Promised Land

April 13, 2020
A large, prosperous, and politically moderate middle class shaped the American century, according to this judicious and informative debut history from Stebenne, an Ohio State University history and law professor. He explores the revolutionary impact of New Deal social insurance programs, housing subsidies, and labor laws, as well as the WWII-era G.I. Bill, in turning America’s hardscrabble working class into a middle class of well-paid, often unionized (mostly white) workers with cars and suburban houses, who watched bland comedies about middle-class families on TV. The result, Stebenne writes, was a “middle class was as much a state of mind as an economic and demographic reality... sharing a national pride and purpose,” along with centrist politics and a family-friendly middlebrow culture. Stebenne also analyzes limitations that undermined the middle class, including a manufacturing sector that grew overpriced and sclerotic compared to foreign competition, racial discrimination, favoritism toward male breadwinners that left women frustrated, and a political and countercultural revolt from the left and the right. Stebenne’s account is well-researched, evenhanded, and illustrated with sketches of the life stories of representative middle-class couples. This concise, lucid account offers a solid overview of mid-20th-century social history. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim & Williams.

April 15, 2020
A history of "the rise of the middle class as a defining feature of American society from the 1930s to the 1960s." In the mid-20th-century, middle-class Americans saw their position as timeless and natural. Few believe that now, and political scientist Stebenne has written a provocative account of their rise and fall. He reminds readers that until well into the last century, farming was a grueling life, and wages in factories, mines, mills, and offices did not support a bourgeois lifestyle. Matters began changing between the wars. The author begins with Herbert Hoover, whose winning 1928 election campaign emphasized the nation's march toward prosperity. His personality ill-equipped him to handle the Depression, an accusation no one makes against his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, whose programs, conservatives insist, did not end massive unemployment. Stebenne agrees and admits that many New Deal programs flopped, but others laid the groundwork for the postwar middle-class explosion. Among these were farm subsidies, business regulation, bank reform, housing legislation, social security, encouragement of labor unions, and a graduated income tax to pay for it. In 1945, civilians had savings that they yearned to spend, so the depression everyone expected when returning soldiers flooded the job market never happened. By the 1950s, prosperity seemed the norm, although it was a white, suburban family prosperity with a male head of household. The impoverished minority seethed, and dissatisfaction swelled among intellectuals and activists. Few doubt that the 1960s saw the end of the good times. Stebenne blames the Vietnam War, the revival of organized, free-market conservatism ("born out of opposition to [John F.] Kennedy's efforts to sustain and expand the existing system through diplomacy abroad and activist government at home"), and competition from Europe and Asia, now recovered from the devastation of World War II, which stimulated businesses to move to the low-wage south and then across the sea. A thoughtful look at a long-ago era when America seemed egalitarian and prosperous.

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May 15, 2020
Much has been reported recently about the decline of the American middle class and how it is affecting the country's economy and social structure, all for the worse. To get a broader perspective on the issue, Stebenne looks to history to contextualize the rise of the middle class and how its dominance transformed America for the better. With a historian's eye for detail and context, he examines factors that helped propel the growth of the middle class, such the expansion of the labor union movement during the Great Depression and the vast increase in the accessibility of higher education after World War II, thanks to the GI Bill. He then shows how the middle class impacted the economy through such industries as automobile manufacturing and construction and society in the growth of suburbs. Stebenne's analysis goes up to the late 1960s, when the growth of the American middle class reached its peak. The Promised Land is a dense and somewhat challenging read, but the determined reader will find it immensely enlightening and rewarding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)