White Workers/Blue Mood
Tyler, Gus
"It's us they is always chokin' so that the rich folks can stay fat." —A 28-year-old Kentucky miner on the "freeze." New York Times, September 24, 1971 What are the facts about the American...
...By public action, we have torn down about twice as many housing units as we have put up...
...The year 1965 was the first of the escalated involvement in Vietnam, and this imposed a triple burden on the American worker...
...he pays for the rich...
...Although not living in affluence, the white worker was better off in the '60s than at any other time of this century...
...In the central cities of these metropoles, there were 748,000 poor families, of which 358,000 were black: less than half...
...So long as black battles white and poor battle not-so-poor, the establishment can continue to "divide and rule...
...GUS TYLER...
...Again this is a halftruth which, if it were totally true, might well lessen social conflict...
...Of the 36.844 million "white-collar" workers, about 18 million were in clerical and sales—an added 22 percent of the employed...
...Wage gains are offset by higher prices...
...Racial suspicion turns into tribal war when people—no matter their color—are oppressed by their circumstances...
...But neither remedy works...
...Often, their neighborhoods abut black ghettos where —after the flight of the more affluent blacks —there are left, according to James Q. Wilson, "only the most deprived, the least mobile, and the most pathological...
...The truth was stated in an editorial by the sober Wall Street Journal on August 5, 1968: In the past 20 years, there have been three distinct periods in which factory prices climbed substantially over a prolonged interval...
...Nor is this white poverty limited to Appalachia...
...This massive shift of about 20 million people in one generation has been described as the most gigantic migration in the history of man...
...Once more, he is the victum of a myth...
...This mood is generally called "backlash," a reawakening of ancient prejudice directed 196 against blacks because they have dared to raise their heads and voices...
...After federal taxes are taken out of the pay, after local taxes are paid, and then the rest is used to buy debased goods and services at inflated prices, the worker knows—and his wife knows still better— that he is no longer moving up...
...In each instance, labor costs per unit of factory output were declining when the price climb began—and these costs continued to decline for a considerable period after the price rise was underway...
...But it sought change within a system that it felt was yielding more and could continue to yield more...
...Two contradictory national policies: to increase agricultural productivity and to restrict its production...
...To add insult to injury, the worker is advised by the media and, more recently, by the Administration, that if prices are going up, it is his own fault: high wages make high prices...
...They pay more and more in local taxes—and feel they are subsidizing crime and riot...
...the affluent found ways to escape in schools and special occupations, the poor were often too ill or illiterate...
...Per capita income was growing because the total national income was growing at a rate faster than that of the population...
...The American worker—white or black—is the victim of maldistribution—of people as well as income and wealth...
...As buying power goes up (current dollars in income), the response of dominant sectors of the economy is not to increase supply but to limit production (or distribution) to keep the consumer on the same level while increasing profits for the seller...
...The result was less and less need for labor on the soil...
...Maldistribution of income and people must multiply strife...
...Now 70 percent of the people—our urban population—live on 1.6 percent of the total land area...
...in 1961, it received a mere 1 percent...
...New York Times, September 24, 1971 What are the facts about the American workers—especially white workers...
...That this median family cannot meet the American standard of living refutes the mischievous myth that poor means black, and white means affluent...
...data for 1960-61 were calculated by the Survey Research Center...
...Between 1964 and 1969, 600,000 blacks fled the central cities for other parts of the metropolitan areas...
...In the 1920s, the white worker opted for immigration legislation to stem the flow of cheap hands...
...What set this wave in motion...
...The further irony is the innocence of those on top who are, in a depersonalized way, responsible for the turmoil on the shrinking turf...
...192 GUS TYLER creased and the percentage making more increased sharply—again in constant dollars...
...Yet somehow they all end up in a fight, with the top acting genteelly through finances, and the lesser people resorting intemperately to fists...
...Lower taxes mean lower services—schools, streets, travel, sanitation, police, medical care...
...Through the `60s, the crush became a crunch—not simply because there were more bodies in the central cities but also because there were fewer places to put them...
...In sum, a top 1.4 percent drew more than the bottom 34 percent...
...And in our torn and turbulent cities, it is too often his "skin" that determines his mood...
...The myth is mischievous because it turns an ethnic difference into a class struggle and implies—and sometimes states —that the way to end poverty is simply to end racism...
...If $6,000 a year were used as a cut-off poverty line, then 29.3 percent of the families in America are living in poverty...
...There was more available for everybody...
...and lump sum inheritances or insurance payments...
...As a result, this numerous class became the mass base of social stability in America...
...The white worker is not affluent—not even near-affluent...
...But he does not quite know against whom to declare war...
...By 1970, if this trend has continued, we were back to 1929, when the top 1 percent held 36.3 percent of the nation's wealth...
...In the recovery years following the Great Depression of the early 1930s, he and his family were enjoying an ever-rising standard of living...
...You had hope...
...He feels that those inflated prices, those high taxes, those inadequate wages are all part of a schema for fattening up the fat...
...The change is negligible— and, after allowance for other receipts not counted as income, we find that there has been no meaningful redistribution of income in the quarter-century since the end of World War II...
...You were future-minded...
...those at the bottom merely want what man needs to stay alive and kicking...
...small farm owners went bankrupt or were bought out...
...Pay envelopes were chewed up by inflation and taxation...
...Since our worker does not know how to deal with the system, he tries to do the next best thing: to act within the system to protect his own skin...
...Most of the poor have jobs—and are white...
...Farm workers went jobless...
...But others might as well have worn that collar...
...First, he had to pay a greater tax to help finance the war...
...His anxieties make him meaner than he means to be...
...In 1910, the top tenth received 33.9 percent of the income...
...In sum, whether we look at white or dark America, in 1947 or 1968, the maldistribution remains almost WHITE WORKER/BLUE MOOD constant—an economic fact regardless of race, creed, etc...
...by 1967, it rose to $8,318, an increase of about $4,000—after allowing for inflation...
...But what is the reality...
...While he rarely, if ever, uses the words "establishment" or "system," he instinctively as sumes there's an establishment that exploits him through a devilishly devised system...
...These figures, from the U.S...
...But in an America that was devoted to the mythos of the melting pot and in a period dedicated to the ethos of one world, the white worker tucked his ethnicity up his sleeve...
...Everything from electricity to eggs is manipulated in closed and increasingly enclosed markets...
...They are high on expectations and low on boiling point...
...Of the 77.902 million gainfully employed in 1969, 28.237 million wore blue collars...
...year—a sum just above what the BLS considers adequate for a family of four in New York City...
...They are paying more for what they buy— and get more cars doomed for early obsolescence, phones that ring wrong numbers, homes that are jerry-built, doctors who make no home visits...
...Others work part years...
...the top fifth received 40.6 percent...
...The bottom tenth got a smaller share of the GNP in 1961 than it did in 1910...
...This logic boggles the worker who cannot understand how he can live better by earning less...
...Since World War II, about a million Americans a year have moved from a rural to an urban culture...
...This maldistribution of income is repeated in a maldistribution of wealth (ownership) which is the major cause of our economic inequities...
...It was not apparent to this same worker that the upside-down system of taxation in the United States placed the cost of these measures on the shoulders of the huge "middle" sector—the sector neither poor nor rich enough to escape taxes...
...A high 52 percent of the families had an income of less than $9,000 a year— a figure still below the official "modest but adequate" income...
...In 1910, he finds, the lowest tenth received 3.5 percent of the income...
...But to explain the growing tension simply as "backlash" is once more to create a mischievous myth out of partial truth...
...So these newly dispossessed become the latest in-migrants, driven from their holes into the surrounding neighborhoods, spreading panic in their path...
...In the form of common crime—in the subway, on the street, at his doorstop...
...This iron law of maldistribution applies not only to the nation as a whole but also to the nonwhite families of America, which darkly mirror the class structure of the mother culture...
...He saw these bits and pieces of socioeconomic legislation as a spur and parallel to his upward effort...
...Consider that Italian "professional" who teaches in Franklin K. Lane High School or that Jewish "proprietor" who owns a candy store in Harlem...
...They seldom use this language, but often feel these sentiments...
...But the truth is that many whites cannot move, because they cannot afford to...
...Typically, they are white workers of more recent stock: economically unmonied and geographically immobile...
...In 1947, 75 percent of the families had an income of less than $7,000, and 25 percent had an income above that figure...
...Sometime in the mid-60s, however, this WHITE WORKER /BLUE MOOD social structure began to fall apart...
...While it is true that a much higher percentage of nonwhites than whites is officially poor, it is equally true that in 1968 twothirds of the poor were white...
...Subsidies to farmers, then, reversed the process by rewarding growers for nonproduction...
...Department of Commerce publication Consumer Income (December 1969), actually understate the great gap between top and bottom...
...Our white worker is ready for battle...
...Hundreds of thousands of units are abandoned annually by their landlords, because the rotting property is all pain and no profit...
...As decay sets in at the ghetto core, rats and rain and fleas and fire take over to deprive the most deprived of their turf...
...The bottom moved from 5 percent to 5.4 percent...
...This strife, ironically, tends not to change but to continue the system that produced the conflict...
...Of the whites, the categories that compose the blue-mooded (exclude farmers and include about half of those in the professional, proprietor, etc., category) make upabout 75 percent of the employed...
...You didn't even mind paying ever-higher taxes, so long as your take-home pay was bigger...
...Despite their lofty titles millions of these are just plain, worried workers...
...These moral exhortations come from the high and mighty, economically ensconced in tax havens far from the madding crowd...
...pay your taxes...
...The year 1965 is also the mid-point of a decade in which America began to respond to poverty and discrimination...
...Part of the system, his experience teaches, is for the rich to use the poorest to keep the once-poor and the possibly-poor as poor as possible...
...Private builders have bulldozed slums to erect luxury highrisers...
...To deny that prejudice exists is naive...
...What looked like a direct way out turns out to be a maze...
...nonwhites 12 percent...
...At the local level, it is the small homeowner who pays the tariff through ad valorem property taxes and the small consumer who pays through the nose for city, county, and state sales taxes...
...You would enjoy it tomorrow, and the kids would enjoy it for generations...
...Almost unnoticed by the media was the decline in the real income of the nonsupervisory employee...
...If these items were included, the income of the top fifth would be appreciably increased—and, by the inclusion of these receipts in the total calculation of income, the percentage of income of the other fifths would be automatically decreased...
...The Johnson years produced a spate of national legislation to provide income and opportunities for the poor, especially the blacks...
...For three decades, they have lived with mass violence, directly and vicariously...
...In 1968, the bottom fifth of the nation's families received 5.7 percent of the country's income...
...Few city dwellers even suspect that much of their urban crisis started down on the farm...
...In 1956, this rose to 26 percent —by 1962, to 33.3 percent (Data are drawn from statistics provided by the Internal Revenue Service, based on estate tax returns that offer loopholes for the most affluent...
...Who, beside farm workers, is not included...
...The reasons: (1) a quantitative erosion of income...
...The worker feels that he is paying triple: he pays for his own way...
...The total in all these blue and bluish jobs comes to 69 percent of the employed...
...Although his findings may be subject to some refinement, his rough conclusions—reached after more than casual digging—tell us a bit more about the rigidities of our class structure...
...In the metropolitan areas of America, in 1968, there were 2.477 million poor families of which 777,000 were black: less than one-third...
...To keep up with rising prices, workers demand higher wages and salaries—through unions and as individuals...
...In the 1970s fury comes easily to the white worker...
...As the wealthiest see their role, they are the great creators: investing, employing, making...
...Out of this fear rose the sadistic Draft Riot of 1863 with its lynching and burning of blacks...
...In the mid-19th century, Irish workers (themselves recent immigrants) feared that the Emancipation Proclamation, ending chattel slavery for the blacks, would intensify wage slavery for the whites...
...that is, 36 percent...
...2) a qualitative erosion of living...
...You were out to "make it," no matter how hard you worked, how much you scrimped, how often you borrowed, how late you moonlighted...
...Under these pressures, the ethnics—white and black—move from economic frustration and personal fear to political fury...
...In each case, corporate profits began to increase sharply well before the price climb started...
...A current notion holds that the central cities are black and the suburbs white, dividing metros into separate but unequal societies in geographic separation...
...to ascribe rising racial clash to a simple proliferation of prejudice, equally naive...
...Second, he had to pay more for consumer goods because this war, like any other, automatically increases demand without increasing supply...
...A. this was happening, however, without any basic redistribution of income in America...
...those in the middle merely try to lift their real income so they and their family can live —better...
...In calculating income, the Department of Commerce excludes "money received from the sale of property, such as stocks, bonds, a house, or a car .. gifts...
...3) a frightening erosion of social order...
...But what was once a drift became a flood in the 1960s...
...In 1947, the median family income (in constant 1968 dollars) was $4,716...
...Between 1947 and 1967, income shares did not change...
...in 1947, the lowest fifth got 4.3 percent and the highest 45.7 percent...
...A study by Robert Lampman points out that although there was less concentration of wealth in the period after World War II than after World War I, a creeping concentration began to set in after 1949...
...Such a collision of cultures has always meant crowding, crime, and conflict...
...You bought on the installment plan, everything from baby carriage to auto...
...As we move into the '70s, many workers fear that the Brass is using Underclass to undermine the Working Class...
...Rural Americans were driven from their familiar farms into the unfamiliar cities, from warm earth to cold concrete...
...He is ready to do the first...
...While families with incomes under $3,000 are officially poor, those with incomes above $3,000 are not all rich...
...It was not status quo-ish in the sense that it would be happy to have its present frozen forever...
...Local governments were trying to cope with their crises...
...And to keep moving, this class joined unions for economic advance and voted Democratic for socioeconomic legislation...
...In short, there is no devil: those at the top merely move their money around in a depersonalized way through impersonal channels (corporations) to multiply their money so they may do man's and God's work better...
...The present generation of workers has grown up in an age of war: World War II, Korea, Vietnam...
...the top from 43 percent to 41.2 percent...
...Retribalization reawakens ancient feelings...
...Out of this arose the Know-Nothing party that threatened, within a couple of years, to become a major national movement...
...A recent Labor Department study found that an urban family of four needed at least $5,895 a year to meet its basic needs...
...Figures for 1910 were taken from National Industrial Conference Board Studies in Enterprise and Social Progress, (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, 1939), p. 125...
...The rise in income was reflected in a lifestyle based on rising expectations...
...During the same period, the percentage of families making under $7,000 a year deTABLE 3 PERCENTAGE OF NATIONAL PERSONAL INCOME, BEFORE TAXES, RECEIVED BY EACH INCOME-TENTH * Highest Lowest Tenth 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th Tenth 1910 33.9 12.3 10.2 8.8 8.0 7.0 6.0 5.5 4.9 3.4 1960 28.0 16.0 13.0 11.0 9.0 8.0 6.0 5.0 3.0 1.0 * In terms of "recipients" for 1910-37 and "spending units" for 1941-59...
...share your neighborhood...
...In protest against this establishment, the worker turns to strikes for higher wages and revolt against taxes...
...Seventy-two percent of the families have an income below $12,000 a TABLE BREAKDOWN OF EMPLOYED PERSONS AGE 16 AND OVER BY OCCUPATION AND COLOR: (in thousands) White Nonwhite Blue Collar 24,647 3,591 Service 7,289 2,239 Clerical 12,314 1,083 Sales Professional-Technical 4,527 10,074 166 695 Manager, OfficialsProprietors, Farmers 7,733 2,935 254 356 Total 69,519 8,384 TABLE 2 PERCENTAGE OF THE TOTAL EMPLOYED IN VARIOUS CATEGORIES OF WHITE LABOR White Percentage of Total (percent) Employed of All Races Blue Collar 32 Service 9.3 Clerical 16 Sales 6 Professional-Technical 13 Managers, Officials 10 Proprietors, Farmers 1.7 Total 88 Whites, then, make up 88 percent of the employed...
...In addition, there were another 9.528 million engaged in service trades—a category that earned less than the blue-collar, clerical, or sales people...
...He sees it everywhere...
...At all levels, America began to spend public money to resolve pressing problems...
...That year, the top 1 percent held 21 percent of the wealth...
...This myth, as that of "the vanishing American worker," is based upon a truth that when exaggerated becomes an untruth...
...The white worker feels economically threatened, personally imperiled, politically suckered...
...If he wants to buy for less, he must work for less...
...In the 1960s, history repeated itself—except that the immigrant was invisible because he was an in-migrant...
...Share your job...
...If, however, the maldistribution of income is an inequity of ancient origin, whose persistence we have noted for this whole century, why is the white worker turning restless at this particular moment...
...The white worker is currently called "middle American," a description that evokes the image of a man and his family at the center of American affluence...
...There is the class listed as professional, technical, managerial, as officials and proprietors, who make up about a quarter of the employed...
...But they never catch up, for in a monopoly-oligopoly conglomerate economy, the man who can fix the prices must always end up winning the game...
...In our case, he is the inherent imperative in a culture that has badly distributed its wealth and people: the devil still is the system...
...The American worker supported these social measures, through the unions and the Democratic party...
...it was constantly pushing for change...
...The physical stage on which this tragedy is unfolding WHITE WORKER/BLUE MOOD is a tiny piece of turf...
...The upper 1 percent rarely suspects that its incredible wealth is the prime reason the lesser people, without urging, are at one another's throats...
...As a child of toilers he holds the traditional view of those who labor about those who don't...
...Although the federal income tax supposedly is graduated so as to make the wealthy pay at a higher rate, this expressed intent is annulled by the many loopholes for those who derive income from sources other than wages or salaries...
...Among nonwhite families, in 1968 the lowest fifth got 4.8 percent of the income and the top fifth 43.6 percent...
...Recently, a young man at Harvard undertook a study of income distribution reaching all the way back to 1910...
...This rural-push–urban-pull has been in GUS TYLER motion ever since the turn of the century...
...You mortgaged your life for a home, because you expected to earn more in the days to come...
...In 1967, on the contrary, 63 percent of the families had an income above $7,000 and only 36 percent had an income below that figure...
...In a recent study by Herman P. Miller and Roger A. Herriott, in which they recalculated income to include some of the factors excluded from the Commerce Department reports, they found that in 1968 the top 1.4 percent of families and individuals drew 11 percent of the nation's income, while the bottom 16 percent drew only 2 percent and the next-from-the-bottom 18 percent drew only 7 percent of the national income...
...Twelve percent of the families in America have an income between $3,000 and $5,000...
...It is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that all of these figures understate the true concentration of wealth in America...
...There were constant reminders of ethnicity in neighborhood names, groceries, bars, funeral parlors, holidays, papers, ward politics, gang leaders, subtle prides and prejudices...
...You planned a future for your kids: a nice neighborhood, a good school, a savings plan to put the kids through one of the better colleges— maybe even Harvard or Vassar...
...Those who cannot flee, stay and get ready for the fight...
...he pays for the poor...
...They are the great givers, turning tax exempt funds to do God's work...
...Data for 1960-61 were available in rounded form only...
...If there is a devil, he is—as he always is— invisible, ubiquitous, and working his evil will through the way of all flesh...
...Subsidized science found ways to make four stalks grow where one grew before...
...The middle three-fifths were bunched between 12 and 23 percent...
...The worker in urban America, however, is the victim not only of income maldistribution— but also of population maldistribution, which is a catastrophe whose impact he cannot stand and whose origin he does not understand...
...The poor are not mainly the unemployed...
...He does so whether he is black or white...
...families listed as living in poverty, 1.363 million or 25 percent are black: only one out of four poor families is black...
...Between 1965 and 1969, the buying power of the worker was in steady decline— despite wage increases...
...It's stylish...
...in 1961, it received 30 percent...
...One-third of the family heads listed as officially poor work full weeks at least 50 weeks a year...
...he resists the others...
...If the worker can afford it, he generally flees—to outskirts and suburbs...
...Here are some facts on income distribution...
...Now, in a retribalized world, he displays his ethnicity —as a pennant to carry into battle...
...in the form of riots in the ghettos or the campus or the prison...
...The result is that millions of workers feel they are paying more and more for less and less...
...The tax was an investment in the future—a town or a country where things would be better...
...The white worker has always had the sense of belonging to some special group...
...They are paying for a war—with their 194 sons, their taxes, and their overcharged purchases— only to feel they are losing the war...
...The table below records the economic truism that the more times change the more they remain the same...
...Third, he supplied his sons for the military...
...The discomfort and disorder that followed set another dynamic in motion: the urban-push-suburban-pull...
...Our latest report on who is poor (March 1970) reveals that of the 5.047 million U.S...
...Finally, this same worker has been squeezed by a system of private taxation, operated through monopoly pricing...
...The young among the white workers, like the young everywhere, add their special stridency to the clamor...
...For generations, employers who demanded protection against foreign imports were importing foreigners to depress wages and break strikes...
...Hard work seems to have brought nothing but hard times...
...The median family income in 1968 (pre-Nixon) was $8,632, about $1,000 short of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics New York Times, September 24, 1971 calls a "modest but adequate" income...
...As they hear it, this is what the rich are saying: "We must fight poverty and discrimination to the last drop of your blood...
...In round figures, about three out of four families struggle along...
...If so many Americans are nonaffluent, who gets the money in this affluent society...
...To a civilizational distemper, they add their hot tempers, turning ethnic salvation into a moral justification for violence...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
