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CounterPunch
August
24, 2002
Proverbial
Wisdom
Clogs, Up and Down
by Susan Davis
"From clogs to clogs in three generations."
(England, 1700 forward, variously.)
According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of
Proverbs, this saying might have originated in Lancashire, one
of England's earliest industrial regions. "The clog, a shoe
with a thick wooden sole, was commonly used by factory and other
manual workers in the north of England." I've seen clogs
in English museums that look like flat wooden sandals attached
to elevating metal frames, a kind of 18th-century platform shoe
to keep the wearer up and out of the muck.
This proverb also turns up as "from
shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations," and
"clogs up, clogs down." The idea is that families can
fall in social scale as quickly as they rise, and this was apt
in the English industrial towns of the 18th and 19th centuries,
where some potters or weavers became factory owners very fast,
only to lose their fortunes and see their children return to
the factory floor. "Clogs up, clogs down" conjures
a lively image of people in clumping uphill to live in a mansion,
and clomping back down again, in search of more modest digs.
There's a suggestion of cyclical justice, that people who've
gotten too big for themselves have been justly cut down to size,
by some sort of generational logic. "Seldom three descents
continue good."
Shifting to the United States, it's well-known
among demographers and social historians that with the exception
of some very rich American families, like the Rockefellers or
Vanderbilts, wealth here churns more than it holds steady. There
is a lot of stability, and very great concentration of riches
at the top of society. Most people don't rocket from working-class
to leisure class, no matter what you see in the lottery advertisements,
and most of the very wealthy don't end up sleeping under cardboard
on the Bowery, no matter what Manhattan tour guides tell you
about the homeless. But in the middle there's tremendous instability,
and in any generation just as many people are downwardly mobile
as are upwardly mobile. I should correct that and say that in
recent years more people have been downwardly mobile, since two
of the hallmark social changes of the last thirty years have
been the the declining American wage and the evisceration of
the "middle," both due in large part to the loss of
solid, well paying blue-collar jobs.
So I couldn't help but think "from
clogs to clogs in three generations" as few months ago when
I read all the complaints about the Justice Department's prosecution
of Arthur Andersen. Enron took its giant auditor down with it.
Andersen employees were laid off as as company's big clients
lost "confidence" in Andersen's ability to produce
reliable and trustworthy financial statements.
The argument in the papers and on CNN
was that it was irresponsible to prosecute a company, no matter
how criminal its behavior, because so many innocent families
would suffer. Of course, huge numbers of former Enron employees
are suffering because of Anderson's creative accounting tactics.
What the complaint in the press meant is that presumably innocent
managers making $100,000 a year are being laid off, and it is
the loss of their class security that is unacceptable.
During the 1980s and early '90s hundreds
of thousands of factory workers lost good jobs, and the government
did nothing to intervene, nor did Lou Dobbs take the feds to
task for allowing such miserable upheaval. In Philadelphia alone
in the 1980s, 100,000 blue-collar jobs vanished. But that was"
restructuring" and the new economy; what's happening now
is "irresponsible prosecution." Managerial workers
and professionals, Lou Dobbs included, always think it can't
happen to them. Of course there's nothing in the least bit natural
or generational about this economic upheaval, but it's starting
to look like it can happen to anybody.
Clogs up, clogs down.
Susan Davis
teaches at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She
can be reached at sgdavis@uiuc.edu
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August 24
/ 25, 2002
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Of Clogs and Enron
Falk / Krieger
No War
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