Going Native

One glance at the social pages of a New York-based newspaper or one of the region’s glossies, and it becomes clear that many of those who summer in the Hamptons like to gaze at their Pilates-toned navels. But here’s one Hamptons-centric tome that seems unlikely to be perused on a gridlock-trapped Jitney this summer. “The End of the Hamptons: Scenes From the Class Struggle in America’s Paradise” (New York University Press, 275 pages, $29.95) by Corey Dolgon is a well-researched, sensitive look at an old battle in the Hamptons.Mr. Dolgon avoids any easy answers or flashy examples of Hamptonite inhumanity to Hamptonite, dispatching with Lizzie Grubman’s backing into nightclub patrons after allegedly calling them “white trash” in one brief paragraph (plus an added bonus of Grubman’s pensive, penitent photo on the cover of New York magazine). Instead of chronicling poor little rich girls gone bad, Mr. Dolgon devotes an entire chapter to local debates over whether land should be reserved for polo grounds (the playpen of the elite summer and year-round residents) or for soccer fields (which are used predominately by Hispanic residents, many of whom are recent immigrants working as day laborers or in the area’s large service industry).Another chapter explores the bias claims brought by minority custodial workers against the now-defunct Southampton College. And the final chapter examines the controversy over the casino that the Shinnecock tribe proposed building near Southampton. Wealthy residents argue that the resulting traffic and congestion would ruin the character of the area; the tribe posits that this character was ruined in 1703 when the Southampton trustees paid the Shinnecocks L20 for their land, laying the groundwork for the supersizing of the area’s future.The Shinnecock casino struggle is one of many trenchant examples Mr. Dolgon uses to prove his central point: that, since Europeans arrived on Long Island in the 1630s, each new wave of immigrants to the Hamptons has come to see themselves as insiders and locals whose manifest destiny it is to protect the character of the area from the influx of future immigrant groups. The Polish and Italian potato farmers who worked the land resented the incursion of the fancy New Yorkers building summer homes and social clubs from the 1890s to the 1920s; the artists who flocked to the area after World War II were less than pleased when their wealthy patrons started cutting up pastures for building plots (although they did make a killing in the resale of their studio shacks); and, today, the summer people and longtime residents bemoan the congestion caused by new year-round residents who flocked to the countryside to escape the city after September 11, 2001.Each generation of wealthy settlers watches in horror as their neighbors erect McMansions that are bigger and brasher than their own, now indisputably tasteful, summer “cottages.” It’s as if the disillusioned residents of East Egg, after years of gazing at the green light on the end of the dock, reach it – only to discover that it’s nothing more than a Home Depot superstore sign. This is the circle of Hamptons life, according to Mr. Dolgon. “Migrants would come to the East End and, over time, metamorphose from explorers or vacationers, to fur traders or seasonal homeowners, to settlers or year-round residents, to founders or locals, their ultimate goal to become natives,” he writes. “And, while each wave brought its own significant transformations in regional economics, politics, and culture, almost every period of change featured the same discursive tendency – the apocalyptic declaration of an ‘end to the Hamptons.'”It is this long-view perspective and appealing “stop your whining” message that saves Mr. Dolgon when his tone veers toward the pedantic and his message to the simplistic. (Isn’t change bemoaned by natives everywhere, and don’t immigrants always have a hard time?) Anyone who has spent a weekend in the Hamptons can relate to the sentiment that the sea and the scenery would be so lovely if it weren’t for all the people, as well as the desire to kick out the renters in the big house with the pool down the street and take it over, abandoning one’s own overcrowded, beer-stained cottage fate.It is tempting to wonder why Mr. Dolgon chose the Hamptons, instead of any other place – perhaps focusing his research closer to home, say in slightly less glamorous Worcester, Mass., where he’s an associate professor of sociology at Worcester State College. But his book is not just the history of a place, it is the history of a symbol: the Hamptons as an aspirational refuge that, when you finally get to live in it, is as troubled as any other place. Nick Carraway may have told the same story in a more entertaining fashion, but both men chose the setting for the same reasons. “While Long Island’s East End is not the only place where these themes converge,” Mr. Dolgon writes, “the Hamptons remain one of the most animated and high profile sites where modern struggles over power, property, and place expose both complex historical characteristics and possible future frameworks for people’s own perceptions of themselves and their world.”Ms. Gage’s “North of Ithaca: A Journey Home Through a Family’s Extraordinary Past” has just been published by St. Martin’s Press.

Going Native

Going Native

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