In the early 20th century, the bourgeoisie in America frequently referred to it as The Servant Problem. It seemed that good servants were getting harder and harder to get. In 1926, Christine Frederick summarized, in the racist manner of the day, how the recent war had made housekeeping so much more difficult for her class:
We women have talked much about "solving the servant problem" for years; yet conditions seem to grow worse rather than better. Fewer servants are recruited each year, and the good Irish and German stock which entered service twenty years ago is being replaced largely by the southern European, Bohemian, and Slav girls, who are much harder to train into our American ideals. But even this source of supply has been lessened since the war because Europe needs her women to rebuild her devastated countries.
Few Americans nowadays have the kind of households that the wealthy families of the Gilded Age had. Indeed even the common English gentry household of a few centuries earlier had a resident servant or two. But The Servant Problem -- let's call it "TSP" -- still lurks in the hearts of a handful of Americans. Those who saw Fahrenheit 9/11 will remember what G.W. Bush called those Americans -- his base.
Keynsian economics was pretty well proven by the events of 1929-1945. And it was accepted by the mainstream for decades. We simply assumed that there could never be another Great Depression because we know how to fix it. The New Deal worked to palliate the harm; the War created huge aggregate demand which led to deficit spending. War per se is not good for the economy; war was simply the one kind of deficit spending that even the most conservative members of Congress couldn't refuse.
In the postwar years, the American economy was strong enough to make good jobs available to most residents of metropolitan areas. But household servants weren't as common as they had been a generation earlier. By the 1960s, many African-American women had moved to the cities and taken jobs as servants. But the civil rights movement also opened new opportunities and made servant work less desirable. TSP is thus even worse than it was in 1886 when William Polderoy wrote,
In earlier years, we could reckon upon a supply of modest, willing, trustworthy girls, who, for the privilege of working in a gentleman's household, were ready to accept a reasonable sum in the way of wages. Now thanks to the pernicious diffusion of radical ideas, everything is different.
[quoted by Rosie Cox in The Servant Problem: Domestic Employment in a Global Economy.]
How, pray tell, can today's "gentlemen" find such "willing, trustworthy girls"? It's those damned radical ideas!
The media has no shortage of Republican talking heads willing to deny that the New Deal did any good. Senators from Ben Nelson rightward are willing to become deficit hawks when it comes to stimulus or unemployment insurance, even if they have beendrunken sailors when it comes to money used to kill people and make more enemies in an endless cycle of war. On today's NPR show On Point, James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation said that his 8th grade and 12th grade textbooks were simply wrong about the Depression. Roosevelt didn't create jobs; he prevented entrepreneurs from doing so. This type of revisionism is the heart of their economic theory. They oppose us "reality-based community" members on economic history as much as they do on foreign policy.
Merely raising the unemployment rate, of course, isn't adequate for them to achieve their goal. The entire TSP-based agenda also requires that domestic help be liberated from what they consider to be the tyranny of the minimum wage. It requires that potential help be liberated from the tyranny of a social safety net which provides them with alternatives, however limited, such as unemployment insurance, transitional payments, and other payments for non-work. It requires the creation of a society where the differential between the top earners and the bottom ones is even greater than it is today, so that the bottom ones know their place.
Until this happens, the Party of No will have failed its duty. Merely stopping the economy from recovering is the simple part. (The truly wealthy have lots of cash. They don't need to take risks with it like many of the merely nouveau riche, or like those grimy entrepreneurs.) They need more unemployment, more abject poverty, more hunger, more desperation. And it is not just young women who will be servants: They know that male service workers, such as gardeners, butlers, country-club waiters and chauffeurs, will be easier to find in a high-unemployment society.
That's the question facing the voters. Do they want a society where everyone has a chance at a god job, a middle-class life, and dignity, or do they Know Their Place? Only if the uneducated, lower-income voters who listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh believe that they should vote against their own obvious interest will TSP be solved. And then America will be right where they want it, a third-world country back in the 17th century, where the rich really could show off their place too.