Dog-Days for a White-Collar Man

EARLY IN John R. Coleman's working-class sojourn, his boss sends him off to deepen a cylindrical hole to make way for a standpipe. Coleman dutifully shuffles off, squeezes his frame down into the muddy pit, and with cramped movements heaves irregular clods back up towards the light. Ill-aimed shovel-loads occasionally fall back on him, but Coleman admits to rather liking the task. And just a few feet away, he notes, another submerged laborer toils in another clammy shaft.

Eventually, Coleman progresses to positions as salad man and garbage collector, but in the chronicle of his stay, Blue-Collar Journal, he never manages to ditch this early alter-ego. For while he maintains a certain down-to-earth, unpatronizing attitude toward the class he is visiting, the chunks of sociology he offers back up to us higher orders tumble back down upon his head, groundless, as often as they manage to make the grade. Coleman is forever uncertain of the proper distance to keep from his proletarian brothers, usually resolving the conflict between his roles as observer and participant by digging his own hole, struggling awk-wardly off by himself while contenting himself that he is indeed slaving with others. And Coleman's vision is ultimately rather confined and earthly, curiously avoiding the more important issues one would expect him to examine--even after just two months as a worker.

John R. Coleman is chairman of the board at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and president of Haverford College. His daily scribblings from a two-month leave he took last spring to live a working-class existence are compiled in Blue-Collar Journal. The narrative follows Coleman's jaunt through three main jobs in Atlanta, Boston and Washington, but now and then wanders to an apparently still-rankling divorce in New York City and an honest youth in Canada.

Unfortunately, Coleman's usually readable and direct style is marred by his tendency to digress upon boring or inconsequential topics with a numbing, often primer-like tone. Coleman's explanation of the Federal Reserve Bank reads like a government pamphlet and never explains why he "feels proud" just to be associated with "presidents of corporations."

Coleman's quest is for a personal knowledge of the working man but also for a simple, manual side to his own nature that he senses he may have lost. Perhaps Coleman could have made his book a testimonial to the "whole man," but fortunately he is not so pompous. In fact, one of the man's few virtues is his lack of condescension. The journal is full of simple declarations of the equalness of blue-collar and white-collar man, and the trusting plain-faced manner in which Coleman voices this truth makes one believe he is not mouthing high-falutin' doctrine.

For Coleman, it is semblances that mark the working man different from the college professor. Give a man a blue collar, lace him up in boots and levis, rub dirt into his hands, face and joints and he will be a working man for a day until a bath after supper has swept these petty distinctions from his natural form. Coleman's earnest, nearlaughable effort to play the role to its hilt--munching the very last of the grits at the oh-so blue-collar diner, mouthing the curse-words he once choked on in front of his students--bespeaks his own faith that only these outward circumstances distinguish the working man.

But here Coleman's objective analysis ends. Rarely does he show a recognition that permanently performing a menial role crushes the working man's dignity in support of the upper class. Rather, any larger sense of the working man's plight is obfuscated by Coleman's personal search--for the lost muscles in his back, for the simple and direct language he knows he will find in the ditch. So he settles into comfortable generalizations, of the meaningless sophistication of white-collar workers who perform interesting tasks and the rude but honest manners of blue-collar workers who execute monotonous manual labor. Coleman chants vacuously at the conclusion that he set out to learn something but instead found a lost part of himself.

Once, I thought I was leaving my identity behind when I started out on this leave. Now I think I may even have found some part of it along the way.

As it is, he has learned nothing. The image of the "happy worker" that he seeks to repudiate in one passage of the journal is, ironically, the paragon he has erected by the end. Coleman's odyssey is the masturbatory indulgence of a graying and cerebral paper-shuffler who is joyously finding sanguine reality in mindless sandwich-stuffing and garbagetoting. He should have left his diary in his desk.

COLEMAN SAYS he vowed to make his sojourn when he saw construction workers in New York rain nails on an anti-war rally of largely student protesters. He would resolve, or at least understand, this seeming conflict, Coleman intones gravely. But he responds with his generalization again. Political thought, he says, is a creature of academia--it does not belong in the ditches.

There wasn't a radical thought in the crew. These men had jobs, they didn't expect government to make those jobs much better, and they were more concerned about future tax bills than about future public aid. On this one work site at least, the ground is barren for the seeds of change. And the political rhetoric I sometimes hear at home would blow away in the wind.

Maybe Coleman's flat pronouncement, that the self-righteous student who promises worker-student alliance has no effect in the ditches, should silence any student reviewer who has begun to criticize the man. But the self-righteous student--still anxious for such an alliance--is not satisfied. The construction workers on girders are still throwing nails at the academics below. Meanwhile, doesn't Coleman cut a suspicious figure? He plunges into the lower-class welter, frolicking in ditches and finding new muscles in his back (and also finding himself), keeping a semi-stupid diary and publishing Blue-Collar Journal, warning us against any politics in ditches.

Coleman's declaration of opposition between workers and students suddenly seems less a studied position than a personal effort to justify his own small-minded excursion. The man's search for his lost half prompts him to rope off the blue-collar world, to preserve it from self-righteous student-socialists, to leave it for bankers and college presidents to find their submerged forgotten selves.

NOT TO SAY that Coleman is stupid. There is some indication that he does recognize an oppressed working class, but in the end he discards his analysis. He says, and one believes him for a minute, he knows the harsh effect the loss of a steady income has on the physiognomy. In his record of employment at the Boston's Union Oyster House, Coleman describes young workers whose lives he says will be dulled by manual labor.

But does Coleman emerge with even the slightest dedication to change in the social sturcture? Does he, with his blunt horse sense, stumble upon even the simplest analysis, that garbagemen should make more than doctors because their trade is more physically taxing? Or does he, with his background in labor economics, volunteer any even slightly liberal measures to redistribute wealth? He does not. He writes:

If the ditches teach me nothing else, they've taught me how incredibly fortunate we are and how much we owe it to the society which supports us to lift up our eyes and reach for the stars.

Even if Coleman won't make any grand judgements on the system that has supported him, he ought to allow others to attain his personal dream of wholeness. In the detachment of his Haverford office, Coleman certainly should reflect on the masses of workers who have never had the opportunity to exercise their minds for a couple of months in, say, the rigors of running a college. Naturally he ought to step down for a spell to give them all a chance to write White-Collar Journals and achieve some sense of regained self. But of course, as Coleman notes, this society supports him and not them, and if anyone wrote a White-Collar Journal he would be as indignant as the dog that used to chase its tail, before the tail turned on the dog one day and fixed it, but good.