Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present

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CLASS UNKNOWN

CULTURE, LABOR, HISTORY SERIES

General Editors: Daniel Bender and Kimberley L. Phillips

The Forests Gave Way before Them: The Impact of African

Workers on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850

Frederick C. Knight

Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work

and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present

Mark Pittenger

Class Unknown

Undercover Investigations of American Work

and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present

Mark Pittenger

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

© 2012 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pittenger, Mark.

Class unknown : undercover investigations of American work and poverty from the progressive era to the present / Mark Pittenger.

p. cm. — (Culture, labor, history series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8147-6740-5 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8147-6741-2 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN

978-0-8147-2429-3 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-8147-2430-9 (ebook)

1. Social classes in mass media. 2. Social classes in mass media. 3. Investigative reporting—United States—History—20th century. 4. Social classes—United States—History—20th century. 5. Working class—United States—History—20th century. 6. Poverty—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

HN90.S6P58 2012

305.50973—dc23         2012008071

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials

to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Rachel and Benjamin

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE: CONSTRUCTING THE UNDERCLASS IN PROGRESSIVE AMERICA, 1890–1920

1.  Writing Class in a World of Difference

PART II. BETWEEN THE WARS, 1920–1941

2.  Vagabondage and Efficiency: The 1920s

3.  Finding Facts: The Great Depression, from the Bottom Up

PART III. THE DECLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS, 1941–1961

4.  War and Peace, Class and Culture

5.  Crossing New Lines: From Gentleman’s Agreement to Black Like Me

PART IV. CONCLUSION

6.  Finding the Line in Postmodern America, 1960-2010

Notes

Index

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the house where I grew up in postwar suburban Indianapolis, books served as doorways into other worlds. This book was born in that house’s sunwashed living room, a welcoming sanctuary of words, ideas, and images that introduced me to other places and people—people who were not like us. One could find there, somewhere above the row with Kidnapped, The Double Helix, and the old hardbacked Oz books, and across the mantle from the shelves that held Shakespeare and Richard Halliburton’s globe-trotting Seven-League Boots, a thin paperback by John Howard Griffin called Black Like Me. On the day I pulled Griffin’s book from the shelf, the gestation of this work began. Here was a book about a man who changed his racial identity in an effort to learn what it meant to be oppressed and despised as a black man in the United States of the late 1950s. I learned in that living room that books opened out not only into long-gone and imaginary worlds, but also into the one that we were all coming to inhabit in the twentieth century’s second half. As for so much else, I have my parents—Suzanne Masters Pittenger and the late Robert C. Pittenger—to thank for that.

I haven’t literally been writing the book from that day to this, although it probably feels that way to some of the patient people around me. Patience and considerable help from others carried me through, and my thanks go out to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and, at the University of Colorado, the Council on Research and Creative Work and the Eugene M. Kayden Research Committee, all of whom provided time and material support for research and writing. The Interlibrary Loan team at the University of Colorado’s Norlin Library was unfailingly efficient and helpful in large and small ways, and I received excellent research assistance from Jennifer Hammond, Colin Church, and Rachel Pittenger, all of whom brought not only energy and skill but ideas and judgment to their work. As the project developed, I benefited from a barrage of suggestions, criticisms, leads, and encouragement, for which I thank Peter Boag, Jim Bright, Lee Chambers, Constance Areson Clark, George Cotkin, the late Jim Denton, the late Nora Faires, Bob Ferry, Leon Fink, Toby Higbie, David Hollinger, Dan Horowitz, Padraic Kenney, Eric Love, David Papke, Eric Rauchway, Dorothy Ross, Kristine Stillwell, and David Wrobel. My colleagues in the CU History Department made a lively and discerning audience for one of the first papers that I presented on this topic. They also generously rallied to render aid during a time of personal difficulty—for which I especially thank Susan Kent and members of the department in the late 1990s—and have continued to provide an ideal academic home. I am grateful for the intellectual stimulation and sustenance that I received from Erika Doss, Martha Gimenez, Julie Greene, Rickie Solinger, and the many other members who passed through CU’s American Studies reading group. Stan Thurston and the late Marion Thurston were always warm and reliable sources of support. And, as readers of this book will know, there is nothing academic about the friendships we forge in the academy: to Fred Anderson, Virginia Anderson, Bob Hanna, and Martha Hanna, my thanks for our years of abundant food and drink, camaraderie, and intellectual work and play, as our families have grown up together while our working lives advanced.

Parts of the first three chapters have been published previously, and I am grateful for permission to make use of material from A World of Difference: Constructing the ‘Underclass’ in Progressive America, American Quarterly 49 (March 1997): 26–65; and What’s on the Worker’s Mind: Class Passing and the Study of the Industrial Workplace in the 1920s, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 39 (Spring 2003): 143–161. I also appreciate the suggestions and guidance of editors Lucy Maddox and Raymond E. Fancher, respectively, and the perspectives offered by readers for those journals, all of which helped me to sharpen my arguments and exposition. Thanks to Dan Bender and Kim Phillips, who believed in this book and moved it along the path toward publication in NYU Press’s Culture, Labor, History series; to Salwa C. Jabado, Gabrielle Begue, and Constance Grady who answered questions and kept the process moving; and to Deborah Gershenowitz, my editor at the press, who saw to it, with great patience and consummate professionalism, that the job got done.

Books would be written faster if historians didn’t have families, but life, as well as departmental social functions, would be less rich and interesting. This book is dedicated to my children, Rachel and Benjamin, who helped it along by regularly demanding to know how I was progressing on the dedication. They probably did not expect to grow up with the book, but so they have, and magnificently. I hope it proves worthy of them. But without Sharon, so much would have been missing—including them. Although the words for better or for worse did not appear in our homemade wedding ceremony, they might as well have. Thanks to Sharon, for everything, again.

INTRODUCTION

In 1902, Bessie and Marie Van Vorst—sisters-in-law, writers, and avowed gentlewomen—changed their clothes and took up factory work, promising to reveal to readers the world of the unknown class, for whom they intended to serve as a mouthpiece in the struggle to inaugurate a more just and egalitarian society. In undertaking this project, they joined an American tradition of undercover investigation that had begun to take shape in the late Gilded Age, flourished from the Progressive Era through the 1930s, shifted in focus and method during the postwar decades, and persists to the present, constituting a distinctive ongoing commentary on the development of class society in the age of industrial capitalism. The Van Vorsts shared a conviction with other journalists, social scientists, novelists, and intellectuals who went down and out, to use the term later coined by George Orwell: The only way to understand life across the class line was to live it. Over more than a century, a mass of such investigators fanned out through American steel mills, coal mines, construction sites, hotels, department stores, paper-box factories, taxi-dance halls, restaurants, hobo jungles, hop fields, and lumber camps. They hoped to learn what it meant to work hard and to be poor. They wanted to know what it meant not to be—and perhaps by extension, what it did mean to be—middle class. Most writers shared with the Van Vorsts a suspicion of grand theory, favoring instead a homespun epistemology of experience. Their books and articles characteristically foregrounded two perspectives: a sometimes shrewd critique of the official knowledge obtainable from self-interested employers, sentimental philanthropists, and abstractly minded economists; and an often naïve and condescending conviction that, through class masquerade, they might discover and adopt their subjects’ viewpoint, and thereby contribute to resolving the social problem.¹ For most, going undercover was both an empirical task and an existential dare—a mission, and an adventure. This book tells their story.

The Van Vorsts’ coinage of the unknown class implies two things about the undercover tradition. First, these investigators went beyond tourism or slumming to immerse themselves in what the restaurant investigator Frances Donovan called a new world replete with life, new and strange: a world of difference. In that world, they worked and lived among people who shared traits and practices (later sometimes called cultures) that were strikingly different from their own. Their task as writers became especially to represent difference, if also to seek commonalities that might foster cross-class solidarity. In describing from the inside how the other half lived, they often revealed why and how they believed class differences had arisen, and to what extent they seemed fixed and permanent.² Second, unknown class implied how class, as a category applicable to U.S society, remained vague and troublesome to investigators and to their audiences.³ When most down-and-outers described the working-class other, they tended to emphasize appearance, behavior, language, and social practices, while paying less attention to the structural factors and power relations that produced harsh working conditions, unemployment, and poverty. Many echoed the American narrative of social mobility, fluidity, and classlessness; indeed, their stories of class switching suggested such fluidity, as could their well-meaning efforts to make the poor seem less alien than their readers might expect.

This is a multigenerational story, but not one in which the same gestures were endlessly repeated. Writers’ perspectives on class, labor, and working-class people shifted in concert with particular historical contexts, as will be evident in the chapters that follow. I will track the tradition from its Progressive Era origins and proliferation (chapter 1) through a sequence of distinctive stages: into a New Era of postwar labor militancy and 1920s industrial psychology, personnel management, and romantic vagabondage (chapter 2); through numbing defeats and redemptive struggles in the wastelands of the Great Depression (chapter 3); across wartime renegotiations of gender and national identity in a reborn industrial economy, and onward to celebrations of postwar affluence that merged with Cold War fears of communism to cast class into the shadows (chapter 4). The story’s contours and key themes change markedly in the later 1940s and 1950s, with the increasing prominence accorded to race in social thought and public discourse during the rise of the civil rights movement (chapter 5). John Howard Griffin’s undercover classic Black Like Me (1961) serves as a marker for those shifts, and it signifies a turning point in the nature of the tradition and its discourses.⁴ The final chapter briefly charts the undercover tradition’s persistence in postmodern America, when the very definitions of borders and identities underwent seemingly constant reconsideration.

My goals are twofold. First, I will reconstruct the story of a little-known mode of producing social knowledge that proved influential in both popular and academic realms. By social knowledge, I mean not what Americans today would acknowledge as verifiable truth statements, but I refer to ideas and images that earlier historical actors took to be accurate when explaining their society. Bearing an authority that seemed undeniable, undercover investigators worked to establish knowledge about the unknown class in a nation that largely denied the very relevance of class to its historical experience. These investigative accounts tell us much about how earlier Americans thought about work, poverty, and class, and about how modern understandings of those categories were created. I will also consider how class passers’ personal, professional, gender, and class identities were at stake in this enterprise. Because their truth-telling method relied on sustained deception and masquerade, their stories illuminate how less-flexible Victorian understandings of identity gave way to modernist conceptions of malleable selfhood. In attempting to do this story justice, I will range beyond conventional nonfiction print sources to interweave discussions of short stories, novels, plays, and movies that drew from and commented on the undercover tradition.

Second, I wish to demonstrate the role of cross-class passing in the genesis and development of something much larger: the common view of the poor that was once associated with terms such as dangerous classes, and more recently with debates about a culture of poverty and an underclass.⁵ Labels in this lineage have typically connoted a social stratum whose members’ values and practices are believed to be entirely separate from those of people in mainstream society, and whose undesirable traits appear to result from a vague congeries of environmental and hereditary influences. Because undercover investigators claimed a unique authority to speak of and for the poor, and because they often portrayed their subjects as beings of a radically different order, we must ask about their contribution to this genealogy. How did such essentialist representations comport with the emphasis on environmental causation that was supposedly ascendant from the Progressive Era onward? What role did undercover writers play in advancing an alternative view that conflated class with race and culture—a conflation often understood to have degenerative or devolutionary implications—which can be identified in popular and academic discourse throughout the same period? I believe that this tradition of conflating categories coexisted with, and even infiltrated, the better-known countertradition associated with the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students, who stressed cultural and historical factors over biological explanations of difference.⁶ Variants on the Boasian culture concept that emerged in the social sciences could prove just as deterministic as biology had proven in older formulations about human development. Such determinism often reflected the persistent legacy of Lamarckian biology, which had long linked environment with heredity through its emphasis on the inheritance of acquired traits.⁷ Down-and-outers usually saw themselves as friends of the poor, but many did meld class, race, and culture to articulate degenerationist, quasi-Lamarckian theories of poverty. Yet their texts often proved internally contradictory, because many of the same investigators also emphasized the positive ways in which poor people sought work, struggled to survive, and found meaning in those endeavors. Thus, down-and-outers intended to serve as tribunes of the poor, even as they also helped to lay the foundations for the concept of an underclass—a concept later attacked by critics for similarly conflating race with class and culture.⁸

This study is marked by some anomalous features. First, although what I call a tradition was demonstrably continuous and productive, it was not always overtly self-conscious. Writers and reviewers did sometimes allude to previous undercover texts. But perhaps to underscore the audacity of their approach, authors often ritualistically described achieving the supposedly unprecedented realization that they must live a working-class life in order to write authentically about it. Why not be a waitress, Frances Donovan asked herself in 1917, as if such a thought had never struck anyone before—when it obviously had, as anyone with Donovan’s graduate training in sociology should have known.⁹ Comparable declarations of originality remained common at the twentieth century’s end.

Further, most participants in this tradition had no set name for their method. Reviewers sometimes called it slumming—an appellation that down-and-outers routinely rejected because it implied sensationalism and exploitation—and sometimes it was referred to as the more academically respectable participant observation. But neither label precisely describes the practice of purposefully deceiving others about one’s class standing in order to write about the resulting experiences. Therefore, I have used the terms down-and-outers, undercover investigators, and class passers more or less interchangeably. The last term, suggesting an analogy with racial passing, is the trickiest. Racial passing in the United States has usually meant moving upward on the scale of societal power and privilege. But class passing, in which downwardly mobile writers proclaimed themselves uniquely qualified to represent those below them on that scale, was itself an exercise of power. It could also lead to further accretions of power through professional advancement, public notoriety, and book sales. But if the analogy is not exact, the term still seems appropriately descriptive. Clearly, the makers of this tradition will not solve the problem of nomenclature for us. Some simply called it spying, or worried that it might be seen that way.¹⁰ Reviewers have always been of mixed mind about the practice’s legitimacy, regarding its results either as uniquely valuable and insightful, or as inauthentic, unscientific, and redolent of undemocratic attitudes. However warranted such praise and blame may have been, I believe that this tradition’s history is uniquely revealing about the construction of social knowledge of work and poverty in modern American history.

I should also emphasize that I have not attempted to write social history. I will not argue that these writers’ narratives did or did not match up with some verifiable social reality, that they can or cannot show us how it was to be a hop picker or a hobo. Rather, I have tried to reconstruct how investigators entered a world that was not their own, and why they represented that world and its inhabitants as they did. To accomplish this, I have sought to establish connections among these individuals, and to link them to the contexts—intellectual, cultural, social, economic, political—in which they operated. Drawing on the evidence of their texts and on available biographical information, I have put those texts in dialogue with each other to ask certain basic questions about each generation of investigators. Why did they go undercover, and what were they looking for? What intellectual equipment and cultural preconceptions did they bring to their tasks? How did their often-contradictory mix of motives and emotions—idealism, daring, desire, fear, voyeurism, revulsion—shape their efforts to forge experience into ideas and images? How did their class, gender, and racial identities affect their representations of the other? How did they change, or not change? How did their texts fit within, challenge, or just ruffle the surface of ongoing discourses about class, work, and poverty?

Finally, assessing this tradition is not a simple matter. Other scholars who have touched on it tend to highlight the investigators’ elitism and self-delusion.¹¹ In a thoughtful analysis of the subject, the literary scholar Peter Hitchcock concludes that undercover texts arise out of writers’ class-based reflex or duty to understand the conditions of their own class’s superior position, and that they always reaffirm the permanency of class distinctions and shrink from suggesting any effort to abolish them. This perspective has not been limited to the academy, because class passing has also been a popular journalistic genre. Reviewing the stage version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s undercover study Nickel and Dimed (2001), a critic complains that the play is mainly about the middle-class narrator’s liberal guilt and offers no authentic voice for the poor.¹²

This approach bears a certain sort of fruit, but such readings strike me as unduly limited. Undercover texts are only inconsistently egalitarian and cannot offer a transparent window on reality, but they are not reducible to exercises in middle-class condescension. In highlighting the complex interplay between democratic aspiration and elitist objectification in these works, I will argue against Hitchcock’s contention that a cultural logic of slumming operated to consistently confirm an invidious sense of difference and to rein-scribe the class line.¹³ While most down-and-out texts were not avowedly revolutionary, they were produced because middle-class authors situated themselves amid some of the worst ravages of the emergent capitalist order, struggled to grasp the origins and nature of class difference, and groped toward a critical, independent, modern consciousness of self and society. They are better understood, as Hitchcock also suggests, in terms of position and identification. Beginning from my best understanding of each writer’s consciousness of self and class, I ask how class passers positioned themselves with regard to their subjects, to their imagined audience, and to structures of power and authority; and I ask to what extent they identified themselves with their subjects, and sought to represent—however imperfectly—their points of view. It is too easily asserted that describing the working-class other serves solely to define the middle-class self and that crossing a border serves only to reinscribe it.¹⁴ We should also recognize that neither the border nor those on either side of it will necessarily look the same to a writer or an audience after the crossing has occurred. This was what set undercover investigations apart from more conventional modes of studying American work and poverty. Whatever their blindnesses and limitations—and I will not under-state them—down-and-outers from the Progressive Era to our own time have repeatedly demanded that Americans open their eyes to the willfully unseen and that they confront the persistent, pressing, and still-unanswered question of the unknown class.

PART I

A World of Difference

Constructing the Underclass in Progressive America, 1890–1920

1

Writing Class in a World of Difference

From the early stirrings of social and political reform in the 1890s through the progressive heyday of the 1910s, journalists, social scientists, novelists, and the occasional unemployed college graduate chose to live and work in disguise among factory laborers, clerks, waitresses, beggars, and tramps, in order to observe and to write about them. Most produced texts that embodied the contradictions of Progressive Era American thought, which was riven by tensions between democracy and egalitarianism on one hand, and elitism, racism, nativism, patriarchy, and a drive for social control on the other. Most also offered a characteristically progressive mix of science and sympathy when describing their subjects: They proclaimed their scientific faith in the primacy of facts over opinion and mere sentiment, yet their pages pulsed with the authors’ efforts to sympathize and identify with their coworkers and neighbors. Most hoped that their hard-won knowledge might contribute to a progressive reshaping of the U.S. social order.¹

Jack London’s People of the Abyss (1903) is the best-remembered chronicle of such experiences,² but I will address an array of less familiar figures who contributed to this discourse. While charting their practice’s prehistory, reconstructing their motives and methods, and examining their texts, I also consider how tightly stretched were their intellectual and cultural commitments between a waning Victorian culture and the subversive attractions of modernity. These social explorers belonged to that founding generation of young American moderns who from the 1890s onward confronted the jarring but exhilarating transformations of America’s economic organization, its sex and gender roles, its ethnic and racial makeup, and its international posture; who navigated between capital and labor through settlement-house work, political reform, and radicalism; who sought to live experimental lives, and, in myriad ways, attempted to capture the new. But when older evolutionary and racial preconceptions shaped their encounters with social difference, investigators could find the border zone between class identities to be a shadowy and liminal realm, disconcerting to those still imbued with an orderly Victorian worldview that depended on fixed categories and borders. Many worried that their project might entail more than temporarily adopting a new persona—a modernist performative strategy typical of a culture of personality in which they had not been raised. What might become of the eager explorer cast adrift in that nether region where middle shaded into lower, whiteness into color, and human into subhuman? Indeed, going down-and-out might result in going native, becoming addicted to tramping, or disappearing forever into the teeming urban underbrush.³ The risks were real and the stakes were high as this first generation of undercover investigators began its descent into the abyss of American poverty.

Origins

Fin-de-siècle social investigators had precedents aplenty for their project of dwelling as natives in unknown worlds. From colonial-era captivity narratives, to Richard Henry Dana’s ordeal before the mast, to the Civil War-era deluge of stories about cross-dressing women’s military adventures,⁴ American readers enjoyed a steady stream of opportunities to imagine life on the far side of various lines. In the 1880s, Mark Twain constructed fictional adventures in downward mobility to shock his aristocratic characters into realizing their submerged democratic tendencies: After trading places with the pauper, the young prince would become a more caring king; after traveling in peasant garb with the Connecticut Yankee and enduring the horrors of slavery, King Arthur would abolish the evil institution. But when Edward died too young to affect social conditions, and the Yankee’s plans for reform foundered on the rock of Arthurian Britons’ training—deeply ingrained, quasi-hereditary cultural values and assumptions—Twain’s tales presaged similar confusions among progressive social investigators who also grappled with environment and heredity, free will and determinism, and elitist pessimism and democratic hopefulness.⁵

British and Continental students of poverty provided Americans with more precise models for undercover social investigation. Peter Keating has identified a British tradition of such explorations, generally intended to stimulate reform through state action, which he dates from the journalist James Greenwood’s 1866 account of A Night in a Workhouse. Charles Booth’s monumental studies of London poverty (1887–1903) marked a shift within the British tradition from Greenwood’s brand of individual journalistic and humanitarian impressionism to Booth’s efforts, as a Comtean positivist and self-styled sociologist, to achieve a more detached and scientific standpoint. But here, too, complexities arose. As Judith Walkowitz points out, once Booth went to live among the impoverished, both his personal identity and his scientific determination to construct a taxonomy of the urban poor continually wavered and collapsed in the face of his multiplicitous experiences.⁶ The example of Booth’s scientific aspirations proved important to American investigators, even as they faced similar issues of conceptualization and identity.

Continental exemplars of undercover investigation came especially from Germany during the 1890s. American students of industrial conditions encountered the works of a theology student, Paul Göhre, and of Dr. Minna Wettstein-Adelt, both of whom published studies of Saxony workers. Wettstein-Adelt’s book, which came out in 1893, remained untranslated and unreviewed in the United States, but academic writers sometimes cited it together with Göhre’s Three Months in a Workshop (1891) when reviewing American down-and-out texts. Göhre’s book, translated in 1895, had a much broader American effect. The reform-oriented economist Richard T. Ely contributed a prefatory note for American readers, and the book was widely and well reviewed in both learned and popular opinion journals.⁷ Göhre offered Americans their first example of a book-length down-and-out study, and he introduced many of the questions and themes that would characterize the American discourse over the ensuing decades: the methods and ethics of undercover investigation; the tensions between science and sympathy (between amassing data and empathizing with the objects of study); the propriety of investigators speaking for their less fortunate brothers; the labor question considered in its moral and intellectual, as well as its economic and social, dimensions; and the possible roles of the state, the churches, the unions, and the socialist movement in addressing workers’ conditions and concerns. Richard Ely noted the profound sensation the book had produced in Germany and urged American readers to embrace its lessons, as all industrial nations could be expected to develop according to the same evolutionary model.⁸ The German investigators quickly made their mark in the United States. The sociologist Annie Marion MacLean, who published down-and-out studies between 1899 and 1923, acknowledged in 1903 her debts to Wettstein-Adelt and Göhre. Ely’s promotional efforts also bore fruit closer to home: His daughter, Anna, a Wisconsin Ph.D. student, expanded her education by working at a Milwaukee tool manufacturing shop, and then at a New York cannery where she toiled along with Alice Van Hise, the daughter of the university’s president.⁹

American undercover investigations seem to have begun as a means to investigate crime and labor activism (often seen as roughly synonymous by the owning classes). From the beginning, issues of personal identity and social utility were both salient. John Kasson found that Pinkerton detectives who entered the underworld in disguise sometimes grew so inured to duplicity and so alienated both from their own true sel[ves] and from the society they purported to protect that they led lives more radically fragmented, isolated, and theatrical than did their quarry. Just such a fate would have threatened the Springfield, Massachusetts, police detectives who marched for a month in the ranks of the New England tramp army during the 1877 national railroad strike. Chief Detective Stephenson reported that his fellow knights of the road stood ready for pillage and destruction, but, like the social revolution feared by that era’s middle class, Stephenson’s tramp uprising failed to materialize.¹⁰

The novel Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist (1890), by the lawyer and social critic Albion Tourgée, served as a harbinger for the growing number of cross-class passing accounts that appeared in the 1890s. Tourgée’s protagonist temporarily assumes the identity of a streetcar driver to learn about the labor question from the inside, and he finds that his month of strange experience as a worker reshapes his life and vocation.¹¹ Many of his real-life counterparts could have said the same. Their endeavors must be understood in light of two emergent phenomena: an expanding discourse on class relations and poverty, and mounting middle-class anxieties about the stability of class identity and privilege. Cities served as foci for both developments, as cities increasingly became the sites of concentrated wealth and poverty. Several notable down-and-outers tramped through rural and small-town America, but nearly all eventually explored the hidden city of the poor¹²—the gloomier side of a harshly dichotomized urban realm. For the better-off who withdrew to comfortable downtown enclaves or to the expanding suburbs, the poor became literally less visible—except to participants in slumming tours—and increasingly were a construction of newspapers, magazines, and books. Just as Londoners had been taught for decades by the reform and sensational presses to see their city as sharply divided between savage, poverty-stricken East London and civilized, prosperous West London, so also did Americans come to understand their cities in radically binary terms.¹³ Already by mid-century, a lurid genre of urban exposé had evolved. Newspapers, magazines, and guidebooks conducted illustrated gaslight tours through the lights and shadows of metropolitan poverty, penetrating realms that were rife with immanent dangers and forbidden pleasures. More serious Gilded Age readers could also peruse Charles Loring Brace’s analysis of The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), and, by the 1890s, the sympathetic but still touristic explorations of Jacob Riis and others into the lives and lairs of the other half, now lavishly illustrated with photographs.¹⁴

This variegated literature offered consumers a peculiar mix of stern Victorian moralism and furtive enticement. Readers’ responses might range from sympathy, to quasi-pornographic stimulation, to fear of falling from their own positions of privilege. As early as the depression of the 1870s, middle-class readers of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper began to see faces and bodies that looked all too much like their own in wood-block engravings of tramps and vagrants. Such images portrayed once-respectable casualties of unemployment, now among the familiar degraded types who were assumed to have merited their fate. During the deeper depression of the 1890s, middle-class Americans might increasingly perceive their perch in the social hierarchy as precarious. The very meaning of middle class was rendered uncertain by the chaotic industrial changes that incessantly eroded existing social boundaries.¹⁵ Recurrent assertions that the embers of social hatred had for years been smoldering in the vagrant class (as one student of tramps put it) fed those middle-class insecurities, even as they sharpened readers’ curiosity about the unknown world of the poor. As the reform impulse quickened in the nineties, armchair explorers found this other world graphically represented for their private consumption in a burgeoning variety of formats.¹⁶

By the 1890s, reformers and social scientists were conducting interviews, mapping neighborhoods, and gathering statistics about poverty and the poor.¹⁷ But these individuals generally did not represent themselves as members of the class they were investigating. Neither did those whose sojourns among the poor were undertaken for therapeutic purposes but included no element of deception, or were simply unintended and involuntary.¹⁸ Progressive Era down-and-outers’ most exact American predecessors were the sensational stunt girl newspaper journalists such as Nellie Bly and her many imitators, who escaped the confines of the women’s page by writing about their brief experiences as flower vendors, beggars, and ballerinas. Nellie Bly wrote Ten Days in a Madhouse for Joseph Pulitzer’s World in 1887, and she spawned this fad for female writers, which subsided in the early 1890s when such assignments came to be seen as overdone and trivial, and also as demeaning exercises imposed by male editors who resisted female reporters’ efforts to broaden their domain.¹⁹ Just as the genre was waning in the United States, Elizabeth Banks, an American expatriate journalist, carried out a series of stuntlike investigations in London where she passed as a domestic servant, a crossing sweeper, a flower girl, and a laundry worker. Billed as the work of an American Girl in London, Banks’s articles made a great splash in that city, and many were republished in New York papers. On returning to the United States in the later 1890s, Banks parlayed her newspaper notoriety into a few years’ lucrative work