Saturday, February 28, 2009

They'll Be Back? Are The Living Dead In Texas (And Don't Know It)?

The days of Texas swagger are done. Gone is Larger-Than-Life Lyndon. Gone are Bush 41 and Bush 43. (Thank the God of your choice.) Gone is Mr. Sam. Gone are all of the Texans who held sway in the House of Representatives and the Senate. We are left with Cornball (R-San Antonio), he of the Connallyesque white hair — but little else. (All hair and no cattle.) The Lone Star politicians have turned inward and leave the national stage to people named Nancy, Harry, Chuck, and Barney. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.

PS: No one is perfect. The author of this farewell to Texas influence in DC is mistaken about T-Bonehead Pickens' residence; T-Bonehead moved to North Dallas (where his newest neighbor is The Dubster) from Amarillo in 1989. No one in Amarillo was sorry to see T-Bonehead leave for Big D.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
My Fellow Texans, Let's Consider That Our State's Day In DC Is Done
By Bryan Burrough

The key to Texas influence in the 20th century.

Tag Cloud of the following article

created at TagCrowd.com

In 1845, the second-largest independent country in North America, the Republic of Texas, held its nose, took a deep breath and merged with its upstart eastern neighbor, the United States. (As a Texan myself, I understand the occasional regret that we took y'all's name instead of the other way around.) For the next century, Texas didn't give America much trouble. By and large, it was known for cattle with large horns, men with large hats and its citizenry's penchant for orneriness, braggadocio and shooting one another.

All that began to change in the late 1940s, when America suddenly discovered that an awful lot of Texans had somehow become very, very rich — and very, very interested in national politics. The East Coast establishment's dismay at this news was captured in a six-part series of front-page stories in The Washington Post that began 55 years ago this month. Authored by the Pulitzer Prize-winning White House correspondent Edward T. Folliard, the package promised what an editor's note called a first-ever look at "The Big Dealers, the fabulous money men of Texas who have been pouring part of their millions into American politics. ... The unique thing about them is public ignorance of their motives, purposes and ideas."

Thus began more than half a century of Texas political power that would see the first Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, take a seat in the Oval Office; a second, George H.W. Bush, 25 years later; and in short order a third, George W. Bush. Along the way, the Texas "Big Dealers," a class of rightwing oilmen more commonly known as the Big Rich, would thrust upon the nation a series of princelings, beginning with their in-house attorney, John Connally, and leading through men such as Tom DeLay, Dick Armey and Phil Gramm.

But now, barely a month into the Obama administration, even the proudest Texans must admit: The days of Lone Star Power are over. You may greet this news with tears or with relief, but there's no denying it. Now that George W. Bush has hightailed it back to Dallas, there is no Texan of any real significance left on the national stage. Kay Bailey Hutchison is still hanging on, and Texas has that governor, Rick whatsisname, the guy with the haircut, but the most visible Texan in Washington right now is probably Libertarian Ron Paul. I don't think I need to say much more than that.

The twangy voices of political Texas, once so loud and proud, have been hushed. Molly Ivins is gone; great lady, sorely missed. Progressives such as Ronnie Dugger and Jim Hightower still soldier on, but not like before. The closest thing to a public intellectual Texas can claim is Kinky Friedman, a Lone Star icon whose political pronouncements make Ron Paul look like Lincoln. Offhand, I can't even name another Texas congressman. You?

It's been a long time since Texas was irrelevant. Few remember it now, but before World War II it was regarded as little more than a supersize Mississippi, a backward, agrarian society whose ultraconservative businessmen were best known for the Texas Regulars, a third party they formed in 1944 to challenge Franklin D. Roosevelt. The party's defining platform plank called for "restoration of the supremacy of the white race." Those were the days of Governor [W. Lee] Pappy O'Daniel, a hillbilly singer and flour salesman who won the statehouse in 1938 on a simple platform: the Ten Commandments. The state's most notable legislation during the 1940s made membership in the Communist Party punishable by death. And you thought Washington was a tough town.

Texas might have remained a marginalized curiosity, but oil changed everything. Until the Great Depression, control of Texas oil remained largely in the hands of Yankee corporations. There were some wealthy Texans, but no Big Rich. During the Depression, however, the cash-strapped major oil companies all but stopped looking for oil, preferring to simply buy what they needed elsewhere. Into the vacuum charged hundreds of Texas oilmen, known as wildcatters, who between 1930 and 1935 proceeded to discover the largest oilfields ever found in the Lower 48, including the biggest, East Texas, and the runner-up, at Conroe, north of Houston.

Once the dust settled, four men had found the most: H.L. Hunt, a onetime Arkansas gambler and practicing bigamist who cut a deal to buy the heart of the East Texas field; his Dallas neighbor Clint Murchison, who made his fortune running illegal "hot oil" during the Depression; Murchison's boyhood chum Sid Richardson, a Fort Worth wildcatter who hit it big in far West Texas; and a cantankerous Houston oilman named Hugh Roy Cullen, a fifth-grade dropout who doled out political advice to anyone who would listen — and to quite a few who wouldn't. It was Cullen of whom Wendell Willkie was speaking when, during an exchange of pointed correspondence during his 1940 presidential run, he noted with a sigh: "You know the Good Lord put all this oil into the ground, then someone comes along who hasn't been a success at anything else, and takes it out of the ground. The minute he does that he considers himself an expert on everything from politics to pettycoats."

It was these four oilmen whose millions built the foundation of Texas political power. Murchison and Richardson used suitcases of illegal cash to help get LBJ elected to the Senate in 1948. Three years later, Cullen bought a radio network with an eye toward making it a proto-Fox News. When it went belly up, he took to lobbing checks into political races around the country; Cullen was the largest single donor to American candidates in 1952 and again in 1954. Hunt went a step further, starting the first genuine conservative media network, Facts Forum, which launched scads of newsletters, radio and television programs. When he got religion in the late 1950s, Hunt started LIFELINE, one of the first media outfits to try mixing right-wing politics with sermonizing.

The Big Rich emerged at a key moment in the nation's political history, a period that saw the birth pangs of modern conservatism. In the years before William F. Buckley founded the National Review in 1955, theirs were some of the loudest — and wealthiest — conservative voices in the land. "Virtually every Radical Right movement of the postwar era," the Nation argued in 1962, "has been propped up by Texas oil millionaires."

In the short run, the Big Rich squandered their political capital. After the press deduced how much money they had shoveled to Joe

McCarthy — sometimes known as Texas's third senator — his demise was theirs. In the long run, however, the Big Rich got Texas rolling down a path that by the 1960s would give birth to the modern Texas GOP, one of the first great Republican machines of the postwar South. It was Cullen whose money and organizational drives in the 1940s and '50s helped transform the Texas Republicans from a cadre of nattering nobodies to a new home for thousands of newly minted conservatives. They got the conservative John Tower elected the state's first GOP senator in 1961.

Ever since, Texas oil money has been a reliable backbone of the conservative movement. Not that all that cash easily translated into influence. After taking millions from ultraconservative oilmen over the years, Lyndon Johnson went and got all liberal. Before Murchison died in 1969, he wouldn't even take LBJ's calls. The first George Bush was never conservative enough for most oilmen, but then many considered him a Yankee carpetbagger to begin with, about as much a Texan as Winthrop Rockefeller was an Arkansan. The younger Bush, however, was the real deal, an actual Texan wildcatter who shared the Big Rich's values and views pretty much across the board. Hunt and the others never knew George W., but they would have loved him.

And now, well, it's over. The Bush administration's bonfire of the inanities has made being a Texan something you don't brag about. None of the East Coast Texans I know want to talk too much about their heritage these days — surely a first. Nationally, about the only Texas oilman who can still make waves is T. Boone Pickens, who has captured a certain amount of national attention with all those commercials about alternative energy. Folks listened to Boone for about five minutes when oil was at a million dollars a barrel, but now that the price has fallen, he has grumped his way back to Amarillo. I don't know too many writers knocking on his door these days, but that could be just the fact that he lives in Amarillo.

I'll miss all those Texans around Washington. The big boots, the big belt buckles, the big talk, the vaguely horrified look on the faces of network correspondents forced to do standups amid the cow pies and convenience stores ringing the Crawford White House. You think Joe Biden is gonna wake up one morning and shoot a load of buckshot into a Texan's face anytime soon? Ah, good times.

Texas will rise again, of that I have no doubt. I don't know when, and I don't know who, but it will. Remember Santa Anna. He thought he'd stomped the Texans at the Alamo, yet it took barely two media cycles for Sam Houston to spring off the canvas and chase him back to Mexico. So smile if you want. I'm telling you, they'll be back. ♥

[Bryan Burrough is a native of Temple, Texas. Burrough graduated from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor's degree in Journalism. While in college, he served as editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, worked as a reporter for the Columbia Missourian and interned at the Waco Tribune-Herald and the Wall Street Journal's Dallas Bureau. He later joined the Journal's Houston bureau and soon transferred to the Pittsburgh office. A year later he moved to the New York bureau to cover mergers and acquisitions. In 1992 he joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent. Burrough is the author of four books: Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (With John Helyar), Dragonfly: An Epic Adventure of Survival in Outer Space, Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra, and The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Burrough is a three-time winner of the John Hancock Award for excellence in financial journalism.]

Copyright © 2009 The Austin American-Statesman

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Friday, February 27, 2009

O No! The Book Title Was Dress For Success, Not Distress!

When it comes to style, this blogger is hopeless. If this is (fair & balanced) envy, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
Styles And Styles Of Texas: From Davy Crockett To Sasha Fierce (Beyoncé), Thirty People Who Changed The Look Of Our State—And The World.
by Jordan Breal, Gary Cartwright, Michael Hall, Skip Hollandsworth, Kristie Ramirez, John Spong, Mimi Swartz and Brian D. Sweany

Tag Cloud of the following article

created at TagCrowd.com

1) Davy Crockett
(August 17, 1786—March 6, 1836)

He preferred to go by David, but he also understood the significance of image. After losing a bid for a third congressional term, in 1831, he took note of a popular play based loosely on his life and of its protagonist, Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, who wore an animal-pelt hat with a long tail. The real backwoodsman decided to make a public display of the look and rode his budding myth back to Congress in 1833. After another defeat, two years later, he migrated in character to Texas to found a new republic; instead he died a true hero. While the fifties coonskin-cap craze grew from a Fess Parker portrayal that was more Nimrod than history, Walt Disney had found the right symbol. As Alamo survivor Susanna Dickinson told a writer, “I recognized Colonel Crockett lying dead and mutilated between the church and two-story barrack building, and even remember seeing his peculiar cap lying by his side.” JOHN SPONG

2) Jack Johnson
(March 31, 1878—June 10, 1946)

Born in Galveston only one generation removed from slavery, he became the first black heavyweight champion of the world on December 26, 1908, earning him the everlasting hatred of white America, which jeered his “unforgivable blackness.” But he endured the slander with a maddening calm. A notorious bon vivant, he attended operas, played the bass viol, and indulged in pricey call girls, fine wine, and games of chance. Always the fashion plate, he hired a maid to care for his wardrobe, which included 21 expensive suits. He favored high collars, suede gloves, diamond stickpins, patent leather boots with spats, and an ivory-handled cane—the outward representation of his fierce insistence on living as he wished. GARY CARTWRIGHT

3) Stanley Marcus
(April 20, 1905—January 22, 2002)

While most of the world was willing to dismiss the state’s entire population as rubes, he knew better. Assiduously dapper, Harvard-educated, and Jewish, he was an unlikely arbiter for Texas’s new oil rich, but that is what he became, turning the family store, Neiman Marcus, into a glamorous, global vehicle for his “quest for the best.” He was status conscious but never snobby; there was something for everyone at Neiman’s, he believed (if couture was out of your league, for instance, you could always buy a scarf). Yet he knew that understatement had its limits and that Texas excess should not be ignored: He created Neiman’s His and Her Gifts for the Christmas catalog (twin Beechcrafts, two-by-two pairs of animals for a Neiman’s-stocked Noah’s ark). Without him, Dallas would have been Kansas City. Or Cincinnati. MIMI SWARTZ

4) Glenn McCarthy
(December 25, 1907—December 26, 1988)

The archetypal Texas wildcatter made more, lost more, and spent more than almost anyone you could name, and he built Houston’s mammoth Shamrock Hotel, a monument to himself so flashy that it nearly gave Frank Lloyd Wright a stroke. Dark-eyed and smooth, he favored ascots and treated himself to airplanes and Hollywood starlets. A brawler, he naturally spent a lot of time in courtrooms, once in a silk bathrobe and silk scarf while recovering from surgery. True to form, he never missed a chance to leverage everything he had, so he wound up broke and pretty near forgotten. Still, his indomitable flamboyance earned him the cover of Time, in 1950, and he was the role model for the likes of Michael Halbouty, Oscar Wyatt, and—who else?—Jett Rink. MS

5) Lyndon B. Johnson
(August 27, 1908—January 22, 1973)

One can’t help but think of his audiotaped request that Joe Haggar leave more room in the crotch of the “first slacks”—or as he put it, “down where your nuts hang.” The fact is, he dressed carefully his entire life, in part to dispel the notion that a country boy was necessarily a hick. His philosophy—“Sell for what you’re worth”—ensured that should opportunity ever knock, he would not miss out because of a poor impression. His inelegant instructions begat exquisitely tailored suits, as evidenced by photos showing him giving the Johnson treatment; when he leaned over his victim, arms folded across his chest, his coat sleeves stayed in perfect coordination with his shirt cuffs. That sense showed too in his choice of Stetson’s Open Road model, now known universally as an “LBJ hat.” He didn’t need a wide brim to imply status. In effect he was all cattle, no hat—the embodiment of buttoned-up Texas power. JS

6) Claudia Heard de Osborne
(June 1910—March 18, 1988)

For the Corpus Christi oil heiress, buying couture was more than a hobby—it was a religion. From the forties until 1968, when her close friend Cristobal Balenciaga closed his atelier, she amassed a collection of more than five hundred of his creations, at $3,000 to $8,000 a pop. She shared an apartment and villa in Madrid with her husband, Spanish sherry heir Rafael de Osborne, but during fashion’s high seasons, their apartment at the Ritz in Paris—where she had several rooms just to store her clothing—became her preferred residence. To ensure that she fit into her made-to-measure dresses, she watched her weight obsessively, requesting that the Ritz make her green pea soup every day for lunch. When she became pregnant, she didn’t stray from her runway-perfect look: Balenciaga made her a couture maternity ensemble of black silk taffeta. KRISTIE RAMIREZ

7) [Sam] Lightnin’ Hopkins
(March 15, 1912—January 30, 1982)

The image was of a subtle, weary sophistication. He played a primitive, albeit electrified, blues and was ever aware of his rural East Texas roots, but he dressed to present his public with an urbane showman. By the time he’d achieved living-legend status, in the sixties, that audience would often show up on his porch, young white fans who’d driven from all over the country to slip him cash dollars in exchange for a song or two in the barbershops and bars near his home in Houston’s Third Ward. Writer Michael Point, his unofficial driver during those years, says he was ready for them: “He always had to have his hat, shades, the right socks and shoes, and the gold tooth displayed.” He kept that hat cocked at just the right angle—along with his cigarette,guitar, and flask—to remind the white boys he knew something they didn’t. JS

8) Dale Evans
(October 31, 1912—February 7, 2001)

America’s most famous cowgirl might have been made in Hollywood, but she was born in Texas. Long before Frances Octavia Smith became the silver screen’s glamorous “Queen of the West” as Mrs. Roy Rogers, the Uvalde native was just another wannabe actress with a cumbersome name. But she shed obscurity like an old coat the first time she stepped out of the wardrobe trailer in a short, spangled ensemble, her euphonious new moniker written in script on her satin blouse. With fringe dripping from her shoulders, embossed leather cuffs on her arms, a felt hat tilted back to frame her curls, and an embroidered denim skirt that fell a generous length from the top of her gleaming white boots, she epitomized Tinseltown’s version of housewife-on-the-range chic. But she also had her own hand-tooled holster slung around her waist and a buckskin horse that she wouldn’t dare think of riding sidesaddle. Little girls finally had their own cowboy hero. JORDAN BREAL

9) Lydia Mendoza
(May 21, 1916—December 20, 2007)

Working-class Mexicans and a flood of first-generation immigrants found in her a musical hero to identify with. A twelve-string guitar in hand, she’d often perform in the classic folklórico dresses of her parents’ native Mexico, her shoulders wrapped in a fringed rebozo, bringing south-of-the-border barrio style to the limelight for the first time. To Anglos she appeared downright exotic, and even though her look was traditional, what she was doing was anything but. As a Latina playing and singing her own songs, she gave hopeful dreamers a taste of what was possible in the new world, a place where you could break the rules while still embracing where you came from. KR

10) Nancy Hamon
(December 12, 1918— )

She’s the doyenne of Dallas society—so if you claim to be, you’d better think again. Have you ushered in a brand of over-the-top entertaining the likes of which no one in Big D has seen, inspiring social swells who want to thrill guests and bring down the house? Has Town & Country photographed you in your Oscar de la Renta? Has W featured your legendary parties? Was Ava Gardner your good friend? Did Howard Hughes come to your house and fix your toilet? Did you take over the Dallas Museum of Art to throw a costumed ball with an Arabian Nights feel; have Tony Duquette haul in eight semis from Los Angeles filled with costumes, sets, and props; and wear a turban custom-made for you? Has Van Cliburn played “Happy Birthday” on the piano to you at a party for three hundred of your closest friends? Yeah, that’s what we thought. KR

11) Grace Jones
(November 1921 [?]—February 16, 2008)

Born into a family of ranchers, she was a risk taker—one of the first female pilots to ferry aircraft during World War II—but her eponymous shop, in Salado, filled with clothing from the runways of Paris and New York, would be her biggest adventure. The onetime model turned the limestone shell of a former bank into an upscale boutique and, with her Southern charm and determination, convinced Dior, Valentino, Lacroix, and Beene to sell her their lines. Soon Hollywood actresses Loretta Young and Gene Tierney, Lady Bird Johnson, and moneyed city slickers were shopping in the middle of nowhere. Some had never laid eyes on a cow before, so one can only imagine what they were thinking as they landed their private helicopters in a pasture out back. KR

12) Tom Landry
(September 11, 1924—February 12, 2000)

When he took his spot in the Ring of Honor at Texas Stadium, his name wasn’t flanked by a football or a trophy. Instead, it was the silhouette of a fedora. The revered head coach of the Dallas Cowboys tops a short list of men, including Humphrey Bogart and Indiana Jones, who managed to make that totem of midcentury conformity a symbol of their own individualism. From 1960 to 1988, he patrolled the sidelines on Sunday afternoons wearing a stone face and a conservative jacket, tie, and hat (he favored a Mallory with a feather in the band). The wardrobe was partly the influence of Halas and Lombardi, but the image served a larger purpose. With Dallas tagged as a “city of hate” after the Kennedy assassination, he became its public face: dignified, professional, and successful. He emerged as the ultimate model for our aspirations; the clothes confirmed the status we wanted to achieve. BRIAN D. SWEANY

13) Joanne King Herring
(July 3, 1929— )

Immortalized by Julia Roberts in "Charlie Wilson’s War," she doesn’t need much of an introduction. She’s the classic Texas blonde, unapologetically sexy with a giggle and a smile at the ready and smart enough to know that a disarming demeanor doesn’t hurt. The diamonds, riotous parties, three husbands, and pile of curls would make you think otherwise, but she’s no bimbo: As honorary consul to Pakistan and Morocco a generation ago, she made regular trips to the Middle East and played a now-famous supporting role in the conflict in Afghanistan, proving that a little flirting and high heels can sometimes be your best weapon. Her infectious charisma (she once blew someone a kiss after he gave her the finger) and flamboyant style (metallic-gold leather jacket, meet leopard-print cowboy hat) helped secure her place as a darling among the political jet set. KR

14) Willie Nelson
(April 30, 1933— )

Nehru jackets and turtlenecks. Fringed buckskins and bankers’ suits. A borderline pompadour. The looks chosen for him by Nashville record executives in the mid-sixties made no more sense than the countrypolitan strings they slathered on his songs. But more than the music changed when he moved to Austin. If the outlaw-country sound was what he heard in his head, its image was what he found on the floor of his bus: T-shirts, jeans, and running shoes. He grew out his hair, threw away his razor, and put on a bandanna, not to fit in with the hippies but because he felt like it. Simply put, he quit bothering to compromise and became a star on par with Sinatra and Satchmo. His comfort in his own skin has made for hits and misses both musically and sartorially—think of his reggae album and his micromini Texas flag jogging shorts. But in the end it’s all him, no negotiations and no apologies. JS

15) Ann Richards
(September 1, 1933—September 13, 2006)

Actually, her hair was never that big—certainly not as big as the beauty shop bouffants favored by small-town Texas women. Yet whenever you saw her, you could not stop staring at her old-fashioned white permanent, spun as fine as cotton candy, shellacked with what seemed like an entire can of hair spray. When Hillary Clinton got slammed in the press for her various bad hairstyles, she famously told the first lady to go with one that people wouldn’t notice or else, pointing to her own hair, “make a statement.” Her statement was about permanence: Her hair let the world know that she was a formidable, unmovable woman. She could be a lot of fun, it said, but don’t mistake that for fluff. Anyway, her bigness was not, as an element of her style, only about hair. It was about attitude. Which is exactly why we’ll never forget her. SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH

16) Suzy Parker
(October 28, 1933—May 3, 2003)

Before anyone who was professionally photographed could call herself a supermodel and $10,000 was what you had to pay to get one to wake up, there was the flame-haired San Antonio native who personified high fashion in the fifties. In her pictures for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, often shot by famed photographers Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Horst P. Horst, she dressed in couture taffeta ball gowns, wrapped herself in ermine, poured her arms into opera-length gloves, and came across as untouchable. But in person she was such a blabbermouth that once when she was working with Horst the frustrated lensman walked: “I said, ‘You keep talking,’ and I left.” She was the first model to earn more than $100 an hour, an ungodly sum fifty years ago, and the close relationship she shared with Avedon inspired Audrey Hepburn’s character in the movie Funny Face. KR

17) Lynn Wyatt
(July 16, 1935— )

Even now, at a certain age, she reigns supreme. Mick Jagger and the Duchess of York no longer visit her in River Oaks, and the themed birthday parties at her French Riviera villa are a part of her storied past (see “My Life”), yet a gaggle of young and not-so-young Houston women are still fighting to be this generation’s version of her. Growing up within the hallowed walls of Sakowitz, the family luxury goods store, she became her own best creation. She combined flawless taste, self-deprecating wit, and a signature blond bouffant —once described as “fried, dyed, and shoved to the side”—and managed to trump blue-blooded Houston and international society by outdressing them all. She understood before anyone else that you could look as good in cowboy boots as you could in Manolos, as long as you had the confidence to carry it off. And by the way, she can still get Elton John on the phone. MS

18) [Charles] Buddy Holly
(September 7, 1936—February 3, 1959)

That his look is as well-known as his music is a testament to the first rule of politics and style: Turn your weaknesses into strengths. The credit goes to Phil Everly, who, on an early tour, told him, “If you’re going to wear glasses, wear glasses.” So he ditched his half-plastic, half-wire frames and put on a pair of big, black, plastic clunkers that his Lubbock eye doctor had picked up in Mexico City. Technically he looked even nerdier, but he went on to become the first bespectacled rock star. It was a trademark so recognizable that today’s fans tend to forget how stylishly he dressed otherwise, favoring Ivy League V-neck sweaters offstage and tuxedos on. In fact, he never performed without at least a sport coat and tie until his ill-fated final tour, when, after a trip to London, he opted instead for a red ascot bought for him by his new bride, María Elena. JS

19) Janis Joplin
(January 19, 1943—October 4, 1970)

The key moment for her came in 1966, when she moved into a San Francisco Victorian with designer Linda Gravenites. Prior to that she’d struggled as a jeans-and-T-shirt folkie in Austin, feeling out of place against the backdrop of UT’s Greek scene and lacking the looks or voice of a Joan Baez or Judy Collins. But she flowered in the Haight-Ashbury freak-for-all. Dress was becoming art, and the vintage stores provided the velvet and feathers that Gravenites mixed with beads, bracelets, and boas to form the singer’s gypsy pastiche. Ironically, that look is now the preferred means for each generation of UT sorority girls to pretend they’re not from Highland Park. JS

20) Zack Carr
(November 4, 1945—December 21, 2000)

All you need to know is that he left Kerrville to become Calvin Klein’s creative director. Immensely sophisticated but always self-effacing, he helped shape, over thirty years, the tonal, modern silhouette that is the designer’s signature today. He had a knack for being ahead of the curve: Before actresses were cover girls and models were first choice to showcase clothing, his flair for reeling in celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz to expose the line was unmatched. His design legacy includes Klein’s first underwear campaign, whose racy tone spawned in later years a topless Kate Moss and a chiseled Mark Wahlberg in his boxer briefs. KR

21) Farrah Fawcett
(February 2, 1947— )

Not long after the Corpus Christi native and UT graduate arrived in Hollywood, she posed for a poster in a red one-piece bathing suit that revealed the outline of her nipples. She grinned broadly, showing her very white teeth, and her feathery blond hair was tousled in every direction. When the poster was released, in 1976, it instantly ranked in the annals of cheesecake history alongside Marilyn Monroe’s Playboy centerfold and Betty Grable’s World War II pinup. Twelve million copies were ultimately sold, the most of any poster ever. To this day, no one can explain how she came to symbolize all-American beauty in the seventies, but she was the first celebrity to capitalize on the commercialization of her looks in quite that way. And for many of us who grew up in that era, she remains the best. SH

22) George Strait
(May 18, 1952— )

Legend has it that when he showed up for his first Texas Monthly cover shoot, in 1988, he honored the photographer’s request that he bring a couple different outfits by packing two pairs of creased Wranglers and two white dress shirts, all of which were starched to a crisp. Apocryphal maybe, believable nonetheless. At no moment in his career has he strayed far from the uniform of a South Texas calf roper: stacked jeans sized two inches too long so they wouldn’t come up over his boot tops when he rode, button-down collars that wouldn’t flap when he lassoed, low-heeled boots so he could run to a roped calf when he dismounted, and a trophy buckle to prove he was good at it. He’s made a mint for his preferred brands—Justin, Wrangler, Resistol—and provided the look that dominated dance halls and frat houses in the eighties. JS

23) Jerry Hall
(July 2, 1956— )

Of all the supermodels to emerge from Texas, none have ever come close to our ultimate “it” girl. Raised in the working-class Dallas suburb of Mesquite, she escaped to Paris at age sixteen, was discovered by a fashion agent while sunbathing on a beach in Saint-Tropez, and was featured on more than forty fashion magazine covers. And, boom, along came Mick Jagger. They spent the next two decades together making tabloid-worthy headlines before splitting up, in 1999, but unlike other models-turned-rock-star-wives, she hardly disappeared. She took roles in big-budget movies (Batman) and plays (The Graduate), starred in a reality-TV series (Kept), and, late last year, was hired by Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld to model for the fashion house’s handbag line. That makes 37 years as a style icon . . . and counting. SH

24) Lyle Lovett
(November 1, 1957— )

“Style is communication,” he explains. “It tells people what to expect from you. You can never underestimate the superficial power of human beings.” For some, the list of designers he has been associated with—Armani, Comme des Garçons, Prada—is indeed impressive, and also incongruous; seeing a Texan singer-songwriter dressed to those particular nines is a paradox, like hearing Bach float out of a barn. It makes perfect sense to him. “I grew up watching LBJ and the Kennedys, the classic menswear of the sixties, dark suits with natural shoulders that let you look like a guy, not a guy in a suit. That’s my idea of the way a man dresses.” He intends for that elegance to let his audience know he appreciates their time and attention. As for his earlier trademark, the woodpecker coif that was once as recognizable as Ann Richards’s beehive, he says, “I guess what I was communicating was ‘Never cut your own hair.’ ” JS

25) Emilio Navaira
(August 23, 1962— )

With his macho black mustache, pressed Wranglers, and ever-present Stetson, he could be the cowboy next door. But pair his classic looks with a smooth voice (accompanied by a conjunto accordion) and his signature dance move, the Emilio shuffle, and híjole: The Grammy Award nominations and big-name sponsors, like Miller Lite and Wrangler, pour in. “He had this energy that no one else had,” says David Lee Garza, whose band, Los Musicales, gave him his big break. “When most singers would just stand there, he did these moves, swaying back and forth.” Although a serious bus accident has sidelined him for the past year, his influence still makes him the gold standard in tejano today. KR

26) Wes Anderson
(May 1, 1969— )

The world that the Houston-born filmmaker has created onscreen is one of vaguely luxurious quirk, set in an indeterminate era and peopled by grown-ups who act like children. The same description could apply to his closet, filled as it is with his signature shrunken suits and Wallabees, plus all manner of corduroy, sweaters, and scarves. While his films of late have been knocked for displaying more style than substance, his own look remains widely admired and copied. The clear progenitor of the geek-chic trend that has defined menswear in recent years, he’s a best-dressed-list perennial and a member of Esquire’s style hall of fame. Hipsters should note that his tailor, Mr. Ned, of New York, says the auteur has begun wearing his pants a little longer. JS

27) Erykah Badu
(February 26, 1971— )

Like a child in art and music class, the Dallas singer treats every day as a project, with herself as the medium. She draws on plenty of groovy templates (earth hippie, soul shouter, rap poet, jazz crooner) and is as apt to borrow from black-power iconography or Chinese astrology as Yoruban mythology. She treats her body as a mannequin: On her head might be a wig with hair that is straight down to her knees, parted in the middle like Cher’s; molded like Diana Ross’s; poufed like Angela Davis’s; or fluffed to the side like Loretta Lynn’s. On top she might wear an African gele. Or she might shave her head. On her body might be a plaid pantsuit or a seventies retro space suit or African ceremonial garb or baggy pants and a T-shirt. On her feet might be Converse sneakers or nothing at all. Experiment, grow, experience; fail, succeed, whatever. Wake up the next day and try something new. MICHAEL HALL

28) Selena
(April 16, 1971—March 31, 1995)

Cleavage-baring bustiers paired with boots weren’t typical tejano attire until she made them her trademark. Her onstage style was a well-fused combination of accessible South Texas boots and jeans and glitzy studded bolero jackets and push-up bras. She was exacting with her ensembles, designing and detailing most of them herself to ensure that just enough was left to the imagination. Who can forget the concho leggings she wore one year at the Tejano Music Awards or the shimmering purple bodysuit she rocked at the Houston Astrodome? The latter was such a favorite that she covered a pair of boots in a similar fabric. When it came time to lay her to rest, her family chose a purple outfit as her last. KR

29) Eva Longoria Parker
(March 15, 1975— )

The dark hair. The glittering eyes. The stark, familiar beauty in stilettos on such a teeny, tiny frame. The ten hairdo-and-designer-gown changes at the 2008 ALMA Awards—an Olympian accomplishment worthy of Gabrielle Solis, the negligeed schemer she made famous on Desperate Housewives. Sure, she plays something of a sexpot cliché in the Hispanic spitfire tradition, but she’s a shrewd operator of the first degree, someone who knows what she wants (an NBA star for a husband, a wedding reception in a storybook castle in France) and how to get it, inspiring millions of girls, Latina and otherwise, to toss their heads back and follow her lead. MS

30) Beyoncé [Giselle Knowles]
(September 4, 1981— )

There was a time when there was only one kind of Texas beauty: blond-haired and blue-eyed. Now girls of all races and creeds affix to their mirrors pictures of a young woman so famous she needs only one name. Yes, she earned more than $80 million from June 2007 to June 2008. Yes, she made that spicy homage to Gwen Verdon. Yes, she’s getting A-list movie roles and magazine covers. But it’s her face—wide-open, winning, simultaneously innocent and knowing—that promises she’s still a Texas girl, despite Jay-Z and the Sasha Fierce alter ego that no one really buys. MS ♥

[A Fort Worth native, Jordan Breal is a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and joined Texas Monthly in February 2005. She has contributed to Chile Pepper Magazine, D Magazine, and Create, among other publications.

Gary Cartwright received his B.A. in journalism from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. He has had a distinguished career as a newspaper reporter and as a freelance writer, contributing stories to such national publications as Harper’s, Life, and Esquire.

Michael Hall graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979. Before joining Texas Monthly in 1997, he was an associate editor of Third Coast Magazine and the managing editor of the Austin Chronicle.

Skip Hollandsworth was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas and graduated with a B.A. in English from Texas Christian University. He has worked as a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Dallas, and he also has worked as a television producer and documentary filmmaker.

Kristie Ramirez began her career in fashion journalism at D Magazine where she served as the associate editor covering fashion, beauty, liefestyle, and society.
Ramirez has written extensively on style, interiors, and lifestyle for Conde Nast Traveler, The Dallas Morning News, and projects for Teen Vogue, and Texas Monthly.

John Spong holds a bachelor’s degree in history and a J.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1997, after a brief yet dramatically unfulfilling stint as a civil litigator in Austin, he joined Texas Monthly as a fact-checker. He became a staff writer in 2002.

Mimi Swartz grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Over the years, Swartz’ work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic and the New York Times’ Op Ed page and Sunday magazine. Her work has also been collected in Best American Political Writing (2006), and Best American Sportswriting (2007). Swartz has been a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 1994.

Brian D. Sweany started out as an intern in the publisher’s office of Texas Monthly in January 1996 and was hired as a copy editor in the editorial department nine months later. Born and raised outside of Dallas, Sweany earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of North Texas and a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Sweany has also served as an assistant professor in the journalism department at Ithaca College in New York.]

Copyright © 2009 Emmis Publishing

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Advice To Young People: Go To College, But Get A Summer Job Working With Your Hands!

In 1974, Robert M. Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and thirty years later (roughly), Matthew Crawford offers a meditation on the meaning of motorcycle repair (manual work) as a way to an authentic life. The mantra of the 21st century should be work with one's hands as the mantra of the 19th century was to go West and the mantra of the 20th century was to go to college. If this is a (fair & balanced) life goal, so be it.

[x The New Atlantis]
Shop Class As Soulcraft
By Matthew B. Crawford

Tag Cloud of the following article

created at TagCrowd.com

Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.”

At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.

Judging from my admittedly cursory survey, articles began to appear in vocational education journals around 1985 with titles such as “The Soaring Technology Revolution” and “Preparing Kids for High-Tech and the Global Future.” Of course, there is nothing new about American future-ism. What is new is the wedding of future-ism to what might be called “virtualism”: a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. New and yet not so new—for fifty years now we’ve been assured that we are headed for a “post-industrial economy.” While manufacturing jobs have certainly left our shores to a disturbing degree, the manual trades have not. If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China. And in fact there are reported labor shortages in both construction and auto repair. Yet the trades and manufacturing are lumped together in the mind of the pundit class as “blue collar,” and their requiem is intoned. Even so, the Wall Street Journal recently wondered whether “skilled [manual] labor is becoming one of the few sure paths to a good living.” This possibility was brought to light for many by the bestseller The Millionaire Next Door, which revealed that the typical millionaire is the guy driving a pickup, with his own business in the trades. My real concern here is not with the economics of skilled manual work, but rather with its intrinsic satisfactions. I mention these economic rumors only to raise a suspicion against the widespread prejudice that such work is somehow not viable as a livelihood.

The Psychic Appeal of Manual Work

I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in a commercial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked. As a residential electrician, most of my work got covered up inside walls. Yet even so, there is pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation. Maybe another electrician will see it someday. Even if not, one feels responsible to one’s better self. Or rather, to the thing itself—craftsmanship might be defined simply as the desire to do something well, for its own sake. If the primary satisfaction is intrinsic and private in this way, there is nonetheless a sort of self-disclosing that takes place. As Alexandre Kojève writes:

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

Hobbyists will tell you that making one’s own furniture is hard to justify economically. And yet they persist. Shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future. Finding myself at loose ends one summer in Berkeley, I built a mahogany coffee table on which I spared no expense of effort. At that time I had no immediate prospect of becoming a father, yet I imagined a child who would form indelible impressions of this table and know that it was his father’s work. I imagined the table fading into the background of a future life, the defects in its execution as well as inevitable stains and scars becoming a surface textured enough that memory and sentiment might cling to it, in unnoticed accretions. More fundamentally, the durable objects of use produced by men “give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men,” as Hannah Arendt says. “The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.”

Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has recently argued. The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new. The craftsman is then more possessive, more tied to what is present, the dead incarnation of past labor; the consumer is more free, more imaginative, and so more valorous according to those who would sell us things. Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous.

This would seem to be significant for any political typology. Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the mechanic, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good. Yet this assessment was made before the full flowering of mass communication and mass conformity, which pose a different set of problems for the republican character: enervation of judgment and erosion of the independent spirit. Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political. The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.

Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement. Somehow, every worker in the cutting-edge workplace is now supposed to act like an “intrapreneur,” that is, to be actively involved in the continuous redefinition of his own job. Shop class presents an image of stasis that runs directly counter to what Richard Sennett identifies as “a key element in the new economy’s idealized self: the capacity to surrender, to give up possession of an established reality.” This stance toward “established reality,” which can only be called psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw. It is dissatisfied with what Arendt calls the “reality and reliability” of the world. It is a strange sort of ideal, attractive only to a peculiar sort of self—gratuitous ontological insecurity is no fun for most people.

As Sennett argues, most people take pride in being good at something specific, which happens through the accumulation of experience. Yet the flitting disposition is pressed upon workers from above by the current generation of management revolutionaries, for whom the ethic of craftsmanship is actually something to be rooted out from the workforce. Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because one wants to get it right. In management-speak, this is called being “ingrown.” The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out, and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry.

The Cognitive Demands of Manual Work

In The Mind at Work, Mike Rose provides “cognitive biographies” of several trades, and depicts the learning process in a wood shop class. He writes that “our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission.... It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain.”

Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials—that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems. And in fact, in areas of well-developed craft, technological developments typically preceded and gave rise to advances in scientific understanding, not vice versa. The steam engine is a good example. It was developed by mechanics who observed the relations between volume, pressure, and temperature. This at a time when theoretical scientists were tied to the caloric theory of heat, which later turned out to be a conceptual dead end. The success of the steam engine contributed to the development of what we now call classical thermodynamics. This history provides a nice illustration of a point made by Aristotle:

Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

Another example is the Vernier scale used on machinists’ calipers and micrometers. Invented in 1631, it is a sort of mechanical calculus that renders continuous measurement in discrete digital approximation to four decimal places. Such inventions capture a reflective moment in which some skilled worker has made explicit the assumptions that are implicit in his manual skill.

In what has to be the best article ever published in an education journal, the cognitive scientists Mike Eisenberg and Ann Nishioka Eisenberg give real pedagogical force to this reflective moment, and draw out its theoretical implications (“Shop Class for the Next Millennium: Education Through Computer-Enriched Handicrafts,” in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education). They offer a computer program to facilitate making origami, or rather Archimedean solids, by unfolding these solids into two dimensions. But they then have their students actually make the solids, out of paper cut according to the computer’s instructions. “Computational tools for crafting are entities poised somewhere between the abstract, untouchable world of software objects and the homey constraints of human dexterity; they are therefore creative exercises in making conscious those aspects of craft work ... that are often more easily represented ‘in the hand’ than in language.” It is worth pausing to consider their efforts, as they have implications well beyond mathematics instruction.

In our early work with HyperGami, we often ran into situations in which the program provided us with a folding net that was mathematically correct—i.e., a technically correct unfolding of the desired solid—but otherwise disastrous. Figure 7 shows an example. Here, we are trying to create an approximation to a cone—a pyramid on a regular octagonal base. HyperGami provides us with a folding net that will, indeed, produce a pyramid; but typically, no paper crafter would come up with a net of this sort, since it is fiendishly hard to join together those eight tall triangles into a single vertex. In fact, this is an illustrative example of a more general idea—the difficulty of formalizing, in purely mathematical terms, what it means to produce a ‘realistic’ (and not merely technically correct) solution to an algorithmic problem derived from human practice.

I take their point to be that the crafting problem is in fact not reducible to an algorithmic problem. More precisely, any algorithmic solution to the crafting problem cannot itself be generated algorithmically, as it must include ad hoc constraints known only through practice, that is, through embodied manipulations. Those constraints cannot be arrived at deductively, starting from mathematical entities. It is worth noting in passing that this has implications for the theory of mind favored by artificial intelligence researchers, as it speaks to the “computability” of pragmatic cognition. It would be a task for cognitive science to determine if these considerations place a theoretical limit on the automation of work, but I can speak firsthand to how one area of work is resistant to algorithmic thinking.

Following graduate school in Chicago, I took a job in a Washington, D.C. think tank. I hated it, so I left and opened a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. When I would come home from work, my wife would sniff at me and say “carbs” or “brakes,” corresponding to the various solvents used. Leaving a sensible trace, my day was at least imaginable to her. But while the filth and odors were apparent, the amount of head-scratching I’d done since breakfast was not. Mike Rose writes that in the practice of surgery, “dichotomies such as concrete versus abstract and technique versus reflection break down in practice. The surgeon’s judgment is simultaneously technical and deliberative, and that mix is the source of its power.” This could be said of any manual skill that is diagnostic, including motorcycle repair. You come up with an imagined train of causes for manifest symptoms and judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a stock mental library, not of natural kinds or structures, like that of the surgeon, but rather the functional kinds of an internal combustion engine, their various interpretations by different manufacturers, and their proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire. If the motorcycle is thirty years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business twenty years ago, its proclivities are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred Cousins in Chicago, had such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I could offer him in exchange was regular shipments of obscure European beer.

There is always a risk of introducing new complications when working on decrepit machines, and this enters the diagnostic logic. Measured in likelihood of screw-ups, the cost is not identical for all avenues of inquiry when deciding which hypothesis to pursue. For example, the fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips-head, and they are always stripped and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch, if each of ten screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments can cloud one’s thinking. Put more neutrally, the attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand, but a strong pragmatic bearing on it (kind of like origami). The factory service manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, but they never take such factors into account. So you have to develop your own decision tree for the particular circumstances. The problem is that at each node of this new tree, your own, unquantifiable risk aversion introduces ambiguity. There comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. Any mechanic will tell you that it is invaluable to have other mechanics around to test your reasoning against, especially if they have a different intellectual disposition.

My shop-mate Tommy Van Auken was an accomplished visual artist, and I was repeatedly struck by his ability to literally see things that escaped me. I had the conceit of a being an empiricist, but seeing things is not a simple matter. Even on the relatively primitive vintage bikes that were our specialty, some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. There was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think tank.

Socially, being the proprietor of a bike shop in a small city gave me a feeling I never had before, or since. I felt I had a place in society. Whereas “think tank” is an answer that, at best, buys you a few seconds when someone asks what you do, while you try to figure out what it is that you in fact do, with “motorcycle mechanic” I got immediate recognition. I bartered services with machinists and metal fabricators, which has a very different feel than transactions with money, and further increased my sense of social embeddedness. There were three restaurants with cooks whose bikes I had restored, where unless I deceive myself I was treated as a sage benefactor. I felt pride before my wife when we would go out to dinner and be given preferential treatment, or simply a hearty greeting. There were group rides, and bike night every Tuesday at a certain bar. Sometimes one or two people would be wearing my shop’s T-shirt. It felt good.

Given the intrinsic richness of manual work, cognitively, socially, and in its broader psychic appeal, the question becomes why it has suffered such a devaluation in recent years as a component of education. The economic rationale so often offered, namely that manual work is somehow going to disappear, is questionable if not preposterous, so it is in the murky realm of culture that we must look to understand these things. To this end, perhaps we need to consider the origins of shop class, so that we can better understand its demise.

Arts, Crafts, and the Assembly Line

At a time when Teddy Roosevelt preached the strenuous life and elites worried about their state of “over-civilized” spiritual decay, the project of getting back in touch with “real life” took various forms. One was romantic fantasy about the pre-modern craftsman. This was understandable given changes in the world of work at the turn of the century, a time when the bureaucratization of economic life was rapidly increasing the number of paper shufflers. The tangible elements of craft were appealing as an antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy, and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the professional classes.

The Arts and Crafts movement thus fit easily with the new therapeutic ethic of self-regeneration. Depleted from his workweek in the corporate world, the office worker repaired to his basement workshop to putter about and tinker, refreshing himself for the following week. As T. J. Jackson Lears writes in his history of the Progressive era, No Place of Grace, “toward the end of the nineteenth century, many beneficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims.” Various forms of antimodernism gained wide currency in the middle and upper classes, including the ethic of craftsmanship. Some Arts and Crafts enthusiasts conceived their task to be evangelizing good taste as embodied in the works of craft, as against machine-age vulgarity. Cultivating an appreciation for objets d’art was thus a form of protest against modernity, with a view to providing a livelihood to dissident craftsmen. But it dovetailed with, and gave a higher urgency to, the nascent culture of luxury consumption. As Lears tells the story, the great irony is that antimodernist sentiments of aesthetic revolt against the machine paved the way for certain unattractive features of late-modern culture: therapeutic self-absorption and the hankering after “authenticity,” precisely those psychic hooks now relied upon by advertisers. Such spiritualized, symbolic modes of craft practice and craft consumption represented a kind of compensation for, and therefore an accommodation to, new modes of routinized, bureaucratic work.

But not everyone worked in an office. Indeed, there was class conflict brewing, with unassimilated immigrants accumulating in America’s Eastern cities and serious labor violence in Chicago and elsewhere. To the upper classes of those same cities, enamored of the craft ideal, the possibility presented itself that the laboring classes might remain satisfied with their material lot if they found joy in their labor. Shop class could serve to put the proper spin on manual work. Any work, it was posited, could be “artful” if done in the proper spirit; somehow a movement that had started with reverence for the craftsman now offered an apologetic for factory work. As Lears writes, “By shifting their attention from the conditions of labor to the laborer’s frame of mind, craft ideologues could acclaim the value of any work, however monotonous.”

The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program. The invention of modern shop class thus serviced both cultural reflexes of the Arts and Crafts movement at once. The children of the managerial class could take shop as enrichment to the college-prep curriculum, making a bird-feeder to hang outside mom’s kitchen window, while the children of laborers would be socialized into the work ethic appropriate to their station through what was now called “industrial arts” education. The need for such socialization was not simply a matter of assimilating immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who lacked a Protestant work ethic. It was recognized as a necessity for the broader working-class population, precisely because the institutions that had previously served this socializing function, apprenticeship and guild traditions, had been destroyed by new modes of labor. Writing in 1918, one Robert Hoxie worried thus:

It is evident ... that the native efficiency of the working class must suffer from the neglect of apprenticeship, if no other means of industrial education is forthcoming. Scientific managers, themselves, have complained bitterly of the poor and lawless material from which they must recruit their workers, compared with the efficient and self-respecting craftsmen who applied for employment twenty years ago.

Needless to say, “scientific managers” were concerned more with the “efficient” part of this formula than with the “self-respecting” part, yet the two are not independent. The quandary was how to make workers efficient and attentive, when their actual labor had been degraded by automation. The motivation previously supplied by the intrinsic satisfactions of manual work was to be replaced with ideology; industrial arts education now concerned itself with moral formation. Lears writes that “American craft publicists, by treating craftsmanship ... as an agent of socialization, abandoned [the] effort to revive pleasurable labor. Manual training meant specialized assembly line preparation for the lower classes and educational or recreational experiences for the bourgeoisie.”

Of the Smith-Hughes Act’s two rationales for shop class, vocational and general ed, only the latter emphasized the learning of aesthetic, mathematical, and physical principles through the manipulation of material things (Dewey’s “learning by doing”). It is not surprising, then, that the act came four years after Henry Ford’s innovation of the assembly line. The act’s dual educational scheme mirrored the assembly line’s severing of the cognitive aspects of manual work from its physical execution. Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in character. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements. Paradoxically, educators who would steer students toward cognitively rich work options might do this best by rehabilitating the manual trades, based on a firmer grasp of what such work is really like. And would this not be in keeping with their democratic mission? Let them publicly honor those who gain real craft knowledge, the sort we all depend on every day.

The Degradation of Blue-Collar Work

The degradation of work in the last century is often tied to the evils of technology in one way or another. And it is certainly true that “technical progress has multiplied the number of simplified jobs,” as one French sociologist wrote in the 1950s. This writer pointed out a resemblance between the Soviet bloc and the Western bloc with regard to work; both rival civilizations were developing “that separation between planning and execution which seems to be in our day a common denominator linking all industrial societies together.” Yet while technology plays a role in facilitating this separation of planning and execution, the basic logic that drives the separation rests not on technological progress, but rather on a certain mode of economic relations, as Harry Braverman has shown in his masterpiece of economic reflection, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Braverman was an avowed Marxist, writing in 1974. With the Cold War now safely decided, we may consider anew, without defensive ire, the Marxian account of alienated labor. Braverman gives a richly descriptive account of the degradation of many different kinds of work. In doing so, he offers nothing less than an explanation of why we are getting more stupid with every passing year—which is to say, the degradation of work is ultimately a cognitive matter.

The central culprit in Braverman’s account is “scientific management,” which “enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.” The tenets of scientific management were given their first and frankest articulation by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an unembarrassed evangelist of efficiency whose Principles of Scientific Management was hugely influential in the early decades of the twentieth century. Stalin was a big fan, as were the founders of the first MBA program, at Harvard, where Taylor was invited to lecture annually. Taylor writes, “The managers assume ... the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae.” Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process. This process replaces what was previously an integral activity, rooted in craft tradition and experience, animated by the worker’s own mental image of, and intention toward, the finished product. Thus, according to Taylor, “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or lay-out department.” It is a mistake to suppose that the primary purpose of this partition is to render the work process more efficient. It may or may not result in extracting more value from a given unit of labor time. The concern is rather with labor cost. Once the cognitive aspects of the job are located in a separate management class, or better yet in a process that, once designed, requires no ongoing judgment or deliberation, skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower rate of pay. Taylor writes that the “full possibilities” of his system “will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system.”

What becomes of the skilled workers? They go elsewhere, of course. But the competitive labor-cost advantage now held by the more modern firm, which has aggressively separated planning from execution, compels the whole industry to follow the same route, and entire skilled trades disappear. Thus craft knowledge dies out, or rather gets instantiated in a different form, as process engineering knowledge. The conception of the work is remote from the worker who does it.

Scientific management introduced the use of “time and motion analysis” to describe the physiological capabilities of the human body in machine terms. As Braverman writes, “the more labor is governed by classified motions which extend across the boundaries of trades and occupations, the more it dissolves its concrete forms into the general types of work motions. This mechanical exercise of human faculties according to motion types which are studied independently of the particular kind of work being done, brings to life the Marxist conception of ‘abstract labor.’” The clearest example of abstract labor is thus the assembly line. The activity (in the Aristotelian sense) of self-directed labor, conducted by the worker, is dissolved into abstract parts and then reconstituted as a process controlled by management.

At the turn of the last century, the manufacture of automobiles was done by craftsmen recruited from bicycle and carriage shops: all-around mechanics who knew what they were doing. In The Wheelwright’s Shop, George Sturt relates his experience in taking over his family business of making wheels for carriages, in 1884, shortly before the advent of the automobile. He had been a school teacher with literary ambitions, but now finds himself almost overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of his new trade. In Sturt’s shop, working exclusively with hand tools, the skills required to build a wheel regress all the way to the selection of trees to fell for timber, the proper time for felling them, how to season them, and so forth. To select but one minor task out of the countless he describes, here is Sturt’s account of fabricating a part of a wheel’s rim called a felloe:

Yet it is in vain to go into details at this point; for when the simple apparatus had all been gotten together for one simple-looking process, a never-ending series of variations was introduced by the material. What though two felloes might seem much alike when finished? It was the wheelwright himself who had to make them so. He it was who hewed out that resemblance from quite dissimilar blocks, for no two felloe-blocks were ever alike. Knots here, shakes there, rind-galls, waney edges (edges with more or less bark in them), thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman’s ingenuity every few minutes. He had no band-saw (as now [1923]) to drive, with ruthless unintelligence, through every resistance. The timber was far from being prey, a helpless victim, to a machine. Rather it would lend its own special virtues to the man who knew how to humour it.

Given their likely acquaintance with such a cognitively rich world of work, it is hardly surprising that when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, workers simply walked out. One of Ford’s biographers wrote, “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”

This would seem to be a crucial moment in the history of political economy. Evidently, the new system provoked natural revulsion. Yet, at some point, workers became habituated to it. How did this happen? One might be tempted to inquire in a typological mode: What sort of men were these first, the 100 out of 963 who stuck it out on the new assembly line? Perhaps it was the men who felt less revulsion because they had less pride in their own powers, and were therefore more tractable. Less republican, we might say. But if there was initially such a self-selection process, it quickly gave way to something less deliberate, more systemic.

In a temporary suspension of the Taylorist logic, Ford was forced to double the daily wage of his workers to keep the line staffed. As Braverman writes, this “opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs.” These anxious workers were more productive. Indeed, Ford himself later recognized his wage increase as “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” as he was able to double, and then triple, the rate at which cars were assembled by simply speeding up the conveyors. By doing so he destroyed his competitors, and thereby destroyed the possibility of an alternative way of working. (It also removed the wage pressure that comes from the existence of more enjoyable jobs.) At the Columbian World Expo held in Chicago in 1893, no fewer than seven large-scale carriage builders from Cincinnati alone presented their wares. Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work.

Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy. Changing attitudes toward consumption seemed to play a role. A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode, and indeed the experience of early (eighteenth-century) capitalism, when many producers worked at home on a piece-rate basis, was that only so much labor could be extracted from them. Contradicting the assumptions of “rational behavior” of classical economics, it was found that when employers would increase the piece rate in order to boost production, it actually had the opposite effect: workers would produce less, as now they could meet their fixed needs with less work. Eventually it was learned that the only way to get them to work harder was to play upon the imagination, stimulating new needs and wants. The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has shown in a recent article, through the installment plan, previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a wholesale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto “Be frugal and free,” the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending. Indeed, 1907 saw the publication of a book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the disciplinary process. As Lears writes, “Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly.”

The Degradation of White-Collar Work

Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers—clerks—who replace the professionals. If genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite, this has implications for the vocational advice that students ought to receive.

“Expert systems,” a term coined by artificial intelligence researchers, were initially developed by the military for battle command, then used to replicate industrial expertise in such fields as oil-well drilling and telephone-line maintenance. Then they found their way into medical diagnosis, and eventually the cognitively murky, highly lucrative, regions of financial and legal advice. In The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past, Barbara Garson details how “Extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity.” She finds that, like Taylor’s rationalization of the shop floor, the intention of expert systems is “to transfer knowledge, skill, and decision making from employee to employer.” While Taylor’s time and motion studies broke every concrete work motion into minute parts,

The modern knowledge engineer performs similar detailed studies, only he anatomizes decision making rather than bricklaying. So the time-and-motion study has become a time-and-thought study.... To build an expert system, a living expert is debriefed and then cloned by a knowledge engineer. That is to say, an expert is interviewed, typically for weeks or months. The knowledge engineer watches the expert work on sample problems and asks exactly what factors the expert considered in making his apparently intuitive decisions. Eventually hundreds or thousands of rules of thumb are fed into the computer. The result is a program that can ‘make decisions’ or ‘draw conclusions’ heuristically instead of merely calculating with equations. Like a real expert, a sophisticated expert system should be able to draw inferences from ‘iffy’ or incomplete data that seems to suggest or tends to rule out. In other words it uses (or replaces) judgment.

The human expert who is cloned achieves a vast dominion and immortality, in a sense. It is other experts, and future experts, who are displaced as expertise is centralized. “This means that more people in the advice or human service business will be employed as the disseminators, rather than the originators, of this advice,” Garson writes. In his 2006 book The Culture of the New Capitalism, Richard Sennett describes just such a process, “especially in the cutting-edge realms of high finance, advanced technology, and sophisticated services”: genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite. It seems we must take a cold-eyed view of “knowledge work,” and reject the image of a rising sea of pure mentation that lifts all boats. More likely is a rising sea of clerkdom. To expect otherwise is to hope for a reversal in the basic logic of the modern economy—that is, cognitive stratification. It is not clear to me what this hope could be based on, though if history is any guide we have to wonder whether the excitation of such a hope has become an instrument by which young people are prepared for clerkdom, in the same perverse way that the craft ideology prepared workers for the assembly line. Both provide a lens that makes the work look appealing from afar, but only by presenting an image that is upside down.

The Craftsman as Stoic

We are recalled to the basic antagonism of economic life: work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests. That’s why you get paid. Thus chastened, we may ask the proper question: what is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. What I have tried to show is that this humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing. What is to be done? I offer no program, only an observation that might be of interest to anyone called upon to give guidance to the young.

Since manual work has been subject to routinization for over a century, the nonroutinized manual work that remains, outside the confines of the factory, would seem to be resistant to much further routinization. There still appear developments around the margins; for example, in the last twenty years pre-fabricated roof trusses have eliminated some of the more challenging elements from the jobs of framers who work for large tract developers, and pre-hung doors have done the same for finish carpenters generally. But still, the physical circumstances of the jobs performed by carpenters, plumbers, and auto mechanics vary too much for them to be executed by idiots; they require circumspection and adaptability. One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine. The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.

So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable. ♥

[Matthew B. Crawford is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and a contributing editor of The New Atlantis. He would like to thank Joe Davis and David Franz, both of the Institute, for their contributions to this article. In November 2008, this article won a $25,000 Templeton Enterprise Award for the best article in the "field of humane economics and culture over the past two years." Crawford's book, Shop Class as Soulcraft is forthcoming in June 2009.]

Copyright © 2006 The New Atlantis

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