'Slumming' as a Social Good

• Published in: In these times 2012, Vol.36 (9), p.36
• Main Author: Garb, Maggie
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Capitalism; Nonfiction; Pittenger, Mark; Poverty; Workers
• ISSN: 0160-5992

Class Unknown is also a tale of how "class" faded from the American vocabulary. The Progressive Era investigators saw class as a structural force that rendered some people poor and some rich. By mid-century, class had been replaced by "culture." And culture, though a seemingly benign explanation for social differences, quickly took on the characteristics of a biological condition, of something largely immutable. By the '50s and '60s, social critics wrote of a "culture of poverty," which was passed across generations and was, like a chronic illness, incurable. It wasn't until the late '50s and early '60s that a new generation of white investigators would go undercover, this time crossing racial divides. Amid the post-war civil rights movement and liberal calls for racial integration, a handful of white writers journeyed into Jim Crow black life. The most famous was John Howard Griffin, whose 1961 book Black Like Me offered a seminal - if deeply flawed - account of white America's struggle to address the so-called American dilemma. Griffin concluded that beneath the skin, there was little difference among "men"; no debilitating or inferior culture. Griffin's universalizing of human experience won laudatory reviews in the early '60s. More than a century later, it's not clear what impact [Walter Augustus Wyckoff] and his successors have had. His writings did not lift the poor out of poverty. His articles did not make J. P. Morgan sympathetic to labor. [Mark Pittenger]'s study, long on descriptions of the writers and critical analysis of their books, says little about how the undercover investigations affected American politics, society or the poor themselves. Which is too bad. Ultimately, Pittenger's book suffers from the ailments of most of the studies he analyzes: It says little about the deeper structures of American capitalism that have produced a growing population of desperately poor laboring people.