The End of the Hamptons: Scenes from the Class Struggle in America’s Paradise by Corey Dolgon

When places that might inspire dreams of better days are conquered by those beholden to bureaucratic bottom-lines and cultures of greed, it may be better for everyone that they come to an end.
— Corey Dolgon, The End of the Hamptons

“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” New Journalism pioneer Gay Talese wrote in 1961. These days the same could be said of that Long Island country hideaway-turned-overpriced suburb known as the Hamptons — long associated with well-financed eccentricity, and that dead-boring “sport of kings,” polo. Professor Corey Dolgon’s book The End of the Hamptons gives a rare glitz-free guided tour of the Unnoticed Hamptons. It’s written partly out of Dolgon’s frustration with how mainstream media (i.e., the shopping-culture tribunes of New York magazine, New York Observer, Time Out NY, among others) either perpetuate the image of the Hamptons as simply an Edenic playground for the rich, or recite the familiar “rich gone bad” Bonfire of the Vanities-style script.

Dolgon focuses on the more vital sociological issues that New York’s glossy gossip rags ignore: the struggles of the un-chic working-class element of the Hamptons, the seismic (and fairly recent) shift from the Hamptons as a seasonal resort, to a more permanent year-round residential community; and the complex problems associated with sustaining a larger year-round population — like say, the increasing tension caused by ever-widening racial and economic divisions. If you read most popular magazines and newspapers in NYC, you probably didn’t know there was a crack epidemic in the Hamptons as late as 2002; or, for that matter, a controversial outsourcing/union-breaking incident at Southampton College, involving the loss of job security and benefits for custodial workers. And yes, there are problems with homelessness in the Hamptons, believe it or not. Under the media’s radar can also be found a substantial Latino population in the area, too; many of them are construction workers and day laborers following the current housing boom. And because of the outrageous cost of Hamptons rent, there have been instances of Latino families living as many as 20 to a single-family home.

Dolgon’s book is part “people’s history” of the Hamptons, as well as a varied portrait of the current social landscape. He leans on a neo-Marxist dialectical approach to analyzing how social forces have shaped the history of the Hamptons, tracing, in his words, “the dance of historical rupture and continuity, of social structure and human agency, of cultural identity and natural ecology.” The original inhabitants, the Shinnecock Indians-once trading partners with the English and Dutch — were, by the dawn of the 18th Century, stripped of their economic (and thus, political) power, and rendered impotent by the economic leverage of Anglo tradesman and the burgeoning whaling industry. This political power is something the remaining Shinnecock Indians have been looking to gain back ever since. European immigrants who came to the Hamptons in the 19th and early 20th century thrived, Colgon reasons, because of a willingness to downplay their ethnicity and assimilate quietly into white-American capitalist society. Blacks, Indians, and Latinos, who are more apt to retain a strong sense of cultural identity, are less likely to be accepted.

He recaps the rise of the modern Hamptons in the 19th century: its East End serving as a seasonal resort for well-off artisans and wealthy aristocrats tired of the ever-worsening conditions of industrialization and crowded urban living. The area became a favorite residence of surrealist painters in the 1950s, bringing widespread media attention, which naturally led to the influx of middle-class, urban-professional vacation-seekers in the 1960s. As Dolgon sees it, today’s Hamptons have become a stamping ground for a new hip army of “hyper-bourgeoisie” and their “postmodern” sense of entitlement. Vineyards and horse farms have effectively replaced essential staple-food crops and traditional agricultural production. Blockbuster Video and Starbucks proprietorships are rendered in “cute country” cottage-style architecture. Today’s new breed of hyper-solvent Hamptonites shell out big bucks for ersatz faux-Arcadian charm, as long as they still have access to their favorite urban shopping conveniences.

In a clever bit of comparative anthropology, Dolgon studies the formation of cultural identities and narratives in today’s Hamptons through the spectacle of sport: Polo is played to promote the social status of the newly rich, and confirm the identity of the old aristocracy; Soccer provides local Latinos with a way to connect with their own heritage. But polo, of course, grabs the attention of the mainstream press, while the Latino soccer games mostly agitate the conservative Caucasian locals — who tend to be suspicious of large congregations of non-white folk. Fact is, many of these upper-crust families are happy to reap the benefits of African American and Latino labor, but are uneasy with the prospect of living among those workers who build their houses and mow their lawns.

Dolgon puts doomed Southampton College under his sociological microscope as well, detailing the irresponsible corporate-style mismanagement that led to the school’s closing; the controversial outsourcing (an attempted transition to non-union workers) of that school’s mostly African American custodial workers is a darkly ironic take on the “Think Globally, Act Locally” maxim, and a disturbing example of the pervasive Wal-Mart-influenced bottom-line mentality creeping its way into the university system (not to mention a case of veritable institutionalized racism). Dolgon also emphasizes the efforts made by a coalition of activist students and custodial workers who, through persistence and organization, effectively dismantled the Southampton Dean’s biased and greedy outsourcing agenda.

Even (assumedly) well-meaning liberal conservationists and local celebs’ valiant acts of working-class empathy and attempts at preserving the area’s history can’t escape Dolgon’s sharp criticism. Dolgon is skeptical of environmental activists like woodsy author Peter Matthiessen writing elegies to the passing of “bonacker” culture (i.e., disenfranchised haul-seining fisherman) or a bonehead celebrity like Billy Joel who commits acts of civil disobedience in the name of preserving some “living history” of the area’s diminishing working-class; meanwhile, the poor and powerless are treated as “museum pieces.” These activist gestures often come from the very core of oppressive Hamptons’ power-culture: by “naturalizing” themselves as salt-of-the-earth Islanders, righteous rich dudes like Joel simply obscure their own complicity in making Long Island less amenable to the struggling peoples they supposedly honor.

To Dolgon, most of these outspoken “conservationists,” are simply the latest in a long line of upscale former carpetbaggers who, when confronted with the differing values of a new generation of incoming migrants, their protests take on the language of an embattled, indigenous people. Could they merely be, as Dolgon coyly wonders, “an urban bourgeoisie claiming (and then protecting) an identity as landed gentry?”

Although Dolgon is generally a tenacious and unforgiving critic, he does, however, avoid confrontation with the occasional sticky issue. Although he clearly disdains the new breed of Hamptonites, it’s true that the demand for their cookie-cutter mansions creates jobs (although often low paying) for poor immigrant and minority workers. Dolgon craftily flashes forward to address the lack of affordable housing for these underpaid workers, and to expose the neighborhood Establishment’s growing discomfort with the local extracurricular activities of said laborers. And of course, he obviously sides with the plight of both Latino migrant workers and the remaining Shinnecock Indians. But here’s the difficult part: Indians are fighting to keep their land from falling into the hands of corrupt paleface real-estate brokers, while many Latino and African American workers’ jobs depend on this (at least temporary) housing explosion. What to do?

Dolgon does at least suggest that pro-environmental land-use demands and altruistic preservationist activism must not take precedence over economic opportunity for the current Hamptons underclass. Case in point, the Shinnecocks’ ongoing (uphill) battle for political power in the Hamptons. The question of whether or not Indians should be given land for building casinos transcends partisan politics and demands pragmatism: talk of casinos has conservationists and yuppie moralizers Hilary Clinton and Chuck Schumer advocating more “ethical” government assistance over the possibility of instantly profitable casinos. But the Shinnecock are well aware that government subsidies won’t give them the necessary political power to advance their quality of life beyond base subsistence. Oddly, the Marx-quoting Dolgon seems to concur with the Reagan administration’s view on this subject, which advocated the building of the casinos as a means to Shinnecock self-empowerment.

Probably the most discernible weakness of Dolgon’s approach is a conscious eschewing of a “blueprint for action.” And by his lofty standards you get the sense that Hamptons life has been mostly downhill since around 1800 (and for the Indians this may be true). But Dolgon’s hard look at the contemporary Hamptons’ troubling socio-economic situation exposes rarely publicized ills plaguing that community. And The End of the Hamptons overwhelmingly succeeds in providing much more urgent Hamptons news than the usual tabloid banality of “new” money encroaching on “old” money, and mentally unstable socialites driving their SUVs through crowds of tipsy partygoers.