“House-poor people work for their land as much as any farmer.’’—Ellen Goodman, “The Last Boat to the Middle Class,” reprinted in Close to Home (1978)
A recent tribute by Boston Globe columnist and novelist James Carroll made me look up this piece by his just-retired colleague, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ellen Goodman. Some of the numbers cited in the 1978 article quoted above sound almost laughably historic now (the price of a new home in 1972 was $22,000 in 1972 and $53,700 six years later).
Another sentence also piqued my interest, about how, in the late Seventies, “the market went as wild as Wall Street in the twenties.” Goodman could never have imagined the nearly 30-year spree that, except for relatively brief interruptions, came to an end in September 2008.
Btu then again, nobody could. The tragicomedy of modern economics is that it continually exceeds the imagination of the ordinary cautious citizen.
A recent tribute by Boston Globe columnist and novelist James Carroll made me look up this piece by his just-retired colleague, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ellen Goodman. Some of the numbers cited in the 1978 article quoted above sound almost laughably historic now (the price of a new home in 1972 was $22,000 in 1972 and $53,700 six years later).
Another sentence also piqued my interest, about how, in the late Seventies, “the market went as wild as Wall Street in the twenties.” Goodman could never have imagined the nearly 30-year spree that, except for relatively brief interruptions, came to an end in September 2008.
Btu then again, nobody could. The tragicomedy of modern economics is that it continually exceeds the imagination of the ordinary cautious citizen.
One other thing: Goodman speculates that the American love affair with home ownership might have begun because, “as descendants of land-less immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.” With a bit more legwork, she could have fleshed this out a bit more.
The region covered by the Boston Globe features a disproportionately high number of Irish-Americans, not a few of whom were descended from emigrants fleeing the Great Famine of the 1840s. That catastrophe—and the landlessness they and their ancestors suffered—remained seared into the American Irish consciousness for decades to come. I’m sure the same situation occurred in the case of other emigrant groups.
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