Category Archives: American Conditions

Small Red House

5 Jun 2014 By in American Conditions Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Small red house, © 2014 Susan BarsyThe South Shore Line, an electric train that runs from South Bend Indiana into Chicago, runs through some of the most beautiful places along Lake Michigan as well as some of the poorest and dirtiest.  The simple beauty of the dunes, marshes, and woodlands that line the Lake alternates with a landscape that industry and humble labor of many sorts have shaped.

The train runs along the beautiful old Calumet Trail, a prairie path that has existed since Indian times, following the curve of the Lake across boundaries separating town from country, blurring the distinctions of ownership and governing.  All of northern Indiana and Chicago’s southern hinterland are seamlessly joined.  On both sides of the train flow thousands of properties—neat and messy, beautiful and ugly, thriving and moldering—suggesting every condition of American society.

It’s a hard train ride because so many neighborhoods are decrepit and decaying.  So many places—and people—are just scraping by.  Our America is not a spotless picture-perfect place.  Off the political grid are thousands of people subsisting in garbage-strewn trailer parks, or living in ramshackle housing with windows missing.  They are exiles from the land of opportunity.  Embarrassing aberrations with no place in the progressive narrative of the world’s greatest nation, they are geniuses of survival, disciples of the art of making something out of nothing.  With luck, every day is the same, where social isolation limns the horizon.

Is this the nation our forebears intended us to become?

American Hunger Means A Feast for Some

18 Apr 2014 By in American Conditions Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

The empty feastStuck in a cab heading north last time President Obama was in town, I had an opportunity to listen to NPR, a station preferred by many cabdrivers.  It was five p.m. and traffic was at a standstill, so I was able to catch most of ‘Marketplace.’  One of the features was about food-stamp assistance and the many thousands of American workers who don’t have enough to feed their families.

One of the persons interviewed was a Walmart employee, who recalled a painful period recently, when she and her family had had to rely on food stamps, even though she was working full-time.  Her voice kept breaking as she talked.  Embarrassed by her hardship, she was fighting back tears.  To me, her experience was extremely shocking, illustrating how Walmart, one of America’s largest, most profitable corporations, is essentially gaming our federal-assistance programs.  Its lowest-wage workers manage to keep going only by using food-stamps to feed their families.  What’s more, when underpaid workers and others receive food-stamps, they often spend them at Walmart and other discount retailers.

An April 15 article appearing in Forbes magazine reports that “Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion in Federal Assistance.”   The article is based on findings of a new study by Americans for Tax Fairness, which estimates that a single Walmart supercenter costs US taxpayers as much as $900,000 and $1.75 million annually, because Walmart pays its employees so poorly that, to meet their needs, many end up relying on food stamps, Medicaid, and low-income housing.

Similar reports released last fall showed that American taxpayers also foot nearly $7 billion of the annual labor costs at McDonald’s and other leading fast-food companies.

Meanwhile, Walmart is thought to be the single biggest corporate beneficiary of food-stamp spending.  The Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal reported last year that the retailer received as much as 18 percent of all the food-stamp dollars spent.  That amounts to $14 billion annually.   Walmart’s total profits were $17 billion in 2013.

Millions of Americans experience “food insecurity”—meaning they do not know where their next meal is coming from.  An astonishing 1 in 7 Americans (47 million people) rely on food-stamps these days.  Even that figure doesn’t represent the number of Americans who are hungry.  Many elderly people who qualify for food stamps refuse to sign up for them because of their pride, according to Eli Saslow, whose reporting on American hunger for the Washington Post has just won the Pulitzer Prize.

I urge you to read or listen to Krissy Clark’s eye-opening 3-part series, “The Secret Life of a Food Stamp,”

Part 1: ‘The Secret Life of a Food Stamp’
Part 2: ‘Save Money, Live Better.’
Part 3: ‘Hungry for Savings’

Only a combination of social pressure, individual choice, and political action can ensure more Americans a taste of the American feast.

Click on the red links for more information about this important issue.

The Greening of American Workers

10 May 2013 By in Work and workers Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

FSA photo of Illinois railroad worker William London, 1942 (Courtesy Library of Congress via the Commons on Flickr)

Industrial America has ever been one of environmentalism’s staunchest enemies.  Efforts to set higher standards for food and drug safety, for purer air and water, and for cleaner and less toxic methods in agriculture, manufacturing, and the extractive industries must all contend with this constant drag.  The pollution and spoliation of our environment and the globe’s finite resources is ongoing.  One wonders what lever might be applied, in addition to the tired ones of law and conscience.

Looking at this picture suggests another form of pressure, namely, the green convictions of a younger generation of American workers.  Many children of factory workers, for instance, now refuse to consider careers in manufacturing, for the simple reason that they see it as dangerous and dirty.  And when we look at many of the ugly industrial regions on the country, with their belching smokestacks and their tankers of waste, we can easily see why they disapprove.

I wonder whether in time the greening of America’s young people might have a powerful effect in getting American industry to clean up, too.  The US economy will wither if its productive enterprises can no longer claim the loyalty and commitment of its most talented and discerning youth.

Image from this source.

The Era of the Dynamite Girl

18 Apr 2013 By in American Conditions Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Aftermath of bombing at the Chicago Federal Courthouse, 1918 (Courtesy of the National Archives via Flickr Commons)

The years after the end of WWI were turbulent ones in the United States.  A slump came with peace, as wartime demand for American agricultural and industrial output weakened, diminishing American opportunities.  The Russian Revolution of 1917, and the radical political ferment that contributed to it, had a profound effect on political activism in the States, as workers and intellectuals explored whether communist or socialist doctrines could be used to revolutionize a capitalist system that was generating unacceptably high levels of inequality and suffering.  The anarchist sentiment that had triggered the outbreak of WWI had never vanished, and it combined with other domestic conditions, including historically high rates of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, to make the years before 1920 ones of conflict and unease.

The threat of domestic violence, and the fear of such threats, was felt in many parts of the country.  These were the years of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare, as well as a deadly race riot in Chicago and the dubious prosecution and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in New England.

In Chicago, the year 1918 got underway with the arrest of a nineteen-year-old Italian-born radical named Gabriella Antolini, who was found carrying a satchel full of dynamite (36 pounds) along with a loaded pistol through Union Station.  The press immediately dubbed her ‘the Dynamite Girl.’  A professed follower of anarchist Luigi Galeani, Antolini served eighteen months in prison.  She was a sympathizer of the IWW, the radical labor union headed by Big Bill Haywood and headquartered in the city.  That summer, Chicago tried to stay steady amid a series of bombings and attempted bombings, typically connected with labor disputes, and some seemingly involving IWW members, known as Wobblies.

On September 4, 1918, a bomb exploded in the north lobby of Chicago’s Federal Building, killing four people.  According to later accounts, a man in a tan raincoat had been seen pacing around the building around 3:00pm with a cigar box with a string dangling from one side of it under his arm.  He was seen to drop the cigar box and kick it under a radiator near the Adams Street entrance before hurrying away.  According to Sean Deveney, writing on his website The Original Curse, the explosion was so powerful that it ripped open the Federal Building and threw from their seats employees at work inside the neighboring Marquette and Edison Buildings.  The buildings’ windows were shattered, shards of glass raining onto the streets.  Although many suspected a connection to the recently concluded trial and conviction of some 100 IWW officials, the perpetrator of the crime was never found.

Image: The wreckage of Chicago’s Federal Building, 1918, from this source.

How Much Do We Need?

6 Aug 2012 By in American Conditions Tags: , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

House and fruit stand in Houston, 1943 (Courtesy Library of Congress via the Commons on Flickr)

During the Great Depression, in the 1930s and early 40s, the federal government sent photographers out all over the country to document the condition of the people (and to keep a few more photographers employed).  The effort produced some of the most famous images in American photography, as well as scads of seldom-seen photographs, like this one, now available online.

The pictures capture America at a time when the modern consumer society was just beginning.  Americans drank Pepsi and Coke, bought things on credit, and wore factory-made clothes.  In many parts of the country, though, many Americans still used horses, made what they wore by hand, grew their own food, and did without refrigerators or washing machines.  The “March of Progress” hadn’t yet made it to their neighborhoods, and perhaps some were not all that eager to see it arrive.

Life was tough, but the relative simplicity of Americans’ material conditions brought clarity.  It was easy to see the relation between work and the standard of living people enjoyed.  Then, as now, many Americans lived in a precarious state or in out-and-out poverty.  Society was less knit together in a corporate economy, so the solitude of failure was a specter individuals lived with daily.  The wedge between the hard work of getting and the easy work of spending was already there, but there were far fewer goods to buy.

A tension had already developed, between the industrial output of the US and the capacity of individual citizens to consume all of what the nation made.  As early as the 1890s, the government and corporations began pushing to develop markets for our products overseas, producing the kind of globalism that prevails today.  No one has ever figured out what to do when the goods in the world exceed what the human population wants or needs.

Today, in a time of high long-term unemployment, commentators fret about “low consumer confidence.”  We’re told this is the reason American corporations are reluctant to hire.  Yet it’s perverse to hope that Americans will spend when they are in debt, unemployed, and impoverished.  It’s amazing how much more “confident” a consumer feels when he or she has a paycheck or a real wad of money.

Corporations and banks show their contempt by sitting on hordes of cash rather than making it a priority to hire American workers, which would ease our collective difficulties.  Meanwhile, we have lost sight of economic independence as an important goal of a free people.  In the midst of this antagonism, we need to keep asking, how much do we need?

Top image: House and fruit stand in Houston, photographed by John Vachon, 1943,
from this source.