Chapter 1
THE AMERICAN DREAM: MYTHS AND REALITIES
I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone.1
If I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world.
In the particular is contained the universal.2
MY HOMETOWN WAS, IN THE 1950s, a passable embodiment of the American Dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever their background. A half century later, however, life in Port Clinton, Ohio, is a split-screen American nightmare, a community in which kids from the wrong side of the tracks that bisect the town can barely imagine the future that awaits the kids from the right side of the tracks. And the story of Port Clinton turns out to be sadly typical of America. How this transformation happened, why it matters, and how we might begin to alter the cursed course of our society is the subject of this book.
The most rigorous economic and social history now available suggests that socioeconomic barriers in America (and in Port Clinton) in the 1950s were at their lowest ebb in more than a century: economic and educational expansion were high; income equality was relatively high; class segregation in neighborhoods and schools was low; class barriers to intermarriage and social intercourse were low; civic engagement and social solidarity were high; and opportunities for kids born in the lower echelon to scale the socioeconomic ladder were abundant.
Though small and not very diverse racially, Port Clinton in the 1950s was in all other respects a remarkably representative microcosm of America, demographically, economically, educationally, socially, and even politically. (Ottawa County, of which Port Clinton is county seat, is the bellwether county in the bellwether state of the United Statesâthat is, the county whose election results have historically been closest to the national outcome.3) The life stories of my high school classmates show that the opportunities open to Don and Libby, two poor white kids, and even to Jesse and Cheryl, two poor black kids, to rise on the basis of their own talents and energy were not so different from the opportunities open to Frank, the only real scion of privilege in our class.
No single town or city could possibly represent all of America, and Port Clinton in the 1950s was hardly paradise. As in the rest of America at the time, minorities in Port Clinton suffered serious discrimination and women were frequently marginalized, as we shall explore later in this chapter. Few of us, including me, would want to return there without major reforms. But social class was not a major constraint on opportunity.
When our gaze shifts to Port Clinton in the twenty-first century, however, the opportunities facing rich kids and poor kids todayâkids like Chelsea and David, whom we shall also meet in this chapterâare radically disparate. Port Clinton today is a place of stark class divisions, where (according to school officials) wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the high school lot next to decrepit junkers that homeless classmates drive away each night to live in. The changes in Port Clinton that have led to growing numbers of kids, of all races and both genders, being denied the promise of the American Dreamâchanges in economic circumstance, in family structure and parenting, in schools, and in neighborhoodsâare surprisingly representative of America writ large. For exploring equality of opportunity, Port Clinton in 1959 is a good time and place to begin, because it reminds us of how far we have traveled away from the American Dream.
⢠⢠â˘
June 1, 1959, had dawned hot and sunny, but the evening was cooler as 150 new graduates thronged down the steps of Port Clinton High School in the center of town, clutching our new diplomas, flushed with Commencement excitement, not quite ready to relinquish our childhood in this pleasant, friendly town of 6,500 (mostly white) people on the shores of Lake Erie, but confident about our future. It was, as usual, a community-wide celebration, attended by 1,150 people.4 Family or not, the townspeople thought of all the graduates as âour kids.â
Don
Don was a soft-spoken white working-class kid, though no one in our class would have thought of him that way, for he was our star quarterback.5 His dad had only an eighth-grade education. To keep the family afloat, his dad worked two jobsâthe first on the line at the Port Clinton Manufacturing factory, from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and the second, a short walk away, at the local canning plant, from 3:30 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. His mom, who had left school in the 11th grade, âlived in the kitchen,â Don says, making all of their meals from scratch. Every night, she sat down with Don and his two brothers for dinner. They got used to eating hash, made by frying up everything left in the house with potatoes. The boys were in bed by the time their dad got home from work.
They lived on the poorer side of town, and did not own a car or television until Don went off to college, by which time 80 percent of all American families already had a car, and 90 percent had a TV. Their neighbors drove them to church every week. The family had no money for vacations, but Donâs parents owned their home and felt reasonably secure economically, and his dad was never unemployed. âI didnât know that I was poor until I went to college and took Economics 101,â Don recalls, âand found out that I had been âdeprived.â â
Despite their modest circumstances, Donâs parents urged him to aim for college, and, like many other working-class kids in our class, he chose the college-prep track at PCHS. His mom forced him to take piano lessons for six years, but his true love was sports. He played basketball and football, and his dad took time off from work to attend every single one of Donâs games. Don downplays class distinctions in Port Clinton. âI lived on the east side of town,â he says, âand money was on the west side of town. But you met everyone as an equal through sports.â
Although none of his closest friends in high school ended up going to college, Don did well in school and finished in the top quarter of our class. His parents âdidnât have a clueâ about college, he says, but fortunately he had strong ties at church. âOne of the ministers in town was keeping an eye on me,â he says, âand mentioned my name to the university where I ended up.â Not only that, the minister helped Don figure out how to get financial aid and navigate the admissions process.
After PCHS, Don headed off to a religiously affiliated university downstate (where he also played football) and then on to seminary. While in seminary, he developed doubts about whether he could âhack itâ as a minister, he says, and came home to tell his parents he was quitting. Back home, he stopped by the local pool hall to say hello. The owner, a longtime friend of his dadâs, referred to him as âa future minister,â and a customer asked Don to pray for himâwhich Don interpreted as signs that he should continue on his path.
Immediately after college, Don married June, a high school teacher, and they had one child, who became a high school librarian. Don had a long and successful career as a minister and retired only recently. He still helps out in local churches and has coached high school football for many years. Looking back, he says he has been blessed with a very good life. His rise from a poor but close-knit working-class family to a successful professional career reflected his native intelligence and his gridiron grit. But as we shall see, the sort of upward mobility he achieved was not atypical for our class.
Frank
Frank came from one of the few wealthy families in Port Clinton. In the late nineteenth century, his maternal great-grandfather had started a commercial fishing business, and by the time of Frankâs birth the family had diversified into real estate and other local businesses. His mother graduated from college in the 1930s and then earned a masterâs degree at the University of Chicago. While in Chicago she met Frankâs father, a college-educated ministerâs son, and they soon married. As Frank grew up, his father managed the family businessesâfishing, a shopping center, farming, a restaurant, and so forthâand his mother did charity work.6
Port Clintonâs social elite has long made the Port Clinton Yacht Club its hub. While Frank was growing up, his grandfather, father, and uncle each served a term as the clubâs âCommodore,â and his mother and aunt were elected âShipmates Captainââpinnacles of local social status. In short, Frankâs parents were the wealthiest, best educated, and most socially prominent parents of the class of 1959.
Nevertheless, the social distance between Frankâs family and those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder was much shorter than is common in America (even in Port Clinton) today. Frank (who lived only four blocks away from Don) recalls his neighbors as âa nice mix of everyoneââtruck driver, store owner, cashier at the A&P, officer at a major local firm, fire chief, gas station owner, game warden. âWe played baseball out in the backyard or kick-the-can down at the corner,â he says. âEverybody just got along.â
Despite his familyâs affluence, Frank worked summers at the family restaurant, starting at fifteen, scraping paint and doing cleanup work with his high school buddies. And his family carefully downplayed their social status. âIf youâre in Port Clinton with a group of boys who can afford a Coke, thatâs what you are to order,â Frankâs grandfather had memorably warned Frankâs uncle. âIf weâre in Cleveland or New York, you can order whatever you want, but when youâre with kids in Port Clinton, you do what they can do.â
In high school, Frank interacted with his classmates as a social equalâso ably, in fact, that many of us were unaware of his exceptional family background. But signs of it did appear. He was the first in our class to wear braces. In elementary school he spent winter months at a family home in Florida, attending school there. His grandfather was on the school board. Frankâs parents once invited a teacher over for dinner. Afterward Frank chided his mom, âWhy did you embarrass me in front of the whole class?â The suggestion that his parents might ever have intervened to try to alter a grade strikes Frank as absurd: âAre you kidding? Oh, jeez, as far as we kids knew, the teachers are always right.â
Frank was an indifferent student, but that didnât mean his parents neglected his educational prospects. âMy life was programmed from the time I was born until I was through college,â he says. âYou knew you were going to go to college, and you better graduate.â With financial support from his parents, he attended a small college in Ohio, graduating with a major in journalism. After college, he enlisted in the Navy and for seven years navigated Navy transport planes around the world. âI loved it,â he recalls.
After his naval service, Frank worked for about twenty-five years as an editor for the Columbus Dispatch, until he objected to some personnel decisions and was fired. At that point he returned to Port Clinton, semiretired, to work in the family businessesâthe fish-cleaning operation, dock rentals, and the boutique. He has been helped financially through some difficult years by a trust fund that his grandfather created for him at birth. âItâs not a lot of money,â he says, âbut Iâll never starve.â Frankâs family fortune has cushioned him from some of lifeâs hard knocks, but it was not a trampoline that boosted him ahead of his peers from less affluent homes, like Don.
Class Disparities in Port Clinton in the 1950s
Class differences were not absent in Port Clinton in the 1950s, but as the lives of Frank and Don illustrate, those differences were muted. The children of manual workers and of professionals came from similar homes and mixed unselfconsciously in schools and neighborhoods, in scout troops and church groups. The class contrasts that matter so much today (even in Port Clinton, as we shall shortly see)âin economic security, family structure, parenting, schooling, neighborhoods, and so onâwere minimal in that era. Virtually everyone in the PCHS class of 1959, whatever their background, lived with two parents, in homes their parents owned, and in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone elseâs first name.7
Our parents, almost universally homemaker moms and breadwinner dads, were not especially well educated. Indeed, barely one in 20 of them had graduated from college, and a full third of them hadnât even graduated from high school. (For the most part, they had completed their schooling before high school education became nearly universal.) But almost everyone in town had benefited from widely shared postwar prosperity, and few of our families were poverty-stricken. The very few kids in town who came from wealthy backgrounds, like Frank, made every effort to hide that fact.
Some dads worked the assembly lines at the local auto part factories, or in the nearby gypsum mines, or at the local Army base, or on small family farms. Others, like my dad, were small businessmen whose fortunes rose and fell with the business cycle. In that era of full employment and strong unions, few of our families experienced joblessness or serious economic insecurity. Most of my classmates, whatever their social origins, were active in sports, music, drama, and other extracurricular activities. Friday night football games attracted much of the townâs population.
Seen a half century later, my classmates (now mostly retired) have experienced astonishing upward mobility. Nearly three quarters of us obtained more education than our parents, and the vast majority made it higher up the economic ladder. In fact, some kids from less well-off backgrounds have climbed further up that ladder than kids from more comfortable, better-educated backgrounds. By contemporary standards, our classâs absolute level of upward educational mobility was remarkable, a reflection of the high school and college revolutions of the twentieth century. Half the sons and daughters of high school dropouts went on to college. Many of those who were the first in their family to complete high school ended up also being the first to complete collegeâa remarkable jump in a single generation. Even more striking, although the two black students in our class contended with racial prejudice (as we shall shortly see) and came from homes in which neither parent had completed grade school, both earned postgraduate degrees.
In 1950s Port Clinton, socioeconomic class was not nearly so formidable a barrier for kids of any race, white or black, as it would become in the twenty-first century. By way of comparison, the children of the members of the class of 1959 would, on average, experience no educational advance beyond their parents.8 The escalator that had carried most of the class of 1959 upward suddenly halted when our own children stepped on.
This high absolute mobility of my class of 1959 could have been consistent with low relative mobility, if everyone had moved upward in lockstep, but actually, even relative mobility was high. In fact, upward mobility among the kids from the lower half of the socioeconomic hierarchy was almost as great as among the most privileged kids. In short, lots of upward mobility from the bottom and a modest amount of downward mobility at the top.
To be sure, less educated parents, with narrower cultural horizons and less familiarity with advanced education, sometimes had lower educational aspirations for their kids. However, if they, or our teachers, or informal mentors in the community (like Donâs pastor), or our friends encouraged us to attend college, we invariably didâwith virtually no trace of economic or financial or neighborhood bias in our college going.9 Low costs at public and private institutions across Ohio were supplemented by a wide array of locally raised scholarshipsâfrom the Rotary Club, the United Auto Workers Union, the Junior Womenâs Club, and the like. Of all college grads in the PCHS class of 1959, two thirds of them were the first in their families to attend college, a...