Italian painter Nicolino Calyo (1799-1884) did a series of watercolors in 1840 depicting various vendors on the streets of Lower Manhattan. The vendors were hustling to make a living selling their products and services from baskets, tables, handcarts and carts pulled by horses. The paintings described below[i] reveal the reality of life for those living hand-to-mouth; the paintings are now owned by the Museum of the City of New York:
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- The boot cleaner and chimney sweep
- Strawberries from baskets nestled in the crooks of a young woman’s arms—“Fine, ripe and red!”
- The Whale Oil Man, two cans yoked across his shoulders with a dipping cup dangling on the side
- An old women with baskets on the sidewalk–“Here’s Beans, Peas, Cucumbers, Cabbage, Onions, Potatoes!”
- One wagon loaded with bread, another with charcoal
- A lemon and orange stand–“very fine, very cheap” from the “warm countries”
- An ice cart with blocks cut from “Rockland Lake”
- Root beer–3 cents a glass
- Raw oysters displayed on a table–a penny apiece
- A butcher’s stand–$3.94 for a 21-lb veal and $1.50 for 12 lbs. of mutton
Those sidewalk vendors are among the icons representing the spirit of entrepreneurship in early America. Fast forward to New York in 2020. Has anything changed? Are you kidding? The details of the American Hustle are different, of course, but the essence is still there and even more people are sliding toward the edge of penury than was the case in 1840. The competition and greed have grown as the god Mammon directs his minions on Wall Street, K Street, Madison Avenue and Congress. It might seem today that too many Americans admire Ayn Rand (unrestrained greed) sitting at the right hand of the god Mammon with Jezebel (cruel and without compassion) on the left. Good grief, how are we going to support such outrageous accusations? Actually, as you will see, it’s really not that hard.
The dance many of us are doing, the American Hustle, has us behaving like frantic dung beetles, rolling up ca-ca into balls and stashing them away in our garages and storage units in quantities beyond any rational need, while the growing majority finds the basic material needs–food, clothing and shelter–fading out of reach. “The United States does not guarantee the availability of affordable housing to its citizens, as do most developed nations. It does not guarantee reliable access to health care, as does virtually every other developed nation. The cost of a college education in the United States is among the highest in the developed world.”[ii]
Until 1968 most American workers expected to have a higher standard of living than their parents. Today (2020), however, no matter how hard they “hustle” in America, the 90% are falling farther and farther behind the 10%. “These changes have become harder to reverse because the distribution of political power also is increasingly unequal. Our system of democracy is under strain as those with wealth increasingly shape the course of policymaking acting from self-interest and perhaps failing to imagine life on the other side of the divide or to design policy in the common interest.”[iii]
“The wealthy are particularly successful in blocking changes they don’t like. The political scientist Martin Gilens of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Benjamin Page of Northwestern have calculated that from 1981 to 2002, policies supported by at least 80 percent of affluent voters passed into law about 45 percent of the time, while policies opposed by at least 80 percent of those voters passed into law just 18 percent of the time. Importantly, the views of poor and middle-class voters had little influence.”[iv]
The latest “hustle” involves monetizing social media which as it turns out is giving voice to the darkest aspects of the false self. “The shareholders of Facebook decided, ‘If you can increase my stock tenfold, we can put up with a lot of rage and hate.’”[v]
So there you have it! As many of us boogie doing the American Hustle, spinning and dizzy, we hear the fading melody of American exceptionalism. The coronavirus that threatens us from without is nothing compared to the disease afflicting our soul. “We were not as healthy as we thought we were. The biological virus infecting individuals is not as devastating as our social virus. Its symptoms—inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities—were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.”[vi]
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Supplemental Readings:
Attitudes, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
Beliefs, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
Values, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#30 The American Hustle
[i] American Heritage. “When the Old Streets Talked.” June 1955, pp. 46-49.
[ii] Bennet, James. “The America We Need.” The New York Times Sunday Review. April 19, 2020, p. 3.
[iii] Ibid., p. 2.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Dowd, Maureen. “Think Outside the Box, Jack.” The New York Times. May 31, 2020, p 9.
[vi] Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The Ideas That Won’t Survive the Coronavirus.” The New York Times Sunday Review. April 19, 2020, p. 10.
