Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion by Steve Fraser (review)

The delusion, of course, is that in “America” it doesn’t. Here, Steve Fraser dissects six key monuments of the mythical “classless America” in order to show both how class tensions underlay the historical actuality of each case and how social, political, and ideological forces have managed to obscure that agonistic reality. The result is a tour de force of scholarship-based popular history and inspired social and political criticism. Having written on these themes before — from his historical studies of labor and ruling-class power to his books on Wall Street and late twentieth-century “acquiescence” in growing inequality — Fraser now distills his wide-angle learning into a brief, readable, and compelling account of American history. Writing for a historical moment when the Trump, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez phenomena have partially reawakened the language of class, Fraser emphasizes the darker portents that follow from the dogged American dialectic of classed reality and the mythic denial of it.

The illusory baseline lay in the idea that British North America promised a fresh start in the New World, offering both individual freedom and egalitarian harmony wholly apart from Old World hierarchies. To make a full set of case studies, Fraser adds the following: the imagined Constitution of finely-tuned checks and balances; the idea of social mobility so salient in Lincoln’s free-labor ideology; the lure of “lighting out for the territories”; the retrospective, mid-twentieth-century romance of immigrant assimilation linked to the coinage of “the American Dream”; the Fordist promise of mass consumption; and the spirit of national self-congratulation that has encumbered and constrained the meaning and consequences of the great civil rights bills. Tracking this chronological sequence, Fraser unfolds a keen analysis of successive transformations in early, middle, and late capitalist development — unraveling mythic consciousness without falling into mere debunking. Thus we see that the aura of liberty and communal harmony in the earliest British settlements obscures the system of colonial-mercantile plunder and primitive accumulation that sustained those settlements and devastated indigenous societies. The Constitution secured the power of those committed to developing a fully commercialized republic; and the icon of cowboy independence in the trans-Mississippi West hardly measured up to the grinding labor demanded by the big business of cattle ranching in the era of “extractive capitalism” (125). Inequality, “dominion,” “subordination,” and “the abrasions of class,” Fraser writes, run through it all (20, 67, 254).

Fraser does not always probe in depth the discursive practices that have produced and replicated the mythic aura over time. But he gets close to that kind of inquiry in his brilliant chapter on the Statue of Liberty and its associated “nation of immigrants” (105) ideology. Immigration was entirely unconnected to the monument’s origins: the French gift was the project of Third Republic liberals who hailed the apparent order and stability of bourgeois America, even as the rapacious Gilded Age businessmen of the United States showed little interest in raising the funds to match the French donation. Emma Lazarus’s poem of welcome to the world’s “wretched refuse” was added only in 1903, almost twenty years after the statue’s unveiling, and no one paid attention to the poem until New Deal politics (following immigration restriction) latched onto immigrant assimilation as part of “the American Dream.”

Next to that chapter, the book’s highlight lies in Fraser’s masterly account of the social struggle and processes of accommodation bound up with civil rights achievements of the 1960s. There he ponders the mystery of the deep gulf between the “class-inflected” civil rights agitation of the 1940s, starting with A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, and the popular memory of the 1963 March, which has effaced the call for “Jobs and Freedom” that figured in the official name the organizers gave to the event (emphasis added). The social-structural forces eroding the strength of the Jim Crow order (mechanization of...