How well off (or not) was young Bill Clinton, really?
Amazing how memes go unquestioned for a long time, including by me.
When I imagined the school years of Bill Clinton, I had always had a vague notion of a poor kid, raised by a single mom and on his own a lot. However, I recently read his wikipedia and did some thinking and some research.
President Clinton was born in 1946. Sadly, shortly before President Clinton was born, his father had died. Soon after his birth, his mother left to study nursing in New Orleans. (His wiki does not explain why she did not study in Arkansas.) At that time, nursing was one of highest-paying, most respected professions for a woman.
She left her son with her parents, who, wiki says, owned a "small" grocery store. Again, remember the times. Small stores, not huge conglomerates, were the rule, not the exception. If you owned a business of any kind that was a going concern, you were considered relatively well off. Perhaps not rich, but certainly not poor.
In 1950, his mother returned and married the President's stepdad, Roger Clinton (whose surname the President later took as his own).
President Clinton in 1950, via wikipedia creative commons.
Roger Clinton owned an automobile dealership. Demand for cars was great in 1950, having built up through World War II, while many factories were devoted to the war effort. Bill remembers Roger as a drunk and a gambler, but, still, he (and Bill's mother?) apparently made a good living because Bill went to a private, Catholic elementary school. He went to public high school. Supposedly, while in high school, he decided that he wanted to go into public service and also decided that he wanted to be a lawyer.
His wiki says that he attended college in Georgetown with the aid of scholarships, but it does not say that he had a full scholarship. I spoke with a woman I know who is 80. She said she, too, had had several scholarships for college, one for $2000 as a result of being valedictorian of her high school class, quite a sum at the time. However, some of her scholarships were for as little as $200. So, even with several scholarships, she had to work part time and summers and also get help from her parents, both of whom were laborers. Also, she had to live at home and commute.
At that, she felt lucky her family had allowed her to attend college. Her female cousins had been expected to get a job after high school so they could contribute to the household--and they, in turn, felt lucky that their parents did not make them quit school at age 16 to get a job. Only the males in their families had been able to go to college and some could not even do that, but went into the military. Apparently Bill Clinton was much better off than that. (I will emphasize that this woman is 13 years older than the President, so not exact parallel. Still, the difference seems clear.)
Bill attended Georgetown, which meant room and board as well as tuition, studying foreign service. The choice of major in itself would not have been typical for an impecunious student, especially one without connections. A poor student at the time would have been more likely to choose a more practical major that pretty much assured him or her of getting a job very soon after graduation, perhaps teaching.
While in college, he got an internship for three years with Senator Fulbright. I don't know if that has been explained in any of the President's books, but it was certainly a plum for someone with political ambition. Being described as an internship and not as a job, I assume it paid little or nothing, another indication that Bill was more comfortable financially as a young person than I had assumed.
After college, he received, and accepted, a Rhodes Scholarship, to attend Oxford, in England. He left that program early, apparently because of Vietnam War draft concerns, then went to graduate school (law school).
Wiki does not mention any scholarships for law school. At some point, he followed Hillary to California. Yadda, yadda, it seems he got his first steady paying job after graduation from law school in 1973, at age 27, as a law professor at the University of Arkansas. (This seems like an extraordinary job for someone fresh out of law school.) In 1974, he ran for Congress and lost. In 1975, he married and ran for Attorney General and won. We pretty much know the rest.
Coincidentally, the woman to whom I spoke for some rough comparisons, had been offered a Fulbright Scholarship. However, she had to turn it down because she definitely had to get a job after college graduation and stay employed. She was out of money, and though she and her mother sewed her clothes, down to her slips, she was in desperate need of supplementing the items of her wardrobe they could not sew.
And, yes, she had to contribute to the household budget so that her parents could help her younger siblings go to college, too. Also, she was engaged and needed to save for her wedding as her parents could not afford to give her any help at all with that. Quite a contrast.
At that, she does not believe she was poor at all for her time because she was able to finish college, something theretofore reserved for males in families like hers; she never went hungry or homeless, etc. In addition, her parents had even been able to put a down payment on a three-family home while she was in high school. (The two rents enabled them to get their own floor almost free, which is why they had been able help her some with college tuition, books, carfare, etc.)
In all, this was an eye-opening experience for me. I am not sure why I had been imagining an impoverished childhood, with a single, working mother. It seems clear there was a relatively financially comfortable life for his grandparents, his mother and his stepdad and him, and possibly some political contacts as well, that enabled him to get the internship with Senator Fulbright.
= new reply since forum marked as read
You apparently missed the point anyway. 
FIVE minutes? Really? It's not that long.
Democrats were fleeing from the "Liberal" label. 
wikipedia commons
The things he signed into law have brought a lot people who work in the private sector a degree of pain.
http://tdl.org/txlor-dspace/bitstream/handle/2249.3/201/04_text_mills.htm
United States History
Textile Mills
Despite its industrial gains, overall the South remained essentially an economic colony of the North, supplying the raw materials for northern industries. The South initially wanted northern capital and investments to “kick-start” the economy but never escaped this paradigm. Southerners became agents and executives for northern corporations rather than owners or principals of their own businesses. Industries did diversify in South but remained little more than branch plants, factories, or chain stores for businesses headquartered in the North.
Seizing the industrial spirit and taking advantage of the South’s major cash crop, southern capitalists began a campaign to bring cotton mills to the region. In the antebellum period the center for textile manufacturing had been New England, and its mills continued to make cloth throughout the post-Civil War period but by 1910, New South industrialists successfully captured the textile mill industry. Described as “extraordinary,” the rate of textile mill growth in the South jumped from 161 in 1880 to 239 by 1890 to 400 in 1900. The main four southern states that had textile mills—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—took advantage of Appalachian river water sources to power the plants, but those same rivers, some rushing off the mountains into the Piedmont, later provided hydro-electricity. The first factory to operate with electricity in the United States opened in the South.
Small-town boosters, eager to promote the new mills, boasted that the factories would revolutionize the South. Mill owners viewed workers as the major recipients of their generosity, offering them steady wages and housing. In reality, the wages were so low that women and children were forced into working long hours at even lower wages than men. What was a work day like in a textile mill? Mill workers:
Started their day at 6:00 a.m. and continued working until 6 p.m., with only small breaks between
Worked 6 days a week with only Sunday off
Averaged a pay of 12 cents a day in the 1880s
children working in a textile mill
While workers struggled, investors in these same mills often earned profits of 22 percent, and some got away with 75 percent profits. The textile industry, though touted as a saving grace to poor southern farmers, in fact trapped many of them into working in the mills their entire lives. Their children often followed suit, receiving minimal education and earning little. The children sometimes suffered incapacitating injuries, such as severed fingers or limbs and byssinosis or brown lung disease caused by the narrowing of the airways due to the inhalation of cotton fibers. Whereas Henry Grady may have been espousing a New South ethos of industrialization and modernization, the majority of southern workers found themselves caught in web of labor exploitation.
Why Work at a Mill?
Cotton mills in Durham, North Carolina, 1909.
If conditions were so bad and the pay so low, why did white southerners work in the mills? The push-pull of the economy sent rural folk off the farms. The increase in sharecropping, tenantry, and the crop lien system across the South caught freed people and poor white farmers in a nearly inescapable system of debt peonage. As railroads crossed the South, they brought with them commercial items for sale from the North and the Sears Catalogue with its appeal to “store bought” merchandise. Consumer wants and needs pushed families to seek cash and that meant turning to off-the-farm work. Poverty and the increasing lure of commercial goods drove yeoman farm families to consider the change to mill work.
Merchants and lenders, who had earned profits through the crop lien system, bankrolled the cotton mills and then invited those once self-sustaining farmers to work in them for consistent, although low wages. The first to leave marginal farms and come to work in the mills were widows, itinerant farm laborers, and young single women. By 1890, as more farmers had to leave the land, family units arrived to work in the mills. Shrewd owners offered housing to workers based on how many “hands” a family could provide the mill; it was necessary to have at least one worker per room in order to live in a four-room mill house. In those early years, 92 percent of mill workers lived in the villages offered by the company, and they grudgingly accepted the mill owned house, store, school, and church. They barely tolerated the mill owner’s intrusion into their lives and downright hated it when they were paid in scrip and could only redeem their “pay” at the owner’s store. Trading the perils of the crop lien system, mill hands lamented the way the owners kept them in debt: “If you worked at the mill they’d just take your wages and put it in the company store and you didn’t get nothing. For years and years they didn’t get no money, just working for the house they lived in and what they got at the company store. They just kept them in the hole all the time.” Learn more about working in the mill in the “Capturing Child Labor” interactive.
Mill Village Life
For all its problems, mill village life supported workers emotionally and sometimes materially in the years before World War I. Called by historians a “unique workers’ culture,” mill hands created their own sense of family out of the mill community. Rural families in the South replicated the kinship patterns in the mill villages that had long sustained them, sometimes with real kin, other times with neighbors and friends. Community gatherings fostered common trust and good will: weddings and holiday celebrations brought mill workers together on their one day off a week. Women often jumped in to help when a worker became ill. They organized a “pounding” for the stricken, bringing a pound of food to the home. Some women, through herbal medicine and midwifery, found that they could achieve a form of respect often denied them at the workplace. Delivering babies and providing healing through folk remedies were not just sidelines, they were important life sustaining tasks that mill villagers needed. Village men achieved prominence through their music—banjo, fiddle, and guitar playing. They would make music on weekends, providing entertainment and recreation in the days before radio. These were the ties that bound one to the other and created a form of solidarity that could be counted on when labor strife overwhelmed them.
Daily Life
Mill hands’ lives were dominated by the factory that loomed as a giant structure near their small clapboard homes. Their daily routine hardly varied as owners sought to create a tractable work force. Supervisors roamed the mills making sure that carders, spinners, weavers, and doffers were fully engaged in their tasks. Breaks were few, and women complained that they hardly had time to relieve themselves before a supervisor accused them of malingering. Discipline could include cursing, yelling, and jerking children around who may have fallen asleep or simply acted in a childish manner.
Jobs were usually sex and race segregated; the only jobs available to black men were in the basement where they opened the bales of cotton. In the upper floors white men and women often shared jobs as weavers, while women and children worked together as spinners and doffers – replacing spools of thread and tying broken ends. Men were always supervisors over women and women earned half to two-thirds what men earned; children earned even less. In patriarchal replication of family life, white men held authority over women and children, but the fact that no man could earn a wage high enough to support his family; that his wife and children had to work, undermined male authority and sometimes led to domestic abuse, racial rancor, and the support of political demagogues.
South Carolina Governor Cole Blease, who used racist language to remind poor textile workers that their whiteness made them superior to any African American, including a black college professor, handily won the white male mill worker vote, while doing nothing to improve their lot. Such ideology coupled with the mill system perpetuated poverty, led to extreme controls in the form of vigilante justice, and kept women and children in menial and subservient positions. The tendencies to strike for better wages and improved working conditions did not materialize until after World War I, but the labor agitation almost never succeeded in gains for the workers.
http://tdl.org/txlor-dspace/bitstream/handle/2249.3/201/04_text_mills.htm
