ICE: Good People and Dirty Work
Watching recent events in Minneapolis from the comfortable distance of several thousand miles and a large ocean, my mind turned to an influential paper by Everett Hughes, based on an extended visit to West Germany in 1948. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ began as a public lecture, for McGill University in Montreal, later the same year, although it was not published until 1962. The paper’s influence, though, may owe more to the catchy title, and its wider implications within Hughes’s approach to the study of organizations, than to its specific content. It is, however, that content which makes it so relevant to this historical moment.
Hughes asks two questions: How did ‘good Germans’ come to let the Nazis get away with their crimes against humanity? How did the Nazis recruit and maintain a workforce to carry out these crimes? Comparing ICE to the agencies of the Nazi state risks being a lazy trope. Hughes’s approach, however, gives a degree of precision that is lacking in the way labels of fascism are being freely applied. As he notes, the analysis is applicable to many other instances of state-sponsored or sanctioned systems of cruelty and death, whether from lynch mobs in the American South or forced collectivization and the Gulag in Soviet Russia.
Like other interactionists, Hughes is sceptical about explanations based in some form of collective psychopathology. Suggestions that there is something peculiar about the German psyche simply invert the racial ideologies of National Socialism. We position ourselves as a superior race but we do not challenge the premise: “It is the Nazi tune, put to words of our own”. The Germans are us, and we are the Germans.
Ordinary Germans had ways of closing off consideration of what was being done in their name. Hughes recounts a conversation with an architect in Frankfurt about how awful things were – but something had to be done about the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe. They were the lowest class of people who brought dirt, disease and crime – but simultaneously secured privileges in the professions and the civil service that should be reserved for the home population. Hughes notes the irony of such talk in a city that had been home to one of the oldest, wealthiest and most integrated Jewish communities in Europe. Under the Nazi regime, there were, of course, huge personal risks in speaking out but it was acting in an environment of popular unease about the arrival of these strangers that went essentially unchallenged. The state’s leaders promised that action would be taken without going into too much detail about exactly what this meant. Its agents would not tell and the population would not ask…
But agents still needed to be found. Many of them were men and women with a history of social failure. They had found it hard to secure and retain jobs during the difficult economic conditions of the 1920s and 1930s. They had been disappointed in realising the expectations of the class into which they had been born, whether in skilled manual labour or in white-collar and professional employment. The institutions of the Nazi party and state gave them a sense of value and purpose. Their mission was to cleanse society of all those elements that discomfited respectable citizens, and it made them an elite. They were the people who were not too proud and fastidious to get their hands dirty doing the work that was really needed to make Germany great again. Their mutual regard created a self-absorbed cadre with its own rules, culture and modes of discipline which insulated it from other social institutions.
It is characteristic of the Chicago tradition that Hughes ends his discussion by noting that societies cannot really do without agencies of social control. The challenge is not to abolish them but to constrain them and integrate them in ways that maintain their accountability to the society as a whole. In many ways, he echoes the founder of modern policing, the 19th century English politician, Sir Robert Peel, with his vision of police as citizens in uniform rather than a militarized army of occupation.
The parallels with ICE as the enforcers of MAGA are not, of course, exact. Today it is much harder for ‘good people’ to look away from what is done in their name, when every phone has a camera to document street violence. The US economy certainly has a large pool of displaced workers at all levels – but their neighbours seem readier to call them out. Do you want to be the parent at the elementary school whose day job involves kidnapping toddlers?
The contribution of the social sciences does not, though, lie in simple slogans and denunciations. It is in understanding the disruptions of social and economic orders over the last fifty years or so and in devising means to engage those who seem to have nowhere to go and nothing to do. Rebuilding that sense of community and stability is not as easy as voting for a different party next time an election comes around.
