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 New Part Three - May 11: James Fallows Barbara Ehrenreich Part Two - May 4: James Fallows Barbara Ehrenreich Part One - May 2: James Fallows Barbara Ehrenreich Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of Blood Rites; The Worst Years of Our Lives (a New York Times bestseller); Fear of Falling, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and eight other books. A frequent contributor to Time, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine, she lives near Key West, Florida. James Fallows is The Atlantic's national correspondent and the author, most recently, of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996). His new book, Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel will be published next month. Previously in Fallows@large: The Work of Words (February 21, 2001) An e-mail exchange with Christopher Hitchens, author of Unacknowledged Legislation and would-be prosecutor of Henry Kissinger. Darwin Had It Backwards (January 17, 2001) An e-mail exchange with Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. More by James Fallows More on books More on politics More on poverty Join the conversation in Post & Riposte. |
fallows@large | Dialogues with James Fallows  An exchange with Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America ..... From: James Fallows To: Barbara Ehrenreich Subject: Daily life among the "invisible class" Dear Ms. Ehrenreich—or "Barb," as they'd call you at Wal-Mart:
But when I say that I wish everyone would read this book, I mean something more literal. It really would change many people's view of daily life, and perhaps also their sense of politics, if they spent the few hours it takes to read this brisk book. I'll introduce this book, and its potential importance, with two comparisons, one of which could annoy you. The non-annoying one is Michael Harrington's The Other America, published in the early 1960s. The other is John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, published at about the same time. What the books had in common was making white, affluent Americans of the Kennedy-Johnson era say to one another, "Wait a minute! You mean, everyone isn't living the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle? You mean, there are still a lot of poor people in Appalachia, and that even after Sidney Poitier, the Negro still does not get a fair shake?" The two books are very different in their tone, and Harrington's is seen as the classier in retrospect. But both helped the influential part of American society imagine what the lives of those they didn't see each day could be like. From The Atlantic: "The (Still) Relevant Socialist" (August 2000) Michael Harrington, the author of The Other America, was the most charismatic figure on the American left in the past half century. His case for a democratic socialism takes on new meaning in the age of globalization. By Harold Meyerson (Note for those who weren't around at the time: Harrington's book, on the persistence of poverty after the perceived magical affluence of the Eisenhower years, became the manifesto for the anti-poverty efforts of the early 1960s. Its role was like that of Charles Murray's anti-welfare tract, Losing Ground, in the early Reagan era, but in reverse. John Howard Griffin was a white journalist who used tanning creams and other devices to make himself look black. His book, a chronicle of the time in which he "passed" as a black man, and how difficult that time was, became a bestselling sensation and was eventually made into a movie, starring James Whitmore.) Unlike Harrington and Griffin, you take a jokey, picaresque approach to the adventures you recount—how about the documentarist Michael Moore as a comparison here? But like Harrington's book, I think yours has the potential to alert those in the top part of society to a reality it has overlooked, and like Griffin, you go undercover and send back reports on daily life among the invisible class. What is shrewd about your choice, I think, is that the world you're exploring is not that symbol of social failure, the "underclass," but rather people classified as modern successes. These are people with full-time jobs who make slightly more than the minimum wage—the working poor. My eyes have skidded past the words "working poor" on the pages of newspapers a zillion times, but they won't anymore after your chronicle of becoming such a person for several months. To set this up just a bit more for onlookers, before asking a question, let me explain that your book is the account of three month-long episodes of attempting to live entirely on earnings from $7- or $8-per-hour jobs. You show up in low-wage cities and try to get on your feet, like someone "graduating" from welfare to work. One of many intriguing aspects is the juggling of three challenges: landing a job (not that hard, in the "tight" economy of the late nineties); doing the job (sometimes quite hard, as you make vivid); and finding a place to live (nearly impossible, for reasons we will get to). The account is realistic and sobering. But the tone is far from grim, as a few samples might show: About a restaurant where you worked in Florida: "Picture a fat person's hell, and I don't mean a place with no food." Also in the restaurant: "I bond with Timmy, the fourteen-year-old white kid who buses at night, by telling him I don't like people putting their baby seats right on the tables: it makes the baby look too much like a side dish." About your "home" while working in Maine: "There is no window. Well, there is a windowlike structure near the ceiling, but it offers a view only of compacted dirt, such as one might normally see when looking up from the grave." And about why you choose Minnesota rather than California when looking for low-wage sales jobs: "Warnings about the heat and allergies put me off, not to mention my worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do." And so on. In our next round, I plan to ask you about all the "policy" implications of what you've written. You say near the end of the book that you're describing the bottom 20 percent of the workforce, and hoping to get the attention of the top 20 percent. What, exactly, they should do if you get their attention is for later on in our exchange. But for now let me ask you some questions of procedure and craft. I mentioned earlier that the Black Like Me comparison might give you the willies. That book, for all its "progressive" impact at the time, is now seen as somewhat slumming and condescending. I don't think your book has a slumming tone. But you must have worried about this at some point, right? If so, how did you deal with it? If not, why not? Also, how was the experience different from what you anticipated? What ended up being the biggest surprises—both in what was easier than you expected, and what was harder? And, let me ask you two questions about the "invisibility" of the world you're describing. Why do you think there have been so few chronicles about the realities of working at Wal-Mart or Comfort Inn, which employ more people than the dot-coms did even at their height? And what about your revival of (if you'll excuse me) the Black Like Me investigative approach? Should magazine and book writers be doing this more often? Is it a neglected tool in our arsenal? Over to you. Again, thanks for the book. Jim Fallows
Next Page: Barbara Ehrenreich - May 2
Part Two - May 4: James Fallows | Barbara Ehrenreich New Part Three - May 11: James Fallows | Barbara Ehrenreich
What do you think? Join the conversation in Post & Riposte. More on books in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. More on politics in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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