Donald Trump has now revealed when he thinks our golden age was -- during the Gilded Age. William McKinley is his ideal President, mostly because he charged high protective tariffs.* That makes sense from an economic royalist perspective, but Vance is no economic royalist. Vance is a champion of the working class, and the Gilded Age was most definitely not a golden age for the industrial working class.
The Gilded Age was the time of The Jungle, of brutal work hours and frequent industrial accidents with no workers' compensation. It was also a time of a chaotic business cycle, with alternating bouts of inflation and deflation, and of widespread, violent industrial strife, particularly during economic down turns, and the National Guard being called out to suppress strikes. It should also be noted that at the time the industrial working class, far from being seen as the most quintessentially American of all Americans, were regarded as suspect -- immigrants whose first language was not English, associated with radical anarchists and socialists or, at best, corrupt political machines. Identity politics were rampant at the time, with each ethnic group of immigrants sticking together in its own separate neighborhood, voting for its own candidates, and not trusting outsiders.
The Progressive Era brought in some workplace safety laws, limitations on hours, and Workers Compensation laws. But it was the Great Depression, the New Deal, and mass diversion of manufacturing to military use during WWII that brought about national recognition of unions and the right to strike, the National Labor Relations Board, and good-paying manufacturing jobs. In short, the golden age of good-paying manufacturing jobs was the 1950's.
Many people have pointed out that people in the 1950's were less wealthy in absolute terms than today. One of the reasons people could afford to buy a house right out of high school was that houses were smaller then, even though families were larger. Many appliances were bough separately instead of coming with the house. A single car was the general rule, at least at the outset -- a two-car garage was a clear status marker. But I don't think the MAGA working class crowd would find that concerning. If absolute wealth has gone up, they may say, why can't we afford a larger house now on a blue collar wage.
But there were serpents in the garden even in the 1950's. For one thing most men in the 1950's did not actually work in manufacturing. The number runs to about 30-32% of the workforce. Similarly, only about a third of the workforce belonged to a union even at their height. Nor were women quite so uniformly full-time housewives as nostalgia would have it. About a third worked outside the home, albeit at lower wages than men. Though factory jobs paid well, they were not appealing in most other regards -- extremely regimented and prone to repetitive-stress injuries. And then there was the matter of race. Immigration was mostly restricted to northern and western Europe, so the ethnic strife of the past largely faded. But there were plenty of Black people who were long-term residents of the United States and were largely excluded from the general prosperity -- not only in the segregated South, but in the North the good-paying jobs were generally White-only. And let us not forget that the GI bill led to an ever-growing expansion in the college-educated population, turning college from the preserve of a small elite to something available to the broader public. Presumably Vance and his cohorts would see this a a bad thing.
It should also be noted that the 1950's were the beginning of the liberal international order that Vance so despises. The Cold War drove our foreign policy, and the US founded the NATO alliance, and well as other anti-Communist alliances. We also worked to reduce trade barriers, believing that protectionism greatly contributed to the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Even much of our domestic policy -- encouraging unions and good blue collar jobs, and support for Civil Rights -- was driven by the Cold War and the perceived need to maintain our moral authority against the Communists.
And, just for what it is worth, popular culture of the day did not valorize manufacturing work the way so many people do today. Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best all featured white collar families. Art imitated life in I Love Lucy -- Ricky was a night club performer. The Honeymooners was an exception, a show about a blue collar family, but a bus driver, not a factory worker. Blue collar characters became more prevalent in the 1960's and 70's, but still one has Fred Flintstone (crane operator), Archie Bunker (retired dock worker and taxi driver) and a whole spate of movies with truck drivers for heroes. The same may be said for the 1980's and 90's, featuring Dan Conner (drywall contractor) and Al Bundy (shoe salesman).
Manufacturing jobs began taking on a certain political glamour when they started being automated away or going overseas. But they never employed more than a minority of the workforce even at their height, and were never all that appealing, except in retrospect.
__________________________________________
*During Trump's first term his favorite President was Andrew Jackson. Jackson is a controversial figure, seen by admirers as the first true People's President and the transition of the US from aristocratic republic to true democracy and associated by detractors with the Trail of Tears, the spoils system, and a depression caused by his veto of the national bank. But no on disputes that Jackson was a highly consequential figure. McKinley is a strict mediocrity, noted mostly for being assassinated and making way for Teddy Roosevelt.
No comments:
Post a Comment