Marginal People in Deviant Places

Front matter

Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

Janice M. Irvine

Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments Preface

ONE Introduction Two Making Up Hobos: Nels Anderson and Other Tramp Tales THREE The Taxi-Dance Hall: Paul Cressey’s Ambivalence

Preface

Figure 1. Howard Becker, piano, performing at the 504 Club in Chicago, circa 1950. Xxiv Figure 2. Mad magazine cover, December, 1971. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 3. Zora Neale Hurston collecting folklore, late 1930s. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 4. Early gay pride march, Mattachine Society of New York. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 5. Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 6. Center Building, St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., circa 1900. XXX Figure 7. Lobby card for the 1927 film The Taxi Dancer. Available on Fulcrum.

x Illustrations

Chapter 1

Figure 8. Book cover, Must You Conform? by Robert Lindner, 1956.

Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 9. Ernest Burgess course notes for Social Pathology, October 4, 1927. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 10. Cesare Lombroso, six figures illustrating types of criminals, 1888. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 11. W. E. B. Du Bois in his office, circa 1948. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 12. Georg Simmel, circa 1901. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 13. Industrial Workers of the World (WW) demonstration,

New York City. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 14. Federal Bureau of Investigation, American Sociological Association, September 14, 1965. Washington, DC: FBI Freedom of Information—Privacy Acts Section.

Figure 15. Street signs marking the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 16. “Urban Areas,” map illustrating the growth of cities.

Figure 17. The sleeping porch in the Allison Building at

St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 18. Israel Levin Senior Center, December 2018. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 19 Marginal People in Deviant Places. Map by Janice M. Irvine ©. Artist, Molly Brown, South Portland, Maine.

Chapter 2

Figure 20. The National Hobo Museum, at the former Chief Movie Theatre on Main Street, Britt, Iowa. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 21. The Hobo, by Nels Anderson.

Figure 22. More than twenty-five years a bindle stiff. Photograph by Dorothea Lange, 1938.

Figure 23. Advertisement for the book, The Hobo, from the University of Chicago Press. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 24. Lou Ambers with a large bag mounting a train. Photograph by Alan Fisher, 1935. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 25. Front page of The Adventures of a Female Tramp, 1914, by hobo writer A-No. 1. Available on Fulcrum.

Illustrations xi

Figure 26. Downtown Chicago intersection in the late nineteenth century, congested with horses, carts, carriages, and train cars. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 27. Chicago Gangland, 1927. Created by University of Chicago sociologist Frederic Milton Thrasher for his book The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. 47

Figure 28. Nels Anderson included samples of menus from restaurants in hobohemian. From The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, 1923. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 29. Century-old hobo graffiti found by anthropologist Susan Phillips under a concrete bridge of the L.A. River. 48

Figure 30. Lou Ambers cooking over a campfire, using a tin can on a stick. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 31. A squatter in Chicago, named Blackie, reading a newspaper in the type of living area Nels Anderson referred to as a hobo jungle. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 32. A boxcar located at the hobo jungle on Diagonal, one block off Main Street in Britt, Iowa. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 33. Russel-Morgan print of a tramp smoking cigar with cane over his arm, 1899. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 34. Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 35. Physician and occasional hobo, Ben Reitman. From The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, 1923. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 36. A poster by the International Brotherhood Welfare Association advertising a hobo rally and lecture entitled “The Hobo and His Welfare,” with Dr. Ben Reitman and James Eads How. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 37. Industrial Workers of the World, “The Little Red Song Book,” 1918. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 38. Publicity photograph of Charlie Chaplin for the film Modern Times, 1936. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 39. Toward Los Angeles, 1937. 57

Figure 40. Century-old hobo graffiti under a concrete bridge of the L.A. River. Available on Fulcrum.

Chapter 3 Figure 41. Film poster for 1931 Lionel Barrymore production

Ten Cents a Dance, starring Barbara Stanwyck. Available on Fulcrum.

xii I/lustrations

Figure 42. Chicago sex work establishments during the Prohibition era, 1920-1933.

Figure 43. A photograph of Jane Addams, cofounder of Hull House, in Chicago, was included in a gallery of Keepers of the Faith. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 44. Book cover of Hull House associate Louise DeKoven Bowen, The Public Dance Halls of Chicago. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 45. Cover of antidance treatise, From the Ball-room to Hell, 1892. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 46. Road map of Chicago and vicinity, produced by Cities Service Oil Company, 1937. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 47. This Knights Templar postcard, of the 3 1st Triennial Conclave “Welcome” sign, held in Chicago, August, 1910.

Figure 48. System of Chicago Surface Lines, 1929. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 49. On the dance floor, 1938. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 50. The Migration of Negroes, 1890, The Georgia Negro. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 51. Nationalities Map No. 1—Polk Street to Twelfth, Halsted Street to Jefferson, Chicago. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 52. Paul Cressey’s map for The Taxi-Dance Hall text,

“From Where They Come in the City.” Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 53. Paul Cressey’s base map of Chicago, marking the locations of taxi-dance halls licensed in 1927. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 54. Moral crusades against taxi-dance halls in Chicago and other regions of the United States were widely reported in newspapers. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 55. The Social Dance book cover, 1921. An antidance treatise by Dr. R. A. Adams that argues that dancing is both immoral and physically unhealthy. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 56. Paul Cressey’s book on taxi-dance halls received widespread coverage in the Chicago newspapers. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 57. A taxi dancer responded to the flurry of news coverage about Paul Cressey’s book, The Taxi-Dance Hall. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 58. Book cover, Taxi Dancers, by Eve Linkletter, 1958. Available on Fulcrum.

Illustrations xiii

Figure 59. Excerpt from Paul Cressey’s field notes in which he discussed seeing the book (which he misspelled) The Well of Loneliness. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 60. Book cover, The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyfte Hall. Available on Fulcrum.

Chapter 4

Figure 61. Road map of Florida, 1938. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 62. Zora Neale Hurston and an unidentified man, probably at a recording site in Belle Glade, Florida, 1935. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 63. Commemorative plaque celebrating Hurston as “Eatonville’s Daughter,” at the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 64. Zora Neale Hurston as a student at Howard University, 1919-23.

Figure 65. Zora Neale Hurston and three boys, in Eatonville, Florida, 1935. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 66. Zora Neale Hurston, half-length portrait, at the Florida Writers’ Project exhibit, at the New York Times Book Fair, 1938. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 67. Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State. Compiled and written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, 1940. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 68. Segregation at the bus station in Durham, North Carolina, 1940. Photographer, Jack Delano. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 69. Notes taken by Stetson Kennedy on dialogue between Zora Neale Hurston and Dr. Carita Coree, director of the Florida Writers Project about reporting of the Ocoee Incident. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 70. Zora Neale Hurston, with Rochelle French and Gabriel Brown, in Eatonville, Florida, 1935. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 71. Phosphate mine in the Bone Valley Formation region. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 72. Gulf, Florida & Alabama Railway Company turpentine camp, circa 1900.

xiv Illustrations

Figure 73. Zora Neale Hurston, smoking a cigarette, at the Aycock and Lindsay turpentine camp, Cross City, Florida, 1939. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 74. Zora Hurston’s manuscript, “Cross City: Turpentine Camp,” written after her visit to the Aycock & Lindsay turpentine camp, 1939. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 75. Burned, typewritten title page of Hurston’s article, “Florida’s Migrant Farm Labor.”

Figure 76. Newspaper advertisement for Negro dolls and the Negro Doll Company. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 77. Cover of anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s 1930 text, The Anthropometry of the American Negro. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 78. Eugenics Society exhibit, 1930s, advising visitors to “Marry Wisely.” Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 79. Flag, announcing lynching, flown from the window of the NAACP in New York City, 1936. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 80. Florida and the Railroad Barons map shows the expansion of rail lines in Florida, which bolstered industrial expansion in areas such as phosphate mining, sugar production, and myriad fruit and vegetable products. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 81. Trainman signaling from a Jim Crow coach,

St. Augustine, Florida, 1943. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 82. Zora Neale Hurston and her car, Cherry. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 83. Cover of the Negro Motorist Green Book, by Victor Hugo Green, 1940 edition. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 84. Dell’s Café, Eatonville, Florida. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 85. People dancing, probably from the Georgia, Florida, and Bahamas expedition, 1935. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 86. Migratory laborers playing checkers in front of jook joint during slack season for vegetable pickers, Belle Glade, Florida, 1941.

Figure 87. Burned fragment from Hurston’s papers expressing her frustration with Southern racism. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 88. Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to W. E. B. Du Bois, June 11, 1965. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 89. Zora Neale Hurston moved to this single-story, stucco house in Fort Pierce in 1957. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 90. Zora Neale Hurston’s weathered cemetery marker at

IIQ

Illustrations xv the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Fort Pierce. Available on Fulcrum.

Chapter 5

Figure 91. Hospital for the Insane of the Army and Navy and the District of Columbia, 1860. 142

Figure 92. https://arcg.is/I KvXfGO0. ArcGIS map.

Figure 93. Surveillance dog in action by the Department of Homeland Security. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 94. Erving Goffman’s text, Asylums, 1961. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 95. St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC, between 1909 and 1932. 145

Figure 96. Maps of St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC, circa 1860. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 97. The former Recreational Therapy Branch building on the St. Elizabeths campus. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 98. Two editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 99. David Rosenhan. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure roo. Original blueprint showing rendering of the Male Receiving Building at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, circa 1934. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure ror. African American patients eating in a segregated dining hall in Building Q circa 1915. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 102. Indian Asylum, Canton, South Dakota. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 103. Historical highway sign in South Dakota marking the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 104. The Burroughs Cottage on St. Elizabeths campus, March, 2017. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 105. Marion Chace launched dance therapy at St. Elizabeths in 1942 and taught for several decades. 155

Figure 106. Ken Kesey in 1974. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 107. The 1946 novel, The Snake Pit. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 108. St. Elizabeths woman patient in a rocking chair. Available on Fulcrum.

xvi I/lustrations

Figure rog. Advertisement for Haldol, the antipsychotic drug released in 1967. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 110. Book cover of a reader compiling articles from Madness Network News. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 111. Buildings remain closed and shuttered at St. Elizabeths Hospital, 2018. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 112. Aerial view of St. Elizabeths Hospital, west campus. Available on Fulcrum.

Chapter 6

Figure 113. Sociologist Laud Humphreys. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 114. Draft cover page of Laud Humphreys’s dissertation. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 115. Book cover of a 1975 enlarged edition of Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. 170 Figure 116. New York State Historic Site plaque at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, New York City, marking the uprisings in June, 1969. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 117. Laud Humphreys 1968 diary. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 118. Systematic Observation Sheet developed and employed by Laud Humphreys in recording tearoom encounters. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 119. Map of Forest Park indicating some of the restrooms that served as popular tearooms. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 120. Map of the World’s Fair in St. Louis, 1904, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. 178 Figure 121. One of the outdoor restrooms in Forest Park. 179 Figure 122. Men’s restroom in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where US Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested for lewd conduct. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 123. Advertisement by Guild Book Service for the report, “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida.” Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 124. Photograph of an apparent tearoom sexual encounter. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 125. Book cover of the fiftieth-anniversary edition of City of Night, by John Rechy, originally published in 1963. Available on Fulcrum.

Illustrations xvii

Figure 126. Laud Humphreys autographed a first edition of Tearoom Trade to his friend and colleague, sociologist Carol Warren. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 127. The physical altercation between Laud Humphreys and Alvin Gouldner was covered by the New York Times, headlined, “Sociology Professor Accused of Beating Student.” June 9, 1968. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 128. Laud Humphreys’s diary entries from May 20-21, 1968. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 129. Sociologist and activist Mary McIntosh. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 130. Photograph of a glory hole published in a gay magazine. Available on Fulcrum.

Chapter 7

Figure 131. Traffic heading toward the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 16, 1969. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 132. Book cover, Sherri Cavan’s Hippies of the Haight. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 133. Cover of the first issue of the men’s magazine Playboy, December 1953. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 134. Cover of the Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1967, which ran writer Joan Didion’s famous article, “Slouching ‘Towards Bethlehem.” 212

Figure 135. The Death of Hippie funeral notice, scheduled in Haight Ashbury for October 6, 1967, attributed the hippie’s death to mass media. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 136. Sociologist Sherri Cavan at her home in Haight Ashbury stands in front of some of her sculptures, 2014. 215

Figure 137. Street signs mark the famous intersection of Haight Street and Ashbury Street in San Francisco. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 138. 1967 Screen print of San Francisco represents the city’s art and music scene. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 139. Sherri Cavan’s house on Page Street in 2014. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 140. Hippie is a Straight Theater Celebration, 1967. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 141. Hippie is making mandalas, 1967. Available on Fulcrum.

xviii I/ustrations

Figure 142. Tourists peer out a bus window on the Gray Line bus company’s “Hippie Tour,” 1967. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 143. Hippies with marijuana stash in an apartment, 1969. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 144. The Jimi Hendrix Red House, Haight Ashbury. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 145. Janis Joplin performing in 1969. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 146. Hippie is salesmanship, 1967. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 147. Hippie is getting busted. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 148. Newspaper article reporting the Death of Hippies ceremony at Buena Vista Park, 1967. San Francisco Chronicle. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 149. Haight Ashbury continues to attract tourists to shops commercializing the region’s hippie history. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 150. Life Magazine cover depiction of the new youth communes as a confrontation with the United States.

Figure 151. Number Our Days book cover. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 152. Barbara Myerhoff, with members of the Israel Levin Senior Adult Center.

Figure 153. Israel Levin Senior Adult Center. Available on Fulcrum. Figure 154. Colorful murals on Israel Levin Senior Adult Center. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 155. Gathering Place on the Bench. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 156. Life Not Death in Venice protest. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 157. K.O.S. protest.

Figure 158. Act Up members engage in street protest, circa late 1980s. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 159. Queer and Queer Nation. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 160. Senior Center demolition. Available on Fulcrum.

Figure 161. Bench outside Israel Levin Senior Adult Center, December, 2018.

Acknowledgments

Writing about deviants is exciting. Until it isn’t. On the one hand, this has been the most fun I’ve ever had doing research. It involved my favorite activities: travel, exploring archives, and talking to people. This project deepened my recognition of how my life has been so profoundly constructed by knowledge, art, and politics by, and about, those of us on the social margins. On the other hand, this book brought more than its share of heartache. For one thing, people died. The news, by email or word of mouth, that one of my interviewees had died brought a lingering sadness. This was a historical project, and poring over obituaries and reports of memorial services for an earlier generation of scholars kindled a new poignancy about their lives and work. This bittersweet reminder that I, too, am simply a small part of a longer tradition of rethinking difference led me to locate myself on the map of scholars and our research places that I designed for this book. Additionally, it is an understatement to note that immersion in histories of relentless racism, sexism, and homophobia was painful. The persistence of bias, injustice, and stigma toward unconventional ways of living and unconventional forms of knowledge is dispiriting and enraging.

This project would not have become a book without Sara Cohen. It was an easy decision to follow her to the University of Michigan Press after our several years of rich collaboration at Temple University Press. I’m grateful for her unwavering faith in this book and my writing process, for her incisive comments on multiple drafts, and for generally putting up with me. Many thanks to University of Michigan Press for producing a beautiful book. Likewise, I was lucky to have two anonymous reviewers whose very smart comments made this a better book.

xx Acknowledgments

It has always amazed me how generous people are with their time and memories when they agree to do interviews! Many thanks to the numerous scholars, artists, and activists who agreed to talk with me, and to those who participated in video interviews. Your insights and stories lent depth and nuance to my thinking about the texts, places, and time periods I’ve explored in this book. Every interview was a powerful reminder of the interconnectedness of personal and historical dimensions in the production of knowledge about social difference.

I received crucial institutional support for this project from several sources. Many thanks to the American Sociological Association for a grant from their Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, and to the University of Massachusetts for a Social and Behavior Sciences Faculty Research Grant. A stipend and digital support from the University of Massachusetts’s Innovate program supported a very early pilot chapter, “Asylum Stories,” built as an Open Educational Resource on the Scalar platform. ’'m deeply grateful to Michele Turre, our uber-competent senior instructional technologist, for her “assistance” on that project, which basically consisted of her building everything while I sat next to her, watching. Likewise, I received crucial digital support from UMass Amherst IT, Instructional Innovation. The UMass SOAR Fund and the College of Social and Behavior Sciences offset the subvention cost necessary for publication. In our year-long seminar in the Institute for Social Science Research Scholars Program, faculty members, particularly cofacilitators Naomi Gerstel and Laurel Smith-Doerr, provided helpful feedback on tender, early drafts. Laurel’s enduring enthusiasm for my work helped me think this deviant project was viable. Finally, the Conti Fellowship from UMass was an unexpected and welcome gift of release time for a year-long focus on research and writing.

The cover image, Untitled 1987, is by the Australian artist, poet, and mental health advocate Graeme Doyle (1947-2021). Doyle’s art is held in The Cunningham Dax Collection, Melbourne, Australia, which notes that Doyle, who experienced a long-term struggle with mental illness, “identified himself as an ‘outsider artist,’ intentionally acknowledging his position on the margins.” Doyle’s outsider art, which depicts complexity and stigma related to mental illness, resonates powerfully with this book’s themes of outsiders, marginality, and difference. Many thanks to Julia Young at the Dax Centre, who facilitated permission to feature Doyle’s painting on the cover.

A huge shout-out to archivists and librarians! The interlibrary loan staff at UMass delivered at warp-speed the vast range of sometimes-obscure materials I requested over the years. I worked in several special collections,

Acknowledgments xxi and I’m grateful for the friendly efficiency of the many archivists there: the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, the New York City Public Library, the University of Florida, the University of Massachusetts, and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Thanks also to Sarah Leavitt, curator at the National Building Museum, for helpful conversations about St. Elizabeths and comments on an early draft chapter. My last research trip unfolded, and unraveled, in Florida during the week of March 9, 2020. When it became clear I would have to change my flight and go home early, I rushed to the University of Florida special collections a day ahead of schedule. Many thanks to Flo Turcotte, literary manuscripts archivist, for rearranging her schedule to come to the library to chat about Zora Neale Hurston and facilitate my collection of digital images. It was the day the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, and Flo was the last archivist I spoke with in person for a very long time.

Finishing a book in a pandemic was, well, basically like doing anything else in a pandemic—scary and hard. Several months into lockdown, with pretty much everywhere, including UMass, closed, I left Northampton, Massachusetts, and moved to Portland, Maine. For many months I was lost, in every sense of that word. I mourned the sudden absence of local friends and colleagues, and was untethered from institutional resources. I’m grateful to fellow sociologist Wendy Chapkis at the University of Southern Maine for academic collegiality, friendship, and for directing me to the phenomenal Osher Map Library at USM. Executive Director Libby Bischof and Osher Professor Matthew Edney were welcoming and generous on my first pandemic-era visit back to an academic space. Libby and Matthew, along with Bob Spencer and Louis Miller, located and then produced high-resolution scans of several fabulous maps in this book. Thank you all for your kindness to a displaced scholar!

Portland offered additional supports, in ways unexpected and moving. For one, soon after arriving there, I decided to create a graphic representation of all my research sites. Although I brainstormed ideas for this conceptual map, I had no idea how to artistically render such a thing. Unexpectedly, I found an artist who is also a geographer! Pm exceedingly grateful to Molly Brown, of MollyMaps in South Portland, for her collaboration in turning my fantasy map into reality. Colleen Bedard also gave me helpful artistic advice during my early mapmaking foray. Additionally, after a chance conversation on a freezing, masked, January Meetup beach walk, Barbara Cray generously volunteered to edit my videos for me (Sara Cohen heroically picked up the ball at the end.) Finally, my new Portxxii Acknowledgments land friends regularly asked how the book was going, fed me, patiently explained my new city and state to me, and invited me to that classic Maine cultural experience, “camp.”

Then there are the other all-important people. Like many academics, my intellectual webs traverse state and national borders. Without naming them all, I newly appreciate, in their abrupt dislocation during the pandemic, how ambient connections to broader intellectual conversations shape our work. Zoom and Skype helped them endure. In different ways, my closer circle of scholars has strengthened this work and kept me saneish: Kathy Davis, Arlene Stein, Regina Kunzel, Katie Young, Jackie Urla, Sarah Babb, Jen Lundquist, and Jon Wynn. Finally, Barbara Cruikshank, along with everything else, helps me remember myself as a scholar. You have all talked me through this project’s broader frameworks and finer points of analysis, the roller-coaster of thinking and writing, and life’s pleasures and vicissitudes during ten years of research. Just knowing you are out there has made all the difference.

Preface

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.!

Joan Didion

In mid-twentieth-century publishing, “the outsider” arrived. Four books— all similarly entitled “outsider”—highlighted a robust cultural visibility of, and curiosity about, those who defied social convention. During the McCarthy-era Red Scare, the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Wright explored themes of racism, segregation, and the American Communist Party in his 1953 novel The Outsider. The 1956 book by working-class English writer Colin Wilson, The Outsider, surprised everyone, including the author, by becoming an instant bestseller. Heralded as capturing “a representative theme of our time . .. of our deepest predicament,” the book explored writers who fled a “cow-like” herd mentality to seek a deeper existential truth.” S. E. Hinton’s novel a decade later, The Outsiders, about marginalized, working-class teenage “greasers,” inspired a film adaption by Francis Ford Coppola. Recently, actor and writer Lena Dunham wrote that “over 50 years later” The Outsiders “has never felt more relevant—or true.” Finally, sociologist Howard Becker’s 1963 essays featuring dance musicians, Outsiders, helped turn the social science of difference on its head.* It was the century of the outsider.

These authors wrote against the grain of Cold War, midcentury conformity. They all described themselves as outsiders, and their characters struck similar chords in their critique of social conventionality. Richard xxiv Preface

Howard Becker, piano, performing at the 504 Club in Chicago, circa 1950. Courtesy of Howard Becker.

Wright’s outsider, Cross Damon, represented “a black man’s attempted escape from stable, essentialist forms of identity, including race.”* Colin Wilson celebrated the alienation of his artistic outsiders, Hinton’s gentle juvenile delinquents overcame the stigma of poverty to become heroes, and Becker indicted those who made and enforced social rules, thereby creating “outsiders” of his then-edgy marijuana-smoking musicians. And yet, as suggested by the almost simultaneous publication of these books, the outsider theme already had an enduring cultural presence. From the turn of the twentieth century, social marginality had been growing increasingly visible, whether through hierarchies of racial, national, gender, or economic inequality, or as the margins chosen by bohemians and political radicals. Paradoxically, outsiders were also, well, popular! At least, some of them were. And discovering which outsiders could be marketed and sold would become central to what I call “outsider capitalism.”

‘Together, sociology, popular culture, political activism, and even the process of commodification all reflected and produced this zeitgeist of the outsider. As literary critic Carla Cappetti has argued, urban sociologists

Preface xxv and novelists “intellectually rubbed elbows” and served as reference points for each other. University of Chicago sociologists had a direct impact on the novels of key early-twentieth-century writers such as Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, and Nelson Algren. Conversely, Roger Salerno dubs the work of Chicago School scholars “sociology noir” for its overlapping sensibilities with noir popular culture.’ In addition, emerging forms of technology enabled innovative cultural production such as television, film, and photography. For example, mid-twentieth-century photographer Diane Arbus notoriously challenged positivist and eugenic theories of knowledge and scientific categorization within documentary photography and celebrity portraits, with her conceptual reversals of the freakish and the normal.* Mad magazine, founded in 1952, fostered a new deviant aesthetic of quirky, outsider critique. Alfred E. Neuman (the E stands for Enigma) helped a generation of young people develop a posture of snarky wit. These myriad outsider stories intertwined to make visible the perils, pleasures, and politics of difference.

This, too, is a book about outsiders. It explores cultural ideas about strangers, marginality, deviance, and differences. The social-scientific knowledge production about difference is its central theme. I explore different stories we tell about differences, and how those have changed, and not changed, over time. When this book begins, in the early twentieth century, race science produced the dominant narratives about human variations. Biological theories of difference produced a narrative othering that produced and reinforced caste hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, mental status, age, and other variations. Discourses on nature and biology framed otherwise benign human differences as unnatural, deficient, and even dangerous.

In contrast, during this same period, some social scientists reconceptualized scientific knowledge, theoretical frameworks, and languages of human differences. They honed ethnographic practices to capture the diverse worlds of differences and outsiders, and of the places they inhabited. They rewrote social knowledge about differences, against the individualizing pathologies of scientific racism. Instead, these scholars told complex stories about social worlds of marginality, inequality, exclusion, and stigma, as well as vibrancy, creativity, and rebellion. They uncovered cultural logics in the social worlds of those who were nonconformist and different, and developed new ideas that blurred the boundaries between normalcy and deviance.

This book examines those early- to mid-twentieth-century redefinitions of difference. Each chapter is a time capsule, following a classic or xxvi Preface little-known ethnographic text published between 1923 to 1978, or, in the case of anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, a body of her ethnographic research in Florida. The book explores hobos and taxi dancers and their immigrant dance partners of early Chicago. It traverses the social worlds of rural, southern African Americans brought to life by Hurston. It journeys through the asylums inhabited by midcentury mental patients, the “tearooms” of men having public sex, and the Haight Ashbury hippie district. We end with elderly Eastern European Jewish immigrants at a Venice Beach senior center.

These snapshots of ethnographic knowledge production illuminate ways of knowing about difference in specific historical moments. In this book, I braid together the stories told by the ethnographic text with the metastory of how the story was crafted. These stories about the story explore the where, how, and when of the authors’ projects, such as their methods, theoretical frameworks, and intellectual networks (or absence of them), as well as the challenges and support they encountered in their research. The historical, cultural, and political contexts—the experiences of researchers— influenced what stories could be told and who could tell them.