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Series Exhumes Out-of-Print Books by Black Authors

A row of vintage worn books

Since last January, author Michael A. Gonzales has been writing a monthly column for Catapult called “The Blacklist,” in which he rescues out-of-print texts by black authors from obscurity. Gonzales so far has uncovered little-known works of satire, crime fiction, and urban realism from the middle to the end of the 20th century. In each installment, he interviews those close to the work — usually editors, friends, or the authors themselves if they’re still living — for insight into the book’s creation.

The second piece in the series was on Henry Dumas, author of several collections of poems and short stories, as well as the posthumously published novel, Jonoah and the Green Stone. Dumas was killed by a police officer in a New York City subway station in 1968 at age 33.  The novel was acquired by Toni Morrison for Random House while she was an editor there. With a detailed, painterly touch, Gonzales brings color and drama to the story he tells about the book and the atmosphere that nurtured it into being:

It was poet and Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe who introduced his friend Toni Morrison to both Dumas’ work and Redmond. Having moved to New York City in 1971 to teach, Troupe was already a well-known poet and essayist on the West Coast. “I didn’t know Dumas personally, but I loved his literary voice,” Troupe said from his home in Harlem. “His voice was different from the other young poets; it was elegant, but also as haunting as voodoo. I gave Toni the two books (Poetry for My People and Ark of Bones) published by Southern Illinois University and she freaked out. She loved them and wanted to publish them at Random House.”

In a 1975 review, the New Yorker called the prose in Ark of Bones a “collection of extraordinary short stories,” while also declaring that “Dumas was that rarity—a passionately political man with a poet’s eye and ear and tolerance of ambiguity . . . one of the saddest things about his book is that it leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that there were even better books to come.”

On the night of his murder, Dumas, who in photos was a lean, goateed man, had just left a rehearsal with jazz futurist Sun Ra and his Space Arkestra, and was headed downtown, perhaps to hear more way-out musical sounds at the Vanguard or Slugs. Although he also loved gospel and the blues, it was at Slugs where Dumas and Sun Ra met in 1966. “Everybody should try to be what they are,” Sun Ra told the young scribe, whose tapes of the interview were released posthumously as The Ark and the Ankh in 2001. According to the Redmond-penned liner notes, “The two men were very close and Sun Ra waxed alternatively angry and depressed when he received news of his protégé’s death.”

In the latest installment, Gonzales highlights Rhode Island Reda detective novel written by Charlotte Carter. She was a Chicago-born poet who’d been inspired to write crime fiction, in part, by the work of Chester Himes. While introducing us to Carter’s novels, Gonzales also draws a lineage of black crime fiction.

According to Paula L. Woods’ seminal collection of Black crime fiction Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes, the first published Negro mystery story ever published was “Talma Gordon” by Pauline E. Hopkins in 1900 in Colored American Magazine. Still, it wouldn’t be until the 1990s that Black women began contributing to the genre en masse with novels by Eleanor Taylor Bland, Barbara Neely, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Grace F. Edwards lining the bookstore shelves.

Nevertheless, it was [Charlotte] Carter’s jazz-loving, sexually liberated protagonist that resonated with me from the moment I’d bought the book at the now-closed Shakespeare and Company bookstore on Lower Broadway. “A terrific novel, from those witty, subversive opening sentences, to the edgy, melancholy and very satisfying ending,” read Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson’s blurb on the book. Tracing [protagonist] Nanette’s origins, Carter says, “I was with a man (Frank King) who I subsequently married actually, and he was writing crime fiction. One day we were on 6th Avenue in the 20s, in what used to be known as the Flower District, and we saw a young woman playing saxophone with a hat in front of her to collect tips. When we got home, Frank said, ‘You should do a book about a female saxophonist. It would be kinda funny, but you like mysteries so much, why don’t you do that?’ And, that’s how it started; I never would have done it without him.”

The Blacklist goes a long way towards highlighting the complexity and variety of literary art by people of color. This kind of excavation work often goes unnoticed and unheralded — it is in the vein of Walker’s headstone for Hurston, Nina Collins’ rescue of her mother, Kathleen’s short stories, Brigid Hughes’ recovery of the work of Bette Howland. It’s an exciting series to follow, and I anticipate that some of the work highlighted will make its way back to the marketplace.

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Exodus in the Ozarks

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Pam Mandel | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,441 words)

 

“Well, what are you doing all the way out…here? How’d you find this place?”

The question wasn’t fair. Billygail’s Cafe is only ten miles outside Branson, Missouri. Sure, it’s on a country road, and sure, it feels like you’ve found something special, but it’s listed on Trip Advisor and USA Today and showed up on an episode Man vs. Food on the Travel Channel. Use Yelp to find breakfast while you’re in Branson and you’ll get Billygail’s.

The real question was not what I was doing at Billygail’s. The answer to that was easy: I was there to muscle my way through a gorgeous 14-inch plate-obscuring sourdough pancake. The bigger question was, what was I doing in Branson?

The short answer is I was in Branson for a conference and to see a place I’d never been before. There’s little I like more than going somewhere new and finding out I’m wrong about it — and for a writer, no surer way to find a great story. My previous exposure to Branson was limited to a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Martin take a road trip, detouring through Branson to catch a performance by Nelson’s unlikely hero, Andy Williams. I didn’t buy the Simpson’s vision wholesale. I looked at Google, too, and found plenty of references to the show scene — and to country music. I’d baked extra time in my trip to explore — and to catch at least one country music show.

“Yeah, you could do that,” said the conference organizer who helped me plan my travel. “And yeah, there’s music here, but there’s this… other thing.” She pointed me to the website for Sight and Sound, a 2000 seat theater that stages multimedia spectacles based in the Bible. The current production? Moses.

A bad West coast Jew, I know little of my inherited theology. But like many of my Jewish friends and family, I know three or four things about the story of Moses — kind of the cornerstone story of the Jewish faith. Plus, Passover — the holiday where we eat matzoh ball soup and recount how Moses led “the chosen people” out of Egypt into the Promised Land — happens to be my favorite holiday. So, while Dolly’s Stampede is the most popular attraction in Branson, and there’s plenty of wholesome country western cabaret, I couldn’t resist this opulent retelling of the history of the Jewish people.

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The Tether Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Sergio De La Pava

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | May 2018 | 18 minutes (4,881 words)

Lost Empress addresses the injustice of mass incarceration, plays with the possibility of parallel universes, and uses arena football as a metaphor for how the revolution is unforeseeable. Welcome to the world — or should I say worlds — of Sergio De La Pava, whose fiction certainly doesn’t lack for a sense of scope.

His debut, A Naked Singularity, followed a young, incredibly successful public defender through a personal and professional collapse, weaving in a heist narrative and moments of absurdist comedy, moving from harrowing scenes of inequality to suspenseful setpieces and back again. Initially self-published before being reissued by the University of Chicago Press (which also released his second novel, Personae), A Naked Singluarity would go on to win the prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize — an award also won by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Paul Harding’s Tinkers.

In De La Pava’s fiction, grand ideas and societal tragedies coexist with a brisk narrative voice and an irreverent worldview. Lost Empress alternates between two seemingly unconnected stories: Nina Gill, a genius football strategist, suddenly becomes the owner of an indoor football team in Paterson, New Jersey, during an unexpected pause in the NFL season; meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles, imprisoned at Rikers Island, ponders his earlier crimes and romantic connections, and his plans for the future. Within this sprawling narrative, De La Pava tells the secret history of a Salvador Dalí painting, discusses Cambodian politics in the late 20th century, and muses about why the NFL’s labor market is uniquely exploitative of American athletes.

Improbably in our age of hyper-specialization, De La Pava, like the hero of A Naked Singularity, is a public defender in Manhattan, where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time. He recently wrote an impassioned op-ed calling for reform of New York’s discovery laws. His interests are obviously wide-ranging, and our conversation touched on the cultural history of Paterson, what we hate about rich people, the multiverse, and more.

*

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The Dying Days of the New West

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Tori Telfer | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,912 words)

The American West brings out a hunger in people. I’ve felt it myself — an urge to disconnect from society, buy a horse, live next to a giant saguaro. My husband and I have talked for hours about moving to the town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, where we were invited to live by an elderly gay couple we met beside a Tucson, Arizona pool. They told us that houses were cheap and everyone was friends and they’d be our uncles; we took their business card home and spent nights looking at houses on Zillow, cooing over cacti. The destiny was almost made manifest, then real life intruded. Guess where we’re moving instead? New York City.

The urbane, European-inflected East Coast has looked at the West with a strange blend of envy and hope for most of United States history. While the United States was built partially on the idea that the West was our manifest destiny, an East/West rivalry has also been baked into our identity from the beginning; even the famous “Go west, young man!” dictum contained within it some eastward scorn. That cry came from an 1865 New York Times editorial, in which Horace Greeley, the newspaper’s editor, exclaimed that “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

In 1836, the writer Francis Grund speculated that westward expansion would only stop when some “physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress”; by the late 1800s, the ocean proved to be no such barrier, as America’s westward colonization encroached on the islands of the Pacific, reaching as far as the Philippines; in 2018, there is so little West left to discover that when we want to dream about the idea of the “frontier,” we look to Mars. Today’s West is a place of deep irony: lands that look wide-open to the naked eye but are actually choked by bureaucratic red tape. In fact, “the West” is more of a mirage than a reality, these days. But the hunger is still there. Read more…

Get With the Modern Age, Sign Up for the Longreads Books Newsletter

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Dear Reader,

Over coffee a few weeks ago, our audience development editor Catherine Cusick told me something remarkable: someone, somewhere is always reading “A Sociology of the Smartphone,” an excerpt from Adam Greenfield’s book Radical Technologies (Verso, 2017) which we published in June of last year. This astute social scientific rumination on our new and profound interconnectedness via the “ubiquitous… slabs of polycarbonate” in our pockets is Longreads’ most-read book feature of all time.

Meanwhile, in “The Death Row Book Club,” our recent excerpt from The Sun Does Shine (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Anthony Ray Hinton remembers that “the books were a big deal. Nobody had books on death row. They had never been allowed, and it was like someone had brought in contraband.” It is the book, sometimes just a single copytossed from reader to reader across the prison library with a little prayer that it never land too far out of anyone’s reach, since rising from your seat during death row book club is strictly forbidden — which provides a new and profound interconnectedness for the prisoners.


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In another of our recent book excerpts, from Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank (Henry Holt & Co., 2018), we read that when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded their literary magazine Les Temps modernes in the rubble of Paris in 1945, they had to request an allocation of paper from the government. They had to bring their own rations to the literary parties. Nevertheless, the magazine was an instant, global success — Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s books became bestsellers, rumors spread that women would swoon when they heard Sartre lecture, even the State Department got Existentialist fever, and Richard Wright bought his entire family steamer tickets to France and wrote in his diary that he “felt relief as he saw the Statue of Liberty” drifting away. He came to Paris to advise Les Temps modernes on their upcoming “America” issue — in which they excerpted books like The Black Metropolis, a groundbreaking sociology of redlining and poverty on Chicago’s South Side.

Of course, in this post-Rex world, the State Department surely no longer has the wherewithal to bother reading such a minor cultural artifact as the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter. Indeed, the founding of Les Temps modernes differs from the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter in, ah, a number of ways — probably the most important of which is that I have not written a 1,000-page philosophical novel to co-promote with this newsletter. But I find myself dwelling on it anyway, comparing our efforts to the past and its apparent perfection. (Or near perfection. According to David Remnick, who is certainly an authority on such things, it was the first issue of The New York Review of Books — also founded, incidentally, at a moment of paper shortage, during the 1963 printer’s strike — which was “surely the best first issue of any magazine ever.”) After all, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand on the shaky notion that there is some strong dividing line between “the modern times” and “history.” And difficult to think that we should not be making comparisons.

So in the future (no matter how alarmingly it starts to resemble the past), look to this newsletter to encounter new works that hopefully, as Sartre bragged in his introduction to the first issue of Les Temps modernes, “do not… miss a beat on the times we live in,” that “inten[d] to influence the society we live in,” that “take sides.” You’ll read excerpts from new books like Noliwe Rooks’ groundbreaking study of inequality in public education, Cutting School (The New Press 2017); interviews with authors who’ve written remarkable new books that we’re eager to hear more about, like Elizabeth Flock’s study of love, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea (Harper, 2018); essays and discussions about the writer’s craft; and book reviews. Yes, book reviews. This, despite the fact that, in her interview with Longreads, the cultural critic Michelle Dean notes the hysterics to which Norman Mailer was driven by Mary McCarthy’s The Group when he reviewed it in 1963 (in those same venerable pages of the New York Review of Books, although not in the first issue — I checked — but rather the fourth one). Dean tells us that, reading Mailer’s review and others like it, she “starte[d] to have a sense of humor about the value of a review that comes out when a book is initially released.” She continues:

You start to realize how wildly out of sync [contemporary reviewers tend to be] with whatever later opinion of the book developed after people had the chance to digest it and think about it…. The reception adds an element of absurdity to the whole thing.

So there you have it. The modern times are wildly out of sync (more so than ever?) and absurdly wrong about new books; these days books are as ubiquitous as air and as precious as contraband; and we at Longreads have decided it’s the perfect time to start a books newsletter. Welcome and enjoy!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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When Sartre and Beauvoir Started a Magazine

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Agnès Poirier | Excerpt adapted from Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 | Henry Holt and Co. | February 2018 | 20 minutes 5,275 words)

In September 1945, together with their band of students and friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were working night and day finalizing the first issue of their journal Les Temps modernes. They had launched the idea at the end of 1944, choosing the title as a tribute to Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, apart from Camus who was too busy editing Combat, they could rely on almost everyone else to write for them — Communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and Socialists: their schoolmate and liberal philosopher friend Raymond Aron, the Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, the Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo, along with a new generation of writers who were submitting articles and ideas such as Jacques-Laurent Bost. The British writer Philip Toynbee would contribute a Letter from London, while novels and essays the committee particularly liked would be serialized prior to their publication or with a view to attracting a potential publisher. Les Temps modernes would be a laboratory of new ideas and a talent scout rolled into one. Simone de Beauvoir had personally approached the minister of information, the Gaullist and résistant Jacques Soustelle, to ask for an allocation of paper.

Gallimard had agreed to finance the journal and to give the team a little office where they could hold their editorial meetings. The first issue was planned for October 1, 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre was made the head of the publication, “Monsieur le Directeur,” and he thought it important to make himself available to everyone. This would be democracy and public debate in action. He committed to receiving anyone who asked to see him at the magazine’s office at 5 rue Sébastien Bottin every Tuesday and Friday afternoon between five thirty and seven thirty. This commitment was printed at the beginning of the magazine, along with the telephone number Littré 28-91, where they could be reached. Sartre had decided to dedicate the first issue of Les Temps modernes “To Dolorès,” in all simplicity. Simone did not blink an eye.

In the first issue, Sartre announced loud and clear what Les Temps modernes stood for. It was to be the megaphone that would carry their thoughts far and wide.

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps modernes will take sides.

The tone was set, the thinking promised to be muscular and the writing fearless.
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My Own ‘Bad Story’: I Thought Journalism Would Make a Hero of Me

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Steve Almond | Bad Stories | Red Hen Press | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,223 words)

Since November 8th, 2016, like so many other Americans, I’ve lived in a state of utter shock and disbelief over the results of the presidential election and everything that’s followed. Author Steve Almond found himself equally bewildered, but after wallowing in dread for a few weeks, he decided to try to make sense of what happened through the lens he’s most familiar with as a journalist, author, and co-host of the New York Times ‘Dear Sugars’ podcast: story.  The result is his new book, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, in which he contends that the election of a racist, misogynist, bullying con artist like Donald Trump wasn’t just possible; it was inevitable. He says it’s the result, in part, of our buying into a litany of “bad stories” — about our country and its history, and ourselves. In 17 essays, the book covers vast swaths of American history, from the birth of the nation, to Watergate to now. Here I’ve picked an excerpt of the book in which Steve focuses on his own “bad story,” and those put forth by the Fourth Estate, having to do with his years as a young journalist. I also spoke with Steve for an edition of the Longreads Podcast. – Sari Botton, Essays Editor

Listen to the Longreads Podcast Interview with Steve Almond here:

***

I spent the first half of my adult life almost comically devoted to the belief that journalism would preserve American democracy. I still believe in the sacred duties of a free press. But if I’m honest about my own experiences in the field, the lessons that emerge most vividly are these:

1. Reporters are no more virtuous than anyone else, and often less so

2. Journalism hardly ever tells the most important stories

3. Even when it does, not much happens

***

Consider this story: the summer before my last year in college, I took an internship at the Meriden Record-Journal, a tiny paper in central Connecticut. I was asked, toward the end of my tenure, to undertake what sounded like an ambitious project: documenting 24 hours in the life of the city. I was teamed with a veteran reporter named Richard Hanley, an energetic psychopath who sustained himself on a diet of steamed cheeseburgers and Kent cigarettes and who, wisely, consigned me to the graveyard shift.

Had I been serious about this assignment, I would have consulted with police, city officials, maybe a historian to map out an itinerary. I would have hung out with workers on an overnight factory shift, tagged along with a cop, visited an emergency room or a jail or a radio station or a homeless shelter. Instead, I spent most of the night camped in diners and donut shops, cadging quotes from bleary waitresses, then roaming the empty downtown waiting, I suppose, for the essence of Meriden, Connecticut to descend from the dark summer sky and reveal itself, like an arch angel. I eventually retired to the bucket seats of my Mercury Bobcat.

This piece stays with me, I think, because it begins to capture the audacious fallacy at the heart of modern journalism, the idea that a subjective (and frankly haphazard) account of one night in Meriden, compiled by a lazy 20-year-old who has never even lived in the city, can be touted as a definitive version of the place.

Or maybe the lesson is this: my bosses actually liked the story I handed in. The executive editor later called me into his office. He was a towering silver-haired reptile, reviled by that entire small, ill-tempered newsroom. But he looked upon me fondly, probably because I was obsequious and poorly dressed. He floated the idea that I drop out of school and come to work full-time for him. When I demurred — and this part of the story I’ve never quite figured out — he slipped me an envelope with $350 cash inside. “Go buy something for your girlfriend,” he murmured mystically. “Go get her some cocaine.”
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Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

 

‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’

Uncle Lee, photo courtesy the author

Alice Driver | Longreads | March 2018 | 10 minutes (2,574 words)

“I didn’t choose. I walked backwards till it came around front.” — Uncle Lee

I sipped my Uncle Lee’s favorite gin martini made bitter with the taste of three pearly onions at The Alley Cantina in Taos, New Mexico. The mother of my long-lost cousin Julianne stepped up to the microphone in front of the gathered crowd and told the story of their brief love affair and how Lee “loved women.” I’ve never been to a funeral like the ones on TV where you go to a cemetery and cry while watching a casket go into the ground. My family does these storytelling gatherings with food and drink, and we bask in the memory of the ones we loved in sharp and detailed pain and glory.

I didn’t know that Julianne existed until I was in my 20s. My Uncle Lee, who died at 73, was a tall willowy, half-bent figure who had two sons and a daughter. As a young man, he had survived several diving accidents, which according to another uncle, Larry, left him a little bit crooked in posture. Uncle Lee disclosed Julianne’s existence to some of the family over the years, but that news reached me late. It hit me like a wave rolling me under the currents — took my breath away — because she had my green eyes, and the tall, lean Driver build. In another universe, she could have been my sister. We had followed parallel tracks, both spending much of our 20s living and working in Latin America. She eventually settled in Bolivia, married, and had a daughter.

At my Uncle Lee’s memorial, Julianne read a letter she had written to her 22-month-old daughter about Lee, who she came to know as her biological father when she was a teenager. Before his death, he had traveled to Bolivia to spend time with her, and she held close those memories of getting to know him as a father. Tears ran down my face and into my bourbon and ginger ale as I watched Julianne read from her journal. Following Julianne, a woman got up and told the story of my Uncle Lee making the French doors for her house. He was a fine woodworker specializing in spiral staircases. Before sitting down, she said, “We weren’t lovers.”
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From One Friendship, Lessons on Life, Death, AIDS, and Childlessness

Left to right: Dan, the author, and Michael. (Photo courtesy of the author)

S. Kirk Walsh | Longreads | January 2018 | 27 minutes (6,711 words)

 

I first met Dan Cronin on an early spring evening in 1993. Michael, my new boyfriend, introduced us. We were standing on the southwest corner of 12th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A stream of cabs, city buses, and cars surged toward the illuminated marble arch of Washington Square. The changing twilight danced through the rustling, pale-green leaves of the trees that shaded the grounds of the nearby church. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” Dan said to me. His smile was angelic and mischievous, his eyes, a striking slate blue. He lit a Newport cigarette, a wisp of smoke releasing from the corner of his mouth.

That night, we decided on dinner at a family-run Italian restaurant in the West Village. The three of us talked about books (J. M. Synge, E. L. Doctorow), Catholicism (the religion of our childhoods), Arthur Ashe’s recent death from AIDS, Dan and Michael’s strong allegiances to Upper West Side. It was a memorable night. As I said goodbye to them at the 14th Street subway stop, I felt a kind of certainty and contentment as if I already knew that Dan and Michael were going to be a part of my life for a long time.

Prior to that night, Michael had also told me a lot about Dan: He was a professional tenor, who had performed on Broadway and national tours around the country. He was a voracious reader of American history, passionate about all things Abraham Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. He was religious in his daily purchasing of lottery tickets. (He always played the same numbers; the street address of his childhood home.) He was employed as a waiter at the famed Russian Tea Room. (He was the shop steward of the union, and the powerful position allowed him to work only when he felt up to it.) Having recently visited his ancestral town in County Kerry, Ireland, he told a story of encountering a man who could recite passages of Ulysses in Gaelic.

Over the past year, Dan and Michael had become close friends. They had many lively discussions about sports and politics, but their true bond centered on their experiences with recovery, addiction, pain, and abuse. “He’s a remarkable man with many talents,” Michael said when he first told me about Dan. “It’s sad because he’s HIV positive.” Shortly after his diagnosis seven years earlier, Dan started taking high doses of AZT (zidovudine, the first antiretroviral drug approved by the FDA in 1987) as a part of his treatment protocol.

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