Vol. 91: Middle-class assumptions

Where do you stand on slavery, elitists, and children’s rights?

       Years ago, a woman I knew discovered, while reading a history paper written by her professor husband, that household servants in colonial America were paid less than a dollar a day.

       “Had we lived back then,” she exclaimed, “imagine how many servants we could have afforded!”

       “Had we lived back then,” her husband replied, “we would have been the servants.”

       That exchange occurred to me the other day when I read that Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina as well as the Republican party’s current candidate for governor of that unfortunate state, had once advocated the restoration of slavery.

       “Slavery is not bad,” Robinson posted on the message board of a pornographic website called Nude Africa, according to a recent CNN investigation. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”

       Granted, Mark Robinson’s encomium to slavery appeared more than ten years ago, before he went into politics and presumably before the synapses in his brain had entirely grown together. Presumably Robinson’s online paean to slavery— not to mention his praise for Hitler, his self-identification as a “Black Nazi,” his scorn for “Martin Luther Koon,” and his professed affinity for transgender pornography— can be chalked up to a need to be noticed, which no pornographic website visitor can satisfy by merely endorsing conventional wisdom. Maybe Robinson’s parents didn’t pay him enough attention as a child. Or maybe, like me, Robinson was just trying to provoke a dialogue by striking provocative poses.

       Still, not to put too fine a point on it: Mark Robinson is a Black man whose ancestors were themselves slaves, not masters, and…. do you get my drift?

       Strange, isn’t it, how most of us assume that, had we lived in other times and places, we’d occupy the same status that we enjoy today?

A Black columnist’s challenge

       Back in the allegedly good old days, newspaper columnists who confronted a daily deadline with nothing to say often fell back on the easiest solution: lamentation over the moral decay of contemporary society, especially when compared to the enlightened world of the 19^th, 18^th, 15^th, 12^th, Third, or whatever other century they chose to eulogize long enough to fill their allotted 800-word daily quotas. This was an especially daunting challenge for the late Claude Lewis of the Philadelphia Bulletin (and later the Inquirer), one of the first Black columnists to write regularly for a predominantly white audience, and consequently one of the few Black columnists who didn’t see everything through a racial prism.

       In November 1981 Lewis solemnly informed his readers that “Our nation is a study in overkill.” The evidence? Americans drink liquor “in gluttonous proportions.” We drive in a hurry. “We prefer our music loud…. There is no individual in America.” Our deepest thinkers are “Barbara Walters, Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace…. Our heroes have become Elvis Presley, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Richie (sic) Pryor.”

       Then followed the inevitable comparison with the good old days. “Whatever happened to those men and women of the past,” Lewis inquired rhetorically, “who offered us a measure of tranquility and a ration of something other than rage?” Lewis trotted out the usual suspects: Thoreau, Emerson, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, etc., etc., who, according to Lewis, “massaged our minds and provided us with at least a pause, a moment to measure the machinations of time.”

       Since I wasn’t around to measure those machinations, I’m unqualified to question this portrait of that halcyon epoch. No doubt 19^th-Century people functioned on a higher plane than we modern wretches do, massaging their minds with Emerson and Thoreau while working 80-hour weeks in textile mills, whupping slaves, and battling diphtheria epidemics, not to mention keeping up appearances at lynchings and tarrings-and-featherings. Nineteenth-century men and women, you must admit, packed a lot of living into their 43 years, which was their average life expectancy.

       Since I was then editor of the Welcomat, a weekly Philadelphia alternative paper, I seized that occasion to remind Lewis that my European Jewish ancestors passed up Emerson and Thoreau in favor of two other popular 19^th-Century pastimes: hiding and fleeing. Lewis’s own 19^th-Century ancestors, for that matter, had no time for Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson because they were too busy setting a new world’s record for minimum hourly wages received. As for everyone else’s ancestors, perhaps they participated in one of those exciting 19th-Century wars to make the world safe for colonialism. Or maybe they got involved in one of the 19^th Century’s exciting theological debates, which usually concluded with the burning of the losers, if not entire churches and towns.

A magazine’s ‘elitist’ publisher

       And didja ever notice how “elitists”— that is, folks who believe society functions best when it’s run by people of superior intellect, wealth, talent, and breeding— always assume themselves to be members of that elite? D. Herbert Lipson, my boss at Philadelphia Magazine in the early ’70s, was best known for his tailored suits, his obsession with appearances (he chose books for his office shelves based on their size, without regard to their content), and his monthly “Off the Cuff” column, in which Lipson functioned as a combination community conscience and curmudgeon. In one such column, Herb proudly proclaimed himself “an elitist.”

       What struck me at the time was Herb’s blithe assumption that he himself belonged to such a group. In fact, although Herb functioned as Philadelphia Magazine’s impeccably attired public face, his column was ghostwritten by his introverted editor, Alan Halpern (and occasionally by me); Herb couldn’t write if his life depended on it. And he had inherited the magazine from his father.

       To be sure, that inheritance vastly improved on Herb’s watch, and he steadfastly supported it through good times and bad for more than half a century (which is more than you can say for another self-styled elitist, Donald Trump). But without the benefit of a propertied father, a high-priced tailor, and a modish interior designer, could such a man have survived?

       Eric Hoffer once observed that America’s strength lies not in its elites— its Roosevelts, Eisenhowers, and Kennedys— but in its Harry Trumans. By this he meant that in any town across the U.S., you can find at least one citizen— the mayor, perhaps, or the newspaper publisher, or a factory manager, or the school superintendent— who, if he or she awoke tomorrow to find himself or herself president of the United States, could do a reasonably decent and possibly superior job. Hoffer’s experience of the world, of course, was different from Herb Lipson’s: He made his living as a longshoreman.

Raise the voting age?

       Now consider the proposal of my friend Gardner Cadwalader, a civic-minded Philadelphia architect and stockbroker who responded to my recent column about the Electoral College (Sept. 23) by proposing that the voting age be raised from the current 18 to 25 or even 30 or higher.

       “By 30-35,” Gardner reasoned, “most of us have matured out of our educational cocoons, have had military experience, pay taxes, have children, sought a competent and safe public school, are paying a mortgage, learned that politicians tell us one thing and do another. We have become much wiser voters.”

       Are you shocked to learn that Gardner himself would qualify for the electorate he proposes? Are you surprised that, at 76, he shows no interest in excluding, say, voters over 75, an age when they’re more vulnerable to dementia, Alzheimer’s, and cognitive impairment?

       When I was a third grader at P.S. 9 in Manhattan, my teacher, Adelaide Fredericks, routinely devoted the first half-hour of each school day to “current events.” At some point it occurred to me that this daily news discussion probably equipped us third graders with a better understanding of public issues than most grownups possessed. “In that case,” I further wondered, “how come adults can vote and we can’t?”

       Two years later, when New York’s Board of Education elected William Jansen to a seven-year term as Superintendent of Schools, I wrote an outraged editorial in my fifth-grade class newspaper, asking, in effect, “Don’t we kids get to vote on this guy?” Had we enjoyed that right, the good Dr. Jansen might have paid more attention to the rising numbers of Black and Puerto Rican students in his school system, and less attention to the almost nonexistent number of Communists among his city’s teachers.

       Today, having ripened out of my educational cocoon, I recognize the error of my childish thinking. More than 80 years on this planet have taught me that there’s no substitute for the maturity and experience of advanced age. Children will grow out of childhood eventually and get their turn to vote, just as I did. For these little bastards— sorry, citizens of tomorrow— the watchwords must be patience and respect for the superior wisdom of their elders, except when we seniors need their help upgrading our smartphones and accessing our Netflix accounts.

       Now, has anybody seen my reading glasses? I could swear I had them just a minute ago. How the hell am I supposed to finish this column without them?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com