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

This unusual book offers more than its subtitle suggests. In addition to providing a nuanced history of an enduring genre of reportage that has been periodically reworked by generations of American writers, Pittenger's latest book makes deft use of literary and historical analysis to trace how Americans struggled to comprehend the realities of social class. As the United States moved from industrialization to economic depression, war, and postindustrial social change, perspectives on the poor changed, but the problem of comprehending class endured.

Pittenger begins with the rich array of Progressive Era investigators who went "down and out" in order to see and report about how "the other half" lived. He considers the writings of an all-but-forgotten troupe of pioneering social investigators, including Walter Wycoff, Josiah Flynt, Bessie and Marie Van Vorst, and Stuart Chase, who helped "establish a popular genre of investigative literature with distinctive conventions," including elaborate descriptions of the disguises that the writers donned to go underground (41). Although these writers often saw the poor as an alien other, they nonetheless established a sympathetic "societal discourse on poverty and class as experienced from the inside" (41).

In the 1920s, Pittenger shows, a number of investigators, such as Nels Anderson, renewed the genre, evincing a special interest in the lives of hoboes, who provided a counterpoint to the consumerism that was just beginning to transform middle-class culture. Depression-era writers revised the genre for worried middle-class Americans who feared that the distance between their circumstances and those of the transient poor was diminishing. Although these years saw some "down and outers" attempt to soften the effects of class in sentimental portraits, they also produced hard-hitting social critiques, such as Paul Peters' Stevedore, a searing 1934 play based upon the author's work alongside African-American "dockwallopers."

Pittenger explains that World War II altered the tradition of "down and out" reportage, as social scientists raised ethical issues about undercover journalism and substituted data-driven analysis for anecdotal narratives. In the postwar era, ethnic and racial divisions interested investigators more than class division, which seemed to be ameliorated by postwar prosperity. Hence, the great postwar undercover works explored antisemitism and racism.

Yet, middle-class America never gave up its desire to understand the working poor through the writings of those who lived among them, says Pittenger. Barbara Ehrenreich's bestselling Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (New York, 2001) testifies to the ongoing appeal of a genre that has roots stretching back to the nineteenth century. But what distinguishes recent books like Ehrenreich's, he argues, is their "resistance to casting the poor as alien others," as some Progressives once did (187). By explaining how the genre evolved from Van Vorst to Ehrenreich, using both historical and literary analysis, Pittenger provides a memorable meditation on America's ongoing struggle to come to terms with class division.