He could have had class

This is a long and fascinating portrait of the lives of Joe Biden’s father and grandfather, that captures some of the complexities of how class functioned in early and mid-20th century America. Long story short: Joe Biden Sr. (the president’s father) was an ambitious man from a middle class background who in his 20s seemed on the verge of becoming wealthy, in part because of his business dealings with some shady relatives who were both rich and reckless.

It didn’t work out, and he ended up living a staid middle class existence in Pennsylvania and Delaware, but he retained traces of his patrician aspirations, which his children, including Joe Jr., were only vaguely aware of.

It’s also a story of the devastating effects of alcoholism on various members of the president’s extended family, and his consequent campaign to keep as many of his relatives as possible from drinking. Joe Biden Jr.’s own class identity is a pretty complex subject, and this portrait of his family background helps explain how a man who when he was still fairly young bought a 10,000 square foot mansion equipped with a ballroom still considers himself genuinely middle class, which in some ways he is (or anyway was).

The story illustrates the plasticity of the whole concept of social class in America — which is all the more plastic because of the deep levels of repression surrounding the topic in American culture.