Dialectics of Home Part 1

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE PART 2: THE VALUE OF HOME

THE VALUE OF HOME PART 1

The answer is capitalism. I haven't said anything about capitalism in this essay up to now, focusing entirely on our home and the internal structures, processes and moments that give it bounded coherence. Now, I want to consider how capitalism shapes the psychology of home ownership. I am going to do this by taking you on a trip down the highways and byways of Steffen family history. Don't be surprised if we encounter a few detours, dead ends and delays along the way. My advice is to sit back and, if possible, enjoy the ride.

The four sections titled "The Value of Home" roll two stories into one. The first is about how my mother and father, children of the Depression, were able to find each other and material prosperity during the postwar years, thanks to hard work, self-discipline and more than a little good luck. This is a story that tells itself: Mary Alice Steffen née Beck and Charles George Steffen Sr., better known to friends as "Chuck and Mary," were the right people at the right place at the right time. In other words, Chuck and Mary were a middle-class white couple who embarked on married life together in Southern California during the so-called Golden Age of US capitalism.

Woven into this familiar story of postwar success is another story about the inherent contradictions of capitalism, specifically the contradiction of "use value" and "exchange value" embedded in the commodity form. Take the case of home, a commodity that we are all familiar with, and one that played a crucial role in driving capital accumulation during the postwar boom. This commodity is at one and the same time a use value that satisfies a want, need or desire, and an exchange value that can be bought and sold in the market. My parents were deeply invested in both sides of this capitalist equation. Like Odysseus navigating the perilous strait between Scylla and Charybdis, they tacked between use value and exchange value, trying to keep their little boat on course to their final destination, not Odysseus's home of Ithaca but their postwar American dream home, wherever it might turn out to be. When I think about the life they made together during a marriage that lasted from 1951 until Dad's death in August 2019, and Mom's three weeks later, I am struck by how much of it revolved around the following question: what is the value of a home?

Chuck and Mary lived in a succession of four homes spread across the San Gabriel Valley, Coachella Valley and Pacific Coast of Southern California. Here, they raised me and my three brothers, spent their golden years as empty-nesters and crafted an identity as high-achieving, upwardly mobile, self-made Americans. At the same time, they dove into the booming real estate market, buying and selling three apartment complexes, the first two in Greater Los Angeles, and the last one in Las Vegas. Over the course of these decades thousands of tenants made their homes in the one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments owned and managed by my parents. The rental income and tax write-offs of these properties, coupled with what Dad earned in his medical practice, enabled them to live comfortably and pursue their dream of owning a home in which the aspirations and achievements of two postwar strivers would be on full display.

Let's begin with the polaroid snapshot above which comes from a Steffen family photo album. It was taken in the first home of which I have distinct memories and the first one my parents owned. The year was 1957 or thereabouts, the location West Covina, California. That's me with the pistol, sitting alongside my brothers Dan and Mike. Hidden away in the bassinet is my baby brother Mark. (My father drew the arrow to mark the spot.) The 72-year-old man sitting on the couch with his arms around us is my paternal grandfather, William Anthony Steffen.

Gramps," as we called him, was born in Indiana but moved to Chicago at an early age. Despite having only an eighth-grade education, by 1910 he was working in the office of a railroad company as a 24-year-old stenographer while continuing to live with his parents in rental housing located on Chicago's west side. Gramps first set eyes on Southern California through the window of a private Pullman rail car assigned to one of the vice-presidents of the Union Pacific Railroad. In addition to taking dictation and running errands for his boss, Gramps was tasked with placing an unopened quart bottle of Scotch whiskey on the VP's desk every morning, and disposing of the empty bottle at the end of the day. The young Chicagoan liked what he saw of this new country, so much so that he packed up his second-generation German-American father and second-generation Irish-American mother, and moved both of them to LA. Now that he was starting a new life in a new place, Gramps decided to close the books on stenography and try his hand at retailing. Listed as a "hatter" in a 1912 LA city directory, he opened up his own millinery shop shortly afterwards and kept it going for nearly two decades.

In 1914, just as World War I began, Gramps wed Marie Earley, a Midwestern transplant like himself who had recently made the cross-country trek to LA from Logansport, Indiana, perhaps with his marriage proposal in hand. Sometime during the next decade she was joined by her Irish-American mother, father and siblings, who formed a compact Earley colony in the same area of LA where the newlyweds had settled. From 1914 to 1924 Gramps and Marie ping-ponged from rental to rental in downtown LA, saving their money for a down payment on a home. The one they finally chose was a new, or nearly new, 1,484 square-feet, 3 bedroom, 1 bath house, eight miles west of downtown. Here, Gramps and Marie would raise four sons and a daughter in the midst of the greatest crisis in the history of global capitalism.

The 1929 stock market crash combined with changes in women's hairstyles and fashions to undermine the ladies' hat industry. Gramp's millinery business could not escape these structural forces and went belly up. Undeterred, he launched a new venture on Wilshire Boulevard, within easy walking distance of the new home. As a maker and seller of ladies' hats, Gramps had honed his eye for stylish arrangements of bird feathers and other exotic materials as well as his rapport with women customers and their fashion-driven tastes, two skills that were perfectly suited for the florist trade. "Steffen Flowers" opened its doors around the time of the crash and became a successful mom-and-pop enterprise, a life raft that carried Gramps, Marie and the family through the storms of depression and war.

Dad was born in 1926. He spent much of his early life dreaming of the day he would abandon the family raft and swim away. As he remembered it, home was the site of marital friction, inter-familial power struggles and economic uncertainty, which could probably be said for most Depression-era households. According to Dad, the Earleys saw themselves as a cut above the Steffens, largely because Marie's father, George, was a railyard master back in Logansport, a position that carried considerable prestige in two families whose lives and livelihoods were closely entwined with the railroads. If Marie brought even a tiny bit of the Earley's lace-curtain airs to her marriage, it's easy to understand why Dad could detect a chill in the air of his childhood home. But even if Dad exaggerated the class-inflected tensions within this extended family, it is clear to me now that from an early age he was conscious of being looked down upon and determined to find higher ground.

I can understand why he felt this way. Given their plebeian background, the Steffens had few bragging rights as compared with the Earleys. Dad's paternal great-grandfather, Nicholas Steffen, the progenitor of the LA Steffens, was a shoemaker who emigrated with his wife Magdalena to the US from Alsace-Lorraine in 1860, settling immediately in Indiana, where he died in 1924 at the age of 87. Nicholas and Magdalena had a son, Charles N. Steffen, Dad's grandfather and namesake. (NB I am named Charles George after my maternal and paternal great-grandfathers.) Without family financial support, Charles N. began adult life as a common laborer and brickyard worker in Indiana, married Margaret née Flanagan and moved to Chicago where he toiled behind the counter of a bakery. Charles N. never rose above the occupation of "clerk" after relocating to LA, and never owned his own home. He and Margaret rented in Indiana, Chicago and LA, taking in boarders toward the end of their lives, including one John Rauen, a recently arrived young German-American bachelor from Minnesota, who would go on to make millions in the auto-parts industry.

"Uncle John," as he would come to be known in the family, married Agnes Earley, Marie's younger sister and Dad's maternal aunt, thereby adding yet another layer of co-dependencies to the fraught Earley-Steffen relations. During Christmas season both sides of the family would gather to celebrate at Uncle John and Aunt Agnes's 6-bedroom, 6-bath, 6,278 square-feet mansion, which was only a few miles from Dad's childhood home as the crow flies but light years away in terms of money, taste and class. Aunt Agnes and Uncle John reigned over the extended Steffen-Earley clan like the Queen and King of Yuletide.

I won't soon forget the big Christmas feast I attended in the early 1960s, when I was eleven or twelve, hosted by Aunt Agnes and Uncle John. Dad must have felt that time had stopped, for here they were, still holding court in the mid-Wilshire palace where, three decades earlier, he had been ushered in with all the other kids to receive their Christmas gifts courtesy of the royal couple. I don't know what the interior of the house looked like when he first laid eyes on it, but for me it was a mind-blowing menagerie of exotic opulence. Every square inch of it seemed to crawl with either rare statues of the Virgin Mary in all her sad splendor, which Agnes had collected over the years, or herds of hand-carved elephants from artisan workshops across the globe, which John had picked up in his travels.

I knew next to nothing about the backstory of this event, and was too young to ask Dad what was on his mind as he surveyed all these trophies on display. But now I ask myself: Did they bring back memories of Christmases long ago, when he and his siblings took home lavish gifts from their rich aunt and uncle, gifts that their less fortunate parents could not afford to give them? How did this largesse make him feel back then when he was a boy? How did it make him feel now that he was no longer a boy but a grown man and successful physician sitting beside his wife and children at the banquet table? Did he feel pride? gratitude? humility? resentment? shame? Did he feel all of these emotions at the same time, which is not uncommon for beneficiaries of noblesse oblige?

Recalling that family reunion sixty years ago, and the emotions it must have stirred up in Dad, I can't help but admire his fierce determination from an early age to be economically independent and beholden to no one, to rise above what he regarded as humble beginnings and, most important, to succeed, whatever that might mean. Even so, it must be said that his beginnings were far from humble when we consider that his parents were able to buy their own homes, drive their own cars and send all of their children to private school, starting in 1st grade and continuing through high school. But the notion of humble beginnings was consistent with Dad's self-narrative in which an underprivileged kid overcomes obstacles and proves his worth through hard work and perseverance. In this rags-to-riches story, which I have reconstructed from bits and pieces of himself which he let slip over the years, one of the biggest obstacles standing in his path to success was the absence of a positive male role model when he was growing up—in other words, Gramps.

Dad did not share many memories of his father as a younger man, perhaps because Gramps remained an active presence in our family until his death in 1965, even moving in with us for a time. But after Gramps was gone Dad took me aside one day and told me about the time his father, who had fallen behind in his mortgage payments to the bank, negotiated a new, longer-term loan without telling anyone, including Marie. For years she had been looking forward to the day when the family could celebrate their financial emancipation, but when the long-awaited Jubilee came and went, and the mortgage payments continued as always, she finally learned the truth about what her husband had done behind her back.

Why did Dad tell me this story? Because, I believe, he saw it as a cautionary tale, one that he hoped I would file away for future reference when I segued into manhood. Dad wanted me to know that my joking-singing grandfather, whom I adored and will always associate with the sweet aroma of Lucky Strikes and Crown Royal whiskey, had been an incompetent husband, father and provider. Gramps, he was telling me, was the kind of man who kicked the can down the road rather than taking decisive, principled action to solve whatever the problem was. It took a long time for the moral of this story to sink in, and when it did, I started to wonder why my father was so quick to judge his father, a man who, in my eyes, walked on water. Did it have something to do with Dad believing that his mother, who died of cancer in 1948 at the age of fifty-seven, shortly after she and Gramps moved into their dream house, had been stuck with the soul-killing work of stretching the budget and keeping the household running while her husband made merry with his boon companions? I don't know. Dad said very little about his mother; maybe silence was his way of grieving the death a woman whose life was shorter and harder than it should have been.

Dad loved his father, as far as I know. But he always thought of himself as the anti-Gramps, the "adequate man," to use his own words, who did not go MIA when things got tough. This fixation on adequacy was central to his sense of manhood. It was the moral gyroscope that kept him upright and moving forward; the psychic fuel powering his will to succeed; the unforgiving standard against which he measured every man's worth, especially his own; the shining ideal and heavy burden he carried to his grave.

World War II was his gateway to adequate manhood. Before finishing his senior year at nearby Loyola High School, a Jesuit institution for boys, he enlisted in the Navy and served out the war as an ensign stationed stateside. While Dad never saw combat, he was in the queue for Operation Downfall, the US invasion of mainland Japan which would have gone forward as planned if the enemy had not surrendered to Allied Forces in September 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet Union's declaration of war against Japan. As luck would have it, military service did not snuff out his life on some ill-fated naval vessel in the Pacific, but rather opened up opportunities after the war, enabling him to go to college and medical school. In 1950 the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, another Jesuit institution that was his last stop through the Catholic school system, gave the 25 year-old vet its stamp of approval. Former Ensign Steffen was now Doctor Steffen.

I'm going to leave Dad in mid-manhood, fire up his old Studebaker and make the 700-mile drive on Highway 66 from St. Louis to New Orleans, home of Mary Alice Beck, his future wife and my future mother. When Dad graduated from medical school, she was living in a 50-year-old, 1,906 square-feet, 3 bedroom, 2 bath house, around the corner from Tulane University and five miles from the French Quarter. Her father was William Doughty Beck, whom my brothers and I called "Pops." We never really knew him or most of our other Louisiana kin growing up, encased as we were in my Dad's West Coast family. Like Gramps, Pops had little formal education, advancing no further than the 6th grade, but he eventually rose to become a chemical salesman for DuPont, and so was frequently on the road and away from home.

My maternal grandmother, Alice Beck née LaLande, was a classic New Orleans type, straight out of central casting. She swore by the medicinal properties of bourbon and always kept a bottle near to hand, "fo' ma' angi-i-i-ina," as she once explained to my brother Dan. When I visited her at the Catholic nursing home where she spent her final years, she regaled me with misty stories about her LaLande family and how it was founded by two French-born brothers who migrated to Louisiana from Versailles and came to own magnificent sugar plantations until the Civil War turned their world upside down. This proud LaLande completed high school, no small accomplishment for a woman of her generation. Steeped in her family's mythologized past and conscious of her own educational advantages, Alice was convinced that she had married a man beneath her social station, a point which she never let Pops forget, according to Mom's brother Bill, my favorite uncle. This edgy marriage was made even more difficult by Alice's co-dependent relationship with her youngest son, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and required close supervision in group homes until his death. Pops seems to have been the odd man out in this triangle.

Born in 1930, the eldest daughter of four children, Mom was called upon to serve as the family's round-the-clock conciliator and fixer, a thankless job but one she was good at then and would remain good at throughout her life. During her childhood and teen years, Mom was able to navigate between two competing urges, her unwavering sense of filial duty and her deep desire to be released from the emotional pressure cooker of home. Always on the lookout for practical solutions to seemingly intractable interpersonal conflicts, and endowed with a prodigious capacity for focusing all her energies on the immediate task at hand, Mom entered a fast-track nursing program right out of high school, did her student nursing at the historic Hôtel-Dieu, received her certification as a Registered Nurse at age 20 and landed her first job at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. There, in 1951, she met my father, a war vet and newly minted doctor who was doing his internship at Charity.

Love at first sight, I am told.

THE VALUE OF HOME PART 2

There they are in their wedding photo above, Chuck and Mary, the two love birds looking very much, well, in love. Love aside, Dad was Mom's ticket out of the dysfunctionalities of home life in New Orleans, just as Mom was his ticket to adequate manhood in Los Angeles. After tying the knot, they made a quick exit from the Big Easy and lit out for the City of Angels, which was Dad's home turf but terra incognita to Mom. While she would go back to New Orleans for brief visits to check on her mother and sick brother, and maintained close relations with brother Bill in Baton Rouge and younger sister Patricia in Houston, never once did the idea of returning permanently to the city of her birth cross Mom's mind.

She hardly had time to unpack her bags in LA before she was pregnant with yours truly, who came tumbling into the world in 1952, "blue as a berry," as she described me, a condition that might have had something to do with her prenatal regimen of drinking and smoking. Alcohol flows freely on both sides of my family and across the generations, an all-purpose power booster fueling good times and bad times alike. It might be more accurate to say that alcohol is a member of our family. If its name does not appear in the wide spreading branches of the family tree, that is because alcohol lives underground, in the root system. Mom always stood apart as the happy one in this crowd of moody boozers. But her addiction to tobacco was another story entirely. She battled against it for decades with nicotine patches and other treatments, until late-stage Alzheimer's decided the contest once and for all, erasing her memory of the last cigarette and her yearning for the next one. I'm not sure which I hate more, the tobacco industry or this cursed disease.

It seems to me that the negative feedback loop of their childhood experiences—cramped quarters, financial worries, family discord—weighed heavily on my parents' plans for the future. Chuck and Mary wanted a big family and would soon have one, bringing into the world four children during their first six years of marriage. They wanted to have money in the bank, enough to serve as a buffer against the economic insecurity their parents had known. They wanted a home not only for raising their kids but also for displaying their "cultural capital," to borrow a term from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. To sum up, they wanted a chance to prove and improve themselves, to reinvent themselves, to succeed by accumulating wealth and everything that went along with it. Postwar America was rife with such dreams and fantasies.

Shortly after returning to LA with his new New Orleans bride, Dad began a residency in dermatology at UCLA. My 1952 birth certificate from St. Vincent Hospital in central LA indicates that they were renting an apartment not far from the university campus. But it wasn't long before they started looking to buy a starter home, just as Gramps and Marie had done three decades earlier, with the idea of trading it in for the bonanza of ever-bigger and ever-better homes as their family and financial resources grew. Their strategy was to get on the homeownership escalator going up and ride it as far as it would take them. Not until the end of their lives did this strategy for realizing the American Dream fail them.

Chuck and Mary set their sights on the suburban enclave of West Covina, which was a thirty-mile drive from UCLA, due east on Interstate 10, the transportation corridor that in years to come would take them further and further away from Dad's LA-based extended family. Why did they choose West Covina over West LA, where Dad grew up? Why West Covina rather than one of the other suburban enclaves sprouting like mushrooms throughout the San Gabriel Valley? The answer, I believe, is to be found in the city's official website: "As a result of remarkable expansion during the post-World War II building boom, West Covina became America's fastest growing city between 1950 and 1960, with the population increasing 1,000 per cent from less than 5,000 to more than 50,000 citizens." What better place for Dad to hang out his shingle, for Mom to undertake her crash course in motherhood and for the two of them to ride the gravy train of Southern California suburbanization?

From the beginning Chuck and Mary found the real estate market irresistible. Their first purchases of property were in West Covina: the new or practically new, 3-bedroom, 2-bath house that you have already seen in the polaroid of Gramps and the boys, and an older home in nearby Covina which was converted into an office for Dad's dermatology practice. Attached to this second property was a garage rental apartment that brought the medical practice, residential property and commercial property under the umbrella of a single-family enterprise. This three-legged stool would be their business model for the next seventy years, with Dad supplying the steady income and Mom playing multiple roles as business partner, bookkeeper, secretary and replacement worker when Dad's receptionist or nurse called in sick. And lest I forget, she was also our cook, maid, nanny and driver, all of which is to say she was a middle-class American housewife.

In 1960, with the medical practice firmly on its feet, Chuck and Mary made the first of several moves up the homeownership escalator, selling the West Covina starter so that they could buy "an amazing city-light view mansion," as Zillow describes it in a recent listing. This was a break-through moment for them, when their dreams of success took the material form of a big, fancy house. Located on a 3-acre parcel in the hills of adjacent Covina, the 3,441-square-feet house had 5 bedrooms, 5 baths, an outdoor swimming pool and a stable for horses (which remained horseless during our tenure). As befitted their transitional social status as nouveau riche, Chuck and Mary drew on both sweat equity and deep pockets to make their new home a showcase. Dad spent whatever time he could spare away from the office doing his best imitation of a farmer-landscaper. He tilled, sculpted, planted and babied those three acres like his life depended on it, at one point renting a tractor which almost killed him when the brakes went out on the steep driveway. His greatest folly was trying to conjure up a dichondra lawn in the backyard, which four destructive boys and a Great Dane named King wasted no time in turning into a dirt playground.

I wouldn't call this conspicuous consumption exactly, the term used by Thorstein Veblen to describe the ostentatious spending patterns of turn-of-the-century nouveau riche. Chuck and Mary weren't interested in showing off their wealth to outsiders. They were private people, not given to boastful or exhibitionist behavior. The big house, in my view, was for their own personal consumption, serving as a mirror in which they could see reflected the life they were making together as the homeownership escalator took them up and up.

On top of the hill, Chuck and Mary set out to create a domestic space of elegance, refinement and taste, though figuring out just what these words meant in terms of interior decorating was a steep learning curve. Neither of them had any formal instruction in history, philosophy, literature, languages or the visual arts beyond what they had received in high school. Now that their finances were secure, Chuck and Mary aimed to make up for lost time by rounding out their education and applying what they learned to dressing up the city-light view mansion. Convinced that Bourbon France was the apogee of culture and the arts, they brought the Age of Louis XVI into their home, and projected Versailles onto the three acres surrounding it. In their search for French antiques, Chuck and Mary were soon making regular visits to Abell Auction in downtown LA, which boasts in its website of being "Southern California’s premier marketplace for fine estate furnishings." Most of their purchases found their way into the formal living room, an oasis of court life set amid the mashup of American styles to be found elsewhere in the house. It was declared off limits to the kids and King, the latter of whom ignored the interdiction because the snow-white carpet was his favorite place to pee.

The big house was not the only addition made to the Steffen's portfolio in that banner year of 1960. They also launched their first serious sorties into the commercial real estate market with the purchase of apartment complexes in El Monte and Monterey Park, two cities located east of downtown LA which were on the threshold of explosive demographic growth. This buying spree was spurred by a financial problem that most people would gladly have, namely making too much money. As the income generated by the medical practice grew, Chuck and Mary found themselves on another escalator going up to higher and higher tax brackets. This incentivized their search for tax write-offs, which they found in the IRS's accelerated depreciation schedules for rental property enacted in the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the investment-friendly tax code, they were able to scale up the synergies of their income-generating medical practice, tax-saving commercial investments and luxury home ownership.

Life was good on top of the hill with the million-dollar view, or so it seemed to me between the ages of eight and eighteen, when I was living there. But one day, something went wrong. In 1970 my forty-four-year-old father had a full-blown, mid-life crisis. I had just started college at the University of California San Diego, far enough away from home to remain largely and happily oblivious to what was happening on the domestic front.

I'm still trying to piece together the story a half century later. The bare facts are these: Dad announced his retirement, shut down his practice, sold the faux chateau for a big loss, packed up the family and moved the whole circus—Mom, my brothers and assorted pets—to Palm Springs, the desert resort at the base of Mount San Jacinto, a 90-mile drive down Interstate 10. For the next 25 years Palm Springs, home of movie stars and golf enthusiasts, would be Chuck and Mary's new base of operations.

Years later, brother Mike joined Dad on a week-long fishing trip off the coast of Mexico. An avid deep-sea angler who would loosen up as he watched the sun set and the stars come out over the Pacific Ocean, Dad reflected on his crisis and the people discomfited or displeased by it, the latter of whom included Mike, suddenly yanked out of high school just before his senior year and marooned in strange place where he didn't know a soul. "Well, Mike, I guess I was depressed. But you know what I did? I got myself undepressed." He sounds like a private dick out of a Mickey Spillane novel.

Owning up to his depression could not have been easy for Dad, a proud man who had a low threshold for male weakness. But he was still not prepared to explain why he was depressed, much less apologize for whatever hardship his depression may had caused Mike or anyone else. After decades of reflecting on his meltdown, Dad seems to have reached the conclusion that it was a personal vindication of sorts: he had defeated depression through an act of sheer will. But the question remains, at least for me: why did the inner drive that had emboldened him to leave home, join the Navy, work his way through college and medical school, find a soulmate, complete his residency, launch a successful private practice, make a ton of money, join the investor class and cap it off with the purchase of the swankiest house in the neighborhood—why did this drive suddenly desert him at just the moment when he might have been resting on his laurels? Had his fixation on adequacy finally sucked him dry? Yes, I believe it had, at least until such time as he could refill the gas tank and get back into the race.

Chuck and Mary weathered the storm, which took a lot of what might be called stamina. The dictionary defines stamina as "the ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort." No one in the Steffen family had more stamina than Mom. It was owing to her prolonged physical and mental effort, as much as to his own will power, that Dad was able to get himself undepressed. At the time I was too busy studying and dreaming my own dreams to ask questions about the quality of home life in Palm Springs. In 1973 I finished college in La Jolla and moved to Chicago for grad school, reversing the westward trek that Gramps had made sixty years earlier. Mom never said a word to me about what she had to go through. That wasn't her style. She probably reckoned that with four sons, three of whom were still at home, and a depressed husband, the family had enough drama without adding her own troubles to the mix.

Mom knew her business. She had been a family fixer for as long as she could remember.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE PART 2: THE VALUE OF HOME

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist