Bruce Springsteen's Father Complicates a Powerful American Narrative [View all]

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Politicians, academics, community leaders and others have been sounding the alarm that men are in trouble: high unemployment, alcohol and opioid addiction, social alienation, a pervasive sense of hopelessness and dislocation, suicide. A decade ago, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the painful consequences of these trends among the white working classes. Richard Reeves has since demonstrated that these deaths are increasing at higher rates for men than for women.

These important findings have since been misconstrued, sometimes willfully, to advance the idea that the way to heal American men is to return the nation’s economy, as well as its gender dynamics, to some halcyon midcentury ideal. Doug Springsteen’s life illustrates something different.

From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, throughout Bruce’s childhood, Doug held a variety of jobs, including driving a truck and working at a rug mill in Freehold, N.J., and the nearby Ford Motor plant. These were the kind of jobs nostalgically extolled as ennobling and empowering, jobs that produced something of value; when he held them, they allowed him to raise his family in modest but real security.

Doug Springsteen also had an intact marriage with a loving woman, and an unquestioned position as the head of the family. And he did it all decades before the decline of civic life we see today: the dismantling of organized labor and the workplace community it fostered, the drift away from houses of worship and social clubs, and the arrival of a flood of opioids. He lived in the supposed heyday of American working-class prosperity. Despite all this, he suffered in the same ways — feeling undervalued, becoming angry, withdrawn, defeated — as so many men today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/opinion/bruce-springsteen-father-men-america.html?

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Interesting read.

Challenges the "notion" that bringing back grinding factory jobs and coal mining while women stay home raising a baseball team - worth of kids might not be the solution.