The news from Wabasha
McCarthy, Abigail
or SEVERAL HIHDS Abigail McCarthy THE NEWS FROM WABASHA WHERE ALL THE CHILDREN STAY EQUAL his past June, headlines drawn from the 1990 census report were alarming: "Striking Stratification of...
...The town, during my lifetime, at least, has always struck newcomers as relatively classless...
...The next issue will be dated August 14...
...Felix High School classes of 1933, '34, '35, '36, and '37 met for a banquet, a memorial Mass, and a breakfast in my hometown—a town of which long-time and patient Commonweal readers have read before—a lovely little town on the Mississippi in the bluff country of Minnesota...
...In Wabasha, a resident of a retirement home paying $2,000 a month may live next to one in the next apartment who pays nothing at all...
...But, poor as we might have been, we were helped by the existing public mechanisms provided by taxes and private giving, and were soon to be helped even more by the emerging New Deal...
...This June, as during every June, people all across America were getting together...
...All these were our common bond...
...They were going to graduations, weddings, anniversary parties, college and high school reunions, rites of change and memorial of all kinds...
...We benefited from a community with a strong commitment to children and education...
...Our small town and our small Catholic coeducational high school have always commanded unusual loyalty...
...our banks were saved from failure by the federal government...
...And today we are of the only social group, according to the reports, in which poverty has not increased...
...Our farmers profited from governmental subsidies...
...One of the most successful—reminiscing—attributed to himself a well-worn Depression story: "The soles of my shoes were so thin that I could stand on a dime and tell whether it was heads or tails...
...The Reverend Robert Crosbie, for example, who married a local young woman, has remarked on his amazement when they retired there...
...There were two very good high schools, a good public library, town and high school teams, bands, and sources of recreation—scout troops, swimming lessons at the town beach, 4-H clubs, amateur theater, and groups of our own invention...
...In Exeter it was very much town and gown," he said...
...The county takes care of the latter on the basis of need...
...I puzzled over these reports as they appeared, and puzzle over them now, trying to draw from my experience some clues to how equality is created and how inequality is remedied...
...The bluff country is that part of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois that was unglaciated and where water melting from the glaciers carved deep river valleys through the layers of limestone and sandstone...
...Most of those at the reunion were retired but, when working, had ranged in occupation from successful businessmen, college professors, government officials, and lawyers through owners of small farms, construction workers, and railroad maintenance men...
...And my sister journeyed from Seattle to our mutual high school reunion...
...Commonweal 17 July 1992:11...
...This year my Midwestern extended family was no exception to the general pattern...
...But here, where Mary's family's business was one of the two biggest employers, the electrician, the trash collector, the woman who comes to clean, etc., all look on her as an old friend and treat her that way...
...We in the reunion group were, it is true, children of the Great Depression...
...and of course, the hills and the countryside to roam...
...All very well, you say, to talk of equality and income distribution in a community relatively homogeneous with few foreign-born or members of minorities...
...Cousins from Minnesota were going to a family wedding in California...
...Life for both is made pleasant by a corps of local volunteers...
...Society," "Middle Class Shrinking," "Poverty Increases and Spreads," and the most dire of all, "The End of Equality...
...or SEVERAL HIHDS Abigail McCarthy THE NEWS FROM WABASHA WHERE ALL THE CHILDREN STAY EQUAL his past June, headlines drawn from the 1990 census report were alarming: "Striking Stratification of U.S...
...The National Youth Administration kept us in school and, later, the GI Bill saw many through college and into the professions...
...Some of us hadn't seen each other for sixty years but it was extraordinary how close we felt at once and how quickly we bridged the gaps...
...The town service people were apt to be more resentful than friendly...
...Why, I wondered, were we so comfortable with each other...
...Anthropologists of the future might well think that we as a people had an inordinate addiction to celebration...
...On June 13 and 14, the St...
...There were eighty of us in all—a very good representation because our high school classes had never numbered more than thirty or so...
...but the spirit of our gathering was remarkably egalitarian...
...Equal dignity in the public sphere" (Kaus's phrase) depends on adherence "to society's basic values of work and civility...
...It also stemmed, I think, from the fact that we, no matter what the economic or professional status of our families, shared common experiences...
...Perhaps in part this sense of self-esteem and equality stemmed from the fact that most residents of our town were not far removed from their pioneer forebears...
...We are cushioned by Social Security and Medicare and, in some cases, by strong county and state programs...
...We cannot dispute the census facts that engendered these headlines...
...That sphere could include old institutions, such as the draft, and new ones, such as national service....Democrats could easily add a national health-care system and a national day-care system....These institutions would drive home the moral arbitrariness of capitalist success by the crude expedient of treating all income classes equally, and the more subtle strategy of providing a part of daily living enjoyed by various classes on an equal basis...
...We are challenged as a nation to change them...
...My brother went from the city of Washington to Minnesota for 10:17 July 1992 Commonweal a granddaughter's graduation from the eighth grade (yes, they still have those in some Minnesota schools), and then on to a family reunion...
...In keeping with Commonweal's usual summer schedule, only one issue is published each month during July and August...
...We told tales of working for ten cents an hour after school, of classmates who spent summers following the wheat harvest from Kansas and Nebraska through Montana and the Dakotas into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and those who returned late to school in the fall after working fifteen hours a day as cabin boys on Mississippi work boats...
...others were on their way to a college graduation in New York...
...What made us feel almost like brothers and sisters...
...Isn't that what I learned at my high school reunion...
...He had grown up in Exeter, New Hampshire, where his father was a master at the famous and exclusive Exeter preparatory school...
...That pull had brought back alumnae and alumni from Alaska, California, and Washington, from Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee, from Chicago and the nearby cities of Wisconsin and Minnesota to unite with those who had stayed to run the bank, the hardware store, or the family farm...
...A point well taken, but it still seems to me that Wabasha is a case study—a pilot example—of the remedy for inequality proposed by author Mickey Kaus in The End of Equality (Basic Books): The institutional basis for the egalitarian culture would be an expanded "public sphere" of community life...
...small businesses started with loans...
...The pull of home has always been strong for those who had lived or gone to school there—not, for most of us, the pull to permanent return but the pull of our roots, the pull of the places that began our formation and marked us forever...
Vol. 119 • July 1992 • No. 13
