2013 Notable Title in American Intellectual History from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History 

 

Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to "pass" as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. In this first, sweeping study of undercover investigations of work and poverty in America, award-winning historian Mark Pittenger examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and "other" American underclass. While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social thought, Class Unknown offers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.

"Before anthropologists became 'participant observers' or Norman Mailer discovered the 'new journalism,' generations of socially engaged Americans assumed undercover identities and conducted covert investigations to experience and report upon the reality of life for the nation’s poor and marginalized. Mark Pittenger’s original and highly readable  book illuminates the motivations and strategies of these reform-minded investigators, and the work they produced. Class Unknown enlarges our understanding of journalism, reform, and the shifting perceptions of social class in America. I enjoyed this book and learned from it."

"A wide-ranging, erudite, and fascinating analysis of how various journalists, academics, and novelists shed their identities to become the 'Other.' From the Gilded Age to the present, Pittenger takes us on a journey with temporary down-and-outers as they tramp the countryside, experience the urban netherworld, and cross racial lines. He uncovers a tradition of critique and elitism; a struggle over the meaning of authenticity and more emerge in these pages."

"Pittenger's fascinating account of cross-class journeys yields rich insight into the changing constructions of class, race, and self in modern America and brings into focus a little-studied aspect of the history of social science, journalism, and popular culture."

"With smooth prose, expansive reflection, and unerring eye for telling detail, Pittenger turns what may superficially seem an esoteric and even quirky subject into a major work of intellectual history and cultural criticism.  The undercover investigations that he shows to be a mainstay of the American documentary tradition--from the writings of the Progressive Walter Wyckoff, the managerial studies of Elton Mayo, and the radical portraits of Donald Roy through books and film treatments of Laura Hobson (Gentlemen's Agreement) and Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) to the present-day commentaries of Barbara Ehrenreich--regularly attempt to 'domesticate difference'; i.e. they help a largely white, middle-class public to sympathize with and/or better control the behavior of an elusive ethnic, class, or racial Other.  Whereas his 'class-passers' and 'down-and-outers' sought to familiarize readers with people rendered distant from themselves by their poverty or ascribed group identity, so Pittenger freshly portrays the investigators as a distinct set of middle-class professionals well worth knowing."