WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Gary L. Wamsley
No doubt like others Oldfield has conscripted to his cause, I am now
examining my past and how my “class origins” affected me as a person, my
scholarly work, my outlook on American government, politics in general, and
public administration in particular. Moreover, if my class background has made
a difference, what are the consequences? Do I endorse Oldfield’s position that
public administration programs should address the issue of socioeconomic status
with regard to faculty recruiting, student aid, and institutional financial support?
And further, should faculty draw on their lower socioeconomic origins in
teaching and research? After thinking about it for some time, I find I do endorse
his ideas, and the reasons may lie in my own experiences growing up. Let me
struggle to explain some of these reasons.
GROWING UP RURAL
My socioeconomic origins may not be the same as many of the other
contributors. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that many, if not most, of them
come from families more urban and racially and ethnically diverse. My class
background is rural and protestant. I am Caucasian. I was born in 1935 at the
height of the Great Depression, and some of my most formative years were
spent on a small dairy farm in southeast Nebraska. It was not one of those flat
and fertile farms one thinks of when Nebraska is mentioned but rather one that
was hilly, badly eroded, and in places too rocky to cultivate. Life there centered
on the legendary “family farm” my grandparents owned. It included Sunday
dinners grandmother cooked that brought together children, grandchildren,
aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces. (Some might see it as straight out of Norman
Rockwell’s painting of a Thanksgiving dinner.) Contact with the outside world
consisted of driving 2 miles to town (population about 5,000), parking on
Main Street, talking to other people, going through the five-and-dime store, and
buying a quarter’s worth of candy. The farthest we ever traveled was 20 miles to
the annual county fair, and that seemed like a trip to the edge of the world.
Living on a farm probably obscured for me the fact that we were extremely
cash poor, a situation not uncommon for small farmers then. We did not
consider ourselves poor or as being at the lower reaches of the class structure.
In most cases, as in ours, a rural family could fall back on the garden, family
canning, doing their own butchering, and even making some of their own
clothes. Most meals did not include meat unless it was chicken, and then only
for Sunday dinner. (I was in college before I ever saw or tasted a steak.) More
often than not, dessert consisted of bread with milk and sugar poured on top.
We never went hungry, but to this day it pains me to throw away food. My
family was not unique; most of my relatives and neighbors were in much the
same straits. Agriculture was shifting to farms of larger acreage and greater
mechanization. Small farms of only 120 acres were becoming less and less viable.
88 Journal of Public Affairs Education