Class, Reading, and Regions in America
"The New National American Elite" by Michael Lind
A fairly long piece on class in America, which says a lot of interesting things, some of which I doubt. For one thing, towards the end there's a section on "woke speech" as "a ruling-class dialect" which I think is almost but by no means entirely true. (Look, I've spent the better part of a year overhearing technocrat meetings.) But the overarching argument about America's past of regional elites (northeastern, mid-Atlantic, southern, western, etc.) seemed on point. And then THIS fascinating nugget:
"Local patriciates tried to boost their own authors at the expense of those in other American regions. My maternal grandmother, a schoolteacher for part of her career, belonged to the minor Southern gentry. She saw to it that my brother and I were introduced to the literary canon as educated white Southerners of the early 20th century conceived of it: A British substrate, consisting of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, overlain by Southern writers like Sidney Lanier, whose “The Marshes of Glynn” introduced me to the wonders of verse. The equivalent New England literary canon ran directly from Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Scott and Tennyson to Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier and the other “Fireside Poets” (Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville only acquired their present status later, thanks to mid-20th-century academics)."
Now the regionalization of reading, especially in terms of school canon, is something I think is accurate. Today I imagine it would be somewhat mitigated by increasingly standardized class curricula as well as the replacement of bookshops by mega-chains/Amazon. (Although that I can speak less well to since the local bookshop where we had to go buy the handful of books we were expected to purchase was largely dominated by Dickens Village and Precious Moments tchotchkes rather than, you know, BOOKS.) But I do know the books that I had to read, in rural Georgia, were very different from those Scott had to read in Boulder Colorado: I got To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby while he got Bless Me, Ultima and Death Comes for the Archbishop. There's definitely more to untangle on this.
Probably the money-quote from the piece:
"When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?
The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family."
This was also interesting to read following a piece I'm reading for work, “Pushing Back From the Table: Fighting to Maintain My Voice as a Pre-tenure Minority Female in the White Academy” by Dr. Nicole Cooke, which keeps coming back to the questions of "Who belongs at the table (in white academia)?" and "Do I even want to be at this table (in white academia)?" (Some of y'all know that I've struggled in cycles with that last question.)
A fairly long piece on class in America, which says a lot of interesting things, some of which I doubt. For one thing, towards the end there's a section on "woke speech" as "a ruling-class dialect" which I think is almost but by no means entirely true. (Look, I've spent the better part of a year overhearing technocrat meetings.) But the overarching argument about America's past of regional elites (northeastern, mid-Atlantic, southern, western, etc.) seemed on point. And then THIS fascinating nugget:
"Local patriciates tried to boost their own authors at the expense of those in other American regions. My maternal grandmother, a schoolteacher for part of her career, belonged to the minor Southern gentry. She saw to it that my brother and I were introduced to the literary canon as educated white Southerners of the early 20th century conceived of it: A British substrate, consisting of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, overlain by Southern writers like Sidney Lanier, whose “The Marshes of Glynn” introduced me to the wonders of verse. The equivalent New England literary canon ran directly from Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Scott and Tennyson to Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier and the other “Fireside Poets” (Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville only acquired their present status later, thanks to mid-20th-century academics)."
Now the regionalization of reading, especially in terms of school canon, is something I think is accurate. Today I imagine it would be somewhat mitigated by increasingly standardized class curricula as well as the replacement of bookshops by mega-chains/Amazon. (Although that I can speak less well to since the local bookshop where we had to go buy the handful of books we were expected to purchase was largely dominated by Dickens Village and Precious Moments tchotchkes rather than, you know, BOOKS.) But I do know the books that I had to read, in rural Georgia, were very different from those Scott had to read in Boulder Colorado: I got To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby while he got Bless Me, Ultima and Death Comes for the Archbishop. There's definitely more to untangle on this.
Probably the money-quote from the piece:
"When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?
The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family."
This was also interesting to read following a piece I'm reading for work, “Pushing Back From the Table: Fighting to Maintain My Voice as a Pre-tenure Minority Female in the White Academy” by Dr. Nicole Cooke, which keeps coming back to the questions of "Who belongs at the table (in white academia)?" and "Do I even want to be at this table (in white academia)?" (Some of y'all know that I've struggled in cycles with that last question.)