Mike Wallace's Gotham Series Uses a Humanistic Marxism to Capture New York's Working-Class 'In Uno Plures' Tradition
Source: Joel Feingold. "Mike Wallace, Gotham’s Chronicler." October 21, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author says Mike Wallace's New York history books told the city's story from the bottom up, built around the idea that unity comes from embracing diversity, an idea he traces to workers and immigrants. Rulers later borrowed and watered down that idea, but the author thinks it matters more than ever now that the rich are acting with fresh cruelty. He also holds that only Wallace's warm, humane Marxism could tell the whole story.
Conclusion
Mike Wallace's Gotham project, through its droll, cheerful, humanistic Marxist method, uniquely captured the whole of New York's history as a living, changeable story. At its center is a working-class, pluralist 'class-struggle-in-uno-plures' tradition, which the ruling class later co-opted and which is urgently needed today against resurgent social Darwinism.
Premises
- Wallace's Gotham series aimed to synthesize the new histories from below (women's, working-class, Black, Native, immigrant, sexuality, mass culture) and set them against the history of capitalism, going beyond a simple additive synthesis.
- Wallace coined 'in uno plures' ('in one, many'), which inverts the ruling-class motto 'e pluribus unum' and is a central organizing theme of the series. It holds that real unity exists only through radical diversity.
- This tradition originated with New York's working class and its organizations, as shown by the 1934 ILGWU May Day float ('Workers of 32 Nationalities United') and by present-day tenant organizing such as Yu Story's.
- Elites co-opted and toned down the tradition into postwar liberal common sense, as in E. B. White's 1945 essay and the siting of the UN in New York.
- Wallace, building on Hofstadter's work on social Darwinism, showed both that New York boosters helped originate imperial ideologies like Manifest Destiny and that New Yorkers consistently resisted imperialism and racial nativism.
- Today the tradition faces one of the ugliest and most brutal expressions of rich-class social Darwinism in nearly a century.
Assumptions
- Only a Marxist framework like Wallace's can integrate histories from below with the history of capitalism into a whole.
- The 'in uno plures' tradition is authentically working-class in origin rather than a broader civic or liberal creed.
- Selected examples (a union float, a tenant leader, an essay) are representative of a continuous tradition over time.
- Historical writing can and should serve present political action ('a usable past').
- Elite adoption of pluralist rhetoric is co-optation of a working-class idea rather than independent development or genuine shared commitment.
- The author's long personal association with Wallace gives reliable insight into his aims and method.