The Climate of Class

In “The Climate of Class,” Alice Echols takes as her point of departure how biography and family history share considerable ground. At their most ambitious and satisfying each involves braided narratives in which a small... [ view full abstract ]

In “The Climate of Class,” Alice Echols takes as her point of departure how biography and family history share considerable ground. At their most ambitious and satisfying each involves braided narratives in which a small story tells a much larger story. Both have the capacity to trespass, as Allison Light recently argued, and they can breach the divide between public and private and transgress “the hedges around fields of academic study.” Echols’s talk grows out of her just-published book, Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Ruin, and a Hidden History of American Banking, which uncovers a long forgotten Depression-era financial scandal in order to explore the relationship between class, capitalism, and conservatism in America.  At the center of the book is Echols’s maternal grandfather, a barber from Greensburg, Indiana, who remade himself into a prosperous banker in Colorado Springs, Colorado, until the Depression exposed him as an embezzler.  Her grandfather’s nineteenth-century class consciousness–ambitiously upwardly mobile, self-reliant, individualistic–is one scholars too often pass over for the heroic, collectivist, “solidarity-forever” class consciousness most of us favor. His life reveals a good deal about the workings of class within his family of origin but also about the turn-of-the-century class climate in his new hometown, a crucial incubator of modern American conservatism.