30. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012); Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost.

31. These gender differences are explored in chapter 8, “Taking It and Living in the Moments.” See also Lois Weis, Class Reunion: The Remaking of the American White Working Class (New York: Routledge, 2004); Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

32. Putnam, Our Kids, 72 and 69.

33. Cooper, Cut Adrift, chap. 3. Though I am critical of Cooper’s interpretive framework, the portrait of Laura Delgado she provides is rich in nuanced detail, with an abundance of quotes in Delgado’s own voice. The very richness of detail Cooper provides allows readers to develop other interpretations of Delgado’s behavior and perspective. The direct quotes in this paragraph are from 88, 78, and 84.

34. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).

35. Julie Bettie, Women without Class, 125–27; Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost, 111–13.

36. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (New York: Penguin, 2019), 36.

37. Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight about Class (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

38. Wilkinson and Pickett, The Inner Level, 20.

39. Cf. “American workers are amazingly clear on the shape of the American class system and their place within it.… What matters is power, not status.” Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon, The American Perception of Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 283.

40. Light, Common People, 243, 47, and 242.

41. Jeff Torlina, Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011).

42. Elizabeth R. Gottlieb, We Are One: Stories of Work, Life and Love (n.p.: Hard Ball, 2015), 79.

43. “The Making and Remaking of a Labor Historian: Interview with James R. Barrett,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 13, no. (2 (May 2016): 63–79.

44. Quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “Hillary Clinton’s Juggling Act,” New York Times, November 3, 2016. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University and the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012).

45. James R. Barrett, “Blue-Collar Cosmopolitans: Toward a History of Working-Class Sophistication in Industrial America,” History from the Bottom Up & the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), chap. 4.

46. Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 71–72. In the passage quoted, Ignatieff is writing about multiethnic, multiracial twenty-first-century Los Angeles, but he found similar ordinary virtue in studies of New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Bosnia, Myanmar, Japan, and South Africa, all places with actual and potential violence between “in-turned tribes” of different ethnicities and religions.

47. Richard Pipes, “The Cleverness of Joseph Stalin,” New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014.

48. Ignatieff, Ordinary Virtues, 135.

49. Ignatieff, Ordinary Virtues, 114.

50. In addition to Ignatieff, there are sympathetic and insightful treatments of political parochialism and cosmopolitanism in David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: Hurst, 2017); Jonathan Haidt, “The Ethics of Globalism, Nationalism, and Patriotism,” Minding Nature 9, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 18–24. Among the more common and simplistic cosmo-good/parochial-bad treatments is Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

51. See, for example, Jensen, Reading Classes, chap. 4. See also Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Jessica Calarco, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

52. Goodhart’s Somewheres would be at least the 57 percent of Americans who have lived their entire lives in their home state or the average American who lives within eighteen miles of her or his mother. Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (n.p.: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020), 25.

53. Goodhart, Road to Somewhere, 2–5.

54. Eric Idle, Always Look on the Bright Side: A Sortabiography (New York: Crown, 2018), as cited in interview with Idle on Amanpour & Co., October 10, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/video/eric-idle-monty-python-tpxwsv/.

55. Jean Boucher, “Class Hybridity: The Coming of Age of a Sociological Blind Spot,” paper presented at the Joint Conference of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Working-Class Studies Association, Georgetown University, May 30, 2015.

1. Quoted in Betsy Leondar-Wright, Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 117.

2. Tim Strangleman, “Gendering the Closure of Industrial Workplaces: Towards a Comparative European Perspective,” unpublished manuscript, 7.

3. Thomas Gorman, for example, sees the “ranking out” he suffered in the City Line neighborhood of Brooklyn as an “injury of class” that undermined his self-confidence for most of his life, but he also recounts how in midadolescence, when he started to hang out on a neighboring block, he experienced ranking that was “good-natured teasing” rather than a mean-spirited “putting others down.” Thomas Gorman, Growing Up Working Class: Hidden Injuries and the Development of Angry White Men and Women (n.p.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 147–51. Robin D. G. Kelley, on the other hand, sees “the dozens” as creative verbal sparring that is simply meant “to get a laugh,” and his critique of the class dynamics of white social scientists overinterpreting the dozens as evidence of a pathological masculine defense mechanism in a matriarchal urban black culture is both devastating and hilarious. Kelley also makes a compelling case that the dozens is cross-gendered, with women practicing somewhat different forms of it no less humorously. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s DisFUNKtional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 1–4 and 32–36. Betsy Leondar-Wright provides a brilliant overview of this phenomenon in “Class Speech Differences I: Humor and Laughter,” Missing Class, 115–20.

1. Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 15. The profile of George Kimbley is chap. 1.

2. Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters, 36–132, profiles William Young, John Howard, Curtis Strong, and Jonathan Comer.

3. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 44. The profile of Amzie Moore is on 29–47.

4. Jessica McCrory Calarco, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

5. Calarco, Negotiating Opportunities, 190.

6. Our widely tiered labor market has been thoroughly documented as it has emerged over the last forty years. Among the best sources are Steven Greenhouse, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (New York: Knopf, 2008); Arne Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); David Weil, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Tamara Draut, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (New York: Doubleday, 2016); Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane (New York: Little, Brown, 2019).

7. Many sources could be cited, but among the most influential are Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017). Reeves actually advocates “home visiting to improve parenting” (128) and thereby “equalizing human capital development.” (124) Just to be clear, Jessica Calarco is not in this group; she values working-class culture, and her school-based ameliorations involve reducing the opportunities for middle-class students to negotiate special deals.

8. See “Unemployment Rates and Earnings by Educational Attainment, 2019,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm.

9. Parts of my discussion of Calarco here are taken from my review of Negotiating Opportunities. Jack Metzgar, “Middle-Class Influence vs. Working-Class Character,” Working-Class Perspectives, September 10, 2018, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/middle-class-influence-vs-working-class-character/.

10. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 57–58.

11. Ben Hamper, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line (New York: Warner Books, 1986).

12. See Robert Bruno, “Fried Onions and Steel,” in Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown, 62–79 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Stacy James and Jimmy Santiago Baca, eds., The Heat: Steelworker Lives & Legends (Mena, AK: Cedar Hill Publications, 2001), a collection of stories written by northwest Indiana steelworkers; Jill Schennum, “The Labor Process at the Works” and “The Moral Economy of the Works,” in “Bethlehem Steelworkers: Reshaping the Industrial Working Class,” a manuscript I reviewed for Vanderbilt University Press.

13. Schennum, “Bethlehem Steelworkers.” For a more recent study of factory workers, see Marek Korczynski, Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, & Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 64–65.

14. Reg Theriault, How to Tell When You’re Tired: A Brief Examination of Work (New York: Norton, 1995), 96.

15. Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (London: Verso, 2011), 3.

16. The value of labor-union protections of local control in the workplace was a major theme in Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000). The 1959 Steel Strike, which I focused on, was the largest strike in US history (five hundred thousand workers on strike for 116 days), and it was about a section of the Basic Steel contract that conferred substantial formal and informal power on the shop floor to workers who knew how to use (and “abuse”) it. Schennum, “Bethlehem Steelworkers,” supports my view in detail in her chapter “The Moral Economy of the Works.”

17. This directly contradicts Michael Burawoy’s classic study, Manufacturing Consent, which presents this struggle as a “game” where workers, with the help of their unions where present, participate in their own subordination. For me, Burawoy’s 1970s Marxism is an embarrassing example of professional middle-class ignorance, arrogance, and misunderstanding—all the more embarrassing because it reflects my own view of things in the 1970s.

18. Guendelsberger, On the Clock, 15–125. See also Gabriel Winant, “Life under the Algorithm,” New Republic, December 4, 2019.

19. Michael Marmot, The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).

20. Cf. Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).

21. Marmot, The Status Syndrome, 1.

22. Marmot, The Status Syndrome, 207. “Autonomy—how much control you have over your life—and the opportunities you have for full social engagement and participation are crucial for health, well-being, and longevity. It is inequality in these that plays a big part in producing the social gradient in health” (2).

23. Marmot, The Status Syndrome, 11. Marmot’s error occurs early in the book when he says that extreme inequality’s negative impact on health “is not just a matter of money” but instead of “where one stands in the hierarchy.”

24. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being (New York: Penguin, 2019).

25. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men; Jeff Torlina, Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011).

26. Michele Lamont, Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). In fact, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), sees professional middle-class status as based solely on aesthetic and moral criteria and not at all on socioeconomic position, which she says middle-class professionals take for granted.

27. Marmot, The Status Syndrome, 71.

28. Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level, 67.

29. Sherry L. Murphy, Jiaquan Xu, Kenneth D. Kochanek, and Elizabeth Arias, “Mortality in the United States, 2017,” National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief No. 328, Centers for Disease and Control Prevention, November 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db328-h.pdf; Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 49 (December 8, 2015), https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/49/15078.full.pdf

30. “Run out over half a century, [the upward redistribution of income] has slowly eaten away at the foundations of working-class life, high wages and good jobs, and has been central in causing deaths of despair.… If we are to stop deaths of despair, we must somehow stop or reverse the decline of wages for less educated Americans.” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 127.

31. From Barbara Jensen’s oral histories of her family, in this case with Luella (Jensen) Sharpe, used with permission of the interviewer.

32. Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” in The Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 110.

33. See Rachel Sherman, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Jessi Streib, Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (New York: Little Brown, 2017); Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (New York: Doubleday, 2009); Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love and Other Lies about Success and Happiness (New York: Regan Arts, 2015).

34. Elliot Weininger and Annette Lareau, “Paradoxical Pathways: An Ethnographic Extension of Kohn’s Findings on Class and Childrearing,” Journal of Marriage and Family 71, no. 3 (August 2009): 680–95. Melvin Kohn, Class and Conformity: A Study in Values (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1969), found that working-class parents “emphasized children’s conformity to external authority” (680), but Weininger and Lareau point out the paradox that “working-class and poor parents tended to grant children considerable autonomy in certain domains of daily life, thereby limiting their emphasis on conformity” (680).

35. Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

36. The phrase comes from Christopher Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 327, but the most complete articulation of this notion as applied to individual workers is probably Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent.

1. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, expanded ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 114. The discussion of delayed gratification begins on 108. The famous chapter I’m referencing, chapter 4, “Working-Class Authoritarianism,” was originally drafted in 1955 for a conference of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, later revealed to be a creation of the US Central Intelligence Agency (87).

2. Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), chap. 2.

3. Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23.

4. Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel, and Philip Peake, “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competences from Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions,” Developmental Psychology 26, no. 6 (1990): 978–86. I do not know why the study is most often identified by only one of its authors, Mischel, but I follow that convention in the text for convenience and readability.

5. See, for example, Karl Thompson, “The Effect of Cultural Deprivation on Education,” ReviseSociology, February 15, 2014, https://revisesociology.com/2014/02/15/the-effect-of-cultural-deprivation-on-education/. Or just google “immediate gratification” or “cultural deprivation.”

6. Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Haonan Quan, “Revisiting the Marshmellow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes,” Psychological Science 29, no. 7 (July 2018): 1159–77.

7. Shoda, Mischel, and Peake, “Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competences from Preschool Delay of Gratification,” tables 2 and 3.

8. Jessi Streib, The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 192.

9. Jessica McCrory Calarco, “Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmellow Test,” The Atlantic, June 1, 2018.

10. Joshua Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Norton, 2018), 177.

11. Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), traces in detail the political and intellectual debates in the Gilded Age labor movement between advocates of abolishing the wage system altogether and those focusing on fighting for a living wage.

12. Anne Balay, Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 143–44. Chapter 8, “Draggin’ Ass: Persistence and Endurance Are Working-Class Values,” is a thorough exploration of what I’m calling “taking it.”

13. Angela Lee Duckworth and Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, “True Grit,” Association for Psychological Science, April 2013, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/true-grit. Duckworth’s fully developed interpretation is in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016).

14. The “grafters” designation comes from Arthur McIvor, Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 271.

15. Jennifer Silva, We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3.

16. McIvor, Working Lives, 113.

17. Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 152.

18. Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues, 153.

19. Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (London: Verso, 2011), 31.

20. My own blogs are still a good introduction to understanding the job structure, and they have multiple links to the supporting material. See “Our Overeducated Workforce: Who Benefits?,” Working-Class Perspectives, September 29, 2014, https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/our-overeducated-workforce-who-benefits/. Or just google “occupations with the most job growth” to get the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics snapshot of the job structure now and ten years out.

21. Andrew Arnold, Fueling the Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, and Disorder in Pennsylvania Coal Country (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 6–7.

22. Andrew J. Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 158–64.

23. Two excellent studies of working-class tavern life are Julie Lindquist, A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); E. E. LeMasters, Blue-Collar Aristocrats: Life-Styles at a Working-Class Tavern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975).

24. Streib, The Power of the Past, chap. 8. I summarize Streib’s account in my introduction to chapter 6.

25. Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, Andrew Cherlin, and Robert Francis, “The Tenuous Attachments of Working-Class Men,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 211–28, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.33.2.211. Cherlin and his coauthors borrow the concept of a “disciplined self,” contrasted with a “caring self,” from Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, 23 and 46–47.

26. The distinction between hard living and settled living in working-class life comes from Joseph T. Howell, Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1973), 6–7; Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 30–36. Both Howell and Rubin refer to hard living and settled living as “lifestyles,” which suggests too great a degree of freedom to choose among a menu of lifestyles. Conversely, I see them as individual or family economic conditions based on good or bad wages and the steadiness or unsteadiness of work, circumstances that are greatly affected by macroeconomic cycles, business models, the presence or absence of labor unions, and luck more than by individual character or choice. See Jack Metzgar, “Are ‘the Poor’ Part of the Working Class or in a Class by Themselves?,” Labor Studies Journal 35, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 398–416, where I argue for drawing a clear distinction between routine seeking and action seeking as opposing cultural proclivities within working-class life and hard living and settled living as strictly economic conditions. In neither case are individuals or families fixed in these designations, and it is common for individuals and families to move into and out of these economic conditions and cultural proclivities across their lifetimes.

27. “Poverty Thresholds by Size of Family and Number of Children,” US Census Bureau, updated each year, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html.

28. Diana Pearce was a pioneer in these efforts, with the work she did for Wider Opportunities for Women compiled in Six Strategies for Family Economic Self-Sufficiency, which unfortunately is no longer available. For her methodology in a 2008 study she did for Colorado, see The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Colorado 2008: A Family Needs Budget, http://selfsufficiencystandard.org/sites/default/files/selfsuff/docs/CO2008.pdf. The Economic Policy Institute has developed the comprehensive “Family Budget Calculator” (https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/) that determines levels of income adequacy, or “hardship thresholds,” for different locations across the country. More recently, focused on individual workers rather than households, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed the “Living Wage Calculator” (https://livingwage.mit.edu/), which estimates living wages (an adequacy standard) by location across the country.

29. Sylvia Allegretto, “Basic Family Budgets Better Reveal the Hardships in America,” Economic Policy Institute, August 31, 2005, https://www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_snapshots_20050831/. Defining “hard living” in strictly economic terms is conceptually valuable, with important consequences for understanding the working class as a whole. But this does not mean that living cannot be hard within settled-living families, especially for children of alcoholics or parents with other toxic maladies. Thomas Gorman, for example, recounts in Growing up Working Class: Hidden Injuries and the Development of Angry White Men and Women (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), that what by economic standards was a settled-living family was made hard by his father’s chronic alcoholism and the uncertainty and insecurity that introduces into a child’s world.

30. Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 90.

31. Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962), 28–32. For a more recent application of Gans’s categories, see Sherry Ortner, “Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture,” in Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject, 19–41 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

32. See Betsy Leondar-Wright, Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2005). In the chapter titled “Are There Class Cultures?,” Leondar-Wright develops the notion that working-class and middle-class cultures share a pragmatic realism that can often be limiting, while both low-income and owning classes, in different ways, are more likely to dream big, often too big to be useful in achieving better conditions.

33. For a comprehensive history from Manchester, England, in the nineteenth century to Foxconn in China in the twenty-first century, see Freeman, Behemoth. For a centuries-long history of the struggles of one working-class family in the south of England, see Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree Penguin Books, 2014). For a three-generation portrait of an immigrant steel-working family in Chicago from the late nineteenth century until after the mills were gone, see Christine Walley, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

34. Gorman, Growing Up Working Class, 63–68.

35. The concept of a “culture of poverty” was initially articulated by Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Culture in the Culture of Poverty (n.p.: Basic Books, 1959), and then picked up by Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Scribner, 1962). Thus, though used by political conservatives to preach boot-strap government policies of inaction, the concept comes out of the US progressive tradition up to today and has often been extended to cover the entirety of “the working class.” Recent examples include Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017). For a probing critical history of more recent usage of the concept, see Jessi Streib, “The Unbalanced Theoretical Toolkit: Problems and Partial Solutions to Studying Culture and Reproduction but Not Culture and Mobility,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5, nos. 1–2 (March 2017): 127–53.

36. See, for example, Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012).

37. Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (New York: Scribner, 2018); J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).

38. For an insightful survey of the literature of deindustrialized places, see Sherry Lee Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). For a useful survey of people in declining small-town and rural areas, see Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

39. Allison J. Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 100 and 16.

40. Though focused only on officially poor women, not on a broader working class, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage,2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), documents these women’s positive attitudes toward living free of male dependency (chap. 4) and how centrally important caring for their children has been to their lives (chap. 6).

41. Kim Parker and Renee Stepler, “As U.S. Marriage Rate Hovers at 50%, Education Gap in Marital Status Widens,” Pew Research Center, September 14, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marriage-rate-hovers-at-50-education-gap-in-marital-status-widens/; Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society, 16.

42. “The Majority of Children Live with Two Parents, Census Bureau Reports,” US Census Bureau, November 17, 2016, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-192.html.

43. See Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

44. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 49 (December 8, 2015): 15078–83. Though focused only on the white part of the working class in their initial study, in their subsequent book Case and Deaton point out that black mortality rates are still nearly 50 percent higher than that of whites even after forty years of steeper declines in death rates. What’s more, black death rates have more recently started to increase instead of decline. Anne Case and Angus Deaton and, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 64.

45. Case and Deaton (Deaths of Despair, 123) make it even clearer that the tripling of deaths of despair reflects a much larger “disintegration of working-class lives” as a whole, not simply middle-aged white men.

46. Julia Belluz, “Nobel Winner Angus Deaton Talks about the Surprising Study on White Mortality He Just Co-authored,” Vox, November 7, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/11/7/9684928/angus-deaton-white-mortality. A Washington Post investigation of 2014 data found that though the “white working class are more likely to use opioids” than the white middle class, the percentage of reported drug users among working-class whites was only 2.2 percent. Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo, “If You’ve Ever Described People as ‘White Working Class,’ Read This,” Washington Post, November 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/22/who-exactly-is-the-white-working-class-and-what-do-they-believe-good-questions/.

47. See Tamara Draut, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (New York: Doubleday, 2016); Steven Greenhouse, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor (New York: Knopf, 2019), part 4; Annelise Orleck, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising against Poverty Wages (Boston: Beacon, 2018).

48. Marianne Cooper, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 88.

49. Thomas F. X. Noble, The Foundations of Western Civilization (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company, 2002), 85.

50. Mindah-Lee Kumar, “Mindfulness: Finding Joy in the Present Moment,” The Enthusiastic Buddhist, August 15, 2013, https://www.enthusiasticbuddhist.com/mindfulness-finding-joy-in-the-present-moment/.

51. See Tim Lott, “Zen Buddhism Teaches Us of the Importance of Living in the Present,” The Guardian, September 21, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/21/zen-buddhism-lessons.

52. Sarah Blackwell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 20.

53. Even Seymour Martin Lipset recognizes this possibility in a footnote: “It may be argued, though I personally doubt it, that this capacity to establish personal relationships, to live in the present, may be more ‘healthy’ (in a strictly medical, mental-health sense) than a middle-class concern with status distinctions, one’s own personal impact on one’s life situation, and a preoccupation with the uncertain future.” Lipset, Political Man, 110.

54. William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), 24–25.

55. Quoted from Gravity’s Rainbow in Edward Mendelson, “In the Depths of the Digital Age,” The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2016.

56. Cf. Betsy Leondar-Wright, Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Though Leondar-Wright never uses the word “headstrong,” it is one of the themes of her study of how various traditions, including class cultures but also class trajectories, race/ethnicities, and movement traditions, affect how activists understand and frame issues in different ways—issues from whether to serve food or talk at meetings to whether to use direct action or formal petition. To be more effective, Leondar-Wright demonstrates, requires everybody to be open to other ways of seeing and doing—not to abandon your own way, but simply to allow that others’ ways may be legitimate and insightful too, which is what I mean by “less headstrong.”

57. Nancy MacLean wrote about this effort in “Bringing the Organizing Tradition Home: Campus-Labor-Community Partnerships for Regional Power,” in Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America, edited by Daniel Katz & Richard Greenwald (New York: The New Press, 2012).

1. Jennifer Artis’s conception is similar to what British researchers saw as the “concept of ‘enough’ ” among working-class parents and their daughters, an aspiration to simply have “enough materially and emotionally.” Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody, Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 47.

2. John Lennon, “Working Class Hero,” John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970).

3. See Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims, trans. Michael Lucey (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2013); Edouard Louis, The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

4. John Bodnar, “Immigration and Modernization: The Case of Slavic Peasants in Industrial America,” in American Working Class Culture, ed. Milton Cantor (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 334–38.

5. John Bodnar, “Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-Class Realism in Industrial America,” Journal of Social History 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 56.

6. John Bodnar, Workers’ World: Kinship, Community, and Protest in an Industrial Society, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982).

7. Nicole Stephens, Jessica Cameron, and Sarah Townsend, “Lower Social Class Does Not (Always) Mean Greater Interdependence: Women in Poverty Have Fewer Social Resources Than Working-Class Women,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 45, no. 7 (May 2014): 1061–73.

8. The exclusive focus on marriage rates, single parents, and absent fathers in Andrew Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), and Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), cannot capture what is going on in working-class extended families, where so much anecdotal information (including in memoirs mentioned throughout my notes as well as in my own observation and experience) recounts children being raised for a time by aunts and grandmothers and grandfathers—not to mention Elizabeth Warren’s famous Aunt Bee who moved in with her to help Warren mother her children when she first taught law school. See Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 20–23. The strength of the working-class family, traditionally and still now, is in its extension, and a middle-class focus exclusively on nuclear families systematically ignores this.

9. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). See also Michael Ignatieff’s early twenty-first-century investigations around the world as evidence of the connections between peasant culture and working-class realism in Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

10. Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree Penguin Books, 2014), 67.

11. Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Perseus Books, 2010).

12. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, and Nicholas Turner, “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility,” American Economic Review 104, no. 5 (2014): 141–47.

13. Chetty et al., “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity?”

14. Chetty et al., “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity?”

15. “America’s Elite: An Hereditary Meritocracy,” The Economist, January 22, 2015.

16. Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” Science 356, no. 6336 (2017): 398–406.

17. For example, Emmanuel Saez, “Income and Wealth Inequality: Evidence and Policy Implications,” Contemporary Economic Policy, January 35, no. 1 (2017): 7–25. For a more thoroughly prescriptive analysis, see Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York: Norton, 2019).

18. Chetty et al., “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity?”

19. See Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (New York: Penguin, 2019).

20. See Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), chap. 1.

21. Observing many different campaigns through the 1980s in a variety of industries, I found that most antishutdown campaigns did result in substantially better treatment in the closing, both by the companies and by local governments. In the long run that didn’t matter much, but it usually made the transition to joblessness less stark and ruinous in the short term. And fighting back almost always seemed to have some positive psychological benefits.

22. See Staughton Lynd, The Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown’s Steel Mill Closings (San Pedro: Singlejack Books, 1982); Dan Swinney and Jack Metzgar, “Expanding the Fight against Shutdowns,” in The Imperiled Economy: Through the Safety Net, 153–60 (New York: Union of Radical Political Economics, 1988).

23. See Daniel Nelson, Shifting Fortunes: The Rise and Decline of American Labor from the 1820s to the Present (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997); Steve Babson, The Unfinished Struggle: Turning Points in American Labor, 1877–Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

24. A telling example of this cross-class fertilization is that in the 1940s when only one of ten adults “had been to college” (not necessarily graduating), one of three CIO organizers and one of four AFL organizers had been. See Martin Trow, Twentieth-Century Higher Education: From Elite to Mass to Universal (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 234. On the other hand, key CIO strategists such as Bob Travis “never made it past the eighth grade.” Toni Gilpin, The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 90.

25. Franklin Folsom, Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of Collective Action of the Unemployed, 1808–1942 (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991), chaps. 18–36.

26. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, trans. and ed. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Books, 2008, first published in 1856), 174–175. For a full discussion of the evidence from the twentieth century that supports Tocqueville’s view, see chapter 1 in this volume.

27. The best comprehensive account of this period is still Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), esp. chaps. 10–12 for the relative speed of the upsurge when it came.

28. For the period of upsurge in the civil rights movement, see the first seven episodes of the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize (1987 and 1990), and the first two volumes of Taylor Branch’s trilogy Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), and Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1964–65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). As importantly, for the later period when the movement was consolidating its gains, see Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

1. Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Vintage Books 2005), 4.

2. See Barbara Jensen, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), esp. chaps. 4 and 5; Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), esp. chaps. 10 and 11.

3. See Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York: Norton, 2019). Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), brilliantly surveys the politics of what he calls “inequality regimes” around the world and makes a strong case for the necessity today of transnational political economic approaches. In the United States the politics may actually be simpler than that, because we lack so many elements of what is a standard social wage in Europe and elsewhere. Plus, as Piketty documents, in the United States as “the most inegalitarian country in the developed world after 1980,” our top income and wealth groups are accumulating such magnificent sums that taking even a small percentage of their money in fairer taxes could produce huge amounts of government revenue for redistribution (522).

4. Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree Penguin Books, 2014), 189.