The Tribes of America: Tonight in Chicago

Late in 2003 I published a piece in the Village Voice entitled "Attention, Wal-Mart Voters" based on reporting I did across the rural and blue-collar towns along Illinois's Highway 1, asking ordinary folks to reflect on the upcoming presidential election. An obscure, now defunct blog said the piece reminded him of the work Paul Cowan used to do for the same newspaper back in the 1970s, and collected in his book Tribes of America. I'd never heard of Cowan, so I tracked down a copy of the long-out-of-print Tribes. You know how sometimes when you read something that touches you so deeply you remember exactly where you were when you first read it? I can still picture the day, sitting on my in-laws couch around Christmastime in 2003, when I finally met the writer who expressed exactly what it was I was trying to achieve in my own work.

I looked Paul Cowan up online. Learned, tragically, that he had died of cancer in the mid-1980s; I would never get to meet him. (Indeed, he was one of the people to whom I've dedicated Nixonland: Cowan, and his fellow dearly departed journalistic chronicler of America's ideological culture wars Anthony Lukas—"two heroes I never got a chance to meet.") I did the next best thing: I looked up his widow, Rachel Cowan, now a rabbi in New York, and learned more about Paul's life and work. I became, in fact, a bit obsessed with the guy: my brother from another mother.

So when John Palatella, then of Columbia Journalism Review, now literary editor of The Nation, asked me to writ about my favorite book of classic journalism to inaugurate CJR's new "Second Read" feature, the words tumbled out of my mouth: "Have I got a classic for you..."

Here's how the essay I wrote about Tribes of America began:

In the fall of 1974, in Kanawha County, West Virginia, Christian fundamentalists enraged at the imposition of “blasphemous” textbooks in the public schools demolished a wing of a school board building with fifteen sticks of dynamite. When the board insisted on keeping the books in the curriculum, homes were bombed and school buses shot at. “Jesus Wouldn’t Have Read Them,” read one of the slogans of a movement whose leader, a preacher, would soon face charges of conspiracy to bomb two elementary schools.

Into this whirlwind stepped Paul Cowan, a shaggy-haired, bespectacled, left-wing New York Jew, trying to make sense of why he felt sympathy for the side that was laying the dynamite.

For people like Cowan, a thirty-four-year-old staff writer at The Village Voice, it was a boon time for existential drift. In 1970 he published The Making of an Un-American, the memoir of a raw and arrogant new-left punk who had taken a one-year leave from the Voice in 1966 for a stint in the Peace Corps that was supposed to be broadening, but ended up being wildly disillusioning. “When I read that the Viet Cong had attacked the American embassy in Saigon during the Tet offensive,” Cowan concluded in Un-American, “I was almost able to imagine that I was a member of the raiding party.” But by the time Cowan began his next project, in 1971, life inside the new left had become an emotional burden for him: diminishing returns, dashed certitudes, “intellectual claustrophobia.” That was how, “gradually, half-consciously, without any theory or any plan, I decided to cross the sound barrier of dogma and test my beliefs against the realities of American life.” The twelve chapters of The Tribes of America (1979) were the felicitous result.

A person of Cowan’s inclinations and background was supposed to know exactly what to think about a howling mob gathered around a crucifix-emblazoned flag and expectorating demands to burn books of the sort the reporter would want his kids to study, books with chapters by Norman Mailer and James Baldwin and test questions asking students to interpret rather than parrot what they had read. It would have been easy to record the scenes of bonfires and leave it at that; certainly that would have satisfied Cowan’s readers back in Greenwich Village. Instead, Cowan took the riskier step: wondering whether these criminals didn’t also have a point.

The people responsible for the textbooks were bureaucrats who wrote blithely of pedagogy’s power to “induce changes . . . in the behavior of the ‘culturally lost’ of Appalachia,” and identified teachers as state-designated “change agents” and schools as “the experimental center, and the core of this design.” Nowadays the arrogance of this formulation is as grating to us as a chalkboard screech. Not then. It was an era when the language of universally applicable liberal enlightenment flew trippingly off cosmopolitan tongues. Which was why it came as such a shock when the “culturally lost” proved to have ideas of their own — that their culture had inherent dignity and value, and that textbooks suggesting that Christian revelation was on a par with Greek myth were, as protesters put it, “moral genocide.”

It took a keen eye and an open mind to recognize that the cosmopolitans were pursuing a form of class warfare. Cowan noticed how urban and suburban professionals in Kanawha County — “Hillers,” in local parlance — spoke nervously in private of how familiarity with names like Mailer and Baldwin would get their precious darlings into Harvard and keep them out of West Virginia Tech. The Hillers weren’t about to risk having their upward climb impeded by the “Creekers,” poor residents in the hollows who wanted “to protest corruption,” as one suburbanite told Cowan, but didn’t “even know how to spell that word.” But some Creekers were motivated by similar dreams of upward mobility. Their version of it was just incompatible with the Hillers’ impositions — like the kid who told Cowan “he wanted to go to West Virginia Tech, to be an engineer,” and he felt he needed “a good basic education” to do it.

Dynamite wasn’t the answer. But neither was a kind of cultural imperialism indifferent to the fact that 81 percent of the district opposed the textbooks. It was, in a word, complicated. Certainly more complicated than the portraits other journalists were creating for sneering consumption back home: death threats, double-barreled shotguns, Onward Christian Soldiers. The futile last stand of yokels against the inevitable march of progress.

It was at a time when, certainly to the left, local cultures were of keenest interest as obstacles federal judges eradicated in order to deliver social justice. But what Paul Cowan understood long before anyone else was that there was a new kind of story to tell about such conflicts: that attempts to “coax people into the melting pot” had costs as well as benefits, and campaigns to replace “our periods with your question marks,” as one Creeker put it with aphoristic intelligence, must not simply be imposed by fiat. Cowan understood how “often, people I might once have written off as reactionaries were fighting to preserve their culture and their psychological and physical turf,” and that this new argument over the meaning of democracy was defining the next frontier of political conflict itself. That America had tribes, and that sometimes — often — they would come to blows.

We call those fights the “culture wars” now, and we have a more richly variegated vocabulary to describe the Hillers and the Creekers: red state and blue state. Redneck and yuppie. New Class and white working class. “Evangelical” and “liberal.” We describe our nation’s dueling dreads over such concepts with a casualness that once marked cocktail party chatter about the inevitability of consensus liberalism. Writing in the 1970s, however, Cowan had no such clichés to lean on. He had to figure it out for himself. He did so brilliantly — eyes open, with a courage I can scarcely believe. He traveled all over the country: to Boston during the busing wars; to Forest Hills, Queens, where he was shocked at the racism of immigrant Jews fighting the construction of a low-income housing project; to the southernmost border of the United States, where the sacrifices Mexicans were making to preserve their families looked like anarchy to the Americans patrolling the border with shotguns. Cowan’s reporting from these places left him “with a profound respect for the stability of religion, of ceremony, of family life: of customs I’d once regarded as old-fashioned and bourgeois.” His travels also found him realizing that “those same longings, translated into political terms, have produced the vicious fights I’ve witnessed for the past seven years and recorded in this book.” His agonized sensitivity to battlefields then barely emergent makes for one of the most remarkable books I have ever read by any journalist.

It then occurred to me that there was no law of nature that demanded the best book of American journalism I'd ever read need stay out of print. I began working on its literary resurrection. And thanks to the generosity of Rachel Cowan and the hard work of my agent Chris Calhoun, I'm proud to say that the New Press's re-issue of Tribes of America (introduction by Rick Perlstein) is now on sale for everyone to enjoy.

If you like my writing, you'll love Paul's.

Live in Chicago? I'll be reading from the new edition of Tribes at 57th Street Books in Hyde Park tonight at six. Beers afterward at the University of Chicago Pub (basement of Ida Noyes Hall at 1212 E. 59th Stree).