Blue-Collar Down to the Bone

When I was young, every so often my father would insist on showing me the calluses on his hands. "These are a working man's hands," he would say, as I moved my fingers along the arc of hardened skin just below his fingers. He was an electrician who wired houses, and he was proud of those hands. I suspect that this ritual was his way of saying, "I build things, and at the end of the day I can see what I've helped to create."

On the rare occasions when my father took me to a job site with him, usually on a weekend when there was no foreman around, I loved watching him work. His tool belt hung low on his hips, with the hammer dangling at his side. He'd clutch half a dozen nails in his teeth to avoid having to reach into his nail pouch. He would work his way swiftly along the frame of a house, attaching the electrical wire snuggly to wooden 2-by-4s.

My father's view of the world was that men who wore suits to work were "paper pushers" who knew neither the joys nor travails of what he called "working people." He distrusted those who flaunted their educations or used big words when a small one would do. In the social contest for respect, he must have felt that people who came home from work clean looked down on him.

When I went to college in the early 1970s, I learned about the violent American origins of Labor Day. President Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day legislation in 1894, but only after using federal troops to break the American Railway Union's strike against the Pullman Co. and arresting labor leader Eugene Debs. My professors spoke mournfully about how American workers, unlike their European counterparts, didn't recognize their own class interests. They were conservative, my professors insisted, bought off by the false promises of American consumerism and hoodwinked by the hollow myths of upward mobility.

In a sociology class, my fellow students nodded agreeably when our professor showed us the famous pictures of hard-hat construction workers beating up anti-Vietnam war protesters in Manhattan in 1970. I didn't nod with the rest of the class, who were mostly from comfortable upper-middle-class homes in the San Francisco suburbs. To me, that one incident did not capture the complex political attitudes of the blue-collar people I grew up with. I wondered how these affluent students and professors could conclude that owning a small house, a station wagon and getting two weeks of vacation a year were proof of being "bought off."