Reading Roundup
Though a lot has gone on these past two weeks, I’ve been rather busy myself and I just have one reading recommendation for today. Historian Seth Cotlar has a great Substack where he details his research looking through the personal archives of Walter Huss, a far-right white supremacist conspiracy theorist and former Oregon Republican party leader. It’s an interesting regular dose of history of the far-right in the U.S., and Cotlar’s posts often have direct connections to right-wing movements/strategies today.
What struck me about his recent post The Art of the Racist Troll, ca. 1987 (linked above) was how much influence one single dedicated racist can have, and the direct through line he highlighted to Trump and the Republican party today. The post starts on a generous note, highlighting that the Republican leader of the house of representatives at the time sent Huss a letter signed by most members of the house denouncing a racist letter that he sent to the first black woman to serve in the Oregon house.
It’s worth reading the letters from Huss themselves, if only to recognize the parallels, and in some cases exact arguments that the far-right makes today. However, I wanted to note the connection to Trump, as I found it very interesting. In an ecosystem of scammers and ideologues, Cotlar points out how Walter Huss plagiarized some of his conspiracy writing from a prolific right-wing copywriter, Jim Rutz.
Rutz was such a dedicated direct marketing copywriter that the 3000+ square foot house he died in contained no furniture aside from stacks and stacks of direct mail copy that Rutz used in place of chairs and tables. He published a few clever advertisements looking for wives over the course of his life, but, ironically enough given his profession, none of them achieved the desired result. Around 2003, Rutz began contributing scores of articles to WND (World Net Daily), a virulently anti-gay and Islamophobic conspiracy-mongering online Christian publication edited by Joseph Farah (who has his own SPLC page).4
Joseph Farah made the mainstream news in 2016 when the New York Times reported that he was the person who convinced Trump in 2011 that “birtherism” was the messaging he should ride into the national political spotlight. Say what you will about Farah, but he, like other important people in Trump-world like Steve Bannon or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham or Chris Ruddy, has a real marketer’s knack for knowing what sort of messaging might appeal to credulous, reactionary, white evangelicals.
So there you have it.
Book Review
The rest of this post will be my thoughts on Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education by Stephanie Land. Some may recognize the name due to her first book, Maid, which was turned into a popular Netflix series. I’ll admit I’ve only seen the series and haven’t read the book, but I thought it was well done and worth watching. I was surprised when I finished reading the book and added my rating to Goodreads (annoyingly bought by Amazon several years ago) that a good number of people posted negative reviews, often annoyed by the Land’s choices as a working single mother. I listened to the audiobook and thought it was pretty easy listening, but I think there are some valid critiques of the writing and also of the genre of memoirs in general. However, it seemed to me that many reviewers who were upset at the irresponsible decisions or generally difficult choices the author made missed the point of the book. As I touched on briefly in my review of White Trash, class has been embedded in U.S. institutions from our founding, much like race.
This book is a great companion to White Trash because it addresses current issues of class in the U.S. through the author’s perspective on her own struggles. Her experiences illustrate clearly the idea that it’s extremely expensive to be poor. For example, lacking health insurance means Land had to deal with accidents, injuries, or illnesses on her own or risk racking up unpayable medical debt (on top of already massive student loan debt). The book is full of the daily indignities that we as a society force poor people to go through in order to prove themselves deserving of compassion like means testing and paperwork burdens that make it difficult to receive food stamps and almost any other social benefit. Land described feeling great relief when she was able to get free school meals for her child just by checking the box that she received SNAP benefits, rather than going through a weeks-long verification process. All to provide food to a hungry child!
On top of all of this, she spends a lot of her free time working, but because people look down on the necessary and important work of cleaning homes and businesses, she barely makes enough money to survive and faces constant precarity in her jobs. Her experiences put a human voice to the statistics regarding the struggles millions of Americans face every day because of some false and idealized notion of the (individual) American Dream. The feigned ignorance of the wealthy about the support they received their whole lives which allowed them to succeed perpetuates an untenable and deeply harmful ideal of doing everything on your own. People can and often do rise out of difficult situations, but as the book makes clear Land’s lucky breaks came both from her hard work and from the many friends and teachers who supported her. Without that network of people who could take care of her child as needed, or allow her to bring her class, or who went out of their way to support her writing, or any number of little things, I shudder to think what could have happened.
On a final note, Land also clearly expresses how she internalized the assumptions imposed on the poor (as illustrated by the many judgmental reviews), mainly that wealth is an indicator of personal worth and that if someone doesn’t have money it must be a just reward for their poor decisions. Land herself struggles to ask for help at any point for fear of being judged, and in the background is a constant fear of child protective services deeming her an unfit mother and taking away her child. This, along with the massive policing and criminal punishment bureaucracy, is the height of our societal sickness in the U.S.; using taxpayer money to separate families with a thin excuse of “protecting children” while those same funds could be used to instead create a robust social safety net which would go much further toward the goal of protecting children. We have the resources. We know what is right. A better world is possible and it is worth the effort.
Purchase the Book
If you’d like, you can purchase Class through bookshop.org. A way to support local bookstores (or me if you use the link I provide), and avoid the Amazon monopoly.
Here is the link to my store page, with all of my recommendations including Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Education by Stephanie Land.
It's definitely going on my reading list!