Living on the Edge: An American Generation’s Journ ey through the 20th Century (2021) by Richard A. Settersten, Jr., Glen H. Elder, Jr., and Lisa D. Pierce, is a decades-in-the-making accomplishment. My comment on Living on the Edge is framed through my perspective as a US historian versed, particularly, in migration, childhood, critical race, and Asian American studies. Living on the Edge could find a home in a variety of classes. Its finding would prove remarkably useful in courses focused on, for example, the analysis of gender, comparative life course methods, and generational kinship economies. My comments focus on the issue of race and ethnicity in the study, particularly for the pedagogical potential of utilizing the monograph in a modern US survey.
Living on the Edge’s incredibly rich (and longue durée) compilation of longitudinal research, which draws from the well-known Berkeley Guidance Study, spans almost the exact time frame of a modern US survey course, which typically takes 1865 (Reconstruction) as its starting point and continues to the present day. The authors position the “1900 generation” of American men and women at the center of their study within what Gordon (Reference Gordon2016) called the “revolutionary century of economic growth,” the 1870s to the 1970s. The birth dates of the 420 1900-generation constituents were concentrated between 1885 and 1908. They were born in either Europe or the United States and eventually settled in California. Each of the over 200 couples gave birth to a child in either 1928 or 1929, so at the close of the Progressive Era (1890s–1929) or beginning of the Great Depression (1929–1939). The book then follows these families through the Depression, wartime mobilization in support of World War II, long period of prosperity following and into the 1980s and 1990s for those eldest-surviving original subjects.
In teaching such an expansive length of time, sometimes broad sweeps are made, and it can be a challenge to connect students with the material in ways that are both complex and meaningful. To this point, the authors’ careful disaggregation of what I will call the “white experience” at the center of their study provides a noteworthy entry point to engage multiples scales of history (regional, national, international – through the subjects’ migrant backgrounds), elevates diverse class perspectives, and personally invests white students in the course material, in a nuanced and productive fashion. I appreciate, in particular, the on-the-ground evidence and detailing of how original-class standing and generational wealth impacted individual and family experiences during the Depression and after. To disaggregate the experiences of those families who were economically deprived, those who were spared this misfortune, those who actually gained wealth during the Depression, and those who were economically set back but were able to fully recover by the start of World War II, provides a more complete and multilayered understanding of Americans’ experiences during this time period.
As told by Evan Roberts in this symposium, if done well, as with Living on the Edge, historical and life course analyses avoid what some historians call “whiggish interpretations” of past events. In teaching twentieth-century American history, attempts to avoid similar pitfalls by, for example, interrogating what social or cultural structures of power have historically encouraged (or inhibited) the availability of opportunity and upward mobility – particularly in regard to whiteness – may be met with harsh rebuke. It is not uncommon for critical historical analysis, if perceived as too “presentist,” to be misinterpreted by students as a calculated attempt by the professor to introduce a political-social agenda regarding race and privilege. In turn, Living on the Edge offers a productive and preemptive counter to this type of student misreading, as almost all the study’s participants are white, and there is a very clear, numbers-based accounting regarding the class system at play and the ways in which institutional wealth systematically advantages, disadvantages, and mediates the choices made available to individual American citizens.
I now turn our attention to just a few small areas of Living on the Edge that require supplementation if an undergraduate class were to read large portions of the monograph. Part 2 of the book, “Making a Life: 1910–1930,” with Chapter 2 titled, “California, Here We Come,” highlights the westward migration of the 1900 Generation. This migration is very much a history of American Empire and white settler colonialism, but this narrative contextualization is absent. Instead, the study-participants’ migration to California is framed to emphasize individual self-sufficiency: migration to take advantage of better opportunities; organic community building, as with chain migration. It imbues the book’s narrative within the teleological mythology of self-made pioneering Americans. Taking children and childhood as a lens of analysis, white settlers were not only “pushed” or “pulled,” but “taken.” Between 1845 and 1929, for example, the largest portion of those working-class youth transported to the west from their eastern city homes through the orphan trains system were involuntarily removed from the arms of their primarily young, unwed mothers, who were primarily first-generation immigrants, often Irish Catholic (See Holt Reference Holt1992). These children were sent to labor and populate the rural American West and assimilated under the purview of idealized-white, Anglo-Protestant households. My point here is not that any of these orphan trains youth made it into the Berkeley sample, but that the study needed to provide specific, critical migration and US empire, context which was there during the same time frame as the Berkeley Guidance Study’s beginnings. Throughout the book, the authors do allude to prejudices against Catholic and southern and eastern European immigrants and the historic consideration of Protestant and northwest Europeans as the consummate US citizens. Beginning in 1879 and through this same time period, thousands of Indigenous youth were taken from their families and networks of kin to remove unwanted populations from the American West, for them to labor and assimilate into the white ideals perpetrated in US federal boarding schools (See Archuleta et al. Reference Archuleta, Child and Tsianina Lomawaima2000).
In Chapter 5, the influx of Black migrants during the 1940s war-labor mobilization is framed as new, as “[triggering] racial tensions that had not been part of the community before then” (p. 171). There is no mention of the historic, white supremacist, social, political, and cultural California-state tensions that led to the active consideration of legally excluding Black settlers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (See Aarim-Heriot Reference Aarim-Heriot2003). Oregon, one of the 1900 Generation’s central layovers before arriving to California, did succeed in banning Black, Asian, and Indigenous in-state migration for a time. These exclusionary sentiments remained strong in California. Despite the existence of a small Black Californian population prior to World War II, these sentiments succeeded in discouraging large-scale Black settlement for decades.
Relatedly, seldom do the authors use the identifier “Japanese Americans” and instead consistently highlight and refer to this California (and Hawaii-referenced) population as “the Japanese,” conflating international and American communities. Historical context regarding Japan–US migration politics – that large numbers of Japanese Americans migrated to the United States only after US companies’ aggressive labor recruitment campaigns, and only following the US 1853-military-opening of Japan’s ports – is missing. There is also no mention of Japanese Americans’ long history of settlement, their state-economic impact, or contributions. Come World War II, for example, Japanese Californians grew 95% of the state’s peas and snap beans (See Lee Reference Lee2015) Absent, also, is any reference to the 1941 Munson Report which declared Japanese American residents “pathetically eager to show loyalty.” I could not help but read Japanese Californians framed as problematically foreign, as compared to all other California residents discussed, as is too often the case.
The authors do include an explicit caveat regarding how the original sample study was, indeed, drawn from the “Old Berkeley” population and, therefore, is missing the racial diversity most obvious after World War II. They underscore that social change is “an integral feature of the world in which longitudinal studies are carried out” (p. 16). I wonder, though, if in future commentaries or re-print, the authors might not speak to the current state of the field in terms of longitudinal research. In addition, they might reflect on how researchers and institutions – their own identities, networks, and comfort zones – also affect the chosen methodologies, populations tracked, and how these studies are framed, both now and in the past.
