Afternoon Must-Read: Helaine Olen: Poor Stories from [David] Brooks and [Ross] Douthat

…and certainly not one you’d like to think is based on a true story…. An alcoholic father… a mother way too overwhelmed… to show much love to her children. A pervert… attempts a sexual assault on the prepubescent Francie…. The Nolan family savings account… is constantly being raided. Francie’s Aunt Evy’s husband abandons his family. Another aunt ‘gets around’…. Her parents… fake an address in a better neighborhood… forced to drop out of school when her father dies and her mother is unable to support her family…. [A] memoir by Laura Ingalls Wilder… features wife beaters and murderers… Pa skipping out of town without paying the rent. Publishers of the 1930s passed on Wilder’s true-life tale, only responding when she and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane (who complained in her diary of growing up with ‘no affection, poverty, inferiority’) turned the rejected manuscript into the more homespun Little House in the Big Woods…. Even at the time, few readers wanted to hear the truth. Just as our own age does, the late 19th and early 20th century attracted a goodly share of two-bit moralists who confused cause and effect when it came to the lives of the lower classes…. When the young Francie Nolan writes about the truth of her life in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the response from her teacher is less than sympathetic: ‘Drunkards belong in jail not in stories. And poverty. There’s no excuse for that. There’s work enough for all who want it. People are poor because they’re too lazy to work. There’s nothing beautiful about laziness.’… This world receded, not because post-war Americans suddenly acquired morals, but because they achieved prosperity, not to mention a social safety net…. The second Gilded Age is imitating the first. None of this history features in the columns of Brooks, Douthat or others like them, however, who all warble on about an imaginary past.