Rainbow Pie

Rainbow Pie is a coming-of-age memoir wrapped around a discussion of America's most taboo subject - social class. Set between 1950 and 1963, Joe Bageant uses Maw, Pap, Ony Mae, and other members of his rambunctious Scots-Irish family to chronicle the often-heartbreaking post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass. Combining recollection, stories, accounts, remembrance, and analysis, the book offers an intimate look at what Americans lost in the massive and orchestrated post-war social and economic shift from an agricultural to an urban consumer society. Along the way, he also provides insights into how the second and third generation of displaced agrarians , as Gore Vidal described them, now fuel the discontent of America s politically conservative, God-fearing, Obama-hating red-staters . These are the gun-owning, uninsured, underemployed white tribes inhabiting America s urban and suburban heartland: the ones who never got a slice of the pie during the good times, and the ones hit hardest by America s bad times, and who hit back during election years. Their tough work and tougher luck story stretches over generations, and Bageant tells it here with poignancy, indignation, and tinder-dry wit.