As we honor labor today, the
upsurge in union organizing at Amazon, Starbucks, Hollywood studios, and
hotels seems distant from controversies about affirmative action
and legacy admissions at elite colleges. News stories and commentary on unions and universities
have missed a connection between them that sometimes strengthened American civic culture and politics for at least a century. Since at least
World War I, some legatees of Ivy League privilege have deployed their
advantages to oppose injustices and support workers, often against these defectors’ own comfortable families’ and college classmates’ interests, and
often at some risk to themselves.
Their personal conversions and political trajectories have
mattered because they’ve known the “upstairs” of the American household as
intimately as they’ve come to know the “downstairs.” Yet they’ve often been
forgotten, as George Orwell might have been had his account of being Down
and Out in Paris and London not been surpassed by the novels that
cemented his legacy and fame, Animal Farm and 1984.
In 2005, disgusted by Ivy-heavy triumphalism about the war
in Iraq, I searched in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library for examples of
wiser civic-republican leadership by scions of privilege who’d transcended and
sometimes sacrificed their own prospects to strengthen the republic, not the
plutocracy. One of them, Thomas William Lamont II, would have been an uncle of
Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont had he not left Harvard as a freshman to fight
fascism in World War II, only to die in a submarine that was lost off the coast
of Japan nine years before Ned Lamont was born. I profiled him in The American Prospect in 2006.
I should also have profiled then an even more highly instructive
example of labor and civic leadership set by Malcolm H. Ross, a son of an “old
stock,” prosperous family, who graduated Yale in 1919 but plunged into
years of body-wracking labor alongside miners and oil drillers and became a New
Deal official with the National Labor Relations Board. In 1939, Ross
published Death of a Yale Man, a memoir-cum-report-cum-jeremiad
that’s a worthy companion to Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and
his Homage to Catalonia. Ross’s book is especially instructive for Americans
right now, amid today’s organizing efforts, strikes, and controversies over
elite college admissions.
When I discovered Death of a Yale Man in 2005, leaders
of the “global war on terrorism” and on “Islamo-fascism” included President George W. Bush
(Yale class of 1968); Vice President Dick Cheney (Yale dropout, ’61); Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority administrator (i.e., proconsul) L. Paul Bremer III (’63);
CIA Director R. James Woolsey (’68. Bush’s Yale classmate); Director of
National Intelligence John Negroponte (’60); Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, who as a Yale political science professor had taught Cheney’s chief
of staff I.L. “Scooter” Libby (’72); Bush’s “axis of evil” speechwriter David
Frum (’82); Reagan State Department veteran Robert Kagan (’80); Kagan’s father,
the Yale historian of ancient empires Donald Kagan, a fervent Iraq War booster;
and former New Republic editor Peter Beinart (’93), a noted Iraq War hawk who later recanted that position and whose book The Good Fight seemed to say it all.
Some Yale undergraduates whom I was teaching at the time
were all in with the crusade: some headed to Special Forces, others to pro-war
think tanks. But few of them understood how deepening inequalities and
unjust, injurious working conditions at home were weakening the misadventures
abroad. Yet those failed, top-down crusades, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan
but also in Cuba and Vietnam, have always prompted a few heirs of privilege to
challenge their elders’ premises and practices. Even World War I, which Ivy
leaders from Woodrow Wilson on down presented as “the war to end all wars” and
“to make the world safe for democracy,” seeded only more wars and fascism and
prompted the disillusion but also the dedication of people like Randolph Bourne
and Malcolm Ross.
After a
short stint as a bond salesman upon graduating from Yale in 1919, Ross worked
as an oil-field driller in Texas and a copper miner in Kentucky. Later, he
became the public information officer of the NLRB, from 1934 to 1940, and then chair of FDR’s Federal Fair Employment Practice
Committee (now a commission). Because Ross, like Orwell, was a product of elite
schooling, he depicted knowingly the downsides of being elevated at others’
expense and the upsides of a conscience-driven dedication to fighting for
workers whose “attempts
to speak for themselves through organizations were being bitterly and
successfully opposed by another kind of people I knew—the kind with whom I
had gone to Hotchkiss and Yale.”
William
Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” running for president in 1896, had told a
Yale audience that “99 out of 100 of the students of this university are the
sons of the idle rich.” Two decades later, Ross, by then himself a Yale
student, cited Bryan’s charge, noting that ‘‘nine out of 10’’ of his fellow
students subscribed ‘‘to anti-labor attitudes with fervor.’’ A few dissenters
supported the labor-friendly, immigrant “settlement house” movement, but “more
common were those who thought that modern society was ‘rotten with altruism.’”
When he was working with the NLRB and the Fair
Employment Practices Committee in the 1930s and early ’40s, Ross noted that his Hotchkiss and Yale
classmates who’d become company lawyers contesting the government’s “rotten
altruism” toward workers and the poor believed that
the
technique of opposition to [banning child labor] imposes a necessity to avoid
the directly sentimental issues of hollow-eyed children and instead to find
another sentimental plane such as the preservation of the popular concept of
what the Founding Fathers held dear [such as a lone worker’s supposed right to
work or not] to brandish at judges who by the nature of their craft sit in terror
of rendering decisions out of key with the revered past.
Ross described that “revered past” and
its sequels not reverently but morally, even when doing so entailed judging
himself:
Our
Revolution was fought for the right to have and to hold. Our later genius was
to lie in making more possessions than any people on earth had ever before
enjoyed, and with our skill in production came necessity to distribute widely,
to create new desires, and to speed obsolescence so that there might be a
market for almost-new things.…Private ownership and
many things to be owned—these two formed a pact of mutual security and on
their payroll placed art, music, and the drama. Forever before our eyes we had
seen advertisements linking the good and the beautiful with things we would
like to own.…The car I drive owns my
enthusiasms as a swift and gallant mechanism, and so in turn the car must own a
part of me.… Only with an effort can I raise in my mind a picture of the men
who dig the ore and coal, roll the steel, saw the lumber, tan the hides,
fabricate the bolts.
Although the bones of this
passage carry a Marxist critique of commodity fetishism that Ross picked up
from books and pamphlets and union organizers, the word-flesh on the bones of
his passage carries not folksy agitprop but his personal, “old stock” American
sensibility. He brings his structural economic and political reckonings to the
touchstones of direct experiences in mines and oil fields and of his own
“elite” training for republican guardianship. The tension between them carried
him to a fateful life decision:
A
choice was presented during the past few years, between betting on paternalism
as a way of life, or standing with the tough-fibered, earthy, sometimes brutal,
often ignorant men and women who have been taught by living to hate
paternalism. I think their instincts are right. I would like to see America try
democracy at whatever cost to comfortable people. And because I know the
strength of the opponents of authentic democracy, I have decreed the death of
what I was.
The “death” in Death
of a Yale Man isn’t physical but spiritual, and it presages rebirth.
Dying unto one’s former self to be born anew is a Christian trope, but other
societies enact something like it in what anthropologists call “rites of
passage,” which guide youths from childhood innocence to adult membership in
intergenerational communities by putting them through death-like eclipses of
their childhood interests and then through arduous tests of their emerging public prowess
and communal dedication, under the gaze of respected, ratifying elders. But,
like Orwell, Ross put himself through tests that his own elders weren’t
demanding of him.
Effective dissent like
that, whether it’s made by an Old Testament prophet, a shaman, a Nathan Hale or
Tom Paine in British America before the Revolution, or by an Orwell or a Ross,
isn’t driven mainly by bitterness and revenge. It carries affirmations—“I
would like to see America try democracy at whatever cost to comfortable people”—that the dissenter expresses in new or altered prophecies or “constitutive
fictions” that others can listen to, learn from, and love.
Ross is almost startlingly
prophetic in some passages. He anticipated environmental and technological
challenges that few acknowledged in the late 1930s:
Someday … I shall have to tell my son, who was not born when I began writing this book … that the conquest of the forests left bare slopes so that rivers … run mad to
kill people and destroy their farms.… [O]n a new frontier, he will have to
learn of the fight against machines which in curious ways have turned against
their inventors.
David Chappell, one of
the only historians in our time who has rediscovered and written about Ross,
notes in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion
and the Death of Jim Crow, that Ross was “one of
the first non-Southern liberals to gain experience in racial politics” as well
one of the first to write about his fellow white miners and drillers swooning in desperate raptures at
fundamentalist tent revivals led by itinerant preachers such as Billy Sunday in
Kentucky. Chappell quotes Ross’s ironic observation that
“there is a certain dignity about anyone
entirely engrossed in his profession, and Billy was a knockout at the business
of saving, pro tem, the souls of the emotional.”
Ross’s liberal cynicism
about evangelical religion kept him from developing religious commitments of
his own. But through his own irony he could yearn, “Lord of Hosts, if thy
servant Billy Sunday had been a man with an honest tongue to tell people where
they stand and to what cause they should deliver their hearts, what a healthy
jolt those meetings might have given Louisville.” That the coal miners’
suffering never came up when Billy Sunday was in town, largely because he was
in town, “illustrates our traditional preference for emotion over realities.”
By forsaking ample rewards
for conforming to the conventional protocols that had been prescribed for him
in his youth, Ross developed a realistic, not “emotional,” manner of dissent,
strengthened by advantages he’d inherited but also by disadvantages he’d
embraced:
He who
lives among working people has to make his own way. No clothes, no manners, no
position, no reputation can help. There is no log-rolling [in other words, no
mutual back-scratching], no membership in clubs.… For the standards of those who
live without pretense are stripped bare of any values except what you yourself
are. That is, the unsophisticated you, deprived of all glamorous aides. That
cruel unflattering light, I suppose, is democracy. Many people in their hearts
despise or fear it.
Although Ross probably
never met or even read Paulo Freire, the Brazilian, Christian socialist
philosopher and educator who was 20 years younger than he, Freire’s great book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, contains passages that
could have been written, almost word for word, by the author of Death
of a Yale Man, who certainly lived by Freire’s words: “A real humanist
can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their
struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.”
“My life,” Ross reflected
(almost as if he were responding to Freire!), “has been a constant oscillation
between feeling superior and being bumped into reality by the obvious courage
and mentality of people a peg or two lower in the economic scale.” Most Ivy
League graduates are somewhat insulated from the “constant oscillation,” whose
mixture of conceits and good intentions Ross captured well:
A
pleasant culture thrives in soil perennially watered by profits from absentee
ventures. Cherishing their way of life, the established families of the 1890s
and early 1900s closed their eyes to the crude operations through which wealth
passed before it was refined into money. This was not itself a mark of
heartlessness. It was a nice question in ethics, that matter of building up a
family’s comfort and security on profits siphoned by finance from the great
pool of human labor. Near at hand were a man’s first responsibilities—his
career, his home, his children.… Remote from his sight and experience,
belonging to a class he could easily believe less deserving than himself, were
the muckers, the puddlers, the mule-skinners, the bohunks, the roustabouts.… The head of the family thought of these men occasionally, and with a faint glow
of pride at his own capacity for sympathy. And who could criticize him for
sticking to his career instead of begging for ridicule by tilting at social
windmills?
Who, even now, would
criticize the head of a privileged family for sticking to his career while
posting a “Black Lives Matter” sign on a website or a spacious lawn instead of
taking time to try to reconfigure an untrustworthy police department, a
corporate workplace, a school curriculum, or a particular affirmative-action
protocol? In a “pleasant culture” of privilege—like the one that I enjoyed
at the fiftieth-year reunion of my own Yale Class of 1969 in 2019 on the college’s
Old Campus, the very spot where Ross and his own Yale Class of 1919 had known
one another a century earlier—it isn’t often acknowledged that today’s
union-busting efforts and white-supremacist violence aren’t much different from
what he witnessed, reported, and resisted. Most at my reunion in 2019 were
all in with honoring our own classmate, the private equity emperor Stephen
Schwarzman, as
a benefactor and visionary of the university, of America, and of the
world. Most in Ross’s class would have done the same.
Few would have endorsed
what Franklin D. Roosevelt told tens of thousands who rallied to his
reelection campaign in 1936 in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where,
three days before the election, FDR spoke words that Ross surely read and
endorsed:
For
twelve years this nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing,
do-nothing government.… We had to struggle with the old enemies of
peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class
antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering [which] consider the government of the
United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government
by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.
Even
fewer members of Ross’s Yale Class of 1919 can have endorsed Abraham Lincoln’s
assertion, which Ross quotes in Death of a Yale Man’s concluding
chapter: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only
the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher
consideration.”
The book should be read by every student and alum of elite colleges and law schools. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find, except
in a few libraries that have kept it. I’m grateful that it was ever published at all.