When politicians visit diners, who are they trying to reach?
When politicians visit diners, who are they trying to reach?
It’s become a political cliché: Candidates make a stop at a local diner, sometimes grab a bite, and locals get some facetime.
“I think we all know that politicians going to diners, talking to ‘regular people,’ this is such a hallmark of the campaign process now,” said Jaya Saxena, correspondent at Eater. Saxena saw on Twitter last year that New York Governor Kathy Hochul had visited a Long Island diner while on the campaign trail, and that piqued her interest in who was actually eating at these restaurants.
“I looked at the menu and just realized, this is expensive,” said Saxena. “And so to me, that did not feel like a place where ‘everyone’ was welcome.”
Saxena wrote about the history of diners, where she looked at how that diner myth came to be — and whether it’s true in practice. She spoke to “Marketplace” host Kimberly Adams about the essay; the following is a transcript of their conversation, edited for clarity.
Kimberly Adams: So what exactly is the American diner? And where did it come from?
Jaya Saxena: Yeah, so the American diner, I think of it as a place that is supposed to be this great sort of democratic restaurant. The roots of the American diner really exist in lunch carts that came about in the 1870s, 1880s on the east coast, that existed to serve blue-collar workers. And because they were cheap, and because they operated at all hours of the day, and because you didn’t need to be dressed well to eat in them the way that you did if you went to a restaurant in a hotel, anyone really could go in there. At a certain point, they turned into physical locations. And that is sort of where the diner was born.
Adams: Your story is called “The Myth of the Diner.” And I wonder what that myth is and how it stacks up to reality?
Saxena: Yeah, I think we all know that politicians going to diners, talking to “regular people,” you know, this is such a hallmark of the campaign process now. And there was one politician, it was New York Governor Kathy Hochul who had gone to a diner in Long Island and I looked it up and I looked at the menu and just realized, this is expensive. And you know, it was in a pretty wealthy town. But I was looking at it and thinking that this would be a considerable expense for anybody who wasn’t solidly-middle or upper middle class. And so to me, that did not feel like a place where “everyone” was welcome.
Adams: I want to get back to that ‘everyone is welcome’ point in a bit, but I wonder when this happened, this shift from diners being, you know, sort of a place where working class or people with not that much money could get a bite to eat, and this sort of higher and more expensive diner that you saw a politician visiting, when did this happen? And how?
Saxena: Totally. So I think that a lot of it happened between the 1930s and the 1950s. A lot of people had moved to the suburbs, moved their families to the suburbs. And these restaurant owners thought, okay, if I want to continue to do this, this is the new population of people with money that I need to court. So you see a lot of these diners moving from city centers to suburbs. I think that’s where you see booths start coming in so families can sit together in a group instead of everybody being spread out along a lunch counter. A lot of times, if they had the room, they would move the kitchen to the back so you didn’t have to see the food being cooked. And of course, this being in the the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of these places were racially segregated spaces.
Adams: Yeah, let’s get into that a little bit more. Part of what you lay out in your piece is a huge component of the myth of the American Diner is this concept that everyone was welcome. Because that was never really true, was it?
Saxena: No, it was never true. Even from the early days as a horse-drawn cart, these places would have been racially segregated. Then as diners become more of a suburban phenomenon, if you were a member of any sort of “counterculture,” whether that’s just because you looked like a hippie, whether you were queer, if you’re a person of color, these are things that probably would have made you less welcome in these spaces even if they didn’t have an explicit policy. And then obviously you see that play out in the civil rights movement, right? So many of the places where these citizens and these protests were happening were diners and lunch counters.
Adams: You know, I’m really stuck on this idea that politicians will say that they go to diners to connect with, you know, real Americans. And I wonder, given what you’ve learned about diners in America, what does that really mean? What are they actually saying?
Saxena: I think what they’re trying to say is that they are connecting to the working class, but to a very specific image of the working class. And they’re talking about connecting to working class white people — I’m trying to figure out the best way to, to get at this.
Adams: If it is what it is…
Saxena: I think that it is what it is. And I think they’re trying to tap into a very specific idea of Americans, somebody who is white, is working class, who maybe views themselves as not too political or perhaps politically moderate. Someone sort of right in the middle of everything. And that is who politicians want to win over.
Adams: Not to spoil the piece too much because people should go and read it but at the end, you kind of concede that even if there’s all this mythology around diners, maybe they actually are a microcosm of America. Why is that?
Saxena: Yeah, well, you know, I do think again that the diner for all its flaws, there is something that is true about where it came from. And you know when I go to the diner in my neighborhood, I do see a pretty big range of racial diversity there and generational diversity in a way that if I go to a Michelin-starred restaurant, I do not see the same sort of diversity usually. And I also think that people still want diners because for all their flaws, the idea of a third space is so important, this place that is not our home and not our office, that we can go to for a comforting meal. And I think that there are a lot of diners that do provide that for a lot of people.
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