Living and Eating Class: Animals, Food, and American Inequality

Are we living in a new global Gilded Age, and is a new Progressive Era the panacea for twenty-first–century inequality? As these three thoughtful books suggest, there are fundamental flaws with a call for a new progressivism. Inequality is quantifiable, for example, as income differential. Sometimes inequality is measured in qualitative ways: how well does one eat? Are homes safe? Are they free from pests and disease-causing agents?

America at the turn of the twentieth century inherited the inequality of the Gilded Age; but the Progressive Era, far from eradicating inequality, actually bequeathed a legacy of class violence. David Huyssen’s Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 is an elegantly written book, moving poetically through encounters across class, culture, and geography. Inequality is described here as the physical manifestations of class that deeply troubled elite and proletarian New Yorkers. Pausing principally on the garment and subway wars that culminated with tragic fires and dramatic politics and strikes, Huyssen revisits mostly well-understood and amply documented episodes. Many superb books have been written about New York’s Progressive Era strikes and cross-class foment, though only the smallest handful of them appear in the footnotes or text. This is not only a flaw of omission but also a missed opportunity to place long historiographies in dialogue. Because the text curiously passes over so much of the recent historical literature, it misses the opportunity to plumb the relationship between histories of labor and capitalism in the effort to explicate the relationship between class and inequality.

Huyssen begins in the last weeks of the old century, as rich and poor New Yorkers gathered in Madison Square Garden. There, the very rich watched from the balcony as the city’s poorest dined well—for a night. The Christmas banquet fittingly represents the reality of a divided city and foretells the drama to come. Inequality persisted, indeed increased, in the Progressive Era. This book is most successful when it demonstrates in textured detail the way inequality catalyzed fraught encounters across lines of class and ethnicity.

Class divided, but the Progressive Era forged moments of both cross-class conflict and coalition, along with changing dynamics of class relations. Sometimes—indeed, most often—the very rich understood poverty less as the product of capitalism than as the result of personal and moral failure. Thus, they invaded the tenements as official or self-appointed inspectors penetrating into the heart of the working-class home to challenge the way the very poor lived, washed, ate, and slept. Americans were hardly blind to class, but close analysis of the way rich and poor met on the picket lines or in the elite social clubs exposes the way Americans abandoned efforts to restrain capitalism in the “interest of social harmony” (p. 270).

In Huyssen’s reboot of familiar episodes, there remain opportunities to look beyond the words and performances of cross-class confrontations. What was in the soup at the soup kitchen? What foods were served at that Christmas banquet? Katherine Leonard Turner’s How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century tells us a great deal about what working-class Americans ate and just as much about how their diets became the focus of social reform and a measure of class difference. In the rich detail of the meal, the book describes the transformations of diet as cooking became subservient to the rhythms and processes of industrial labor. Class happens, she argues...