The 'American Dream' is for people
who can afford it
By Dave Hage
Staff Columnist
On the day that his factory shut down in 1990, Karel Hoogenraad faced two dilemmas. One was how to support a family without his good mechanic's paycheck. The other was making his four sons understand how the economy could toss a person on the street after 18 years of hard and loyal work.
Solving the first problem was simple. Hoogenraad took two jobs and worked 16 hours a day for two years.
The second still gnaws at him. "The American Dream?" he said over coffee one recent morning. "That's for people who can afford it."
When President Clinton describes America's anxious class, or Pat Buchanan invokes "peasants with pitchforks" protesting corporate greed, they are talking about people like Hoogenraad.
Today, six years after losing his job at DeBourgh Manufacturing Co. in Bloomington, Hoogenraad makes something over $11 per hour -- about what he earned 10 years ago, except that inflation has taken a bite from its purchasing power. He's lost a week of vacation and countless hours with his family.
It has occurred to him that he will never do better than his father, a Dutch immigrant mechanic who worked at a food-processing plant in Wells, Minn. And it worries him that his boys may never do better than he has done.
Hoogenraad, 44, is not alone in these bitter meditations. In the 1970s, three-fourths of American men climbed up the economic ladder, according to the National Commission for Employment Policy. But by the 1980s, that share had fallen to less than two-thirds; and one-third of men finished the decade on a lower economic rung. Women fared somewhat better, but 80 percent of their earnings gains came from longer hours, not higher wages.
Hoogenraad and his wife, who works at a suburban motel, personify these statistics. But they are not the one-dimensional caricatures drawn by Buchanan and other politicians.
For example, Hoogenraad has no hostility to immigrants. To him they are people like his parents -- seeking a fresh start in a new land. He is not a protectionist. He drives a well-traveled red Toyota pickup, and remarks: "I don't care if it's foreign-made so much as if it's union-made."
Nor is he a Luddite. He roams the Internet on the latest of seven computers he has owned, including one he built himself.
But Hoogenraad is plenty gloomy about American society. He has given up on Republicans and Democrats, concluding that they will never deliver what he thinks the nation needs -- stronger labor laws, national health insurance and a fair tax code. "Whoever's got the money is the person who rules," he says.
And in all this, Hoogenraad wonders where he and prosperity parted ways. In high school, he dreamed of going to law school. His mother, a schoolteacher and principal in Holland, instilled the importance of learning in her seven children. But by age 20 he found himself married and working. The dream, he says, "just kind of got put on the shelf."
Months after DeBourgh shut down, Hoogenraad landed a job at American Iron & Supply Co. in Minneapolis. Then he took a night job to pay bills that piled up while he was unemployed.
He would arrive home from his day job about 5 p.m., catch five hours of sleep, then leave for a midnight factory shift. He saw his wife mostly on weekends and his boys for a few minutes each night to tuck them into bed. His civic life, including a stint as a DFL precinct captain, shriveled.
Now his mind turns to the dreams of his boys. His second son, Adam, is studying chemistry at St.OlafCollege in Northfield, Minn. His youngest, Aaron, is finishing high school. The other two finished high school and are scrambling to make a living, one at a local liquor store, the other at a restaurant.
The week that his factory shut down, Hoogenraad dragged his sons along to a union rally to show them the economy's harsh realities. But the boys seemed bored. "You never know if teenagers are listening to you," he says.
Then, a year or two ago, Adam came home from St. Olaf and said he had something to show his dad. It was a term paper comparing the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 and a similar fire at a North Carolina poultry plant in 1991. It mentioned his father's experience, and concluded that America remains a tough place to earn a living. Hoogenraad was stunned that his lessons had sunk in. He told Adam he was proud. He just wishes the lessons were more promising.
-- Dave Hage is a Star Tribune editorial writer.