Class Unknown: Undercover Investigators of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present by Mark Pittenger (review)

The social investigators of the early twentieth century who put on overalls and aprons to find out “what’s on the worker’s mind” (60) have mostly escaped scrutiny of their own lives. They changed back into middle-class attire and shared their newfound wisdom with readers hungry for details from the other side of the social chasm. In his new book, cultural historian Mark Pittenger turns the tables on these “down and outers,” tracing their narrative practices, their impact on popular perceptions of economic life, and their standing in the world of academic research. Crossing borders of class, race, and to a lesser extent gender, investigators revealed the hopes and neuroses of their times, Pittenger argues, as well as the troubled relationship between authenticity and duplicity at the heart of the modern effort to know society. Class Unknown tracks the shifting focus on investigations from class to race between the 1890s and the 1960s, pegging a crucial conflation of class and race to the undercover narratives of the early Progressive Era. Even as cultural relativism took hold in the 1920s, undercover investigations shored up the idea that the poor (and to some extent all workers) were a savage, separate group. Pittenger argues that undercover narratives helped to displace “class as a structural feature of American society” with a flexible understanding of culture and subculture that emerged from the long conversation between academia and popular journalism (79).

If most contemporary readers (and later some historians) treated undercover investigations as if they were direct windows onto social reality, Pittenger’s achievement is to firmly place them back in their deeper social context. True enough, the undercover investigations provided first-person accounts of work and unemployment, and in some cases the studies remain important sources for social history. But investigations were also part of wider trends of antiradicalism, middle-class self-fashioning, and liberal pluralism. Pinkerton detectives had been some of the first industrial investigators to make the leap to popular writing, after all, and several of the more popular Gilded Age narratives were more or less travel narratives. These authors typically treated poverty as if it were an undeveloped country, the poor like members of primitive tribes, and travel across the social divide as a dangerous but personally rewarding endeavor. For instance, Pittenger sums up Walter Wyckoff’s oft-cited account of tramping in the 1890s as a chronicle of “the physical reconstruction of that emasculated male self [softened by the] conditions of his privileged academic life” (21).

Shoring up the middle-class man, not surprisingly, frequently came at the expense of broader social commitments. The experience of living as a worker—the theatricality and duplicity as well as the encounter with unfamiliar conditions of poverty—troubled progressive assumptions about social cohesion and the capacity for positive social change, Pittenger argues. The lousy lodging houses, dive bars, and back-alley sexual advances that came along with living as a “down-and-outer” (3) threw cold water on what writers imagined as the “heroic possibilities of workers’ lives” (21). Crossing over to the “other side” gave these investigators an unusual authority among middle-class readers. With the detachment of those who know the hard realities of urban life, investigators raised the frightening possibility that the social chasm was unbridgeable after all. Some writers had programmatic suggestions, ranging from municipal lodging houses and prison reform to unionization. But others simply described poverty in ways that would reassure middle-class readers that it was really the workers’ fault after all.

Beginning in the 1920s, undercover investigators increasingly deployed the concept of “subculture” as an explanation of working-class behavior and as a fact of social structure. The work of Chicago School sociologists was most systematic in this regard, usually eschewing the narrow antiradicalism and class scolding of earlier studies. Pittenger sees Nels Anderson and...