Her mother had gone back to work to keep the family afloat, but she resented having to do so and wasn’t shy about saying so. Money, or the want of it, was suddenly a source of pain, acid in the air.
For a teenaged Warren, the clunky old Studebaker was one more piece of evidence that she didn’t quite fit in, even as she joined the Sterling Tea Service Club and the Cygnets pep squad.
“I was in a high school where everybody was a click better off,’’ Warren recalled.
“It’s not just that they had so much,’’ she said. “They were just confident. They had the assurance that it would always be there.’’
Money, and the anxiety it can create for families like the one she grew up in, has consumed Warren ever since. It is the focus of her books about struggling middle-class families, her work at Harvard on bankruptcy law, her Washington service as President Obama’s consumer protection adviser, and, now, her campaign for the US Senate.
The seeds of that worry, that fear of not having enough, were planted on the Oklahoma plains. Financial comfort has since come to her, along with professional success - her Harvard salary alone exceeds $350,000. But money has, in her mind, always been about much more than dollar bills. It has been shorthand for security, acceptance, and family stability.
On the campaign trail, she has described her childhood as teetering on “the ragged edge of the middle class,’’ and she has told a story of a family that was “kind of hanging on at the edges by our fingernails.’’
Those descriptions fit, but behind the catch phrases lies a more layered story. The Herring family was down, no doubt, and battered by money worries, but never desperate.
On the trail, she never mentions the Studebaker. Instead, she tells voters, “We lost our car and my mom went to work at Sears answering phones so that we could hang on to our house’’ - leaving the impression on some ears that the family had no car at all.
