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by Thomas Hulse
My mom’s favorite painting is American Gothic. Even if you don’t know the name, I’m sure you can recognize it at a glance. A man gripping a pitchfork stands beside a woman, both posing in front of a white Midwestern house, glum looks on their face. As a kid, I was baffled at how my graphic designer of a mother could find such a boring painting interesting. What about Napoleon Crossing the Alps? The Great Wave Off Kanagawa? The Scream? When there’s so many exciting paintings out there, I could never understand why she enjoyed American Gothic.
American Gothic by Grant Wood
Who creates culture? A lot of people—possibly even most—would say the elite do. Artists, intellectuals, politicians, celebrities, and the media create the culture that everyone else passively consumes and regurgitates. According to this mythos, the elite dictate everything from politics to style to tradition. However, if there’s one thing that political science research has demonstrated, it is that the elite vastly overestimate their own influence. In reality, most people go about their daily lives without much thought for the “famous.” Whatever scandal happened today is not much more than a passing interest or short topic of discussion. People go on like normal, and most ignore or forget about the elite shortly thereafter.
And yet, there is a great deal of class angst generated in the public at large. So much of people’s behavior comes from an attempt to not seem “low class.” For many, if they were photographed in the style of American Gothic, they would feel ashamed. Ashamed that they cannot afford a modern-style house, ashamed that they dress simply, and ashamed that their job consists of manual labor. But I think what my mother sees in the painting is not the perceived flaws that so many would; she sees the rich culture and virtues of middle-class America. There is something beautiful about the everyday-ness of most people. Almost certainly, neither I nor anybody you know will face the decisions Caesar did in becoming a dictator. Nor will anybody have to make the principled but tragic final choice of Cato. Instead, we will have heroism, treachery, and tragedy in our own small lives. We will have the tough decision of how much power we exert over the volunteers in the local bake sale. We will have to decide whether to chastise a friend for a rude comment. And most importantly, we will have to choose between the generic and name brand groceries. These indeed are all minor issues, but how is it that the middle class approaches them? Is it with the arrogance, ill-informed superiority, wastefulness, and elitism of those trying to escape the middle? Or is it with the genuine good-heartedness, cheerfulness, frugality, acceptance, and common sense of those who embrace the middle? If America could embrace the middle class for what it is instead of trying to change it into something worse, perhaps many of our current dilemmas could be happily resolved.
As I prepare to leave UofL to enter into academia—a bastion for the elite—I hope that I never forget the virtue that my mother sees in American Gothic. That even as I become a specialized expert, I listen to the truth and wisdom of my friends in Kentucky. That I understand people come from all walks of life and their perspectives are well-intentioned. And, in general, that life is not something to be enjoyed with expensive goods and snobbery, but instead day-to-day with the people I love and the activities I like doing. In the words of John Updike, “I like middles. It is in the middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. Something quite intricate and fierce occurs in homes, and it seems to me without doubt worthwhile to examine what it is.”
Thomas Hulse is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2023. He studies physics, German, mathematics, and political science at the University of Louisville.