Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left
(1969)
[119] the civil rights movement, in its Southern phase, rested on the indigenous Negro subculture which has grown up since the Civil War under the peculiar conditions of Southern segregation—a culture separate and unequal...
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but semiautonomous and therefore capable of giving its own distinctive character to the movement for legal and political equality.
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[121] The one thing that emerges clearly from Herskovits's work is that whether one is talking about Latin America or about the United States, African survivals are easier to trace in areas like music and religion than in language, politics, social organization, and family life, where they seem almost nonexistent.
Unfortunately the whole question of African survivals
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has now become involved in the politics of cultural nationalism, and it is hard to argue against Herskovits without being accused of wishing to subvert the cultural identity of black people. Herskovits himself explicitly acknowledged a desire "to give the Negro an appreciation of his past" and "to endow him with the confidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have." The same purpose animates many of his present admirers. It is no service to black nationalism, however, to pretend that it grows out of an African heritage; nor is it even necessary to the argument that Negro culture in America ought to be preserved. If the defense of that culture rested only on appeals to the African past, it would not be worth defending.
[124] Some of [Oscar] Lewis's critics...argue that the concept of the culture of poverty implies a "value judgment" and a "cultural smugness" resting on ignorance of the accomplishments of this type of culture, especially of black culture. Thus Todd Gitlin, a spokesman of the New Left, advises those who write about the ghetto to "listen to Otis Redding, B.B. King, the Impressions, etc. etc." and to...
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read Charles Keil's Urban Blues, which he says shows "the richness of ghetto culture."
These remarks betray a very common misunderstanding of the culture of poverty and of the concept of culture itself. Oscar Lewis is not making a "value judgment" when he says that the culture of poverty is a "thin culture." This statement has nothing in common with the cliché that Negroes are "culturally deprived"—the standard view to which Gitlin rightly objects, but which he confuses with Lewis's view. When teachers in ghetto schools say that black children are "deprived," "disadvantaged," and "unteachable," they do show a "cultural smugness" which makes them unable to talk to the children or to listen to what the children are saying. The schoolmarm's view of "culture" assumes that poems, for instance, should conform to certain rigid standards of grammar, meter, and sentiment. Thus a poem about "The Junkies," as Herbert Kohl notes, is dismissed as "the ramblings of a disturbed girl," whereas the same teacher praises "Shop with Mom" for its "pleasant and healthy thought." Similarly with music: some people can't hear jazz, blues, gospel, or "soul" because it doesn't live up to their arbitrary expectations of what "good music" should sound like.
These are "value judgments" with a vengeance. But Lewis is trying to understand the culutre of poverty, not in the narrow sense of the term culture but as a design for living. (Gitlin confuses the two meanings of "culture." And what Lewis discovered in the Puerto Rican ghetto applies—urban blues notwithstanding—to the black ghetto as well: "The low aspiration level helps to reduce frustration,
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[and] the legitamization of short-range hedonism makes possible spontaneity of enjoyment," but "there is a great deal of pathos, suffering and emptiness among those who live in the culture of poverty." To cite a book on the urban blues in refutation of these conclusions misses the point. The question is not whether Negro music provides a "rich" record of suffering, the question is whether the ghetto subculture gives much support to its members. It is precisely because the chief characteristics of the ghetto culture are despair and self-hatred that black nationalism has arisen as a radical cultural therapy for the ghetto.
The contrast between the comparative vitality of Negro culture in the South and the poverty of the culture of poverty explains why nationalist sects like the Nation of Islam, which have never made much headway in the South, find the Northern ghetto a fertile soil; while the civil rights movement, on the other hand, has become progressively weaker as the focus of the Negros' struggle shifts from the South to the North. The civil rights movement does not address itself to the question of how Negroes are to acquire a culture, or to the consequences of their failure to do so. It addresses itself to legal inequalities. Insofar as it implies a cultural program of any kind, the civil rights strategy proposes to integrate Negroes into the culture that already surrounds them.
Now the real objection to this is not the one so often
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given by the advocates of black power—that black people have nothing to gain from integrating into a culture dominated by materialistic values. Since most black people have already absorbed those values, this is a frivolous argument—especially so since it seems to imply that there is something virtuous and ennobling about poverty. What the assimilationist argument does overlook is that the civil rights movement owes its existence, in part, to the rise of a Negro subculture in the South, and that the absence of a comparable culture in the ghetto changes the whole character of the race problem in the North. American history seems to show that a group cannot achieve "integration"—that is, equality—without first developing institutions which express and create a sense of its own distinctiveness. That is why black nationalism, which attempts to fill the cultural vacuum of the ghetto, has had a continuing attraction for Negroes, and why, even during the period of its eclipse in the thirties, forties, and fifties, nationalism won converts among the most despised and degraded elements of the Negro community in spite of the low repute in which it was held by Negro leaders.
[134] Black power proposes, or seems to propose, that Negroes do for themselves what other ethnic groups, faced with somewhat similar conditions, have done—advance themselves not as individuals but as groups conscious of their own special interests and identity. A comparison with other ethnic minorities in American history—the Irish, for example—is instructive. When the Irish first came to Boston, they were "the lowest of the low, lower than the Germans or Scandinavians or Jews, or even the Negroes, who had come earlier and edged a bit up the economic ladder. Irishmen were lucky if they could find part-time work on the dock or in the ditch; Irish girls hoped at best to get work as maids in hotels or in big houses on Beacon Hill. . . . The people from Ireland were a proletariat without machineAs cogent and suggestive as the ensuing passage is, this basis for elevating a single high-profile example to the status of representativeness is quite flimsy! No particular event ought to most nearly fit any given thesis!
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skills or capital. Their sections of Boston were the land of the shanty Irish." [Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile] ...the Irish were also the target of vicious ethnic stereotypes. ... Moreover, the Irish were papists and hence presumably loyal to a foreign power. Nor did they speak good English.
In the face of these disadvantages, how did the Irish escape from their shanty-town ghettos? The myth is: by individual initiative, which demonstrated ability, they overcame barriers to advancement through the usual avenues of social mobility, which eventually led to their assimilation. These commonly held assumptions about the nature of American mobility can easily be tested against a familiar case, that of the Kennedy family, which of all examples ought most nearly fit the myth of America as a society open to individual initiative.
The career of Joseph Kennedy, founder of the present dynasty, does conform in many ways to the class entrepreneurial pattern. What is instructive about Kennedy, however, is that even by the 1920s entrepreneurial opportunities existed only on the fringes of American capitalism. By that time the normal avenue of business advancement lay in the corporate bureaucracies—and these, it is important to realize, had become increasingly the last refuge of the old American elite. As one historian has noted: "Once it became clear that political control of the
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big cities would inevitably pass into the hands of the immigrant groups, Big Business came to be regarded as a new preserve of the older Americans, where their status and influence could continue to flourish." The result was that "the social patterns established within Big Business bureaucracies at the turn of the century helped to close off key areas of the economy and to keep them virtually impenetrable to even the most gifted outsiders. For one without the background, etiquette, and personal appearance to 'fit in,' and without sponsors to smooth his way, a career in one of the major corporations would be more like scaling a high wall than climbing a ladder." [Rischin, The American Gospel of Success (1965)] The corporate bureaucracies readily adapted themselves to the purposes of ethnic exclusiveness because success in the bureaucratic career, by its very nature, depends on the accumulation of educational advantages, on family connections, and on other signs of social status. A study of 185 business leaders between 1901 and 1910 shows that while fourteen per cent had either founded or bought the business in which they now occupied the top positions, twenty-seven percent inherited their positions, while all the rest "climbed the bureaucratic ladder, not infrequently, of course, after their family status, education, and other social endowments helped them get the proper start." [Miller, Men in Business (1952)]
Endowed with several advantages at the start of his career, notably a Harvard degree and marriage into the powerful Fitzgerald family, Joseph Kennedy was president of a
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small bank in Boston by the time he was twenty-five. "But many a Yankee banker still could not wholly accept Joe Kennedy. It was alright for Irishmen to run little East Boston banks and handle immigrants' remittances, they felt, but not to crash the central citadels of finance. So Kennedy, disgusted, began to operate more and more in New York and Hollywood." [Burns] His successful speculations on the West Coast, followed by even more spectacular operations on Wall Street in the early twenties, testified to Kennedy's financial genius but also to the degree to which the normal bureaucratic career was closed off to ethnic minorities. It is highly misleading to think that in American history those minorities have escaped poverty through the dominant institutions of the surrounding culture. On the contrary, they have succeeded in marginal institutions, a fact that incidentally reveals one dimension of the present race problem—the decline of entrepreneurial capitalism in a mature industrial economy.
Entrepreneurial opportunities, however, are only part of the story, even in the case of earlier minorities. Those opportunities could not have been exploited if groups like the Irish had not already achieved a strong sense of ethnic solidarity. In the case of the Kennedy family, it is important to note that Joseph Kennedy's career rested solidly on the achievement of the previous generation. Both his own fa-
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ther, Patick J. Kennedy, and his father-in-law, John F. Fitzgerald, had already "advanced far up into the ranks of middle-class respectability" by selling things to other Irishmen (liquor, for instance) and by capturing their votes, "thus stor[ing] up influence to trade in the political arena." Both saloon-keeping and machine politics represented a form of collective self-help in the Irish ghetto; they depended on a sense of Irish solidarity. In effect, the Irish created their own institutions parallel to the official institutions of American society: the saloon, the Irish-American church, above all the political machine. "Unable to participate in the normal associational affairs of the community," Oscar Handlin writes, "the Irish felt obligated to erect a society within a society, to act together in their own way. In every contact therefore the group . . . became intensely aware of its peculiar and exclusive identity." The Irish did not advance as individuals, they advanced as a group, drastically altering the structure of urban politics in the process. Nor did they lose their ethnic character through assimilation into American life; politicians recognize this when they cater to the "Irish vote." As Harold Cruse observes, "Every four years the great fiction of the assimilated American (white and/or Protestant) ideal is put aside to deal with the pluralistic reality of the hyphenated-American vote." The rest of the time this reality is swallowed up in the rhetoric of opportunity and individualism.
The assertion that "the individual in America has few
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rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another" is borne out not only in the case of the Irish but even more clearly in the case of the Jews. Like the Irish, the Jews escaped extreme poverty through the labor movement or through marginal businesses or professions serving a largely Jewish clientele. To a degree that is seldom recognized, Jewish life in America is self-contained. According to a recent study of Jews in a midwestern city, the Jews after three generations still live in "separate but equal" communities "that endure in spite of all sociological predictions to the contrary." [Kramer and Levantman, Children of the Gilded Ghetto (1961)] Even Jews who have achieved wealth and status...are "understandably reluctant to sever their remaining ties... The community, and their special relation to it, is, after all, the precondition of their status."
In spite of the decline of overt anti-Semitism, the Jews in this city (Minneapolis?) and elsewhere—except for those in the intellectual community, which is exempt from these generalizations—still live in their own separate and self-sufficient community. They derive important advantages from separation of which Jewish businessmen, for example, are well aware.
"In a period of growing oligopoly, Jewish businesses have survived in the shelter of ethnic segregation. Because Jews are excluded from the dominant business community,
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they are beyond the reach of its informal sanctions. They are 'outsiders,' marginal retail traders, who have no reason to be susceptible to the opinion of gentile colleagues who do not accept them in any case."
Thus Jewish businessmen continue to prefer a flexible price system to fixed prices, thereby performing "considerable economic service as middlemen for inflation-conscious consumers and overstocked manufacturers, at the cost, however, of their social honor in the larger business community." Similarly Jewish doctors serve Jewish patients, Jewish lawyers predominantly Jewish clients. "Exploiting their marginality for their own advantage has been the one means of economic survival consistently available to Jews." One of the marginal opportunities open to Jewish entrepreneurs, it should be added, is the black ghetto. Thus in spite of their services to the civil rights movement, Jews now find themselves singled out as special objects of the wrath of black militants. "It is now widely accepted as an incontrovertible fact that . . . there exists a pronounced anti-Jewish sentiment among the Negro masses in this country."
The history of American ethnic-group pluralism does not support the integrationist assumption that individual initiative has been the traditional mechanism of social mobility. Those who urge Negroes to advance themselves through the "regular" channels of personal mobility ignore the experience of earlier minorities, the relevance of which is obscured both by the tendency to view the history of immigration as a triumph of assimilation and by the individualist
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premises which persistently blind Americans to the importance of collective phenomena and therefore to most of history.
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[141, footnote] Recent studies do not seem to bear out [the] assertion that "immigrants made sacrifices of present consumption to capitalize their children." One of the interesting conclusions to emerge from Stefan Thernstrom's study of Irish Workers...is that the Irish often achieved "property mobility" at the expense of their children, or at least the expense of "the forms of mobility which required education."
