Tom Shachtman

Just below is my op-ed on Eric Hoffer (Lakeville Journal, 5/​5/​11), and below that, another for the Journal (10/​28/​10), and below that, others for The Huffington Post, etc.

WISDOM FROM AN OLD WORKINGCLASS “PHILOSOPHER”
Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher.” Just a mention of him produces immediate reactions from those over 55 to whom I say that I am writing his biography – and puzzled looks from those who are younger. His books, especially The True Believer, were enormously popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but by his death in 1983 they were no longer in the canon of what young people read if they were interested in how the world worked.
After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans who knew about Hoffer started remembering what he had so presciently written about mass movements and their true believers, and began to understand the otherwise inexplicable actions of Al Qaeda and its suicide bombers, through such lines as, “Blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for unattainable self-respect.”
Hoffer didn’t like being called a philosopher, but endured it because his publisher told him it sold books. He was unique in American letters in being completely unschooled, and in being a manual laborer throughout his life. Blind as a child, and orphaned shortly after he regained his sight in his teens, he had then moved to California and become a day laborer, then a migrant agricultural worker and, beginning in World War II, a longshoreman in San Francisco before bursting on the scene with The True Believer, published in 1951 – which became a favorite of President Dwight Eisenhower, and later of President Lyndon Johnson.
In his inquiries he ranged throughout history to understand human beings and their relationships to their societies, nature, and work. In one, he questioned whether the masses, even when newly energized by freedom, had ever created a civilization. He decided that they had never done so until the birth of the United States of America. While most writers celebrated Jefferson, Hamilton, and other thought-leaders, Hoffer asserted that the U.S. was the only society not shaped by an elite. The major creators of this country were the masses – the unwanted of Europe, the refuse, the dregs of humanity who had found their way here.
Pyramiding on that bold assertion, he insisted, in The Ordeal of Change, that those who routinely deprecated the U.S. did so on the wrong basis. Our defects were not those of a business civilization, as his contemporary intellects charged – they were the defects of a mass civilization, which Hoffer identified as “worship of success, the cult of the practical, the identification of quality with quantity, the addiction to sheer action, the fascination with the trivial.”
Hoffer then set out a list of America’s virtues: “A superb dynamism, an unprecedented diffusion of skills, a genius for organization and teamwork, a flexibility that makes possible an easy adjustment to the most drastic change, an ability to get things done with a minimum of tutelage and supervision, an unbounded capacity for fraternization.”
Fifty years have elapsed since Hoffer wrote those descriptions of our faults and our virtues, but they sure do resonate today.


LEARNING THAT YOU CAN TAKE A PUNCH

Using statistics from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, sociologist Ellen Idler of Emory University has discovered that “baby boomers” -- born between 1945 and 1964 – are committing suicide at a rate significantly higher than people younger or older, and have been doing so for about a decade. How much higher? A rate of 17.7 deaths per hundred thousand, as compared to 13.0 for younger people and 12.6 for older people. The middle-aged suicide rate for this particular generation is worrying because people aged 40 to 59 have historically had low suicide rates. Also troublesome is that the baby boomers have had higher suicide rates than the norm throughout their lives – double the previous norm when they were adolescents.
Trying to explain the high rate, Idler cites statistics about proximity: people who commit suicide have friends or relatives who have done so.
She reasons that the many adolescent suicides among the baby boomers affected survivor boomers’ willingness to commit suicide later. Her other explanation – more a guess than a statistical inference -- is that because this generation was the first to be very well protected from childhood diseases, when in middle age they began to have chronic illnesses, they despaired and sought to die.
I think the problem is broader than encountering illness for the first time. More likely the boomers are committing suicide at a higher rate because they as a generation have not really found out whether they can take a punch – an illness punch, a death in the family punch, a catastrophic job loss punch. While in World War II, around 400,000 Americans died in combat or in combat-related deaths, out of a population of 140 million; in Vietnam, the baby boomers’ war, the number of combat and combat-related deaths was around 60,000, out of a population of 200 million, a much lower ratio of hurt per family. Of course each family that suffered such a loss was severely damaged, but the pain was not spread around as broadly as in World War II. Similarly, during the Depression, unemployment rates remained above 25 percent for six years; the worst unemployment rate seen by the baby boomers was half that high. Again, when one loses a job, that is unquestionably a trauma for the individual, but looked at in historical perspective, the pain of unemployment has been spread more thinly in recent decades than in the 1930s.
In the course of research for The Day America Crashed I corresponded with hundreds of people who had tales to tell about the stock market crash of 1929. Many worried that when their generation was gone, the United States would be run by successors who equated freedom with wealth, and viewed both as rights, not privileges. The school of hard knocks had taught the elders that not everything in life goes right all the time, and they felt that the generation born after the war, because it had not known hardship intimately, might be cavalier about their money.
I should point out that even in the 1930s, the suicide rate for the U.S. was no higher than in the 1920s. The notion that during the Depression lots of people committed suicide is a myth begun by, of all people, Winston Churchill. He happened to be in New York one late October day in 1929 when the stock markets were crashing, and a man jumped out of a window and landed not far from him; he wrote up the incident in a magazine, and a myth was born.
A lack of difficulties to be overcome has been a significant factor of the lives of many baby boomers, and may be an important contributor to their high suicide rates, which are expected to continue into their old age, in contrast to the usual pattern.
“Most people never learn whether they can take a punch, but I found out,” said a baby boomer friend who had simultaneously been through a betrayal by his law partner, a divorce, and an automobile accident, and come back stronger than ever. Chat long enough with your neighbor, friend, or relative and you’ll hear similar stories about their hardships, and also, that they have not wallowed in those trenches but have somehow managed to get past life’s vicissitudes. They have learned that they can take a punch, and are the stronger for it.
Knowing that we have the ability to survive even terrible things happening in our lives may be the most important lesson any of us can inculcate, and it is one that can counter the despair that leads to suicide.

Here's an op-ed of mine from the Huffington Post that drew a lot of interested responses, most of them saying 'amen.'

A DOZEN WAYS TO ELIMINATE THE MIDDLE CLASS

Cleaning out my files at year’s end, I came across notes that I wrote in early 2002 on a dozen ways to eliminate America’s middle class through the actions of government and private industry. I must have put the notes away because it did not seem possible that all these things could come to pass. How silly of me! In the past decade more than 90 percent of American families experienced severe economic shocks, and that the damage was particularly bad in households earning between $60,000 and $100,000 per year.
Here’s my list of killer actions:
1. Suppress unions. From the 1930s on, unions have been the principal route out of poverty for tens of millions of Americans. Since 1983, membership has been declining, and is now around 12-13 percent of the workforce. Fewer union members equals fewer people in the middle class.
2. Substantially reduce dividends paid by public companies. Stockholders used to rely on dividends to build a nest egg for a downpayment on a home or a fund to send the kids to college. When the average dividend dropped below the rate of inflation, accumulation by dividends became impossible.
3. Lower interest rates on bonds, deposits, and CDs to laughable levels.
4. Fire middle managers and at the same time raise compensation for upper-level managers. Decades ago, the top manager made 40 times the salary of the factory floor worker; now the multiple is 500, and the growth has been provided mostly by firing the managers in between the top and bottom levels.
5. Shift the burden of health care costs from businesses to employees. Medical costs alone don’t cause people to fall out of the middle class; it is the burden of carrying overpriced health care.
6. Underfund pension plans, and don’t punish companies that fail to make their contributions. When an employer inadequately funds its employees’ pension plan, retirees fall out of the middle-class because the money they had counted on receiving has vanished.
7. Raise college tuition to the stratosphere. Even public college costs today are so high that almost no middle class families can pay for college out of current income, and are forced to take out second mortgages so that their children can obtain a sheepskin.
8. Make greed more attractive. When the upper ranks of earners are not taught to be satisfied with a million dollars a year but insist on making ten, rather than being content to share the extra nine with fellow employees, everyone else loses.
9. Make debt attractive. Ease the way for the middle class to spend money through credit and debit cards, and extend credit to people who are less than credit-worthy, thus driving up credit-card rates and greasing the skids toward impoverishment. Then tout second mortgages as a way to consolidate credit-card debts; and then decrease the value of the homes on which the second mortgages have been based.
10. Allow the economy to become over-dependent on consumer spending, and encourage citizens to buy disposable consumer items. The middle class used to be known for its affinity for real property and big-ticket items. But when you don’t buy the refrigerator and instead buy suits, pairs of shoes, and electronic toys (all made in China), not only don’t you have the refrigerator, but the U.S.-based refrigerator-manufacturing plant shuts down for lack of customers, throwing a couple of more thousand people in Michigan out of the middle class, too.
11. Embrace a tax policy inconsistent with the growth of the middle class, for instance, not permitting tax deductions for such middle-class-boosting expenses as life insurance premiums, college tuition payments, and commuting expenses.
12. Facilitate and protect a bought-and-paid-for Congress beholden to the wealthy for their campaign expenses.


Here's an op-ed of mine from The Lakeville Journal. It was inspired by my, gulp, 50th reunion from high school, and many people have said that it touched a nerve ....

THE WARBABIES’ ADULT RITE OF PASSAGE

My high school class’s fiftieth reunion was this weekend. An older male friend laughed when I told him of the impending occasion, and called fiftieth high school reunions “the only adult rite of passage,” with the implication that the event was to be gotten through, endured rather than enjoyed.

Before attending, I agreed with him. As with most people, my time in high school had been intellectually and emotionally exhilarating and troubling in equal measure, and although I looked forward to renewing acquaintance with some childhood friends with whom I had lost touch, there were other classmates who I didn’t care if I ever saw again. And I’d have to see girls that I’d embarrassingly pined over and boys I’d secretly envied. Now they would all be thin, dark-haired, sexy, wealthy, and have incredible accomplishments to their names.

“Do you have your own hair and your own teeth?” a female friend asked me gently when I expressed my apprehension. “You do, so you’ll be fine.”

Our high school, on the South Shore of Long Island, was relatively small, 212 in our graduating class, and most of us classmates had been in school together since junior high. That middle school had been fed by three elementary schools, so we had known some of our classmates since we had been in second or third grade. On my block, seven of the eleven houses held children who were in my class in elementary school and who were my companions during a decade of schooling.

We were warbabies, born in 1941 or 1942; our parents had moved to this suburb, ten miles or so beyond the New York City limits, at the end of the 1940s or in the early 1950s, from Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. They chose it because its public school system was very good, and New York City’s was not.

Our parents had come, that is to say, for us. They felt in their hearts that the most important thing they could give us was a good solid education, and they were determined that we should have it.

That conviction had been drummed into them by their life experience. Born in the Teens and Twenties, they had grown to adulthood in the Depression, which had seared many of them. A goodly proportion of them were children of immigrants. Their struggles had generated in their minds a version of the dream that John Adams had expressed at the time of the American Revolution: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” I now think of this as the germ of the great American immigrant dream: That the first generation does manual labor so that the second generation can be managers and entrepreneurs, and so that the third generation and beyond can become artists, professionals, do whatever they please and can imagine striving for.

I have long held the concomitant belief that my generation of middle-class Americans – we warbabies, we sons and daughters of the American suburbs who trooped off to college as the 1960s were a-borning – that we have been the most privileged and lucky generational cohort ever to have existed on earth. Our children may have it even better, but we were the first.

During 99 percent of the twenty thousand years of recorded human history, most people did drudge work, tilling farms and the like, all of their lives. This began to change with the industrial revolution and radically altered only in the last half of the 19th century, when big cities grew up and provided millions of non-farm jobs for the multitudes. But then came a series of debilitating wars and economic depressions that curtailed many dreams.

And then we warbabies arrived, billowed to suburbia on the wings of the three-generational dream to take advantage of a good educational system and to nurture great expectations. Unlike our grandparents and parents, who had a limited number of opportunities to seize, we had millions of them. And seize them we did. We were able to because we were so well equipped, having been stuffed full of good learning and a great work ethic during high school, and coached and groomed and sent through college on our parents’ nickels, and then out into the world, to do the one thing that our parents required of us: to truly fulfill our dreams, whatever they might be. Business success. Artistic success. Professional success. Familial success.

I had a wonderful time at my reunion, and so did everyone else. We were all friendly, geared to enjoy ourselves, and we did. It was lovely to see so many old comrades – who looked marvelous, by the way. I was thrilled to hear what each had to say as we each took the microphone for a minute or two and spun an incredible variety of stories of fulfillment, ninety of them, each different from the next. Oh, I’m sure there was some excess bragging, but in the speeches and in the answers to the questionnaires that were made into a commemorative booklet there was very little can-you-top-this, and a lot of it’s-been-a-hell-of-a-ride. We made lunch dates, reciprocal promises of visits, renewed acquaintance with a greater dollop of affection than we had allowed ourselves fifty years ago, when as teenagers we were all into expressing our individuality and differentness one from another.

As senior citizens this weekend, some of us were tickled pink by the extent of what we had in common, and our collegiality. Those who had hardly passed a word with one another fifty years ago, at the reunion were not only congenial but also interested in what the other person had to say.

Certainly that attitude is attributable to our having matured; but it is also, and more importantly, testament to our having gained a benevolent and grateful sense about the world, a sense pushed into full bloom by this once in a lifetime rite of passage. What a gift to have given ourselves!

-- Tom Shachtman