Chasing the American Dream with $25

[Guest guest]

Chasing the American Dream with

$25

By

Evan Sparks Thursday, April 3, 2008

Filed under: Book

Reviews

A fascinating new memoir challenges the notion that only dramatic

government intervention can rescue the working poor.

 

 

How’s this for a crazy idea: a guy moves to a randomly selected city with

$25 and plans to have a place to live, a car, and $2,500 in the bank­all

within one year. Adam Shepard performed this exact feat and then wrote a

book about it, titled

 

Scratch Beginnings (SB Press, 240 pp, $13.95). According to

Shepard, his experience proves that the American dream can come true.

 

In college, Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed,

which argues that only government intervention can rescue the working

poor from what Ehrenreich portrays as a desperate plight. Shepard doubted

her thesis and wanted to test it. So after graduating, he went to

Charleston, South Carolina, with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes,

$25, and a made-up tale of woe. He spent the first two months in a

homeless shelter while he worked as a day laborer. He later found a

permanent position with a moving company, which gave him a stable income.

This allowed Shepard to buy a (very) used pickup truck, rent and furnish

an apartment with a coworker, and start saving.

During this time, he was on a strict budget, buying clothes at Goodwill

and lunching on peanut butter crackers and Vienna sausages. After ten

months, he left Charleston due to an illness in his family. By that

point, he had saved over $5,000. Along the way, he had met dozens of

marginal citizens whose lives he found relentlessly fascinating.

 

Self-published earlier this year, Scratch Beginnings quickly

climbed the charts on Amazon.com. Besides being a compelling story, it is

a breezy read. Shepard excels at scene setting and description. Even

readers who have never sweated through a Southern summer will feel the

perspiration when he writes about manual outdoor labor in July. He also

does a superb job of capturing regional accents and patois.

Shepard is an eternal optimist. But just when you worry that his tone is

getting too Pollyannaish, he relates a sobering anecdote, such as the

time a friend succumbed to the lure of drugs or the time Shepard broke

his toe during a move and lost valuable work time. There’s also wry

humor. Describing his neighbors, he writes that they are “Wal-Mart

employees, welders, electricians, landscapers, people with their own

car-detailing businesses­lots of people with their own car-detailing

businesses.”

 

 

As the book shows, overcoming a harsh economic situation is really

all about culture.

Scratch Beginnings is a book with an agenda: to disprove

Ehrenreich’s argument about endemic poverty. In a recent

 

interview, Shepard explained the differences between his approach and

Ehrenreich’s: “She wrote about how tough and depressing poverty is.

Really? Tough and depressing? Of course it is! I wanted to believe that

there were people living in these tumultuous circumstances who weren’t

living the life of cyclical misery that Ehrenreich was writing about,” he

said. “The economics side of Ehrenreich’s story didn’t make sense to me

from the beginning and she never proved her point. To me, anyway. She

lived in a hotel, ate out, didn’t look for ways to really save

money.”

 

In short, “She postured to fail, and she did. I postured to succeed, and

I did.”

 

Critics have dismissed Shepard’s claims by pointing to the fact that he

enjoyed an array of government services, from food stamps to bus rides to

homeless services. But everyone Shepard encountered at the shelter and in

the bad neighborhood he later lived in was already using the same

services. It wasn’t the public services that lifted Shepard out of

destitution­it was his own initiative. Indeed, if spending money on

government services were the best way to cure poverty, it would no longer

be a problem.

As the book shows, overcoming a harsh economic situation is really all

about culture. Someone born and raised in a culture of dependency,

failure, and dereliction will find it much more difficult to lift himself

out of poverty than Shepard did. To be sure, Shepard denied himself his

connections, his college degree, and his credit history when he went to

Charleston. But he could not deny himself the behavioral and cultural

instincts instilled throughout his life. Those instincts are what carried

him through to success.

Meanwhile, the lack of those instincts hurt many of the people around

him. Shepard offers repeated examples of friends who were paralyzed by

their own destructive behavior. For example, his roommate, BG, was a

half-hearted worker who would “borrow” Shepard’s car for hours at a time

and then lie about where he was going. Rather than saving money, he would

spend his earnings on booze, women, lottery tickets, and fast food. As

Shepard left Charleston, he worried about BG: “Fifty dollars at a time,

he had nearly emptied the account he had been keeping with [his brother]

and was back to squeaking by, paycheck to paycheck.”

Ultimately, Shepard came away with the realization that “we are the

product of our surroundings­our families, our peers, and our

environment.” Fortunately, there is hope for those truly devoted to

self-improvement. Of his main coworker, Derrick Hale, Shepard writes: “I

knew that Derrick’s future was bright. I didn’t have to see his beautiful

house or his whopping bank account to know that. He had that killer

instinct, the hardworking aura emitting from him that showed that he was

ready to meet, head-on, any challenge that stood in his way.”

When Shepard last sees Hale, they are at a housewarming party. Hale, who

once spent two years in prison, had turned his life around, stayed

faithful to his wife and daughter, worked hard, saved his money, bought a

home, and tapped into the American dream. As his story shows, the United

States offers far more to the working poor than mere nickels and dimes.

 

Evan Sparks is an editorial assistant at the

American Enterprise Institute.

From

 

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/april-04-08/chasing-the-american-dream-with-25