The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Breaking Down The Class System For the past three days I have been doing hard physical labor. I helped dig a trench along one side of our driveway, I scattered...
...Many of the younger ones yearn for a chance to study, a chance to think, a chance to enjoy the finest and best things of life...
...After a while he confessed: "I was never in the country before...
...But this fine idea was never realized...
...I would begin the vacation period with high ambitions...
...The class lines are becoming more and more blurred...
...I was like Gray's plowman plodding his weary way...
...I want whatever is fine and beautiful...
...It is in connection with this sort of ambition that the shortened work week and the increased mechanization of industry have their significance...
...It was with a real sense of class superiority that he meditated, "The plowman homeward plods his weary way,/And leaves the world to darkness and to me" The poor dope was so dull that he couldn't do anything but work...
...I recall an experience which I had while I was attempting to assist a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union as she arranged her course of study...
...To her, study meant a chance to break over class lines...
...We were thirsty and hungry and tired, and all that we wanted was to have a good meal and a chance to go to bed...
...He would soon be lost in deep sleep...
...The poet, scholar and clergyman was lolling in the fields and happened to see a dull peasant making his way toward home at the end of his long day...
...When we reached the summit, I rolled my jacket into a pillow and stretched out upon the grass...
...We exchanged very few words —just kept on going...
...I advised her to study the history of trade unionism, the organization of industry and similar subjects...
...When I was in high school, I spent my summers working for a farmer who lived not far from our Ohio village...
...I am not pretending that all working people are alike and that all of them have high ideals when they strike for shorter hours or higher wages...
...It is, in fact, rather pleasant...
...We didn't think of going to a concert or a lecture or anything else of that sort...
...But intellectuals like Gray were not tired...
...I had little impulse to think, but some lines from Gray's Elegy kept going through my mind...
...When evening came, we were both ready to stop...
...I never in my life lay down on the grass and looked up at the sky...
...And she hoped, poor soul, to do it by spending a few hours a week at a night school after her day's work...
...In the long struggles for the ten-hour day, the eight-hour day, the six-hour day, it is not the work which the workers have been trying to escape...
...When I was serving as director of the Rand School of Social Science, what gave the position its greatest attraction was the chance which it afforded me to see working men and women make heroic efforts to bridge the gap between the classes which are called "upper" and "lower...
...But my experience with thousands of workers in the adult education field has convinced me that many of them have ambitions which go away beyond any such things...
...Much of this has changed in the last half-century...
...And, by the way, I don't at all object to being tired at night...
...We took a long hike up what the Jersey folk ambitiously call their mountains...
...But what I am thinking of is the intellectual recession which took place in my mind with each returning summer...
...A work-ingman with any sort of car can take his family into the country and escape for a few hours or a day from the hardness of life...
...He couldn't read or write or appreciate any of the beauties of art or nature...
...I didn't do all of these things alone...
...I recall that some 50 years ago, while I was living in a New Jersey suburb, I invited a young New York trade unionist to spend Sunday with me...
...It was my intention to plow through the Latin and Greek classics for which there was no time during the school year...
...They would go on thinking and writing...
...If poet Gray were to see an American farmer riding home on his tractor in mid-afternoon, he would not feel so confoundedly superior...
...My young companion stood awkwardly by—as if he knew not what to do...
...whatever the rich study at Harvard or Yale I want to study here...
...it is the condemnation to a lower form of existence...
...Within my memory, there has been a great change in the life of American working people...
...A good, stout, faithful helper kept pace with me from morning to night...
...No," she shouted, "that is not what I want...
...After a day in the fields, Greek and Latin or any sort of study had lost its attraction...
...The automobile has had a lot to do with it...
...I helped dig a trench along one side of our driveway, I scattered topsoil over hollow places in our lawn and I spread manure over our vegetable garden...
...I shall never forget how she flared up in opposition...
...And our industrial workers are not as tired or tied down as they used to be...
...I was paid a dollar-and-a-half a day, which was a higher wage than was pulled down by any other farm laborer in the neighborhood...
...Many of them may merely yearn for the symbols of some upper-class form of life: better clothes, better homes, shiny automobiles...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 18
