On "Great Man" History and My Grandfather
What a Brooklyn plumber might say about the next phase of the American story
My maternal grandfather was the hardest-working person on either side of my family, maybe the hardest worker I’ve ever known.
A plumber by trade, he would sweat pipes and solder joints six days a week in his prime, more if you take into account all of the free labor he provided to friends and relatives.
He was not an educated man. He was the son of immigrants and I think he quit school after the eighth grade.
Nor was he a particularly deep thinker. His interest in people who were unlike himself was superficial, literally, even though he lived and worked in the melting pots of Brooklyn and Manhattan in the mid-twentieth century.
I don’t think he ever understood what all the 60s countercultural fuss was about, for example…only that change was scary, and uncertain, and seemed to be coming at him from every angle.
Nor was he particularly funny. Nevertheless, I found him very entertaining, especially when he was grumpy and cranky about the state of modern America. As much as I disagreed with everything he might say, I would bait him into an occasional, Archie Bunker-style rant for my own amusement.
Which is why he was still telling his rock-and-roll-obsessed grandson that Elvis Presley was the “ruination” of America…well into the 1990s. Take that Kurt Cobain.
If he was xenophobic and racist (and he was), his was a casual, thoughtless, reflexive form of xenophobia and racism—a fearful, passive, protective closed-mindedness that had more to do with shielding his family from change than with actively rejecting anyone else. Ultimately, it was a mind-your-own-business-and-keep-to-your-own-kind form of xenophobia and racism.
That’s why his response to Donald Trump always sticks out in my mind.
I’m a New York kid and grew up in the 1980s, so Trump has always been a presence in my life: mostly a headline-stealing blowhard who would manipulate the local press to drum up publicity for himself and his businesses. Very often, his businesses needed the help, and so did he. He always seemed rather desperate to me, and desperate for cash. Certainly desperate for attention.
Too often, the star-fucking press would oblige him.
And whenever Trump would show up in a headline, or on the six o’clock news, my grandfather would bark like a rabid dog. Every time. And every time he’d say the same thing: “The old man was worse.”
The “old man” in this case was Fred Trump, little Donnie’s father.
My grandfather didn’t know Fred Trump personally. But he was a plumber in New York in the twentieth century, and he knew a bit about the local construction business, and he knew of Fred Trump.
Of course he did. Fred Trump owned thousands of apartments in the five boroughs and was a stereotypical, miserly, racist landlord, quite possibly a slumlord.
And in the hierarchy of crimes against civilization, that was a far greater crime to my grandfather than being different. Fred was cheap, greedy, and cruel to the less fortunate, and his son was nothing but a buffoon.
Growl, bark, curse. The old man was worse.
I think about my grandfather a lot these days. He was the hardest worker in my family. He was also the only one in my family whom I would consider a “simple man” in the literary sense of that term: He knew exactly who he was, and what his responsibilities were, and he kept his focus. He kept things small.
And he understood, instinctively, that even the people he distrusted (of whom there were many) should be able to love and care for their own families the way he cared for his. No one deserved to be cheated by a son-of-a-bitch like Fred Trump.
These days, rather incredibly, support for Trump-the-son often takes the form of old fashioned “great man” historiography.
“Great man” historiography is a nineteenth century kind of history-writing in which an exceptional (white) man appears when the world needs him most, and changes the course of human relations.
It’s a Romantic top-down notion of change, and it should be completely discredited by now. But it’s alive and well in corporate America because “great man” history is good marketing. It makes for a really good story. People love their heroes, their geniuses, and their hagiography.
Unfortunately, it’s always been bullshit.
Just ask the laborers and tradesmen and middle managers and staff and bureaucrats who prop up “great men.” Just ask anyone who isn’t white. To paraphrase Abigail Adams, the wife of one of our “great men,” just ask “the ladies.”
Just ask the less fortunate anywhere in the world.
Whenever a “great man” makes a “great” move, someone else has given him some seed money, or laid the groundwork, or wiped his chin…and someone else always foots the bill.
Just ask Fred Trump’s tenants.
My grandfather was not a “great man.” He was a “simple man.” And he knew bullshit when he saw it.
Luna speaks…
Loved this story about your grandfather .
This is great, John! Love the topic and the personal connection -- all really well rendered.
Now do the Great Man's siblings: Self-made and boot-strapped. No one is self-made. (See Warren Buffett quote about his potential if born in Madagascar.) And "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps," was a joke. It is actually impossible: bootstraps were inside of boots for pulling them on. Imagine trying to pull yourself up by pulling on the tops of your boots. You would go nowhere!